In my lifetime, musicians with itchy consciences have declared themselves opposed to four things, more or less: Nuclear Power, Nuclear Missiles, Global Warming, and playing concerts at Sun City. They opposed the first because nuke plants poison the earth; they opposed nuclear missiles under the general auspicies of the Bad For Children and Other Living Things Comprehensive Banality Act of 1968; they were opposed to Sun City because of apartheid – bully for them, but let’s see any of them refuse to sell their products in China to protest the occupation of Tibet. They were wrong about nuclear power; wrong about the Soviets, misguided about the effect of depriving South Africa of their presence, and now it’s this. It would be amusing if this stuff wasn’t starting to saturate nearly every single aspect of modern life, turning the most incidental of choices into signs of moral failings.
