Posted on 02/13/2007 3:52:03 PM PST by meg88
As I watched the Dixie Chicks win their five Grammy Awards on Sunday night – for an album staggeringly inferior to its rivals in the same categories – I couldn’t help but think back to the same night four years earlier, when I was being taught how to apply a tourniquet to a gunshot wound, as part of my pre-Iraq journalists’ training.
Back then, I’d never even heard of the all-female country music trio from Texas. That changed a few weeks later – the morning after Natalie Maines, the group’s lead singer, told an audience in London that she was ashamed to be from the same place as George W. Bush.
Overnight, Maines became a pariah: treated back home as a traitor on the scale of Mata Hari. By then, I’d relocated from an SAS training centre in Hereford to a military camp in Kuwait, where I was being taught how to use a gas mask.
Within days of Maines apologising to President Bush (too late to stop the the CD-crushings), the invasion had started and I was on my way to Baghdad, embedded with an artillery division of the United States Marines.
I mention all this because there’s something about the way the Dixie Chicks handled the Iraq war controversy (which included a naked appearance on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, a documentary called Shut up and Sing and the allegation that the Red Cross turned down a $1 million donation from the band, when in fact the donation was conditional on the Red Cross endorsing their tour) that makes me reluctant to cheer them too loudly.
In fact, the band’s carping about the lack of freedom of speech in America always struck me as a bit dishonest. What they really seemed upset about was the cost to their popularity.
The Dixie Chicks seemed to believe that they should be able to say exactly what they want, no matter how divisive, and that the public should unquestioningly continue to contribute to their millionaires’ lifestyles.
Perhaps I’m biased: when you’re on the front lines of an invasion, the last thing you want to hear is a celebrity back home, miles from the bullets, telling you the conflict itself is wrong or pointless.
I remember the morning of March 24, 2003, when I woke up in a trench in the Iraq marshlands, mortar shells flying overhead, listening to Michael Moore giving his infamous antiwar Oscars speech. He had every right to express his opinion. But the Marines I was with also had every right to be riled by it.
And that, to me, is what the Dixie Chicks utterly failed to grasp. In a democracy, speech may be free. But wherever you go in the world – Texas included – an opinion worth holding will always cost you something.
Nice piece. Thanks for posting it.
Excellent article by someone who obviously gets it. Thanks for posting it.
Credibility rarely accompanies those who seek publicity.
If anyone needed proof that any and all "Hollywood award shows" are about politics, one only need witness the Dixie Chicks' Grammy shower. What utter tripe.
A good assessment on the shallowness of Obama. Now the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of the Chixie Dicks.
With "Saddam's angels" written on their naked flesh.
Aside from all political considerations this was an offense against all decent women.
Wasn't that the fat one?
I turned it off after the James Brown tributes. Chrstina Aggie was sensational!
Like I said before, "Pigs selecting the best smelling pig".
Most of the time talent is second to putting down someone who has more class that to respond to moronic, unprovable words.
BY THE WAY SHE LOOKS A LOT FATTER THESE DAYS.
Wasn't that the fat one?
No, Nathalie was the one with Magna Carta written in 72 point Bodoni Bold type... and that was on just one cheek of her fat A$$...
"Chrstina Aggie was sensational"
But did she sing?
After watching the Grammy show not sure if i will be spending much money on music anymore. I have never even heard one song off of the Dixie Album and do believe there were much better groups who deserved to be recognized.
I am very turned off by the music industry and do not think it is wise to support such people!
The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.
Robert A. Heinlein
Contrast that to the Dixie Chicks who, like the author of this piece says, want things both ways. They may be talented musicians, but as songwriters with an eye on social commentary they are a joke.
If you to want run with the big dogs, you have to learn how to pee in the tall grass.
Well, it's nice that they won those Grammys. Maybe they can auction them off to help offset the loss of revenue from plummeting album sales.
Or Bob Hyde (the Bruce Dern character) getting those medals at the end of Coming Home.
It's sad to see people that are so totally stupid and not a clue in the world of what they speak. Wonder how much they paid for those awards?
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