- The scene was the Aladdin Theatre in Las Vegas last Saturday
night. Linda Ronstadt, the fifty-something folk-rocker, was just coming
to the end of a concert backed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and
the crowd gave her a standing ovation.
-
- Then she offered one last song, the old Eagles hit "Desperado",
and dedicated it to Michael Moore, the rabble-rousing film-maker whose
Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has polarised the country like
no other cultural event of the early summer.
-
- Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Depending who you believe,
either the audience ran out of control or the Aladdin's management did.
Either way, the upshot was that Ms Ronstadt was hustled off stage and out
of the building and told she would not be welcome back, now or ever again.
She was not even allowed to return to her hotel room to pack. Hotel employees
checked out for her instead.
-
- "We needed her off the property," hotel spokeswoman
Tyri Squyres told local reporters. "She wanted to incite the audience,
and she incited them to the point where they were very upset."
-
- Hard though it is to imagine a diminutive middle-aged
woman with a bob haircut and a honey-sweet voice starting a riot in America's
very own Sin City, the Ronstadt Affair seems destined to go down as the
latest surreal episode to mark this contentious, jumpily hostile election
season.
-
- Ms Ronstadt's fellow liberal entertainers were quick
to cry foul yesterday about suppression of free speech and what they see
as a climate of fear fostered by the Bush administration. (Ms Ronstadt
herself has chosen not to comment.) The blow-hard opinion makers on the
other side, meanwhile, were equally quick to accuse her of woefully misreading
her audience and turning what was meant to be a pleasant piece of musical
entertainment into a wholly inappropriate piece of political grandstanding.
-
- Amid the furore, it was almost impossible to discern
what actually happened in those fateful few minutes last Saturday night.
According to the Aladdin's president, an expatriate Brit called Bill Timmins,
Ms Ronstadt's dedication to Michael Moore - and her urging that everyone
who has not yet gone to see the film do so -- pushed the audience into
a frenzy of indignation. Soon they were throwing cups at the stage, storming
out of the auditorium en masse and ripping down promotional posters as
they stomped to the box-office to demand their money back.
-
- "It was a very ugly scene," Mr Timmins, who
was in the audience himself, told the Associated Press. Ms Ronstadt, he
charged, "spoiled a wonderful evening for our guests and we had to
do something about it". It was his decision to call security and have
the singer escorted out of the building. She was scheduled to play just
the one night, so she didn't lose any performances, but Mr Timmins made
clear she could forget any future dates at his establishment. "As
long as I'm here, she's not going to play," he said.
-
- Not everyone present agreed with Mr Timmins' account,
however. Paula Francis, a news anchor on a local television station, told
the Las Vegas Review Journal that her experience of the concert was quite
different.
-
- "I was so stunned to read in the newspaper that
anyone had a negative reaction," she said. "Everyone who was
leaving when I was leaving was just thrilled. They thought it was a good
concert." At the moment of the Michael Moore dedication, she said,
"there were loud boos and there was quite a bit of applause. But everyone
calmed down right away and seemed to enjoy the rest of the encore."
-
- Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that the
atmosphere surrounding performers and celebrities who express their political
views - particularly, though not exclusively, when those views are hostile
to President Bush -- has deteriorated significantly in recent weeks. A
similar spasm of tension and partisan hostility surrounded the entertainment
business in the run-up to the Iraq war at the beginning of last year, when
radio stations organised a boycott of the country trio The Dixie Chicks
and a conservative internet group led by a North Carolina housewife entitled
Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits organised letter-writing campaigns to
have prominent Hollywood liberals booted out of their jobs and off the
airwaves.
-
- The latest round was almost certainly kicked off by the
massive wave of publicity surrounding the release of Mr Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Mr Moore's own free speech
rights have not suffered one jot and his film has to date taken in just
shy of $100m (£53m) at the US box-office - five times as much as
his previous record-breaking documentary Bowling For Columbine. But his
gleeful needling of the President, both in the film and in the surrounding
publicity campaign, have infuriated Bush loyalists and set the scene for
a cultural, as well as a political, stand-off in the run-up to the 2 November
presidential election.
