VOICES: Defending Dixie
I never really liked the Dixie Chicks. I grew up on Country music and I've consciously sought the inspiration of women artists, but the truth is that this trio has always irritated me.
Now that impassioned warmongers - beyond simply opting to personally forgo the band's music - are destroying mass quantities of CDs with tractors, crying for radio boycotts and organizing competing concerts starring the likes of the Marshall Tucker Band, I'm somewhat less apathetic. The Dixie Chicks may irritate me, but I find those who are symbolically lynching the band as a warning to other potential naysayers grotesquely nauseating.
Natalie Maines' offending phrase - "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas" - was given way too much attention by the mainstream and right wing media. Any sheep so angry about this comment that he's willing to trade in his Dixie Chicks concert ticket to see the Marshall Tucker Band, deserves to see the Marshall Tucker Band.
The baby-faced blonde from Lubbock, Texas, made a big mistake when she said she was "ashamed." Not because it's a mistake to disapprove of our president during wartime or any of that nonsense, but because it's not what she meant.
In a clarification issued on March 12 and in her apology issued on March 14, Maines mentioned the "astounding" and "huge" anti-American sentiments the band had witnessed while in Europe. Not all U.S. citizens fall into the rogue cowboy stereotype often used to denigrate her fellow Texan President Bush and Maines felt a need to differentiate herself. She wanted her London audience to believe that she and many other Texans are not the provincial Christian Right Republicans the world perceives.
It's too bad she didn't find a better way to say it. It's too bad she didn't spend more time reading poetry.
In Wen Fu: The Art of Writing, Lu Chi give emphasis to the Confucian tenant of calling things by their right name. The book was translated into English by poet Sam Hamill who recently mobilized Poets Against the War.
"Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid," Hamill states in the April 2003 of The Progressive. It's a brief, but powerful lesson and one that could have saved Natalie Maines from months of embarrassment. Almost a retraction, her apology alienated many of those who initially sprang to her defense, yet failed to appease those who found her remark treasonous.
Hamill says many brilliant things in his poetry as well as in interviews and I would have loved to have used this entire column to promote the Poets Against the War anthology that's being published this month - April, by the way, is National Poetry Month. But while people may give poets more intellectual credit than they give to musicians or actors, they don't admire them enough to lift them to any significant level of popularity or celebrity. Very few Americans care that Hamill's initiative collected over 13,000 poems of protest in two months and led Laura Bush to cancel a poetry symposium at the White House in fear of drawing attention to this notable opposition.
Most people would rather debate one sentence uttered by one Dixie Chick.
The Dixie Chicks have sold a ton of copies of their triple Grammy Award-winning release Home. Their latest hit was number one on Billboard country charts for over four months. They've sold out plenty of performances on their upcoming Home tour, including the one facing competition from the Marshall Tucker Band / Rally For the Troops benefit concert being organized by conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher.
If you want to buy the Home album or buy concert tickets (the tour plays in Philadelphia on June 16 and June 17) to counteract right wing protests, go for it. But I'd much rather see you buy a copy of the Poets Against the War anthology. Buy two copies while you're at it. You can send the other to Natalie Maines.
--alicia grega-pikul, 10 April 2003
