Celebrities counter the war.

The few celebrities who have boldly spoken out against the U.S. war on Iraq function as the only voice the Democratic Party has, since congressional democrats were mostly silent during the war. Perhaps politicians are wary of the extreme criticism that these celebrities have encountered from the U.S. media, which generally claims that those who stood in opposition to the war or President George W. Bush are morally irresponsible and unpatriotic. However, despite the media's attempts at portraying these celebrities as losing support and even receiving ridicule, media exposure has kept them in the public eye and stimulated curiosity. Moreover, sales of compact disks, books, and films of these dissenters have increased and changed careers for the better. And such "unpatriotic" celebrities are fulfilling a civic duty by representing those Americans who are too frightened to voice their own opposition but are speaking out with their dollars.

Among the celebrities is Natalie Maines, a Texas native who is the lead singer of the country music trio, the Dixie Chicks. She stirred the most attention when she told the audience at a London, England, concert on March 10, 2003, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." As a result, media with close ties to Bush reacted with a vengeance. The prime example is Clear Channel, a Texas-based monopolistic corporation and owner of more than 1,200 radio stations throughout the United States. Clear Channel promotes radio host Glenn Beck, an organizer of de facto pro-war rallies and hate campaigns against antiwar performers, including the Dixie Chicks.

Because of this, the Dixie Chicks suffered a sharp drop in national radio airplay. According to the April 21, 2003, issue of the Star, one radio chain, Cumulus Media, even arranged for a tractor to crush Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes, and videos. Other organizations sponsored bonfires where their CDs were destroyed. This is a disconcerting reminder of cultural purges like historical book burnings and the destruction of the Iraqi national library, archives, and museums. Yet despite the controversy, the sales of Dixie Chicks CDs and concert tickets have increased. According to USA Today, as of April 24, 2003, the group's latest CD, Home, remains the top-selling album on the Billboard country chart--19 weeks at Number 1--and Number 30 on the pop chart." Their agent, Rob Light, told Billboard that week that, of their upcoming fifty-nine shows, only six had seats left and those were all 85 to 90 percent sold.

On the eve of their U.S. tour on April 24, 2003, the Dixie Chicks appeared on ABC's Primetime Thursday for an interview with Diane Sawyer. Maines said, "Am I sorry that I asked questions and that I just don't follow? No." She and the other band members--sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison--also told Sawyer that the consequences of Maines' comments were too harsh and that they've always supported U.S. troops, even though they question the U.S. war on Iraq. After receiving death threats, Maguire said, "I'm concerned about my safety ... At our concerts this year, we have to have metal detectors, and to me that's just crazy."

On the May 2, 2003, cover of Entertainment Weekly, the three Dixie Chicks appear naked under the headline "The Dixie Chicks Come Clean" with words such as "Boycott," "Traitors," "Proud Americans," and "Dixie Sluts" printed on their bodies. The New York Post reported Maguire as saying, "It's not about the nakedness ... It's about clothes getting in the way of labels." On his website, rock singer Bruce Springsteen defended the group's right to say what they believe:

   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.

Another more political celebrity who has been shafted for his public opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq--and has subsequently experienced a rise in his career as a documentary film director and writer--is Michael Moore. At the seventy-fifth annual Academy Awards ceremony on March 23, 2003, Moore received an Oscar for his documentary, Bowling for Columbine, which attempts to answer why American culture is steeped in gun violence and fear. Upon receiving the award, Moore said:

   We live in a time where fictitious election
   results give us a fictitious president. We are
   now fighting a war for fictitious reasons.
   Whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the
   fictitious "Orange Alerts," we are against this
   war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush,
   shame on you. And, whenever you've got the
   pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your
   time is up.

Although Moore received a combination of cheers and boos from the audience, he says on his website that, on the day following his opinionated speech, attendance to see the documentary increased 110 percent in theaters around the United States. In a week, the box office gross was up 73 percent, and Bowling for Columbine is now the longest-running consecutive commercial release in the United States. More copies of his video were pre-ordered on Amazon.com than Chicago, the Oscar winner for best picture. Moore's 2001 book, Stupid White Men, again became number one on the New York Times bestseller list on April 6, 2003. In addition, his website received ten to twenty million hits a day and, on one occasion, even surpassed the number of hits received by the White House.

So why does the media portray celebrities who oppose the war as suffering for their "wrongdoing"? Moore says that the media does this to make sure that those who disagree with the Bush administration remain silent. He says the media's ploy is to falsely say that celebrities are suffering for their dissent, for they are simultaneously sending the fabricated message that, of course, all American citizens who dare to do likewise will suffer. The administration uses fear to manipulate the public into being docile and complacent so they do what they're told, sitting in mute opposition and fear.

