By DOLPH HONICKER
Back in the 1970s, when Angel Records released a new vinyl long-playing record by Joan Baez, I’d rush out to buy it. She’s 66 now, but the melodious. bell tone quality of her voice has not diminished.
It’s a pity that wounded warriors at the Walter Reed Medical Center were not allowed to hear her. She could have sparked a revolution. Wounded vets might thrown their prosthesis's at orderlies serving them lukewarm coffee.
My wife Jeannine and I are the lucky ones. We attended her concert at Vanderbilt University when she was a raven-haired young beauty and again in Knoxville when she was entering her 60s, still beautiful.
Today we’ve captured her on CDs. I put one on, close my eyes, and she’s there beside me. You wounded vets don’t know what you missed.
`The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney White House shows no compunction in sending troops into the grinding maw of Iraq despite constant evidence that its Plans A, Plans B and C have not worked. But, like an elephant stomping an ant, the Pentagon fearfully squelches the voice of a slim, gray-haired lady who is famous the world over for her folk songs, her songs of protest against war, her tender ballads, pro-union ditties and yes, even her hymns.
Has there ever been a more delusional president, one who does not recognize reality when it slaps him in the face day after day?
Rocker John Mellencamp did perform for the recovering soldiers at Walter Reed. But he apparently caved in and the soldiers did not hear his typical blistering rhetoric against the war in Iraq. Also missing in action, of course, was Joan Baez who says she was disinvited from the event by Army officials.
She told the Washington Post in a letter that Mellencamp had wanted her to perform two songs with him and that she had agreed only to be told four days before the concert “I was not ‘approved‘ by the Army to take part.”
Brave old Army brass.
Secrecy being the watchword in the Bush White House, Walter Reed officials declined comment. But later, in an e-mail on Rollingstone.com, spokesman Steve Sanderson said the medical center received the requests for the Baez participation two days before the concert and that would have required a contract change.
Well, duh, change it.
Who would soldiers rather hear? A rock and roller forbidden to deliver his usual hard-hitting act, or Joan Baez?
In other words, as Bush might say, we screw up concerts the same way we screw up wars -- with red tape.
Or, most likely, this was just the latest lie and deception.
Baez’s manager, Mark Spector, said Mellencamp’s had invited Baez in March and that up to April 23, when she was turned down, everything was “still inching forward.”
Had she been allowed to perform, I would have hoped the wounded warriors could have heard Baez sing Finlanda, a song about Finland:
This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for lands afar and mine./
This is my home, the country where my heart is;/
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine./
But other hearts in other lands are beating,/
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine./
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,/
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine./
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,/
And skies everywhere as blue as mine./
Oh hear my song oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
No, that would never do. Luckily, the Army nipped one revolution in the bud. If peace broke out, what then?
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1 comment:
From what I understand, these days you go to a concert with the performers you have - not the ones that you want. At least that is what Rummy told me.
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