Category: Arts & Entertainment

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, General Commentary, language, media-general Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, a local high school was targeted by an out-of-state hate mail campaign because it chose to produce “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” a gay and lesbian retelling of the Bible by Paul Rudnick. Protestors from various church groups promised to picket the performances. The story even made the Huffington Post.

It happened that the school producing the play was Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public High School, where both my children attended some years ago—a school known for its fabulous (reference intended) theater and dance departments. We’ve continued to attend many of the school’s performances even though my younger child is already a sophomore in college.

So of course, both to defend freedom of speech in the Pioneer Valley and to enjoy a night of theater we knew would be terrific, we attended. And we were gratified that in addition to the antigay protestors, a goodly multitude of pro-performance church groups were on hand to lend support.

The interesting thing is…if you accept the basic premise that gay and lesbian couples exist (and, in this play, were present at creation and right through modern times)—there’s almost nothing blasphemous in the play, which centers on Adam, through the ages, trying to find meaning in life. His questioning is very much rooted in the Old Testament tradition of prophets arguing with God. The whole alternate world is set in motion by a Stage Director (female, in this performance), which makes it clear from the get-go that this is an imaginary theatrical universe within the universe we all now, as opposed to any real redefinition of Biblical history. I found exactly one scene that fundamentalists might object to: 30 seconds out of a two-hour play that imply the Christ child was born of the play’s lesbian couple—and even this keeps the virgin birth intact.

Of course, the vast majority of those who protest this play wherever it is performed have never seen or read it. Fundamentalism, of any religion, leaves no window for dissenters and questioners.

By contrast, I just saw a 1999 movie called “Dogma,” a low-budget flick with a superstar cast (including very young Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a pair of very foul-mouthed sin-avenging angels on a killing spree, George Carlin as a shady, street-tough Catholic Cardinal in New Jersey, Chris Rock as the delightful unknown 13th Apostle, and Salma Hayek as as a celestial being-turned-stripper). Early in the movie, we see Damon in an airport lounge, casting deep doubts about God’s existence into the mind of a confused Catholic nun. After she leaves, Affleck points out the irony that Damon’s character has known God directly.

An angel who kills with an assault weapon is only one of the many blasphemies—not all of them violent. The reimaging of several different pieces of the Jesus story as well as the portrayal of God will no doubt raise a few eyebrows among the faithful. Hundreds of people die in this funny but very gory film.

Now this is a movie that many Christians and religious Jews would find blasphemous all the way through—if they can stop laughing long enough to reflect on it. And yet, I didn’t remember any protests around it!

But Google has a better memory than I do; there were protests, actually. In fact, Disney’s Michael Eisner cut the film loose from his empire, under pressure from the Catholic League. Not only that, but the film’s director, Kevin Smith, infiltrated one of the protests—what a brilliant publicity move! He wrote and spoke (quite humorously) about his experience on this page, which also includes a TV news report of the protest, where he got recognized and interviewed.

I can understand that a film about a couple of angels cursing and shooting their way through modern America would upset people. But what does it say about our culture that people also get upset about sincere and committed expression of same-sex love?

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, People Helping People, Reviews Tagged with , , , ,

“Everything will be all right in the end. If it is not all right, then it is not yet the end.”

—Sonny (Dev Patel), in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”

What a delight! The more you’ve traveled in developing countries, the more you will relate to this charming and yet deeply socially conscious movie (I have not been to India, but I found that my experiences in Latin America—and particularly Mexico—made it very easy to relate to the characters and their adventures.)

First off, it’s an excellent window on India—not the glitzy and modern upper-class Mumbai or Delhi of so many Bollywood movies, but the noisy, colorful, aromatic and yes, gritty reality of the working classes and poor of a less touristed Indian city (Jaipur). Yes, pretty much every one has a mobile phone, the hotel owner has a computer (a very ancient one), and three of the characters work at an Internet customer service company. Yet feels like an India pretty much unaffected by rapid technological change, and I found that quite charming.

Second, it’s another terrific performance by Dev Patel (you’ll recognize him; he played the lead in “Slumdog Millionaire”), this time as the eternally optimistic keeper of the decrepit rusk of a hotel that he’s trying to reinvent as “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful.”