-
- Earlier this month, the comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg
became a target for Republican Party operatives after she made genitalia
jokes about the President's name at a celebrity-studded fundraiser for
Democratic candidate John Kerry. Not only did the Republicans denounce
the whole affair, at New York's Radio City Music Hall, as a "hate
fest" revealing the true colours of both Mr Kerry and the Hollywood
establishment. Ms Goldberg also lost her job as a pitch woman for the diet-food
company Slimfast, which is based in the electorally sensitive state of
Florida where President Bush's brother Jeb is governor.
-
- The issue has been further stirred up by Sir Elton John,
who said in an interview with New York magazine this month that he saw
an "atmosphere of fear" in the United States like nothing else
since the McCarthy red-baiting era of the early 1950s. He said artists
were afraid to speak out and had shied away from the kind of anti-government
criticism that marked the protest songs and political theatre of the Vietnam
War era. "Everyone is too career-conscious. They're all too scared,"
he said.
-
- Sir Elton's remarks could probably do with a little careful
parsing. Although the attacks on performers do indeed raise questions about
freedom of speech, they have also been used and abused by people on both
sides of the argument to further their own agendas. That has been particularly
true of Mr Moore, who expertly manufactured a controversy over the release
of Fahrenheit 9/11 to generate invaluable advance publicity - accusing
Disney of censorship because the company wanted nothing to do with him
and told him to find a distribution deal elsewhere, which he duly did.
-
- Yesterday, Mr Moore leapt on the Ronstadt Affair and
somehow managed to make it all his own. On his website he posted the cover
of Ms Ronstadt's album Living In The USA and added the slogan: "Thank-you
Linda Ronstadt!" He also posted an open letter to Mr Timmins of the
Aladdin, taking him to task for gross over-reaction.
-
- "What country do you live in?" Mr Moore wrote.
"Last time I checked, Las Vegas is still in the United States. And
in the United States, we have something called the First Amendment. This
constitutional right gives everyone here the right to say whatever they
want to say.... For you to throw Linda Ronstadt off the premises because
she dared to say a few words in support of me and my film, is simply stupid
and un-American. Frankly, I have never heard of such a thing happening."
-
- The Aladdin quickly sought to deny that it was suppressing
anybody's rights. "It did not come down to the statements she had
said, per se," a spokeswoman said. "It's about using our venue
for political commentary versus being an entertainer. She was hired to
entertain, not to preach."
-
- That explanation, in turn, seems a little disingenuous,
since Ms Ronstadt has been dedicating Desperado to Mr Moore throughout
her current tour and announced the fact in an interview with the Las Vegas
Review-Journal published last Friday, the day before her concert: "They
say the country is evenly divided, and boy is that true. One half of the
audience cheers and the other half boos," she said.
-
- She added: "I don't understand this country sometimes
and I really fear for it. The government is making everybody in the world
hate us, including the people that used to be our friends."
-
- Besides her music, Ms Ronstadt's political views are
probably the best-known thing about her. In the 1970s she had a much-publicised
romance with Jerry Brown, the liberal governor of California who went on
to make two unsuccessful runs for the presidency. In a show in San Diego
on Sunday night, she made overt references to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's
recent attacks on "girlie men" in the state legislature. Her
dedication to Michael Moore - which she clearly has no intention of dropping
- split her audience in two but caused no undue ructions, according to
an account in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
-
- As Ms Ronstadt's experience shows, the atmosphere in
the United States is not one of systematic censorship so much as extreme
volatility: there is no knowing when a political statement is going to
cause an adverse reaction. The Dixie Chicks episode, triggered by a comment
made on a London stage by lead singer Natalie Maines, who told the audience
she was ashamed to come from President Bush's home state of Texas, might
have been a non-event but for the concerted efforts of a handful of online
Bush supporters and the sympathetic hearing they received from pro-administration
radio station owners.
-
- One radio chain, Cumulus Media, even arranged for a tractor
to crush Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes and videos in an episode that was so extreme
as to backfire. The trio, buoyed by the torrent of publicity, was soon
back on the top of the charts and was even honoured by a neologism - dixie-chicked
- to denote anyone unlucky enough to suffer a political hate campaign.
