Rosanne Cash on the Iraq War

Rosanne Cash is a New Yorker these days.  But she certainly has her share of Nashville roots, and was an important innovator in country music herself.  Her style of music has gone considerably beyond the country idiom.  But she can still crank out a mean version of her father's hit "Flat Top Box," or her own signature "Seven Year Ache."

At her excellent Web site, she occasionally posts thought on various topics, musical and otherwise.  Which is great, not least because she's a very talented prose writer, both essays and fiction.  Her Web post for May 17 includes the following:

Those of you who know my activism and deep political interests are probably wondering why I have not said anything about the war in a very long time.  I don't know what to say.  I am in shock.  I don't need to reiterate my position and why I was against this war from the beginning, and I don't need to give you a laundry list of the administration's catastrophic missteps.  I just want to encourage you to register, if you are not, and VOTE.  And get everyone you know registered as well.  In the Fall of the election year of 1988, I was hugely pregnant, and I stuffed my handbag with voter registration forms, and took them everywhere I went, and was not at all shy about soliciting registrants.  I could hear some people whisper, 'Isn't that Rosanne Cash, pregnant, registering voters?'  I was proud of that.  I plan on doing it again this year.  I cannot tell you how important I think it is to vote.  I believe in democracy like some people believe in a religion, and I believe that no matter how many blows democracy takes, no matter how secretive or underming a particular administration may be, that no single person, no single Cabinet, is more powerful than democracy.  I believe the democratic process will always, eventually, win out, but in order for that to happen, more than half the people in the country need to VOTE!  So please, do your part.  You can't complain about what's going on if you don't vote, and you know how much we all like to complain.

Just before he passed away last year, Rosanne said of her father Johnny that he was as opposed to the Iraq War as anyone else she knew.  Al Gore, it seems, is not the only person who catches some of the Andy Jackson spirit in Tennessee.

When I saw her perform last year, she added some closing lines to one of her songs:

I don't believe in violence
I don't believe in terrorism
I don't believe in preemption
I don't believe in war