Diamonds and rant
When we last checked in with Joan Baez, she was giving it up for peace and love in Charlottesville on the evening after the election this past November: "Joan Baez and me." Today Eric Pfeiffer spent a little quality time with Baez at Camp Reality: "Joan Baez talks to the Buzz." Baez proclaims:
"When I’m in places like Italy I memorize the Italian translation and I say, ‘I ask for your forgiveness for what my president is doing to the world. And they stand, they get up and give a standing ovation, because someone finally does get it. That’s how they see it. Granted, that is my public. But that public is pretty broad."Is there anybody out there who recalls Al Capp's Vietnam War-era depiction of Joan Baez ("Joanie Phonie") in the Li'l Abner comic strip? Capp had her number forty years ago. What a shame he's not around to read Pfeiffer's account. In the bottom two strips below the great Capp features Joanie doing her thing in Italian.
In the Washington Times today, Wesley Pruden elegantly disparages Baez's Crawford stop at almost column length: "Seeking a strategy in gloom and doom." Pruden is great when he's angry, and he's still working off some of the ire of decades past:
Joanie plucked gamely at the strings of her guitar, if not necessarily the heartstrings in the audience, and sang the anthems of the wrinkled unwashed from our most dissolute decade: "Song of Peace" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." She avoided what was arguably her greatest crowd-pleaser, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," an improbable tribute to the Confederacy. She clearly yearns for a reprise of the '60s, when the war in Vietnam gave an exciting social life to the generation drugged on cheap sex and playing at make-believe revolution.In the concluding paragraphs of his column Pruden moves on from a consideration of Joanie Phonie to the loony left's "politics of lamentation." Don't miss it."This is huge," she told the crowd of 200 or so spectators, wilting in the Texas heat and yearning only for a reprise of the air-conditioned comfort back at the motel. "In the first march I went to [during the war in Vietnam] there were 10 of us."
Mzz Baez is the biggest celebrity to show up at the ranch so far, not counting a talk-show hostess from Air America who arrived to audition for the role of the Tokyo Rose for the new century. For her part, Joanie hasn't had a hit in more than a decade, or, as her Internet Web site delicately puts it, she has been "free of any major label associations in the United States."
