two weeks ago, the united way canceled susan’s appearance at a conference on women’s leadership. and both of us last week were told that both we and the firstamendment were not welcome at the baseball hall of fame.
a famous middle-aged rock-and-roller called me last weekto thank me for speaking out against the war, only to go on to tell me that he could not speak himself because he fears repercussions from clear channel. “”they promote our concert appearances,”” he said. “”they own most of the stations that play our music. i can’t come out against this war.””
and here in washington, helen thomas finds herselfbanished to the back of the room and uncalled on afterasking ari fleischer whether our showing prisoners of war at guantanamo bay on television violated the geneva convention.
a chill wind is blowing in this nation. a message is beingsent through the white house and its allies in talk radio and clear channel and cooperstown. if you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications.
every day, the air waves are filled with warnings, veiledand unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. and the public, like so many relatives and friends that i saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear.
i am sick of hearing about hollywood being against thiswar. hollywood’s heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the- magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue. but hollywood, the concept, has always been a popular target.
i remember when the columbine high school shootingshappened. president clinton criticized hollywood for contributing to this terrible tragedy — this, as we weredropping bombs over kosovo. could the violent actions of our leaders contribute somewhat to the violent fantasies of our teenagers? or is it all just hollywood and rock and roll?
i remember reading at the time that one of the shootershad tried to enlist to fight the real war a week before he acted out his war in real life at columbine. i talkedabout this in the press at the time. and curiously, no one accused me of being unpatriotic for criticizing clinton. in fact, the same radio patriots that call us traitors today engaged in daily personal attacks on their presidentduring the war in kosovo.
today, prominent politicians who have decried violence inmovies — the “”blame hollywooders,”” if you will — recently voted to give our current president the power to unleash real violence in our current war. they want us to stop the fictional violence but are okay with the real kind.
and these same people that tolerate the real violence ofwar don’t want to see the result of it on the nightly news. unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in iraq. violence as a concept, an abstraction — it’s very strange.
as we applaud the hard-edged realism of the opening battle scene of “”saving private ryan,”” we cringe at thethought of seeing the same on the nightly news. we aretold it would be pornographic. we want no part of reality in real life. we demand that war be painstakingly realized on the screen, but that war remain imagined and conceptualized in real life.
and in the midst of all this madness, where is thepolitical opposition? where have all the democrats gone? long time passing, long time ago. (applause.) with apologies to robert byrd, i have to say it is pretty embarrassing to live in a country where a five-foot- onecomedian has more guts than most politicians. (applause.) we need leaders, not pragmatists that cower before the spin zones of former entertainment journalists. we need leaders who can understand the constitution, congressman who don’t in a moment of fear abdicate their most important power, the right to declare war to the executive branch. and, please, can we please stop the congressional sing-a- longs? (laughter.)
in this time when a citizenry applauds the liberatio