God bless Rosanne Cash for standing up to the gun lobby
LOOK at the photograph of smiling women at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas and you’ll be struck first by what’s familiar. We all have pictures like that of ourselves with friends, having a good time. Then take in their cowboy hats, boots and denim cut-offs and you’re struck by the difference. Mass shootings have become the quintessentially American tragedy, but what happened this week feels like the most American of them all.
How can US citizens stand by as this preventable bloodshed continues? That’s the question non-Americans who care about the US keep asking. And if it was a simple matter of politics, no doubt gun control measures would have been introduced long ago.
But as we are always reminded, this is cultural. Or, in the words of NRA Country, the concert-staging wing of the notorious gun lobbyists, it’s about “pride, love of country, respect for the military and our responsibility to protect our great American lifestyle”.
Country music and the right to bear arms are intertwined in a single strand of deadly patriotism. This is why there is some hope in the actions of Rosanne Cash, pictured, daughter of the great Johnny Cash, who is calling on her fellow country musicians to take a stand against the powerful NRA. She will find, as did NFL’s Black Lives Matter activists, that such courage is met with fury and ridicule but she could also create real change. God bless America. God bless Rosanne.
OCTOBER 7, 1997: Everyone remembers what they were doing that night, right? Maybe it’s just artist Ross Sutherland, who has remixed the evening’s episode of EastEnders into an audio-visual poem, “Missing Episode”, to air on BBC2 on Saturday.
What might make that date meaningful to the rest of us is the rarity of archive soap opera episodes. They’re the only cultural artefacts that are not retrievable via a few mouse clicks and do not exist in the internet’s permanent present. Plus there’s Carol Jackson to enjoy. As Sutherland notes, “she’s in her most confrontational earrings today”.