PrettyFakes

The first question that comes to mind when we consider the Lee Greenwood Halloween Zombie Massacre of 2004 is, “How did it get so bad so fast?” Well, that’s not exactly true. The first question that comes to mind for some people is, “Do you mean that Lee Greenwood massacred zombies, or that a massacre was committed by a zombie Lee Greenwood?” This is a profoundly silly question, since everyone knows that Lee Greenwood massacres zombies about as well as he writes hit songs, which is to say, poorly. Then there are a few other people who want to know if a “halloween zombie” is different from a regular zombie. These people are pedants. So, the first real question, or third question if you count the morons and pedants, is “How did it get so bad so fast?” The answer has a lot to do with the massacre’s point of origin: the Lee Greenwood Theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The fact of the matter is, most of Lee’s paying customers didn’t much miss their brains after Lee had eaten them, and their friends and families certainly couldn’t tell any difference, partially because shambling and moaning was so in vogue in 2004, as you will recall. Frankly, we should all thank the heroic staff of Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, especially the ostrich jousters, that it didn’t get any worse than it did.

And yet, after the obligatory remembrances on the first anniversary of the Lee Greenwood Halloween Zombie Massacre, the horror of that October night on the Gatlingburg-Sevierville-Pigeon Forge strip seems to have faded from public memory. No one much thinks about the fact that the man who sang “there’s pride in every American heart” had his own thoroughly necrotized heart extracted from his headless body, ground into a fine powder, and surreptitiously slipped into Toby Keith’s high-protein Caribbean Breeze smoothie in hopes of warding off the gruesome fate suffered by the man of whom Keith wrote, ” he was my spiritual father, my greatest inspiration, and a hell of a lay. I’m told. By women.”

Two years later and we’ve nearly forgotten. I hope you’ll all join me this Halloween in buying the cheapest, sweatshoppiest American flag you can, dipping it in blood (preferably not your own, of course), and wearing it as a memorial armband. When people ask what you’re doing, or throw food at you, or try to run you over in their cars, just explain, “I’m doing it for Lee.” It’s what he would have done for us.

UNRELATED: Allegedly: a response to Kubrick’s 1984 open casting call for Full Metal Jacket. Hoax or real? I think you’ll find that this question is totally irrelevant. Via Ed.

And, Emerson LaSalle has some Halloween-appropriate thoughts on vampires.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 8:47 am and is filed under In the Nation, In the South, Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.