-
- Whoopi Goldberg appears to have been a victim of another
such concerted campaign, this time arranged by the Republican National
Committee. Her liberal politics and dirty mouth are hardly secrets to anyone
who has followed her career with even minimal attention over the past 15
years or so, and one imagines that Slimfast knew what they were taking
on when they hired her to speak on their behalf.
-
- In an interview with the New York Daily News immediately
after the furore, she pointed out the manufactured nature of the outrage.
"America's heart and soul is freedom of expression without fear of
reprisal, I find all this feigned indignation about 'Bush bashing' quite
disingenuous," she said. "For the Republican Party to pretend
this is new to them seems a little fake."
-
- Fake it may be, but we can expect plenty more of the
same between now and November.
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=542990
-
-
- Comment
Alton Raines
7-21-4
-
- Typical, whiney, liberal clap-trap! There's no censorship
going on, except the correct kind, by the free market and individual taste
of the public! That's the people exercising their rights. So now we're
to be FORCED to listen to the diatribes and flapping gums of celebrities
as if they have a "right" to be heard? No, they have a right
to say whatever they want and suffer the consequences if it displeases
their audience. That's the price of free speech. But by no means does the
first ammendment even remotely suggest that because one has the right to
speak, everyone has an obligation to listen! When people go to a concert,
they go to be entertained, not to attend a political rally or have their
personal political sentiments trampled on. We don't have to listen to anything
we don't want to listen to. We paid our money for the entertainment, bring
it on and shut the **** up!
-
-
- Comment
- By Frank Warren
- frank-warren@pacbell.net
- 7-21-04
-
- Oh the irony of it all! Our children our being killed
everyday because we "invaded" a country for "ever-changing
reasons," which now leads us to impose "our way of life"
over the "conquered," uh, er, I mean "the liberated."
-
- Oddly enough one of those rights is the "freedom
of speech." I find it puzzling that any American who is in support
of sending our children to die in another country in the spirit of these
ideologies would have a problem with any other American exercising those
rights, guaranteed to he or she, right here in this country.
-
- Does Linda Ronstadt have the right to speak her opinion
when she is doing a concert--of course she does! This is America--she's
guaranteed that right! Does anyone have to listen? No!
-
- It's fortunate, in a way that the young can savor their
innocence, and naivety, but opposingly dismal when evidence surfaces of
said traits from those that should know better. The young and innocent
live in a world without censorship and propaganda--their's is a pure world!
The others are just purely ignorant!
-
- What should the consequences for an entertainer who expresses
her opinion on stage be, from those who disagree with her? Boos? Ok. Leaving
abrubtly? Ok. Making a mental note to never buy a ticket again? Ok. Making
a complaint to management? Ok . . . causing a ruckus? Not ok! Destroying
property? Not ok!
-
- Adding to the irony of the Ronstadt debacle, is the fact
that very essence of music, and lyricism is the core of freedom of speech
and expressionism--my god, that's why we go see them in the first place!
-
- I might add that dedicating the "last song"
at the end of a concert to Michael Moore does not a political rally make,
and shame on Bill Timmins for his treatment of Ms. Ronstadt. Makes one
wonder who made the bigger political statement!
-
- Finally, for the young and innocent, or the old and ignorant,
believe it or not, if you've never been to a concert before, the artist
"doesn't play only the tunes you like!"
-
-
- Comment
Ben Hendrix
7-21-4
Far more revealing in all this hooplah is this statement by Ronstadt:
-
- "It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert
and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian.
It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."
-
- That's a pretty sickening statement, and it reveals much
of the sentiment of the far left in America. They are hateful, spiteful,
bigoted, elitists who make their ultra-conservative counterparts look almost
saintly (almost). I think Ms. Ronstadt needs a little trip down the financial
'blue bayou' ala boycott, because I don't think she realizes just how many
'republicans and fundamental christians' have been paying her bills through
buying her albums and attending her concerts. Time for a wake up call to
the ole' pocketbook.
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