Friday, Jul 25, 2008
It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't moment. Had Martie Maguire presumed to articulate what she thought should have been U.S. policy regarding Iraq, she would have let herself in for comments of the "What does a country singer know about war?" school. Instead, affirming her right as a citizen to criticize the policies of her government, she got pretty much the same response from Sawyer: "If you're going to criticize the president for his own decision, you'd better have your own." Since when is a citizen who criticizes her government required to have an alternate solution?
Had Sawyer been interviewing someone who supported the war, she wouldn't have felt the need to ask what battle plan they believed the Pentagon should have adopted, and it would have been ludicrous if she had. But obedience to power would not, in Sawyer's view, have necessitated such a question. It's not surprising then that after Maguire read this quote from Theodore Roosevelt, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public," the camera simply cut away. There was nothing Diane Sawyer could say to that.
One of the remarkable things about the interview was the Chicks' lack of invective -- toward the troops, toward people who supported the war and even toward Bush. What they expressed about the president was honest disappointment. At one point, Maines imagined what she would have liked to have heard Bush say about the protesters. "You know," she imagined the president saying, "I saw them. I appreciate the sentiment that they're coming from. I appreciate that these are passionate citizens of the United States. But I feel, I really feel, that this is the right thing to do." Sawyer attempted to counter by saying the president had affirmed the right to protest.
But the clip that followed, of Bush on March 6 following worldwide antiwar protests, told a different story. Dripping contempt, Bush said, "First of all, size of protests, it's like deciding, well I'm going to decide policy based on a focus group." It's the perfect distillation of the arrogance of the Bush administration, reducing the fears and concerns of people all over the world to "a focus group." It's exactly what Maguire meant when she said, "I felt like there was a lack of compassion every time I saw Bush talking about this ... for people questioning this, for people about to die for this on both sides."
At one point in the interview, Maines said, "People have died to give you this right. That's what I'm doing. I'm using that right." But she is speaking at a particularly ugly time in American history, when using that right is enough to get you branded a traitor. As Dick Cheney has said, "You're either with us or against us."
"That's not true -- it's not true," Maines said of Cheney's comment. Though to many Americans, it is true. This weekend, I was walking through the central New York town of Clinton and came upon a flier in a store window for a rally in support of the troops. The legend on the top of the flier read "Loyalty Day." The meaning was clear: If you don't support the war, you're a disloyal American.
This is what public discourse has come down to in America right now. The litany is depressing and familiar, from Ari Fleischer's admonition to Bill Maher after 9/11 that Americans have to watch what they say, to the suspension of habeas corpus for thousands of people who've been arrested, to the even more onerous dissolution of civil liberties that would come under the PATRIOT II act. In the New York Times on April 27, Thomas Friedman wrote, "It feels as if some people want to use this war to create a multiparty democracy in Iraq and a one-party state in America."
And it cuts both ways. The left in no way holds power in America at this moment, but its vision of what politics should be often seems to partake of the same either/or dogmatism. In the current issue of Dissent, Michael Wreszin writes in response to an article by Michael Kazin, which he feels exemplifies the dangers of the magazine's belief that the left should speak "patriotically to our fellow citizens."
Wreszin writes, "Anyone seriously engaged in activist politics wants to develop a constituency and see it grow. But did Kazin expect [Martin Luther] King to communicate with the average white citizen in racist Mississippi and Cicero, Illinois?" The vision of politics that this statement reveals is remarkable. Wreszin apparently believes that Martin Luther King was preaching only to the choir, that he didn't try to communicate to the people who disagreed with him. (How then, you wonder, did he expect to change anything?) It's the opposite of the belief that politics is about engagement, and an affirmation of a politics that speaks only to true believers. In other words, it's a rejection of everything that it reasonably means to be political.
As much as I loathe the determination of the Bush administration to use the threat of terrorism to abolish civil liberties and create a government that feels it has no obligation to disclose the reasons for the decisions it takes, you can understand why people buy into that when you see protesters holding signs equating Bush with Saddam, or the placard shown in footage during "Primetime" that read "Bombing Is Terrorism." Real politics are not possible when people abdicate the responsibility to think in favor of ideology, because ideology is always the enemy of thought.
This is the atmosphere in which Natalie Maines chose to speak out. And it's the atmosphere in which she and Martie Maguire and Emily Robison maintain that their questioning of the government and of Bush's willingness to respect the opinions of others marks them as good patriots.
It's not just the clarity and persistence of what they've said that marks their bravery, but who they are. As "Primetime" pointed out, they are hardly the only celebrities to have spoken out against the war. The show noted that Susan Sarandon had been disinvited from a United Way fundraiser, and that her partner, Tim Robbins, had been barred from a celebration of "Bull Durham" at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. But nobody is bulldozing cassettes of Sarandon and Robbins' movies, or Sean Penn's, who took a trip to Iraq a few months back. Nobody is boycotting "The West Wing," although Martin Sheen is a longtime activist. And nobody is burning Michael Moore's book "Stupid White Men." Not to suggest that those celebrities haven't taken grief, but it's no surprise when Sarandon or Robbins or Sheen or Moore speak out against the war. That's a logical action, given their very public politics.
But none of these people reach as wide an audience as the Dixie Chicks, who are the biggest-selling female recording artists of all time. When my Salon colleague Stephanie Zacharek wrote a few weeks back that the backlash against the Chicks was certainly due in part to the traditional conservatism of country music, she got letters accusing her of painting country fans as a bunch of ignorant hicks. Those responses fail to take into account the simple fact of the disapproval that has traditionally been leveled at country stars who don't toe the line.
In the '60s, after saying he was a fan of the Beatles and recording versions of Chuck Berry's "Memphis" and "Johnny B. Goode," Buck Owens took out an ad in a Nashville fan magazine called "Pledge to Country Music" where, among other things, he said, "I Shall Sing No Song That Is Not a Country Song." Johnny Cash alienated many country fans with songs like "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and later protest numbers like "Man in Black" and "Singin' in Vietnam Talkin' Blues" (an amazing song that has much to say about how you can be against a war and care about the safety of the troops). That didn't fit in with a format where a song like Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" (reactionary as hell and still a great song) could he a huge hit, or where, at the height of Watergate, Nixon was welcomed by Roy Acuff onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
The simple fact is that country plays to a huge demographic, and often an older one, and the majority of Americans support the war. It was inevitable that the Dixie Chicks were bound to have, among their fans, people who would be upset by any antiwar statements. In the "Primetime" interview, Maguire talked about trying to convert friends to country music, people who said, "That's redneck music, those people are so backward and conservative." It was obvious how that attitude pained her. But it's hardly painting a large segment of the country audience as rednecks to acknowledge the conservatism of country music.
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