America sings a new song of celebrity censorship

News: "Hard though it is to imagine a diminutive middle-aged woman with a bob haircut and a honey-sweet voice starting a riot in America's very own Sin City, the Ronstadt Affair seems destined to go down as the latest surreal episode to mark this contentious, jumpily hostile election season.
Ms Ronstadt's fellow liberal entertainers were quick to cry foul yesterday about suppression of free speech and what they see as a climate of fear fostered by the Bush administration. (Ms Ronstadt herself has chosen not to comment.) The blow-hard opinion makers on the other side, meanwhile, were equally quick to accuse her of woefully misreading her audience and turning what was meant to be a pleasant piece of musical entertainment into a wholly inappropriate piece of political grandstanding.

Besides her music, Ms Ronstadt's political views are probably the best-known thing about her. In the 1970s she had a much-publicised romance with Jerry Brown, the liberal governor of California who went on to make two unsuccessful runs for the presidency. In a show in San Diego on Sunday night, she made overt references to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent attacks on "girlie men" in the state legislature. Her dedication to Michael Moore - which she clearly has no intention of dropping - split her audience in two but caused no undue ructions, according to an account in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Earlier this month, the comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg became a target for Republican Party operatives after she made genitalia jokes about the President's name at a celebrity-studded fundraiser for Democratic candidate John Kerry. Not only did the Republicans denounce the whole affair, at New York's Radio City Music Hall, as a "hate fest" revealing the true colours of both Mr Kerry and the Hollywood establishment. Ms Goldberg also lost her job as a pitch woman for the diet-food company Slimfast, which is based in the electorally sensitive state of Florida where President Bush's brother Jeb is governor.

The issue has been further stirred up by Sir Elton John, who said in an interview with New York magazine this month that he saw an "atmosphere of fear" in the United States like nothing else since the McCarthy red-baiting era of the early 1950s. He said artists were afraid to speak out and had shied away from the kind of anti-government criticism that marked the protest songs and political theatre of the Vietnam War era. "Everyone is too career-conscious. They're all too scared," he said."


By Andrew Gumbel