Let's Praise Dixie Chicks For Their Music

Those people who joined the Dixie Chick's "fan club" are as hypocritical as those "fans" who stopped buying their music and going to their concerts. The Bush Administration did not pillory them and probably most of the new fans are open or closet bush-bashers.

Dixie Chicks, dissent, and "whacked" paranoia
By Jon Sanders
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

"I think people are paranoid" was how former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart's comments to Reuters began. Hart was speaking about this year's Grammy Awards and the Dixie Chicks. Then he provided a sterling example of that very paranoia.

"I think that if they speak out, they think they're gonna get whacked by the government. It's pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked."

What? The government did nothing concerning The Dixie Chicks after they "spoke out" against President Bush while they were in concert in London. The singers were free to say whatever they wanted, just as the buying public was free to say whatever they wanted with respect to what the Dixie Chicks said.

There was public outcry, and indeed the Dixie Chicks lost fans and concertgoers. But they also garnered new fans, including fawning press. Their "naked" cover on Rolling Stone seems to have started a new fad: the Multimillionaire Artist As Suffering Figure of Persecution.

They would be followed in magazine-cover martyrdom by Kanye West, who nearly ruined a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser with his off-the-cuff remarks about Bush hating black people. His cover shot on Rolling Stone showed him wearing a crown of thorns.

Madonna, as is her wont, took the fad to its logical extremes; comparing Bush to Hitler and Osama bin Laden and then hanging herself on a crucifix.

But it's all vanity. Hart's comments, the "musical martyrs," the paranoia — it's just self-congratulatory hooey. Musicians aren't getting "whacked" by the Bush administration for "speaking out." But it's fun to believe it, because only then could the very mundane act of speaking out in this, the Land of the First Amendment, appear dangerous and brave instead of merely mercenary.

Now appearing on stage......