Friday, November 12, 2004

President war-monger and the freedom of speech

This just about says it all about the state of the country and the world today:
Bob Dylan's Masters of War is a hard-hitting, anti-war song produced more than 20 years before any current Boulder High School student was born.
More than 40 years after its release, the song has been resurrected at Boulder High with huge and confusing repercussions that prompted Secret Service agents to pay the campus a visit Thursday.
Some students and parents apparently let the Secret Service and talk-radio stations know they were unhappy with the plan of a trio of students to do a poetry reading of the song, accompanied by background music, according to Ron Cabrera, the school's principal.
Rumors were rampant that during an audition and rehearsal for today's talent show, the students changed Dylan's powerful last verse at the end of the song to say that they hoped that President Bush was going to die.
The last verse begins: "And I hope that you die; And your death'll come soon."
Secret Service agents interviewed Cabrera on Thursday to determine what all the uproar was about and whether any threats were being made against the president's life.
"They were following up and doing their due diligence," Cabrera said of the agents' visit. "They had been receiving calls from the community and, in the course of the talk show, felt like they had heard (the students) inciting physical harm to the president."

Are the sedition acts coming back with the draft?
"Masters of War" is about the most fitting song anybody could be listening to these days. And remember, those who do not learn from the past...
U.S. Soldiers killed in Iraq: 1,170
UK and other "coalition" soldiers killed in Iraq: 146
U.S. Military wounded: 8,458
Iraqi civilian deaths: at least 14,304

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