After reading through Mike Uhrich's Sept. 28 Viewpoint entitled "Green Day called 'unpatriotic'" five or six times, I am still baffled by it. On one hand it could be satire, in which case it would be the most hilarious Viewpoint of the year. I mean seriously, why else would someone concerned about the popularity and content of a song try to contact John Madden and not the band that wrote the song? Why else would someone get upset over a band with punk tendencies making a political statement? The obvious answer to both seems to be satire. If it turns out to be satire please disregard the rest of this Viewpoint.

But after talking to a few friends and classmates, I saw another possibility; maybe Uhrich doesn't have an amazing sense of humor, maybe he's being serious. Now before I get to defending the band's right to free speech, I would like to make it clear that Green Day is by no means my favorite band (it's actually The Replacements). In fact, I really don't care for them much at all. So with that all cleared up, we can get to the matter at hand.

Let's start out with the content of the song. At one point Uhrich takes the lines "I'm not a part of a redneck agenda" and "One nation controlled by the media" and claims taking a single line from the song cannot be used to explain the meaning behind the song. Yet in the very next paragraph he takes the single line "Don't want to be an American Idiot" and somehow determines that "What they mean is they hate being Americans and wish they weren't."

It seems odd that he could make the same mistake he just warned others not to make. That is very easy to do though, take for example the song "Good Riddance," which he mentioned in the beginning of his Viewpoint. It contains the line "So take the photographs and still frames in your mind." Obviously, this is meant to challenge the Kodak company.

I decided to try to figure out the meaning of the song for myself, and in doing so I decided to do something that a person from the Robert Novak school of journalism probably would consider crazy. I did a little research. It wasn't really that hard, I borrowed the CD from my roommate, looked up the lyrics on the Internet and then listened to the song while reading along. By doing so I was able to get a pretty good grasp on the message of the song — which was repeated about five times because, after all, this is Green Day. The spirit of the song seems to be more along the lines of political and social commentary, not so much outright hatred of America.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at the first four lines of the song, which is three more then you ever got at a time from Uhrich, thus allowing us to look at context. "Don't wanna be an American Idiot / Don't want a nation under the new media / And can you hear the sound of hysteria / The subliminal mindf–k America" Now, if you ask me, that seems like its referring to the public's tendency to believe everything that one media outlet reports. That in turn would make them ignorant, maybe even like an "American Idiot."

I would like to hit on one more thing from Uhrich's Viewpoint. He says "Most Americans exercise their right to free speech, expressing dislike for the parts of their country, but few will stand before a crowd and say, 'I hate America.'" This is just an amazing leap in logic that would make the previously referenced Novak proud. When did disliking an aspect of your country make you hate that country? That's like saying if someone disliked the Golden Eagle as a mascot, then they hated Marquette.

Bottom line: The band used their right to free speech to express their opinion — just like Uhrich did — and their speech furthered discourse, which is usually a sign that it was a good use of speech.

Mase is a senior broadcast and electronic communications major.

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