Posted at TownHall.com. A teaser:


But it’s all vanity. Hart’s comments, the “musical martyrs,” the paranoia ? it’s just self-congratulatory hooey. Musicians aren’t getting “whacked” by the Bush administration for “speaking out.” But it’s fun to believe it, because only then could the very mundane act of speaking out in this, the Land of the First Amendment, appear dangerous and brave instead of merely mercenary. …

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago provides countless examples of a government “whacking” an artist for speaking out. Compare these few lines, for example, to the worst of Dixie Chicks “whacking” anecdotes:

Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.)