We get to follow his first group of guests, a diverse bunch of aging Brits with a big range of reasons for making the trip. Some wholeheartedly embrace the adventure, one hides from it, and one enters the tableaux as an anti-black, anti-Indian racist who only crossed continents to get a faster and much less expensive hip replacement. Love interests and friendships spring up all over the place, including one traveler’s search for his long-lost male lover from 40 years earlier.

Besides the exotic travel and romantic comedy aspects, the movie addresses many issues at play in both India and the West: untouchability, arranged marriages versus love relationships, the economic collapse, same-sex relationships, racism, poverty, the place of secrets versus sharing in a relationship, cultural immersion versus tourism, family dynamics, and rose-colored-glasses optimism versus “business reality.”

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

At 72, Lily Tomlin is biologically old enough to be my mother.

I had the good luck to see Tomlin perform Friday night at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, MA (a venue where I’ve seen many great shows). She is not slowing down. She’s still hugely funny, passionate about her work and her beliefs, and very athletic on stage. She’s able to create fleshed-out characters just by changing her body posture, voice/accent, and stage lighting—needing neither costumes nor props to “channel” acerbic Ernestine, the schizophrenic savant bag lady Trudy, a Texas-accented suburban housewife doing vibrator infomercials, or a mother calling her son to put down those assault weapons and landmines and go wash up for supper. And she had obviously spent some time researching the town where she would perform one night and be gone; she incorporated a surprising number of on-point local references that went beyond the obvious.

It was one of the best comedy shows I’ve ever seen. 36 hours later, I’m still rolling some of her routines through my head and laughing.

Pete Seeger, who turned 93 last week, is old enough to be Lily’s dad. His voice doesn’t have the power it had when he was Tomlin’s age, and he’s backed off from the multi-octave, almost operatic singing of his peak years (go listen to his soaring “Wimoweh” from his 1963 Carnegie Hall concert). These days, he doesn’t perform as often, and when he does, he spends a lot of time teaching songs, talking/chanting them, and letting the audience do much of the actual singing.

But at 93, he’s still living at home in his little cabin in Beacon, New York with his wife Toshi. Last I heard, he’s still chopping firewood for his woodstove. Certainly he still devotes prodigious energies to his many environmental and social justice campaigns. In fact, he performed at an Occupy rally in New York just this fall. There’s even a grassroots movement to nominate Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize (note: as of this writing, the site is experiencing technical problems but claims more than 32,000 signatures).

I’ve been lucky to have great models for growing older all the way back to my childhood. I even worked as a paid organizer for the Gray Panthers for a year and a half in my 20s. And these two are only two of hundreds of people about whom I could say, “I want to be like that when I’m old.” But they’re both very public, and I happen to be thinking about them today. Here are a few lessons I take from Tomlin and Seeger:

  1. Doing what you love and are good at keeps you young
  2. Staying true to your values keeps you young
  3. Being appreciated by others  keeps you young (but note that Seeger was blacklisted and obscure for more than a decade during the McCarthy era)
  4. Finding the fun in life and enjoying the ride keeps you young
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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Peace and War, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

Ever see a 76-year-old-man up on stilts—and not just ordinary stilts but giant ones that elevated him 15 or 20 feet above everyone else?

I saw Peter Schumann, the tireless founder of Bread & Puppet Theater, do just that yesterday, at a performance in Boston.

Bread & Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann, age 76, walking high above other performers on giant stilts.
76-year-old Peter Schumann, on giant stilts

Schumann founded the well-known political theater troupe back in 1963. Known for its giant puppets and unflinching anarchist-socialist politics (not to mention Schumann’s visual art and breadbaking, the collective nature of its living and working, and incorporating audience members including kids into its performance), Bread & Puppet has been fighting the good fight for decades.

Puppet-headed actors on stage: Bread & Puppet Theater
Puppet-headed actors on stage: Bread & Puppet Theater

I first encountered them in the early 1970s, when I used to attend demonstrations against the Vietnam war as a teenager. Walking the line between art and propaganda, the large troupe, based on a  beautiful farm in Glover, Vermont, is always entertaining, and always committed to the arts as tools of personal empowerment, affordable to all.

