The Most Important Movie of the Past 12 Months

Hollywood produces a lot of crap these days, unoriginal movies following formulaic scripts designed to rake in as much cash in as short a time as possible before fading into obscurity. Every once in a while, however, a movie hits theaters and delivers a message. “Shut Up & Sing” isn’t fiction, it’s real. It’s the story of what happened to the Dixie Chicks, the best selling female country music band of all time, when lead singer Natalie Maines stood at the front of a packed London concert hall in 2003, on the eve of the war in Iraq, and said the group was ashamed President Bush was from their home state of Texas.

I’m not sure what took me so long to see this movie … the fact that it was in theaters in Chicago for what seemed like two days late last year might account for the delay. But I finally saw it, and as you can guess from the title of this post, I think “Shut Up & Sing” is the most important American film of the past year. It may end up being the most important free speech documentary of the 21st century. This movie reveals the ugly side of America, the mouth breathing flag-suckers whose first instinct is to lash out at anyone who disagrees with them, as well as the money chasing entertainers and pundits who pander to this simpleton audience.

Everyone should see this movie. Even if you disagree with the Dixie Chicks, even if you threw out their CDs at one of the backwards radio station destruction parties, you need to see this movie. At its most basic level, “Shut Up & Sing” is about the power of words. Up a level from that, it’s about rhetoric, or the art of picking and choosing words to string together to deliver a message designed to promote an agenda.

Natalie Maines spoke off the cuff at that London concert. In the context of the European mood leading up to this stupid and endless war, Maines’ comment doesn’t seem like a big deal at all. Plenty of people in this country were saying worse things about Bush in the run-up to the invasion. But a certain element in this country took what Maines said, cast it in the light of an American speaking her mind overseas instead of in America, and used the predictable outcome for its own divisive purposes.

Before long the neo-patriots had whipped the usual suspects into an anti-liberal, anti-entertainment industry, anti-antiwar crowd frenzy. Free speech, we learn in the movie, is fine for number of Americans, so long as the people doing the speaking stick to an agreeable script. Additionally, we learn that members of the entertainment industry, indeed musicians from the same genre, will turn on colleagues like a wounded puma if they smell a quick buck in doing so.

I won’t go into all the details, or attempt to summarize “Shut Up & Sing” more than I have already. Just see this movie. See it, and ponder for a bit the definition of real courage. Real courage is sticking your neck out on the line—including risking your life—for something in which you believe, regardless of the consequences, or even in spite of them. That describes the men and women fighting and dying in this pointless conflict, and it describes some of those who have spoken out against it, and continue to speak out against it.

Me? I have nothing of great value to lose by describing this perpetual state of war, our dimwitted president and the knuckle-draggers who voted for him in terms I have already used. I don’t make my living in a public way and this forum reaches maybe half a dozen people, on a good day. The Dixie Chicks, however, risked everything. Maybe in the beginning it was unintentional—as I said, an off-the-cuff remark. But very quickly the Chicks made a choice to support one another and to move forward in their own way, beholden to no one, apologizing for nothing, fighting for what they believe in.

That’s America, people. At least, it’s the America I want to be associated with.

The Indignant Citizen