This manipulation of Americans through fear is precisely what Moore's documentary seeks to unveil. As he points out, those at the Academy Awards ceremony were cheering for a film that explicitly shows that Americans are violent--they're killing one another and citizens of countries around the world. The film indicates how the government uses fear and the media to quiet American opposition and makes them do as they're told. Moore says his film reveals that:

   The first Gulf War was an attempt to reinstall
   the dictator of Kuwait; Saddam Hussein was
   armed with weapons from the United States;
   and the American government is responsible
   for the deaths of a half-million children in
   Iraq over the past decade through its sanctions
   and bombing.

He says that the real purpose of the U.S. war on Iraq was for Bush to declare to the rest of the world, "Don't Mess with Texas--If You Got What We Want, We're Coming to Get It!"

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, the political activist and Hollywood heavyweight couple, have also received their share of recrimination. Self-declared Humanist Sarandon was dropped as a keynote speaker at the United Way of Tampa Bay, Florida, conference on women's leadership after receiving complaints about her antiwar views. Her offense was that, when introducing the obituary segment of the Academy Awards show, she flashed a peace symbol with her fingers while walking on stage. She, Robbins, and the First Amendment were also disinvited to a fifteenth anniversary screening of the baseball movie Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Hall's president, a former press secretary of President Ronald Reagan, decided that Robbins' very presence might undermine the efforts of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The April 22, 2003, issue of the Washington Post reported that when Robbins was asked about possible career repercussions due to his antiwar stance, he said, "I just finished two films.... I don't believe there's fallout. If there was, I don't think anyone would say, 'We're not hiring you for political reasons.'" Robbins spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2003, and said that he has a fierce belief in the guaranteed rights of the U.S. Constitution. He continued:

   In the nineteen months since 9-11, we have
   seen our democracy compromised by fear and
   hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process,
   the sanctity of the home have been quickly
   compromised in a climate of fear. A unified
   American public has grown bitterly divided,
   and a world population that had profound sympathy
   and support for us has grown contemptuous
   and distrustful, viewing us as we once
   viewed the Soviet Union--as a rogue state.

Robbins described a story his relative relayed about a local school board that decided to cancel a civics event, including a moment of silence for the victims of the U.S. war on Iraq, because the children were praying for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Another friend shared an incident about a Southern radio disk jockey who called for the murder of a prominent antiwar activist. And apparently even some celebrities have caught the same wave of fear and paranoia even though it's evident that others' careers have only benefited from their expression of antiwar sentiments. Robbins said that a famous rock musician thanked him for speaking out against the war, for he felt that he couldn't do the same. He feared the ramifications from Clear Channel, which promotes his concert appearances and owns most of the stations that play his music. Robbins also said that renowned journalist Helen Thomas asked White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer whether the United States was in violation of the Geneva Convention for showing prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on television. As a consequence, she was banished to the back of the room and no longer called upon.

Robbins said that those who supported the U.S. war on Iraq don't want to see the impact on the nightly news--they prefer the news coverage to be sterile and remain an abstraction, as opposed to the more accurate news that the rest of the world watches. He criticized the lack of political opposition--namely the Democrats who haven't had the courage to speak out against the Bush administration. He pointed out the contradiction of the United States:

   In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation
   of a country as it lives in fear of its own
   freedom, when people all over the country fear
   reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it
   is time to get angry.... The fate of discourse,
   the health of this republic, is in your hands,
   whether you [are] on the left or the right.

He concluded his speech with the reminder that Americans' inherent right to criticize and question their leaders is what makes them Americans, and to allow these rights to be taken away out of fear is admitting that democracy has been defeated.

Actor Sean Penn, in a prewar effort to exercise his democratic rights, wrote an open letter to Bush, which ran as an advertisement in the Washington Post on October 18, 2002. Penn says that he doesn't believe in Bush's simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil:

   Many of your actions to date and those proposed
   seem to violate every defining principle
   of this county over which you preside; intolerance
   of debate ("with us or against us"), marginalization
   of your critics, the promoting of
   fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation
   of a quick comfort media, and the position
   of your administration's deconstruction of
   civil liberties all contradict the very core of the
   patriotism you claim.

Penn writes of the collateral damage of those killed in war and how Americans are being forced to abandon the lessons of history in favor of having complete and total faith in the administration. He says that Bush claims to defend Americans from fundamentalism abroad while hypocritically turning the United States into a fundamentalist nation through the loss of civil liberties, heightened presidential autonomy, and the belief that the United States' manifest destiny is to govern the world.