Peter Schumann talks with the cast just before the show
Not yet in costume, Peter Schumann huddles with the cast at the end of the dress rehearsal

I’m glad they’re still out there pushing the envelope, and was particularly glad to see a large number of kids, both in the audience and among the volunteers who got there early to rehears and join the cast for the day.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, travel Tagged with , , ,

By Shel Horowitz, Editor, Global Travel Review

In my many trips to San Francisco and the Bay area, I’ve tended not to go to the Mission District. I’d walked through it on my first trip to the city, way back in 1976, and remembered it as a depressing area with more than its share of derelicts. While it was not as raunchy as the Tenderloin, it was not, at that time, a place that inspired return visits.

Well, things have changed—somewhat. Valencia Street in particular has gotten somewhat chi-chi, with a wide range of restaurants (and prices), cafes, bookstores, and small shops. I met friends at Osha Thai: upscale and very tasty, with unusual—I’d even call them exotic—menu choices and yet very reasonable prices.

And the Mission is host to an incredible diversity of murals: I’m guessing well over 100, often stacked next to each other in rows of five or more. The largest concentration I saw was along the entire length of Clarion Alley, which runs east from Valencia near 17th Street to Mission (I only made it as far as Lexington halfway down). Themes range from Aztec gods to revolutionary hiphop culture, and artistic quality ranges from thoroughly brilliant to quite amateurish.

Murals in Carion Aley, San Francisco
Phtographers and gawkers in San Francisco's mural-lined Clarion Alley

Another good collection is just east of Mission in the low 20s, behind and around of all things a Zipcar parking lot.

Murals at a Zipcar parking lot, San Francisco
Murals at a Zipcar parking lot, San Francisco

And then there’s the Women’s Building, whose four-storey corner edifice at 3543 18th Street has turned into a giant canvas for muralists on both street-facing sides.

Side view of the Women's Building, San Francisco
Side view of the Women's Building, San Francisco
African woman with child mural closeup, the Women's Building, San Francisco
African woman with child mural closeup, the Women's Building, San Francisco

While San Francisco is a charming, beautiful city, many parts of it lack sufficient trees. Not so Delores Street, a beautiful boulevard with a refreshingly green tree-lined median strip. At 16th is a large Spanish-style church, and immediately next to it is the mission of Saint Francis of Assisi, for whom the city is named.

The original San Francisco mission (built 1785-91) and the neighboring basilica
The original San Francisco mission and the neighboring basilica

The original mission dates to 1776, but this building was constructed a bit later, 1785-91.

Like Valencia, Mission Street has a number of food choices. I met another friend at Gracias Madre, a vegan Mexican restaurant, and from there, continued walking up Mission to 24th Street.

This is an area that time forgot. Crumbling old movie theaters, pawn shops, and yes, lots of derelicts curled up in doorways when not going through trash to salvage deposit bottles. Many of the buildings on this upper stretch have not been updated in decades.

Has time forgotten this thrift shop and pawn shop on San Francisco's Mission Street?
Has time forgotten this thrift shop and pawn shop on San Francisco's Mission Street?

And yet the impression was clean, and the murals were everywhere, and the streets were full of people who seemed engaged with their landscape.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Demographics/Psychographics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

flashmob:“a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.” (Wikipedia)

For the year or so that I’ve been watching the occasional video of flashmobs gathering in public places to perform, I’ve wished I could be part of one. But I didn’t wish strongly enough to organize one.

All the videos I’ve been sent took places in major cities like Amsterdam and Philadelphia. I live in a very rural area whose biggest city (Springfield, MA) has a population of only 155,629. And yet, to make a flashmob, you only need a dozen or so people.

I think a lot of the allure of flashmobs is that for the most part, we live in a society where entertainment is provided, prepackaged. Until 1877 when Edison invented the phonograph, if you wanted to hear music, you gathered some friends with instruments and songbooks and made some. If you wanted a theater experience, you played charades. Public concerts outside of major cities were few and far between. Now, every tiny town has live music 20 or 30 nights a year, and many have music every weekend night all year long. We are, for the most part, deprived of the opportunity to not only make our own entertainment but perform it for others. The flashmob at the Holyoke Mall had one day’s notice, no rehearsal. Singers were to wear a solid color indicating their part (my alto wife wore green, other parts wore red or white)—and of course, many people who just happened to be there joined in the singing.

