No, You Shut Up (and Sing)

And furthermore, shut up, all of you who are telling musicians, actors, filmmakers, authors and such to shut up.

"I paid to hear Don Henley sing, not to listen to his political views," whines the ticket holder.

"Who the hell does Sean Penn think he is, going to Iraq?" fumes the talk-radio guy.

"Bruce Springsteen thinks making millions with a song-and-dance routine allows him to tell you how to vote," grouses conservative New York senate candidate Marilyn O'Grady, announcing her "Boycott the Boss" campaign.

Even quasi-liberal Irvine Mayor Larry Agran sympathized with the people who booed Henley at the Pacific Amphitheatre recently after the singer made a brief comment supporting Linda Ronstadt's brief comment supporting Michael Moore. Agran told The Orange County Register, "It's like, 'Why am I getting this? I didn't pay for the politics.' I can see how a lot of people would regard this as an intrusion."

When you've paid to see an outspoken person and he speaks out, it's an intrusion. When performers gather onstage at a New York political rally and talk politics, it turns into "a Hollywood hate fest," as Republicans labeled it. Is no place safe from these big-mouthed entertainers?

Well, I hear you, conservatives. I feel your pain. If only we would go back to the good old days when artists kept their big noses out of politics, back to when entertainers just entertained, like the ever-grinning Louis Armstrong.

But, oops, even Satchmo fired off a few. Along with writing letters to President Dwight D. Eisenhower extolling the virtues of weed, Armstrong abruptly canceled a 1957 State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union, upset over attacks on black children in Little Rock, Ark. Armstrong told the press, "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell. ... It's getting so bad that a colored man hasn't got any country."

OK, so we'll have to go back further than that, before Armstrong, before even Aristophanes, probably to before humans developed speech or learned to scratch images on cave walls.

For those of you not paying attention for the past two million years, let's bring you up to date: Taking stands and speaking out is something artists do. That's one of the reasons we call what they do "art." Art tells us things we don't know about ourselves. It connects us. It speaks uneasy truths. It is a catalyst for change and always has been.

So it's a little late in the day to tell Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe to butt out of the abolition issue, or tell Picasso to take the rage out of "Guernica," or to demand that Woody Guthrie stop standing up for the downtrodden, or ask Lenny Bruce to stop prodding American mores, or Curtis Mayfield to stop singing about civil rights, or Henry Rollins to stop being so pissed off at everything.

Speaking out is what artists do, and it's a damn good thing, since hardly any other dissenting voice is heard in the media anymore. Last year, millions of persons participated in the largest global demonstrations in history in opposition to the looming Iraq war, and the media spent far more time watching Scott Peterson's boat. In July of this year, more than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel Prize winners, signed a document decrying the Bush administration's distortion and suppression of science in pursuing its dogmatic agenda, and that barely made the crawl on the news.

So, if the voices of millions go unheard; if the alarm raised by thousands of the world's brightest experts matters naught; if the generals, admirals, diplomats, former Bush administration members and other citizens who dare a discouraging word about the White House's giddyup-to-Armageddon aren't deemed worthy of news coverage, then who ya gonna call?

Pretty people. Celebrities. Actors. Singers. But when it turns out some of them also have opinions about the world they live in, conservatives cry foul. Why should these tarted-up show folk be granted access to vent their un-American, out-of-the-mainstream views?

Because they're citizens, Jack. The question shouldn't be "Why are they heard?" but "Why isn't everyone else?" When CNN's Leon Thomas asked antiwar cutie Janeane Garofalo last year why anyone should care what she has to say, her answer was basically, "Because you'll talk to me, and you won't talk to Noam Chomsky."

Unless you're on the elite team, unless you're rich, you're cut out. Conservatives have argued and conservative courts have affirmed that to limit the hundreds of millions of dollars the rich and incorporated pour into the electoral process would be abridging their freedom of speech. Now they're going to begrudge the few seconds of access that celebrity can buy?

