Hooray for Linda Ronstadt!

The Clear Channel Syndrome is alive and well.  That would be as in the Clear Channel that dropped the Dixie Chicks from their play lists when they made a mild implied criticism of Bush the Magnificent in early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.

Vegas Casino Boots Singer Linda Ronstadt Associated Press 07/19/04

LAS VEGAS - Singer Linda Ronstadt not only got booed, she got the boot after lauding filmmaker Michael Moore and his new movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" during a performance at the Aladdin hotel-casino.

Before singing "Desperado" for an encore Saturday night, the 58-year-old rocker called Moore a "great American patriot" and "someone who is spreading the truth." She also encouraged everybody to see the documentary about President Bush.

Ronstadt's comments drew loud boos and some of the 4,500 people in attendance stormed out of the theater. People also tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air. ...

Aladdin President Bill Timmins ... decided Ronstadt had to go — for good. Timmins said he didn't allow Ronstadt back in her luxury suite and she was escorted off the property.

If Timmins banned any of the Bush Fedayeen that caused the disruption from the hotel or had them "escorted" off the property by security guards, I haven't seen it mentioned in the news items I've seen.

Timmins is obviously a jerk, and gave the predictable excuses.  The Las Vegas Sun (Aladdin expels Ronstadt after political remarks 07/19/04) quotes him as saying:

"Whether you are politically on the left or on the right is not the point. She went up in front of the stage and just let it out. This was not the correct forum for that." ...

"If she wants to talk about her views to a newspaper or in a magazine article, she is free to do so. But in a stage in front of four and a half thousand people is not the place for it."

Oh, and of course is Toby Keith had been there and said how much he admired Bush the Magnificent, Liberator of Peoples, Timmins would have had the security people kick him out without even letting him go back to his room.  All for the good of the customers, of course. 

Anyone who believes that, send me $50 and I'll explain to you the Real Story of where them there Iraqi WMDs are hiding.  (Hint: it has to do with leprechauns and magic dust.)

The Sun also says that it's "debatable" how much Timmins' vow to never let her perform there again as long as he's there really means, "since the bankrupt Aladdin is in the process of being sold to a group headed by Planet Hollywood International Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Earl."

In other words, he's a bad businessman as well as a rightwing jerk.

How dumb is this?

This kind of thing gives me the creeps.  Although, I also have to think, what a bunch of dummies.  I mean, if I went to hear that fool Chuckie (CHARLIE DANIELS) play, I would be surprised if he didn't make some Moron-American type remarks.  (If someone wants to tell me I'm being unfair to morons by associating them with Chuckie, I can't really argue with that.)

I can even picture myself getting annoyed and walking out.  But throwing drinks into the air and into the artist posters?  Ripping the posters off the wall?  And for what?  The Chuckie equivalent of what she said would be something like, "Read Rush Limbaugh's new book.  Rush is a fine patriotic pill-popping bigot American, and his Oxycontin-induced insights represent a higher form of political consciousness."  I mean, it's not even worth a regular old bar fight, much less trying to trash a Vegas hotel.

I love it, too, when people sniff about how it's just so inappropriate to mix "politics" with "entertainment."  Tell that to the political reporters who have been covering Arnold Schwartzenegger as "Conan the Republican" and such like.  I mean, even ole Rush, Mr. Oxycontin himself, calls himself an "entertainer."

Women as targets of jingoism

It is kind of interesting, though, that the superpatriots who "support our troops" by ripping down singers' posters in Las Vegas and generally acting like drunken idiots always seem to find female scapegoats who they get way more worked up about than the Shawn Penns of the world.  Jane Fonda, the Dixie Chicks, Linda Ronstadt for that one concert, anyway.  What's up with that?

I've quoted before from the book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998) by Vietnam War veteran Jerry Lembcke, whose title is taken from the mythical story of the Vietnam veterans who were spit on by antiwar protesters, a favorite tale among the blowhard superpatriot crowd.  He has a whole chapter called, "Women, Wetness, and Warrior Dreams" in which he analyzes the sexual symbolism of that particular piece of folklore.

He makes his point in part by recalling the famous photo from V-J day by photographer Afgred Eisenstaedt of a sailor in uniform killing a nurse, which became "the most widely recognized representation of how World War II-era GIs came home from the war."

The contrast between Eisenstaedt's photograph and the image of soldiers being spat upon when they came home from Vietnam is instructive. The use of women in both images suggests that the struc­ture of our memory about wars is closely related to the structure of our gender relations. The memory of America's victory in World War II is encoded in Eisenstaedt's photograph. The soldier is in a decidedly dominant position with one arm around the nurse's waist, his hand pressing into the small of her back. His other arm is around her shoulders, bending her backward. The nurse appears to have gone limp, with her left arm dangling loosely and her right foot extended behind her for balance. This image of the aggressively affectionate World War II soldier, very much in control of his own homecoming experience, stands in sharp contrast to the image of GIs returning from the lost war in Vietnam. Encoded in the image of the spat-upon veteran are the country's collective "memories" of Vietnam returnees being assaulted by aggressive anti-war females and effeminate males. The loss of war is represented in the image as emasculation, the loss of manhood. The Vietnam veteran is victim, not victor.

More revealing still is the fact that the homecoming of World War II Tvictors is remembered through a photograph, while that of the Vietnam victim-veterans is remembered through a conjured up image. A photograph is a form of documentary evidence. It shows that an event really did happen. But there is no photographic or other docu­mentation of soldiers returning from Vietnam and being spat upon. The icon of homefront betrayal, the spat-upon veteran, is a figment of the imagination that has been popularized through storytelling. Recall the similarity in the stories. The spitting occurs at an airport, usually in San Francisco, and the spitter is a girl or male "longhair" who calls the soldier a murderer or baby killer. The stories have been repeated so often that, if asked to do so, thousands of Americans could probably draw pictures of Vietnam veterans coming home to such scenes. Al­though it is a picture that thousands of people have in their minds, it simply does not exist outside of their minds. In my research for this book, involving the search of newspaper reports about anti-war rallies and peace marches, the viewing of almost 150 films, and conversations and correspondence with dozens of individuals, I found only one material representation of the spat-upon veteran image—in a "GI Joe" comic book panel from the mid-1980s.

How are we going to blame the women for the Iraq War and the disaster it's become?  Well, of course, ole Rush has already shown us how.  It was the women in Abu Ghuraib who were behind all the torture!  Not manly men like Rummy or Dick Cheney or Bush himself.  Yeah, that's it. And the Dixie Chicks.  And Linda Ronstadt saying something nice about Michael Moore at a concert.  Yeah, it's the dames' fault, all right.  It all makes sense, once you get into that Oxycontin frame of mind.

[07/20/04 update:  Michael Moore is taking up the issue: Open Letter to Bill Timmins, President Aladdin Casino and Hotel.  Via Thorn Papers blog.]