This editorial is an updated version of a column that first appeared in the Feb. 16, 2007 edition of The Citizen:
Thank God for the Dixie Chicks.
They are back on tour, stopping in Vancouver tomorrow night, more than a decade after alienating American country music fans for having the audacity to publicly criticize then-president George W. Bush for going to war in Iraq.
At the 2007 Grammy Awards, the Dixie Chicks sang Not Ready To Make Nice like it was the last time they'd ever sing it, confirming why they deserved all five Grammys they received that night, including all three major awards - Song of Year, Record of the Year and Album of the Year.
Then and now, they have not received the respect they deserve but then and now, they persevere.
Their accomplishment that night in 2007 stood in stark contrast to the cruelty that greeted the news that same week of astronaut Lisa Nowak's fall from grace and Anna Nicole Smith's sudden death.
Remember Nowak, the astronaut who drove 14 hours in her car, sitting resolutely in her adult diaper so she wouldn't lose time, to confront the woman she believed was honing in on the man she obsessed over?
Nowak's biography on the NASA website read like a textbook on what every parent would hope their daughter would grow up to be. A captain in the U.S. Navy, she spent more than 1,500 hours in the air, piloting 30 different kinds of aircraft. She received three military medals, including the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, and numerous other service awards. She earned three academic degrees, including a master's degree in aeronautical engineering. She operated the Canadarm on her 13-day space shuttle mission.
Like Columbia, a small hole in her hull caused her to self-destruct in spectacular fashion. She was charged with attempted murder and made a laughing stock and a disgrace by a country and a world that thought she was a hero and an inspiration two weeks earlier. The headline in Time magazine was "Houston, she's got some problems."
It's easy to snicker, but there's nothing funny about Capt. Nowak.
Her drive and ambition clearly came with a psychological cost that only made itself fully evident during her frantic drive from Houston to Orlando. Something, somewhere inside this talented, accomplished woman shattered, once more proving that intelligence and accomplishments are easily trumped by affairs of the heart.
Everyone has done something absolutely ridiculous in the name of love and yearning. For those who claim they haven't, they likely haven't fully experienced the other side of love's sharp blade, that horrible longing that makes you finally believe it is possible to die of a broken heart.
That's what killed Anna Nicole Smith that same week in 2007.
How could anyone blame a woman for disappearing for good down a pit of despair after burying her son, who died just three days after she brought a daughter into the world? How could she not look at her new little girl and think only of her dear boy, taken from her?
Unlike Nowak or the Dixie Chicks, Smith was famous for two reasons only. That amazing bosom came with a five-foot-eleven body and a personality that reflected America at its best and worst - large, loud, ample but vacant, intimidating but needy, a world at her feet while hollow inside.
Like even her name, it was all artifice from a sad little girl who only wanted people to like her.
She could have any man in the world, and often did, but the company and sex of men didn't satisfy her. She needed a daddy who offered safety and security, something she briefly found with a wealthy oil magnate 63 years her senior.
She sold every part of her self, not just the body and the breasts, but also whatever pride and dignity she may have been born with. In the end, there was nothing left but grief and the knowledge that the world wasn't laughing with her, but at her.
Clearly, the emptiness Nowak felt also overwhelmed her.
Then and now, women are still too often depicted for their pathetic weakness as if their failure is somehow typical and inevitable.
So thank God for the Dixie Chicks for their enduring success and for giving George W. Bush and anyone else who would stand in their way a defiant middle finger, and for having the courage to shout that as women they want to do more than "shut up and sing."
