Thank you, warrior women of Dixie, and welcome to the movement.
This is extraordinary. A top country group speaks out against the Iraq invasion. The right wing hit squads move into action, whipping up a frenzy, trying to make them grovel. The usual stuff; “fans” burn records, radio stations refuse to play them. They even get death threats.
So what do the Dixie Chicks do? Come back even stronger, that’s what, saying anyone who thought they’d shut up is seriously wrong.
From The Guardian;
“They have been called Saddam’s Angels and the Dixie Sluts, traitors and big mouths, all because they made a disparaging remark about President Bush at a concert in London last month.
Radio stations stopped playing their new CD and invited listeners to dump their old albums in rubbish bins and there have been death threats and calls to boycott their upcoming US tour.
Now the Texas-based Dixie Chicks are fighting back. They have posed for the cover of next week’s Entertainment Weekly cheerfully wearing nothing but the epithets they have attracted and vowing to continue to speak their minds.
“People think this’ll scare us and shut us up and it’s gonna do the opposite,” said Maines. “They just served themselves a huge headache.”
Bruce Springsteen said,
“The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they’re terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American”.
“The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about – namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home”.