Thursday, I received an e-mail from the organizer of a local folk music sing-along: a flashmob would gather the following day to sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at the food court of the largest shopping mall near us, the Holyoke Mall (halfway between our house and Springfield, in a town of 40,005). On a Friday night just before Christmas, it would certainly have an audience. Better still, it was organized by the local opera company; the singing would be worth hearing.

The next morning, my wife, D. Dina Friedman, who sings in a community chorus, got an e-mail about the event that went out to all the chorus members. This was looking better and better. And the timing was perfect; we could drop our son off for the final rehearsal of his school’s winter show, go sing, and be back at school in plenty of time to watch him perform.

The singing was magical. Sound coming from every corner of the large and crowded food court, and a few stunningly stellar voices rising above the crowd. It reminded me of the time more than 30 years ago that I happened to be out on a lawn at my college while the chorus was rehearsing for their upcoming tour, and they invited me to stand within their circle and be surrounded by beautiful sound.

What amazed me the most, though, was not the event, but the aftermath. By the time we returned home after Rafael’s show, when I went to post something on Twitter, I found links to at least two different videos, including this very high quality one posted on the Springfield newspaper’s site.

I sent the link around, and got a couple of “wish I was there” or “how did you find out?” responses. And then last night, I went to a different performance, more than 40 miles away from the shopping mall at a retreat center in a really remote area (it happens to be the most beautiful house I know, one I love to visit for this annual storytelling concert)—and at intermission, I heard people talking about the flashmob and wishing they had known ahead.

In other words, even without a big-city backdrop, this flashmob had an impact well beyond the borders of the food court. E-mail made the event possible; social media gave it permanent life. “And I say to myself/What a wonderful world.”

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Diversity Tagged with , ,

Guest post by By Melissa M Williams, Author of Iggy the Iguana

Have you ever been afraid to start something new because you didn’t know what to expect? Maybe everyone will be different than you? Doing something new and out of our comfort zone can definitely develop a person, well in this case, an Iguana’s personality!

Iggy the Iguana is a story about a young iguana boy starting his first day at a new school. It doesn’t seem too bad, until you find out that he has to change from a private “All-Lizard” school out in the suburbs to a public “All-Animal” school located in the heart of the city in Houston, Texas. Diversity and acceptance has the power to change Iggy from being a timid and insecure iguana to a confident and understanding reptile.

Turtles can’t take off their shells … not even if they have a bad back. Cats have to shave off their hair if they want to play baseball outside in the summertime. Who knew! Bullfrogs from New York don’t always come across as friendly, so maybe you should get to know them a little better. Newborn puppies don’t always look like cute little dogs at birth, so don’t mistake them as aliens. Box shell turtles can’t swim, so why is the one Iggy meets determined to surf one day? Just because the mouse from Spain doesn’t talk very much, doesn’t mean he can’t speak English … maybe he has more to say if you just ask. It’s hard for Iggy to believe that if he didn’t meet all of these different animals in fourth grade, he would have missed out on so much knowledge and excitement. Iggy went from being shy and reserved to being inquisitive and open-minded. Experiences with those who are not alike help a lizard, like Iggy, become a more well-rounded individual, once he realizes his way of doing things is not the only way in the world. Iggy also got to teach the other animals a thing or two about being a lizard! When we accept others and find ways to relate on a whole new level, our own self-acceptance emerges too. Just think, if we were all the same, life would be pretty dull.

Iggy’s story doesn’t just teach that diversity on the outside is interesting, but diversity on the inside matters too. Not everyone’s family upbringing or structure is the same. Many of the animals in Iggy the Iguana didn’t come from the same type of family as Iggy. These eye-opening realizations help Iggy become more empathetic and understanding. The true value of friendship is addressed as Iggy makes lasting relationships with his new friends.

