THE DIXIE CHICKS, you may have heard, have decided that they are no longer a country music band. Member Martie Maguire told the German magazine Der Spiegel, "We don't feel part of the country scene any longer, it can't be our home any more.. . . . So we now consider ourselves part of the big Rock 'n' Roll family."
Forget for a moment that this is like Ian McKellen announcing he's no longer a classically trained actor and that he now considers himself part of the Hollywood action-hero fraternity.
...WHY HAS the country music audience reacted so viscerally to the Dixie Chicks? Part of it may be simple team politics. As Clear Channel's Alan Sledge said, "The people who like the Dixie Chicks are also people who most likely voted for President Bush in the last election."
But on a deeper level, it may have to do with the juvenility of their protests. When Dixie Chicks attack, it's off-handed and completely oblivious to context. When Maines popped off about Bush back in March--as the nation was on the brink of war--she didn't have any real criticism, just a blanket declaration of being "ashamed" that the president was a fellow Texan.
Once the firestorm began, the band didn't elaborate on why, exactly, they were ashamed. They didn't discuss how the United States should be dealing with Saddam or why they thought that a stable regional dictator was preferable to a risky attempt at democratization. Similarly, while touring Europe earlier this month, the group's Emily Robison attacked Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial run, explaining, "I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane. . . . America should be governed by people who have a clue. I hope he doesn't win." These are clearly women who think smart people are supposed to have opinions on everything--that not having an opinion is what makes you a dunce.
Pakistan is the enemy? You mean those guys who literally created the Taliban didn't just change their minds and switch loyalties because Musharraf told them to?
Also at Time this week - a very nice piece from Gregg Easterbrook on the truth about Bush's clean air record.
President or Prime Minister. These titles, customary and seemingly harmless, we unthinkingly accept from anyone who occupies the top slot of government in a sovereign nation. It's also standard newspaper style. But while in free nations such titles connote democratic leadership, in unfree nations they denote nothing of the kind. It would be a useful check on our more deferential instincts were we to use titles tied less to custom than to accuracy. For example: Taiwan has a president, England has a prime minister. Egypt has a dictator, Libya has a tyrant. Greeting some of the world's worst thugs as Mr. Dictator, or Honorable Despot, might sound peculiar, but it might also help keep the realities in view.
Then there is the issue of the facts--a scarce commodity in the oceans of oratory now spilling forth about our threatened Bill of Rights, and about agents spying on Americans' reading habits. In none of the descriptions of the out-of-control attorney general, and accompanying suggestions of incipient fascism on the march, is there to be found any mention of the truth that the attorney general did not, of course, arrogate to himself the power to extend security measures: He went to the courts for permission. They were put in place only after scrutiny by judges.
Likewise, current hair-tearing about secret investigations and library spies notwithstanding, it remains a fact that for decades now, in its pursuit of crimes like money-laundering, the government has been free to prohibit banks from informing clients they were under investigation--and has done so without any outcry from the ACLU about civil rights violations. The Patriot Act could be said to be imperfect in some areas, a dissident member of the ACLU recently informed me--but so dishonest was his organization's portrayal of it as a threat to our basic freedoms, he could hardly bring himself to join any argument against it...
For such times John Ashcroft was a target made to order. Devoutly religious, appointee of George Bush, he could scarcely have been a better fit for the bogeyman figure advanced as the greatest threat to our civil liberties--the perfect model to fire up the crowds at marches, and breast-beating festivals. Not for nothing do the Democratic presidential candidates out-do themselves denouncing the attorney general: they know, the candidates do, what has filtered down to their base, their main audience, after all. They all know, as John Kerry does, that he can say whatever he wants about John Ashcroft--that he views, as a nightmare, members of other races creeds and religions, or anything else the Democratic candidate finds convenient--and it will all be understood, a mark of political virtue.
