What’s the aphorism?  The Iraq war is over and Iran won?

We’ve been duped.  We’re in a war, a fruitless war, a losing war, a lost
cause, worse than that a cause that is destabilizing a whole region making
terrorism more likely, and the news media and the music business are just laying down.

It’s the business of the media to inform the people.  But these nitwits, like
record company executives, are so fearful of losing their jobs, so beholden
to ratings, that they’ve abdicated their core mission.  They didn’t challenge
the war’s false pretenses and they let Karl Rove have a free pass in the Plame
affair and they focus on the inanity and insanity of Laci Peterson and Michael
Jackson rather than explain the boring story to the public how they’re under
the thumb of an Administration ruled by religious zealots paying back fat cats.

The body count doesn’t tell the whole story.  With medical and technical
advances wounded soldiers are now living rather than dying.  Maimed, but we don’t
see their plight depicted in the media, hell, it’s against the mission to show
flag-draped coffins, it’s POSITIVELY UNAMERICAN TO QUESTION THE REGIME! 
Isn’t questioning the regime what this country is BASED upon?

If the media only showed the bodies of the maimed soldiers on television
every night this crazy war would end pronto.  Because the people just can’t handle
it.  Oh, they can handle three dollar a gallon gas, but not the ultimate
sacrifice, life and limb.

Cindy Sheehan is the anti-Republican.  The anti-religious zealot.  Like an
anti-abortion crusader who’s had a fetus removed from her body she’s confronted
the cold hard reality of life.  And that’s death.  When your loved one dies,
all the patriotism, all the praying, all the crap won’t bring them back.  You
question everything.  You know no limits.  Your anger supersedes decorum, makes
you do things you normally wouldn’t, because you’re in such PAIN!

Rather than cop to this pain, the plight of our country, the Republicans go
on attack.  Outing Valerie Plame, labeling MIchael Moore a traitor and
marginalizing Paul Krugman for speaking the truth.  We live in a topsy-turvy era
where what you get is supposed to be free, and if you don’t want something, if it’s
going to help your brother but not you, you don’t want to pay the taxes that
will support it.

How did we come to this point?  Where the public is ignorant and voting
against its own self-interest.  Where poor people are in favor of repealing the
estate tax when it will never ever apply to them.  It’s simple.  By not funding
education.  By making the goals of Americans to be on reality shows and to
become rappers.  By making people believe they have a chance of winning the
lottery.  By keeping them out of the loop, they’ve become dumb, just where the
government wants them.  Facts are irrelevant.  There’s a think tank to debunk
seemingly every well-established scientific truth.  Reality is no longer what can
be proven, but what governing officials say it is.

If the news media isn’t going to stand up to the government, and truly reveal
the quagmire we’re in, in Iraq and financially, it falls to the artists. 
But, there are no artists anymore.  Just ignorant dupes like Jessica Simpson and
her fake sister Ashlee.

Then again, MTV won’t air anything controversial and Clear Channel owns a
huge portion of the airwaves.  When is ANYBODY going to sacrifice self-interest
for the greater good?

It’s great that every artist showed up for a photo op on July 2nd to end
African hunger, but how about an issue closer to home, one we have more power
over, how about the artists uniting to end this war.

It’s not really that complicated.  Military recruitment is already low.  It’s
about getting the word out, informing people, that just because a leader says
something’s true, it’s not necessarily so.

Tonight on "Six Feet Under" they showed a maimed American soldier.  This one
image, of a man without three of his limbs, illuminated the fallacy of this
war more than all the drivel put forth by the talking heads on cable news. 
THAT’S the power of TV.  The image.

But if you show those images the government will retaliate.

But that’s the role of the media.  To expose truth.

And that’s what great art does, expose truth.

I’m not sure there’s a great antiwar anthem bubbling, but I am sure that if
Bruce Springsteen and the other anti-Bush protesters and a bevy of new acts
took their cause to the Washington Monument, there’d be TV coverage,
people would start to think.  It’s 1968 all over again.  A year ago, the public was under the illusion this war could be won.  But Bush’s approval rating has sunk. 
There’s dissension in the Republican party.  Just because the Democrats lost the
election doesn’t mean change can’t be effected now.  It’s time to re-release
that record, market conditions have changed, the public’s ready to hear the
tune.  Now’s the time to organize.  Now’s the time for artists to lead the way.