So when Chris gave the Dixie Chicks documentary a glowing review, I put it at the top of my list. "Shut Up and Sing" is an account of the controversy from The Comment, and the ordeal the trio went through on their journey back to the top of the charts. While playing a show in London during the run-up to the Iraq War, Maines mentioned to the crowd that she was "ashamed that President Bush is from Texas," the home state of all three Dixie Chicks. The crowd cheered, but as soon as The Comment was reported in the world press, rednecks everywhere lost their shit.
I wrote a column about the controversy a year and a half ago, when the Chicks won a butt load of Grammys for their album "Taking the Long Way," and how it was a major vindication for their artistic integrity, as well as a big score for freedom of speech.
But that was before I saw the movie. The cameras followed the women and their families around for three years as the Chicks endured everything from a boycott by country radio, to mass CD smashings and a chilling death threat delivered to Maines on the eve of their Dallas concert. Holy Zapruder, Batman!
Barb and I always had thought that country radio refusing to play the Chicks' music was a major overreaction to a throwaway comment made onstage, but when we saw the hatred, the vitriol, the saliva-flecked bellowing coming from the mouths of conservatives and war-mongering knuckle-draggers over this, we were blown away. But I also noticed that these flag-wrapped rednecks who decried The Comment and demanded that the Dixie Chicks' music be wiped from the airwaves displayed more than a little hypocrisy in their patriotic fervor.
[...]
Toby Keith, by simply acknowledging the Dixie Chicks and voicing his displeasure about their refusal to fall into lock-step with the bomb-Iraq-to-the-stone-age crowd, became the de facto standard-bearer for the backlash. His smug countenance was suddenly everywhere, on talk shows and entertainment shows, bragging about how he wrote that "boot in your ass" song all by himself, and that Natalie Maines "isn't a songwriter." But this film had me seeing the ex-wrestler-turned-faux-cowboy in a whole new light.
Even though Toby Keith's sub-hat doo-rag may be a bit too tight, causing an imbalance of air pressure in his head, he just might be exactly what this country needs in the White House during these turbulent, divisive times.
Obviously, more than half the country didn't mind the way Bush/Cheney was having their way with us and the Constitution in their first term, and reelected them for a second. These voters were like a woman in a shitty marriage, who's getting constantly slapped around by her unemployed husband who drinks too much and is screwing the landlady. But she's decided that it's just too much trouble to start over with somebody else. So it would seem that rational thought has become less and less a part of the election of a new president.
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