By Web site Editor Admin
Amanda DeCamp ended her last column on Green Day’s new music video with, “The only American idiots in this video are the men behind the music.” Its hard to tell if the column is a review on the punk rock movement and/or Green Day as a band, or a conservative take on a political argument? It’s blurry and incoherent, unbalanced, unsubstantiated and finally, a very bold statement concludes it. So, while the columnist enjoys the democratic right to express a clearly conservative piece of propaganda through print-media, she simultaneously criticizes the equal right of expression from an apparently liberal/counter-cultural music group through another medium. Is this not perhaps…a tad contradictory?
People must speak out in a democracy. If they remain silent, those in power would never be questioned, green-lighting the way for corruption, manipulation and an eventual impediment of freedoms. Information would become irrelevant in a society that does not express itself.
To berate Green Day’s music video, “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” because a young man enrages his friends and families by enlisting in the military, and is shown holding a gun in front of a Middle Eastern woman and her child, is an irrational lash at a music group’s voice of disdain for the irrationality of this war, and for the futility of war in general. War kills innocents! Ipso facto! The “mother with her child” is a commonly exemplified symbol to portray a society sickened by war. This is an important image, one that the annual International Photography Awards board would likely view as a necessary shock treatment to open the eyes of the American public to what they don’t see. To say Green Day shouldn’t show this because it does not support the soldiers, is like saying we must deny reality to feel better about the situation. If the war is wrong, then deaths are unnecessary.
The columnist states: “The boy is looked at as cruel and evil for defending his country and being patriotic.”
She asserts that the young man is defending his country. Yet that is just why there is dwindling support for this war; we, the world’s only superpower, were not the ones in defense from Iraq. Also, the war’s goal was to install democracy, but now the region is torn by daily bombings, threats of civil war, an upsurge of insurgencies and Islamic militants. We have succeeded in the further destabilization of an area already oppressed by first-world “ultra-capitalism,” whose only clear mission was maintenance of oil and petroleum reserves. This has led to the inevitable death of not only Iraqis, but also the poor people in Louisiana. That is the brute face of it. Or should we deny all this because it knocks support for our soldiers?
The columnist states: “Perhaps Green Day’s idea of a hero is a musician who did not go further than high school, wears a thick layer of black eyeliner and sings about how the president is an ignorant man.”
This tirade against Green Day, dismissing their high school education and putting down what they wear, has nothing to do with anything they sang about, or for that matter, whether they were right. Ultimately, you have no credible argument. You began your article in support of freedom of speech and then ended it criticizing a rock group for expressing theirs. I personally admire people who take their careers personally and use it to educate the public, or at least prompt them to question. It shows that they are concerned about what mess this country has fallen into and want people to eventually do the right thing. To be supportive of our soldiers doesn’t mean we need to be supportive of what mission they are carrying out, and to deflate the reality of the mission, that innocents are getting killed and families are being ripped apart, would be helping those right-wing neo-conservatives who are driving this country to the grave.
The day our government starts to clean up its approach to foreign policy is the day those who believe in a “greater good” will perhaps stop “speaking out against the government.” For all the rights US governments have bestowed upon the world, they are considerably outweighed by wrongs.