Iggy the Iguana – Iggy the Iguana is the first book in the Iggy Chapter Book Series for ages 7 to 11. The story focuses on the major themes of acceptance, friendship, and diversity while Iggy starts a brand new school. The transition from a private “all-lizard” school to a public “all-animal” school is eye opening, as Iggy soon accepts that just because other animals are different doesn’t mean they can’t be your friends. By the end of Iggy’s 4th grade year, he realizes that changing schools was the best move he could have ever made!
Melissa M. Williams is an advocate for literacy and creativity in children. Her children’s chapter books were inspired by real life experiences with childhood pets she owned while growing up in Houston, Texas. While finishing her Master’s degree in Professional Counseling, Melissa started substitute teaching for elementary schools in order to understand the daily life of her young audience. The students helped her create relatable and realistic stories while including lessons, values and acceptance within the story-line. In addition to writing, Melissa spends most of the school year speaking to students about her own journey as an author and the process of creative writing, while encouraging each student to think outside the box, follow their inner passion, and write their own stories.
Win the Iggy the Iguana Give Away! Including the Newly Released Items in Iggy Collection, Snap Shell the Turtle (Plush Doll), Iggy Collector’s Baseball Cards, and The Read3Zero T-Shirt … supporting the fight against illiteracy 30 minutes at a time. Be our most active visitor during the tour for a chance to win this Iggy Collection — the tour schedule is posted at https://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2010/01/iggy-iguana-and-melissa-m-williams-tour.html to make it easy for you to visit and comment. To learn more about Iggy and Melissa Williams – visit www.iggytheiguana.com.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Democracy, General Commentary, Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For the last 28 years, I’ve lived in or just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. About ten years ago, Northampton established the position of City Poet Laureate, with a two-year term. Until two years ago, the post was mostly ceremonial. The official poet would occasionally show up and read a poem to mark some event or other, but kept a low profile.

Then Lesléa Newman was chosen for the post. She used her entire two years to work as a catalyst to bring poetry to the people–and the people to poetry. She organized event after event, and brought formidable community organizing skills into the task of making poetry relevant to every generation.

Among her accomplishments:

  • Filling an 800-seat theater with a poetry reading involving readers from the community as well as cities within a few hours drive (none of them superstars)
  • Getting poets to agree to write a poem a day for a month and get sponsors to pledge contributions, raing over $11,000 to benefit a literacy program that helps new immigrants
  • Putting together an anthology of local poets
  • Taking poetry programs into the schools
  • Providing exposure to local poets in a newspaper column

    • The list could go on and on. Newman has been a dynamo and an inspiration. Perhaps this is not surprising from a woman whose 57 published books (!) have included such groundbreaking material as Heather Has Two Mommies (possibly the first lesbian-friendly children’s book to get wide circulation, Letter to Harvey Milk, and one of the first novels about bulemia.

    In the United States, we tend to be uncomfortable with intellectuals. People who pride themselves on their lack of knowledge of the world around them actually do grow up to be President (GW Bush) and run for Vice President (Palin). When we do elect a leader who’s an intellectual, like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, it’s because they disguise it well, and we see pictures of them doing “man of the people” activities like chowing down burgers at McDonald’s (Clinton) or taking his kids to the bumper cars at a fair (Obama). I think the last prominent US leader who was not afraid to show himself as an intellectual may have been Franklin Roosevelt.

    Other countries treasure their artists, and especially their dissident artists. The first president of free Senegal was the poet Leopold Senghor; in the Czech Republic, it was the playwright Václav Havel. In the United States, yes, we’ve had a number of Presidents who’d written books before taking the office, including both JFK and Nixon as well as Obama (and his former opponent Hillary Clinton)–but these people were already in public life when they wrote their books. Outside of the movies, which gave us Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and even former Carmel, California mayor Clint Eastwood, it’s hard to think of major US policy makers who really came up out of the arts.

    We’ve had plenty of dissident artists, some of them even pretty famous (Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco). But while art can shape people’s movements, as protest folk and protest rock helped to solidify protests against segregation, the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, it doesn’t seem to shape policy. And in many cases, we find that the dissidents who achieve fame are quieter about their dissent, at least until they’ve already achieved fame (classic example: John Lennon, who did become quite visible in the peace movement after moving to New York). Not too many people stop to analyze the working-class-hero lyrics of Bruce Springsteen and find the progressive values underneath, because it’s cloaked in something that looks superficially like a right-wing version of patriotism. But get down-and-dirty with the lyrics of “Born in the USA”, and you’ll see it’s about a Vietnam vet who went into the army because he grew up in a depressed town, couldn’t find work, and got into trouble–and then after his hitch still can’t find a job.