Republicans didn't mind when Britney Spears opened her navel to say, "I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes," or when Arnold Schwarzenegger's fame gave him a leg up in the governor's race, or that he campaigned with a special-effects crew. Neither did they mind when actor Ronald Reagan became a paid political shill for GE (speaking out against "Marxist" programs such as Medicare and Social Security), or was groomed for public office in a campaign run by behavioral psychologists. When Schwarzeneg-ger spoke at the Republican Convention, or when they did their teary tribute to the Gipper, did Republicans hoist a "Hollywood elite" disclaimer?

Our acceptance of entertainers' opinions has fluctuated over time. In the late '60s and early '70s, antiwar songs were hits on Top 40 radio, and gadflies like Gore Vidal and Orson Welles were frequent guests on The Tonight Show. ABC's entertainment/variety Dick Cavett Show was a forum for serious dissent from both show folk and politicos. In 1971, it featured a Vietnam War debate between young John Kerry and his eternal swift-boat nemesis John O'Neill.

There were cries of "shut up!" then, as well. John Lennon's antiwar statements resulted in record burnings, Nixon rants and years of being spied on by the FBI. But at least he was heard. In contrast to those days, there were the blacklists of the McCarthy era, when voicing a contrary opinion got entertainers fired and shunned.

Things have swung back toward the '50s. Witness the Dixie Chicks being banned from radio networks; Linda Ronstadt chucked out of a Vegas casino and banned for life for briefly expressing her admiration for an Academy Award-winning filmmaker; or the point Bill Maher has made: With all the poor preparation, intelligence failures and administration negligence surrounding Sept. 11, "How come the only person who lost his job over it was me?"

(After ABC axed him, Maher rebounded on cable, and it's a further defense of the merits of entertainers that, along with Jon Stewart's Daily Show, the two most cogent news analysts on TV are comedians.)

Conservatives claim artists are speaking out as an egotistical lark or a publicity move. Sure, some may be dilettantes pontificating from atop a pile of blow, but most are involved, informed citizens with long records of social action. Springsteen, for example, has shown decades of support for both big-issue causes like Amnesty International's opposition to torture and for little-known community food banks. Rather than "telling you how to vote," he's assiduously avoided partisan politics, only previously broaching that subject in the 1980s to set the record straight after George Will and Ronald Reagan erroneously tried to claim him as one of their own. It took George W. Bush's extremism to bring Springsteen to finally speak out this time. (Check out what he has to say at www.brucespringsteen.net/news.)

He and his fellows aren't hatemongers, nor are they heroes. They're citizens, people who realize that America only works if you participate in it. When the divide between rich and poor spreads ever wider, when one American family gets a tax break while others get death notices, when torture is sanctioned, when those in power think a "preemptive war" waged without just cause isn't just plain murder " then "mainstream values" are indeed at stake.

We're talking about the soul of the nation. For artists to remain silent in such times " for any of us to shut our mouths " is nothing short of treason to the ideals upon which this nation was founded. We're a nation of individuals, and it's time to take your individual talents, whatever they are, and step up to the plate.

Earlier this year, Willie Nelson was asked if he was worried about a backlash against his antiwar song "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?"

He replied, "I don't care if people say, 'Who the hell does he think he is?' I know who I am."

These idiots can say anything they want. Their problem is they think that because they are saying these things, they should not have to put up with anything but applause. When they do their thing, that's all they receive--accalim, applause--and now they're whining because when they TALK they don't get the same response.

Talk all you want. But unlike your little "Yes" Men and Women on your payroll, the folks in the audience PAY YOU, and THEY have the right to speak their minds, as well--even if what they're saying is "BOOOO!"

I lost respect for Willie when he did the homosexual GAP AD.. yeah real country Willie... real Texan... outlaw man my Gap undies.... "I know who I am, I'm gonna do a GAP commercial at the age of 78" okay Willie you outlaw-you.... lost all respect.... tough to listen to Poncho an Lefty when the lead singer turned from cowboy to boytoy.

Whine, whine, whine. That's all these people do.

If it weren't for the courage of American soldiers(OVER THE AGES), none of these boneheads would be able to concoct such self-serving supercilious drivel in freedom.

Whining does not and never will defend and preserve freedom.

Noam Chomsky? No soup for you! Next!

