Friday, May 16, 2008
The Dixie Chicks beat back Diane Sawyer on national TV, posed nude for Entertainment Weekly and stood up to the reactionary zeal of country radio. In a time of crisis for America, they're patriots we can be proud of.
Apr 28, 2003 | Scandal in American public life follows a script as predictable as pornography. First come the initial scanty press reports. Then the "He/she/they said/did what?" reaction from the disbelieving public. After that the backlash, both condemnation and defense. And ultimately, in a carefully selected media forum, the public mea culpa.
This final act is what was supposed to have played out last week on ABC's "Primetime Thursday" during Diane Sawyer's hour-long interview with the Dixie Chicks. Except for one thing: The Chicks weren't following anybody's script but their own. Over the course of the interview, filmed in band member Martie Maguire's Austin, Texas, home, Maguire, her sister Emily Robison and Natalie Maines, whose March 10 comment from the stage of London's Shepherd's Bush Empire -- "Just so you know, we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas" -- started the controversy that continues to engulf the trio, the three refused to back down.
Forget the apology Maines issued to Bush a few days after the Associated Press first reported her words, or the stories that her comments had brought the band to the point of dissolution. Offered the chance to take it all back and make nice, the Dixie Chicks instead chose to turn the interview around. Sawyer wanted answers; the Chicks offered questions, hard questions. Sawyer wanted to talk about the damage they may have done to their career; the Chicks talked about the damage being done to America in an era where Vice President Dick Cheney has proclaimed "You're either with us or against us."
The band may have gotten more attention posing nude for the cover of the current Entertainment Weekly, with phrases like "Dixie Sluts," "Saddam's Angels" and "Traitors" stamped on their bodies. But it was the stubborn refusal they showed Sawyer that cut deepest. Yes, Maines, as she did in her apology, said that her statement was "disrespectful" and "the wrong wording with genuine emotion and question and concern behind it." But she didn't apologize for those questions. "I ask questions. That's smart, that's intelligent, to find out facts," she said.
The sisters, Emily and particularly Martie, not only defended Maines but amplified her comments. Given an hour for prime-time damage control, the Dixie Chicks instead stopped the network cheerleading for the war dead in its tracks and expressed the honest confusion many people are feeling far more effectively than any of the strident rhetoric that has emanated from the left as well as the right.
With the Chicks not following the preset P.R. script for smoothing over a public brouhaha, it was up to Sawyer to provide the pornography. You couldn't find it in her connecting narration, which was simply the typical pap that passes for writing in television journalism -- "Freewheeling ... high-spirits ... the famously untamed lead singer ... the rebel daughter of a renowned steel-guitar player ... the refined sisters ... in that friendly, country way, we know all about their lives ... There would be frightening threats, towering rage, in the words of another of their hit songs, a landslide." The pornography came from the way Sawyer, frustrated in her attempt to offer the band up for ritual sacrifice, chose to stand in for the bullies.
Since Maines' comment, the band has received death threats and had round-the-clock security posted at their homes. The people who attend their upcoming concert tour will have to pass through metal detectors. The threats haven't just come from yahoos, like the caller to a radio show heard during the "Primetime" interview who said, "I think they should send Natalie over to Eye-rack, strap 'er to a bomb, and just drop 'er over Baghdad." A San Antonio DJ claimed to know where Maines lived and said a posse should go over to her house and straighten her out. And in South Carolina, where the band will open its tour later this week, a legislator rose in the state assembly and said, "Anyone who thinks about going to that concert ought to be ready, ready, ready to run away from it."
Sawyer didn't descend to this level of bullying. And she didn't adopt the strategies of the higher thugs like Bill O'Reilly, who simply talk their opponents into submission. Sawyer's tactics were subtler, more insidious. Instead of journalist, the role Sawyer chose to play was the junior high school principal who aims to shame you into jelly with a combination of starch and steel.
From the beginning, Sawyer aimed to put the Dixie Chicks in their place. She began the show by saying, "They're not exactly the people your civics teacher would expect to find at the center of a raging debate over free speech in America." These are just country singers, after all, she was saying. Who would expect thought from them? And then, at every turn, the Dixie Chicks simply outthought Diane Sawyer.
Instead of playing a plea for forgiveness, the interview played out as a drama between two sharply different views of what it means to be an American citizen. There was Sawyer's view, in which only certain people are qualified to speak their minds, and the view of the Dixie Chicks, a vision shot through with contingencies and uncertainties far more complex than Sawyer could process. "I guess on some level I feel like me speaking out, not only that particular statement, but here today, is the most patriotic thing I can do," Maines said.
Schoolmarm Sawyer wasn't having it. The aghast subtext of nearly every question was, "I knew you were spirited girls, but what could you possibly have been thinking?" It was all faux, of course, the journalist as devil's advocate, but Sawyer's condescension was real, certainly not ameliorated by her midshow comment that she grew up in Kentucky and loves country music. It reached a pinnacle of sorts when Sawyer repeated Maines' comments and asked, "Ashamed? Ashamed?" as if contrition were the only appropriate response to questioning the president of the United States. And when she didn't get contrition from Maines, she turned on Maguire and Robison, expressing disbelief that "neither of you listening to [Maines' remarks]" were shocked, as if they had all just taken part in the locker-room scene from the movie "Carrie."
Finally, Sawyer said, "I feel something not quite wholehearted when you talk about apologizing for what you said about the president." It's a moment that can stand with the great scene in Frederick Wiseman's documentary "High School," when a teacher rejects a young boy's apology because "There's no sincereness [sic] behind it." This was the assertion of an authority that aims to strip its target of all self-respect, all ability to think for themselves.
The trouble, though, with playing devil's advocate as enthusiastically as Sawyer did is that you begin to ape the nonthought of the role you are playing. Setting the stage for Maines' comments, Sawyer talked of the week before the war started and said, "Seventy percent of Americans were clear that the protesters were wrong." Look at the language. Not "Seventy percent of Americans expressed the opinion that the protesters were wrong," but "Seventy percent of Americans were clear that the protesters were wrong." Case closed. And then later, "But even people who said it's fine to question the war were shocked that someone would stand on a stage and attack the commander in chief." Certainly that is what many people felt. But Sawyer presents the shock as if it were logical. It's all right to question government policy -- which, in Sawyer's formulation, somehow comes into being of its own accord -- but not the person who formulates the policy and puts it into action. And not "the president" but "the commander in chief."
Sawyer seemed on a personal mission here to defend George W. Bush. Maines said, of the buildup to war, "I had a lot of questions that I felt were unanswered," and later, "I just personally felt like, 'Why tomorrow?' It's not like I don't ever want you to go over there ... why can't we find the chemical weapons first?" Sawyer then asked, if they were against the war, what they would have done about Iraq. Calling it an unfair question, Maguire said it was not her place to make foreign policy decisions. Sawyer replied, "If you're going to criticize the president for his own decision, you'd better have your own."
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