Penn also toured Baghdad, Iraq, before the war and was later thrown off of a movie project in a contract dispute. According to the New York Times, Penn claims in a lawsuit that he lost the role as a result of his antiwar stand and was victimized by a resurgence of "the dark era of Hollywood blacklisting." Of interest, however, is the fact that the film's producer, Steve Bing, is a major donor to the Democratic Party.

Penn's former wife Madonna, singer and international diva, produced an antiwar video in January 2003 to promote her new album American Life, although she abruptly canceled it on March 31, 2003. When asked in a Dateline interview on April 29, 2003, why she decided not to release the video, she said that she was aware of what happened to the Dixie Chicks and, shockingly, she didn't want to cause waves for Americans who seemed to be largely divided and unstable due to the U.S. war on Iraq. However, she didn't fear the decline in her record sales.

Another singer, activist Ani DiFranco, performed at a Clear Channel sponsored concert in Newark, New Jersey, which was threatened to be cancelled because she wanted to invite guests to speak out against the war. She daringly went ahead and invited those guests on stage anyway. The show wasn't cancelled, although Amy Goodman--the prizewinning WBAI reporter who introduced DiFranco--told the Village Voice on April 2, 2003, "The security guards took antiwar leaflets out of my bag," confiscating them from others as well, and the operators "were constantly threatening to cut off the mic."

A moderately well-known celebrity, actress-comedian Janeane Garofalo, has become the object of a vicious e-mail and telephone campaign led by Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits that has effectively intimidated ABC into postponing her new sitcom, Slice O'Life, to next year. According to the Washington Post, Garofalo said, "I knew when I started speaking out that it was going to be unpleasant, and I've taken my punches. But the positives have far outweighed the negatives." Just weeks after she extended her antiwar sentiments on news programs, she received several unsolicited offers for stage roles, speaking engagements, and standup gigs. Only now, after more than fifteen years of comedy acts, has she made America Online's "Comedians to Watch" list. She says, "Now I'm almost famous."

According to the April 30, 2003, issue of the Progressive, Garofalo has been active with Win Without War and appeared on CNN, Crossfire, Fox News Sunday, Good Morning America, Inside Politics, and MSNBC. She criticized the media for wasting Americans' time with celebrity bashing and said:

   You can book a guest you can respect or you
   can respect the guest you book. They love to
   pretend that if you are in entertainment,
   that's what defines you and you can't possibly
   have any knowledge of what's going on in
   the news. So you have grown adult anchors
   and media people who are literally acting like
   twelve year olds, saying, "You shut up. You
   don't know anything." Literally treating you
   with the contempt of a schoolyard bully.

Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits has also energetically campaigned against actor Martin Sheen, whose antiwar views led to his credit card commercial being canceled. He appeared at a Los Angeles, California, vigil with "Peace" plastered on duct tape over his mouth. The New York Times said, "If Mr. Sheen is encountering turbulence with network executives, it is probably not because of his views about the war, as he has insinuated, but because of the slippage in West Wing ratings."

Speaking of television coverage, producer Ed Gernon wanted to air, during the U.S. war on Iraq, a four-part miniseries on Hitler's rise to power, and told TV Guide magazine that the timing of the series was absolutely apt. According to the Star, Gernon said, "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war. I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now." His opinion was entirely too strong for CBS's chief executive Lesley Moonves, who decided to sack him. Yet television viewers indicated what they most wanted to watch during the war. As Michael I. Niman points out in his April 24, 2003, article in ArtVoice, "According to the Nation, more people watched Comedy Central's The Daily Show (4 million) at the height of the war, than watched Rupert Murdcoch's Fox News (3.3 million). And why not--Comedy Central actually had better war coverage. Though, ironically, Fox's coverage was funnier."

Some celebrities chose to show their opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq silently, like international singer Shakira. Appearing in a Reebok shoe commercial, she holds two white tennis shoes that turn into white doves as the camera zooms out to show her standing in a vast peace symbol drawn on the sandy beach. However, many celebrities have opted to remain both verbally and physically silent--notably leftist actors Tom Hanks, Woody Harrelson, and Robin Williams--missing a prime opportunity to fire up their careers.

Nevertheless, in all this, the most crucial lesson is that, in order to be members of a true democracy, all Americans--whether or not celebrities--must always feel free to voice their opinions. Bush and his cronies at Clear Channel, Cumulus Media, and Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits shouldn't be allowed to sanitize the public voice so it sounds like a monolithic drone of unification. Americans need to give Bush a forceful reminder, "Don't Mess with U.S. Democracy."

Erika Waak is editorial associate of the Humanist.