I admire the author's attempts at being objective and presenting a few facts within a liberal frame-of-mind (which is extremely rare for liberals and I actually think the article is pretty good) but he still misses the point:

The point is, is that we're at war with terrorists who despise our way of life and our culture. Did the artists in the 50s and 60s ever trash a sitting President openly? Did they ever denigrate America's values? For the most part, no.

It's fine - even commendable - for artists to take a stand on social issues. My problem is that most of today's artists only take one side of the issue- the Left's. It ruins their crediblity, I think.

I heard a lot of mainstream songs in the 80's demonizing Ronald Reagan and America for the agressive nuclear build-up. But I never heard one popular song in sympathy for the Soviet poltical activists in Siberian gulags.

I have heard of mainstream rockers who push for pro-choice. It's a shame forty one millon unborn children aren't around to hear them.
Which popular artist stands up for them?

One other thing that bothers me: real activists who affected change never changed themselves. Ceaser Chavez, who championed rights for poor migrant workers, never ceased to be a poor migrant worker. Martin Luther King, who championed civil rights for African Americans, never ceased to be an African-American.

Bruce Springsteen, who champions the working class, has enough money so that he doesn't have to work another day in his life.

I'm sorry, but it smacks of poor crediblity, to me.

Sigh! So much stupidity, so many misconceptions, so little time.... The issue here isn't whether entertainers have a right to spout whatever political views they choose to -- surely they do.

The issue here isn't whether audiences have a right to purchase or not purchase tickets to an entertainer's gig -- again, surely htey do.

The issue here, the only issue here, is whether it is legitimate for entertainers who spout political views which their normal audiences find disagreeable to suffer economic consequences, e.g erstwhile fans deciding not to attend future concerts or to purchase their records, or, heaven forfend, even to speak out and encourage others to withhold their patronage.

For me the answer is easy: as long as no state action is involved, the fans are well within their rights to criticize, withhold patronage and even organize boycotts. In a free society, you take your chance: if the fans don't like the new album, they don't buy it. If they don't like the politics, they don't buy it. No harm, no foul.

Ugh, what an asshole!! I sent a comment to the orlando weekly and within minutes got a request for permission to print as a letter to the editor. Hey, we can't all expose fraud in the Kerry campaign, but every damn one of us can write to the authors of such stupid columns and let them know.

Below is a copy of the exchange.

Certainly, if I didn't want my opinions known, I wouldn't express them.

Chesley Johnson

-----Original Message-----
From: Lindy Shepherd [mailto:lshepherd@orlandoweekly.com]
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 10:08 AM
To: Johnson, Chesley
Subject: Re: No, You shut up.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. We'd like to
publish your response in our Letters to the Editor section to share with our
readers, but we need your permission to do so. So, please let me know if
that's OK by you.

Lindy Shepherd
Managing Editor
Orlando Weekly
(407) 377-0400, Ext. 216
lshepherd@orlandoweekly.com
www.orlandoweekly.com

on 9/10/04 11:01 AM, Johnson, Chesley at (removed by writer)wrote:

> Hey, yeah, artists have a right to speak out. And non-artists have a right
> to resent it if their opinions are stupid, which they are at least as often
> as anyone else's. They have the right to boo for an artist's political
> opinions just as much as they do for a lousy performance. Maybe they think
> hearing the opinions is a lousy performance. They have the right to walk
> out, to not buy records or tickets. What is it about artists that makes
> them think they can't be criticized for exercising their rights. They can
> be. And, if they don't like it, they should follow the advice of that great
> Democrat, Harry Truman, "if you can't stand the heat; stay out of the
> kitchen".
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Chesley Johnson
> Tuscaloosa, AL 35405
>

Whoopie can express her opinion. People don't have to like it. That's the problem Whoopie has. People don't have to hire her. People don't have to support her opinion. They can disagree. They can even want to have nothing to do with her. People can do that.

And then the left starts whining - about whining, and grousing, and fuming, and labeling, and meannness, and viciousness, and worst of all that all these e-ville ultra-extremist-ultra-doubleultra-right-ultras . . . they're going to vote for BOOOOOSH, who everyone should know is the real criminal. Why won't they just let themselves be 'educated' by Michael Moore?

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