Politics: Sponsored By Nobody

For a while there, I was pretty firmly under the assumption that Neil Young had sort of become a right-winger, because of some comments he made right after 9/11, I guess, and some other clues. Young had always been a big fan of the utterly reputable "Support the Troops, Oppose the War" school of thought, and it seemed that he just kind of collapsed part of it after the terrorist attacks of that day. When I saw him in 1991, during the Gulf War, he opened the show with an elaborate scruffy-Vietnam-vet (played by Young), raising a Iwo Jima like flagpole with a yellow ribbon on top.

Anyhow, it appears that any support for President Bush and the various wars waged by Bush with American lives on the line has turned into rust:

David Fricke: You were on the road with Crazy Horse when America went to war with Iraq in 1991, under a president named Bush. Twelve years later, you're singing these new songs to a nation at war in Iraq, under another Bush. Does the deja vu scare you?

Neil Young: This is a time, I believe, of great inner turmoil for the majority of the American people. There is a new morality coming out of this administration -- fundamentalist religious views; a holier-than-thou attitude towards the rest of the world -- that is not classically American.

I don't think Americans felt holier-than-thou in the twentieth century. We were happy and successful, with a great lifestyle. But something else is going on now. That's what Greendale is about. That's what Grandpa's problem is. He can't understand what's going on. He sees all of these things that the Patriot Act has taken away from what he feels is America.

DF: The other night, you ended "Rockin' in the Free World" with military funeral music -- a feedback quote from "Taps."

NY: That's for the soldiers who die in Iraq every day, because of this stupid plan that the administration didn't have. They didn't know what the hell was going to happen. Bush makes Clinton look like sandpaper -- that's how slippery he is. A lot of people in this country obviously think President Bush is a great leader. If they're happy, they should vote to keep him in office. But if you're not happy, you should also go and vote. Everybody has a right to their opinion, only now it's at the risk of not being patriotic.