    Hey, Bruce, ever thought about running for office?

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Peace and War, Uncategorized

    By Shel Horowitz

    I’ve been wanting to see the Dixie Chicks movie “Shut Up and Sing” since I saw a trailer for it about a year ago. Last night, we watched it on video.

    It tells a gripping story about free speech and repression that started on the eve of U.S. invasion of Iraq. Lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” And all of a sudden, the biggest selling women’s band in the country couldn’t get radio airplay, was picketed, watched right-wingers engage in mass collection and destruction of their CDs, and lost a big chunk of their conservative country music audience.

    Interestingly, their sold-out 2003 concert tour continued to draw wild throngs of enthusiastic fans–but their next tour didn’t do so well. And their next album–an album that contained sharp, penatring original songwriting about the whole experience, a first for this former cover band–was deliberately (and very succesfully) launched through other channels than country radio.

    It is a sad, sad day when the U.S., the country that not only pioneered free speech but enshrined it as a founding principle, in the First Amendment to the Constitution, can be so vicious to its dissenters. These women received death threats for speaking out!

    I want to know how is that when Bill O’Reilly said on national TV that they “deserve to be slapped around,” there was no boycott of his books, no mainstream call to get an advocate of violence against women thrown off the air. How come he wasn’t Imused while the Dixie Chicks got Dixie Chicked?

    Let’s go back to the First Amendment for a moment:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    It seems to be that in the “with us or against us” years of the GWB administration, a lot of people seem all-too-willing to forget this powerful language that has kept us reasonably safe from internal tyranny for years. Yes, I know there are some very unpleasant exceptions, including not only the McCarthy era of the 40s and 50s but also the Palmer Raids following World War I. And Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, “forgot” to block discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity, which was a shame. It would have been helpful to have an early, consistent, and strong legal argument against slavery.

    We got that protection decades later, in the Fourteenth Amendment–and even that wasn’t enough to stop the extreme segregation that followed for a hundred years after the Civil War…the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II–but not German- or Italian-Americans…and the roundups of Arabs and Muslims without due process that took place during the current administration.

    Now, I happen to be a First Amendment absolutist. In fact, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson principal authors of the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution) were absolutist as well–saying in the original draft and in later statements that the First Amendment means “there shall be no law abridging”…from Congress or anyone else (i.e., the states, the executive branch). I actually did some research on this back in 1972, for a high school paper, although I’m not turning up the citation in Google. But it has stuck with me all those years.

    In other words, I think Bill O’Reilly and Don Imus have the right to spew their filth–and their employers have the right to terminate their employment. I think the pro-war faction has every right to stop patronizing the Dixie Chicks, and to picket, and to make noses impugning their patriotism, event hough I happen to think the DCs are the patriotic ones here. But I have issues when that broadens to actual suppression of dissent.

    The DCs were suppressed. Word came from on high from the headquarters of at least two radio networks: Don’t play their music, or else. It was not left to the individual DJs, or even the individual stations. In the movie, we see Senators John McCain (in the days when he hadn’t yet thrown away his integrity) and Barbara Boxer skeptically quizzing record company executives about this. Not shown in the movie but also very much at issue was the “guideline” from Clear Channel to its 1170 stations: don’t play these hundreds of songs, including John Lennon’s Imagine! And the pressure on journalists to go along with the war and beat the drums–and to exclude opposing viewpoints from mainstream channels (casualties included Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue, among many others)…the attempt to suppress Michael Moore’s latest book at the time…and a gazillion other examples.

    (My friends Charlie King and Karen Brandow sing a wonderful song by the Prince Myshkins about this: “Why Aren’t WE On the List?”

    Yes, we must be vigilant against attacks on our fundamental freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly. I think I just might go out this weekend and buy that Dixie Chicks album.

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