fastidium

I was recently looking through the latest Rolling Stone (Issue 1034) and came across two bits of information - both of them involving Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder - that caught my attention.

Pearl Jam played at Lollapalooza in Chicago at the beginning of last month. Evidently, AT&T was broadcasting the show from its Blue Room web site and three-fourths the way through the show Eddie Vedder began slamming President Bush. But, instead of hearing what he had to say, viewers on the web site got 16 seconds of silence. Turns out a subcontractor of AT&T pulled the audio when Vedder got political. Pearl Jam’s guitarist Mike McCready is quoted as saying “When one person or company decides what others can hear, that is totalitarian thinking.” (Pearl Jam’s Anti-Bush Ad-Libs Missing From AT&T’s Lollapalooza Webcast)

If you look up ‘totalitarian’ in a dictionary, you’ll see that it involves subordination of the individual to the state and centralized control by a government. If someone denies you a public voice, it can only be classified as totalitarian if the state department or some government entity was the decision maker. Simply denying someone a public voice does not, in itself, constitute totalitarianism or facism or any other kind of ‘ism’. And, it doesn’t matter if the perpetrator is an individual person or a corporation.

I don’t think AT&T or its subsidiary should have censored Vedder’s political views but its really just a matter of one person not liking what he had to say and pushing the right button; it is not a case of totalitarianism. This is just one instance of a larger capacity in our culture to use monikers and labels. McCready used the label to illicit a reaction in his audience. The same dynamic is at work when those who say that speaking out against the war in Iraq is unpatriotic. No, its not; its voicing an opinion about one’s government but its hardly unpatriotic.

The second misconception is a little more trivial than the first (unless you’re a Cubs fan, I guess). Vedder got the throw out the first pitch at a Cubs-Mets game at Wrigley Field two days before the Lollapalooza gig. This is featured in a Random Notes section of Rolling Stone (p. 52) where a 99-year World Series curse is mentioned. Its funny how these things are called curses. The Red Sox had a curse. It had something to do with the Yankees and Babe Ruth, if I remember correctly. But, seriously, a curse? Why are these things called curses? Couldn’t it just be that your team has been really bad this whole time? Or perhaps, they’ve been good but not good enough?

[tags]Politics, free speech, totalitarian, totalitarianism[/tags]