Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore— John Prine
#365Songs: April 11th
Time ceases to make sense these days. Suddenly that late March, early April 2020 pandemic lockdown is four years in the past, a blur of lost days. The masks are mostly gone, but the chaos remains, the overall unsettling of a world gone mad. So much happened in those early pandemic days that it’s easy to forget we lost one of the finest lyrical storytellers of our time to COVID.
John Prine died on April 7th, 2020, an obit lost in the shadows of too much news. Four years ago.
Listening to Prine’s catalog is like stepping back into your favorite books, meeting up with old friends a few drinks deep into the day, laughing at jokes that never grow old. The New York Times summed him beautifully:
“He took familiar blues themes — my baby left me — but filled them with whimsy and kindness. He liked a saucy lyric, and wrote movingly, in character, of the quiet lives and loneliness of humdrum people. He seemed like a Zen sage and offered an uncynical live-and-let-live morality in his songs, writing in a colloquial voice that revealed a love of the way Americans speak. He showed how much humor you could put in a song and still be taken seriously. He had less in common with any other songwriter than he did with Mark Twain.”
John was a Chicago kid who lived a dozen lives: a drafted soldier turned mailman who was discovered at an open mic night by Kris Kristofferson, who invited him to open on his tour. Dreams do come true, kids.
It was around this time when Roger Ebert saw him play in a Chicago bar, which led him to write:
“He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.”
“Backing into the spotlight,” he wrote. What a great line, what a lovely way to describe an artist who softly accumulated one of the greatest catalogs in music.
Prine’s self-titled debut album is an objective 13-song masterpiece, a collection of short stories that captivate one after the other on repeat. And that gets me to today’s song.
While digesting Reader’s Digest
In the back of the dirty book store
A plastic flag with gum on the back
Fell out on the floor
Well, I picked it up and I ran outside
Slapped it on my window shield
And if I could find ol’ Betsy Ross
I’d tell her how good I feel
But, your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
They’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now, Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reason’s for
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
The old flag decal was the original MAGA hat, a virtue signal that you in fact had no virtues, an adhesive way to whine about us stinking woke ass liberal elites. Notice how those same Jesus lovers who cry scripture when banning abortion stay as silent today about starved and slaughtered Gazans children as they did then about their dying young neighbors during Vietnam.
Prine’s droll, absurdist wit fuels Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore, almost catches you off guard — a goofier Pete Seeger, a more playful Phil Ochs, and as a result the lyrics punch just as hard. A good ole’ fashioned poke the fools political folk song, baked with John Prine’s best ingredients. A former altar boy, Prine wasn’t shy about his belief in God, nor was he shy about calling out the same crowd of hypocritical faux-Jesus freaks who masquerade as moralists. A new generation of the same misogynists swapped a sticker for a bright red hat, and Prine’s song should once again be the anthem that fuels another election year.
Well, I went to the bank this morning
And the cashier said to me
“If you join the Christmas club
We’ll give you ten of them flags for free.”
Well, I didn’t mess around a bit
I took him up on what he said
And I stuck them stickers all over my car
And one on my wife’s forehead
But, your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
They’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now, Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reason’s for
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
Well, I got my window shield so filled
With flags I couldn’t see
So, I ran the car upside a curb
Right into a tree
By the time they got a doctor down
I was already dead
And I’ll never understand why the man
Standing in the Pearly Gates said
But, your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
We’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now, Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reason’s for
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more
