Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference. The Lancer conference is being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. The CAPA conference is now being held online. There is also another excellent JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations at the Lancer conference to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!
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I’m currently driving to Texas and have two goals before I return to Virginia: one, to finish listening to the audio version of Jim Bovard’s excellent book Last Rights (which I can already highly recommend even without yet finishing the book) and, two, listen to Linda Ronstadt’s 24 albums.
Ronstadt is my favorite rock and roll singer of all time, even more so than Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, all of whom are close behind. But it’s not just because of Ronstadt’s phenomenal voice and musical versatility that I have come to deeply admire her over the years. It’s also because of certain courageous political stands she has taken.
Back in 2004 Ronstadt appeared at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas for a performance. During the performance, she praised Hollywood producer Michael Moore for making the anti-Iraq War film Fahrenheit 9/11.
Those who are old enough will recall the extreme pro-government, pro-military, pro-interventionist fervor that followed the 9/11 attacks. It was unbelievable. In fact, even most of the libertarian movement was rallying to the federal government and jumping on board the much-vaunted “war on terrorism” and supporting the invasion of Afghanistan. People were willing, even eager, to surrender their liberties for “security” — anything to be kept safe from “the terrorists” and the Muslims who were supposedly coming to get us and establish Shariah law in every city and community across America. That’s what the USA PATRIOT Act was all about; it was one of the greatest destructions of the liberty of the American people in U.S. history, and if you didn’t support it, you weren’t a “patriot.”
Here at FFF, we experienced this “rally-to-the-government” phenomenon in a very big and negative way. We were holding lonely ground in the libertarian movement (along with longtime libertarian Lew Rockwell, who was also ardently opposing all this). We were pointing out that the 9/11 attacks were generated by the anger and hatred arising from the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. In other words, we were saying that the U.S. government’s explanation for the attacks — that they were supposedly motivated by hatred among Muslims for America’s “freedom and values” — was entirely bogus.
We also ardently opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, pointing out that most of the people who would be killed, maimed, and injured in these wars of aggression would be entirely innocent of the 9/11 attacks and that such invasions would end up generating more anti-American terrorism and more destruction of our rights and liberties at the hands of our own government.
We also opposed the so-called PATRIOT Act, the TSA takeover of the airports, the illegal telecom surveillance schemes, and all the other attacks on our civil liberties.
We were inundated with hate mail and cancelations of support. We even lost a board member who resigned because of our foreign-policy position. I was severely condemned by another libertarian speaker when I gave a talk at a libertarian conference in Phoenix criticizing the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy and the “war on terrorism.”
But we never wavered, and I’m glad we didn’t. And to my everlasting gratitude, the donors who stuck with us carried us through.
When Ronstadt made clear her opposition to the Iraq War at her appearance at the Aladdin hotel, she knew exactly what the reaction was likely to be. Half of the audience of 4,500 booed her and walked out. About 100 people demanded their money back. The manager of the Aladdin, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of the U.S. hotel business, evicted her from the premises.
A few years ago, I wrote about this episode, along with similar treatment meted out to the Dixie Chicks for much the same thing that Ronstadt did — oppose the U.S. war on Iraq. The title of my article was “The Shameful Mistreatment of Linda Ronstadt and the Dixie Chicks.”
More recently, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Ronstadt announced her opposition to Republican Donald Trump’s use of a concert hall in Tucson, where she was born and raised, for a campaign rally. The concert hall is named The Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. Ronstadt didn’t want her name to be associated with Trump’s fierce anti-immigrant policy. In her written statement, Ronstadt wrote in part:
Donald Trump is holding a rally on Thursday in a rented hall in my hometown, Tucson. I would prefer to ignore that sad fact. But since the building has my name on it, I need to say something.
It saddens me to see the former President bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful, tolerant spirit.
I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of … immigrants….
For me it comes down to this: In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump Administration systematically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum. Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers. It remains a humanitarian catastrophe that Physicians for Human Rights said met the criteria for torture.
There is no forgiving or forgetting the heartbreak he caused.
Needless to say, when she issued her statement, she knew that the calumny that was likely to fall upon her might be as big as it was back when she opposed President Bush’s war on Iraq. This is especially true given the strong support that Trump’s border policy has in Arizona. She could have chosen to remain silent. But she didn’t. She decided to speak out against Trump’s vicious and immoral immigration policy. For that, I deeply admire her.
Notice something important about her statement. She didn’t say something like, “I oppose Trump’s immigration policy because I believe that immigrants are good for America” or “I oppose Trump’s immigration policy because I favor an Ellis Island type of immigration policy.”
No, she talked indignantly in terms of the horrible pain that Trump’s immigration policy inflicts on people, especially poor people who are simply trying to survive or improve their economic well-being. In other words, immigration is not some intellectual topic for Ronstadt. It’s that she obviously cares about people.
But there is something else to consider about Ronstadt. Like many people on or near the U.S.-Mexico border, part of her family roots are in Mexico. Her grandfather was born in Sonora, Mexico. Growing up, her family would sing Mexican songs in Spanish. In her autobiography Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, she writes about what life was like growing up on the border, something that I can relate to given that I was born in Laredo, Texas, which is situated on the border. She points out:
In those days, the border was a friendly place, and easy to cross. We knew many of the families in the north of Mexico, and we attended one another’s balls, picnics, weddings, and baptisms. My parents often drove us across the border into Nogales, which had wonderful stores where we would shop. After that, they would take us to the cool, plush recesses of the Cavern Café, and we would be served a delicious turtle soup. I deeply miss those times when the border was a permeable line and the two cultures mixed in a natural and agreeable fashion. Lately, the border seems more like the Berlin Wall, and functions mainly to separate families and interfere with wildlife migration.
I too remember the easy-to-cross border at Laredo. When we were a kids, my parents would take us across the river to shop at the market and head to the Cadillac Bar for nachos and guacamole or to supper at El Rio Hotel on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo. No one worried about violence because there was no drug war being waged by the U.S. and Mexican governments during those years. It was nothing but fun. In fact, back then Laredo was a popular tourist destination.
Now, I don’t know if Ronstadt favors a system of open borders, but my hunch is that she does — or at least would if she were to encounter the arguments in favor of open borders. That’s because given her family roots and her proximity to the border, she clearly understands the wonderful confluence of people and culture along the border.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
After all, let’s not forget something important: Arizona, Texas, New Mexico (yes, New Mexico), California, and other parts of the Southwest were once part of Mexico. The U.S. government used the Mexican War to steal almost the entire northern half of Mexico.
I sometimes wonder why U.S. officials didn’t go ahead and steal the entire country rather than settle for stealing only half of it. At least then no one would be having conniption fits today about Mexicans illegally entering the United States because they all would be Americans. If you’re tempted to conclude that that is an outlandish concept, see this Wikipedia entry entitled “All of Mexico Movement.”
In any event, given that the U.S. stole the northern half of Mexico, that’s why I find it so amusing that so many right-wing supporters of immigration controls get so worked up over how much Mexican culture there is in what used to be Mexico, not to mention the large number of Mexican-Americans living in what used to be Mexico.
I also get amused whenever I receive emails from people lamenting what they consider to be the ongoing corruption of American culture at the hands of Latin American immigrants. Whenever I ask them if they’re thinking of Laredo culture when they say they want to preserve the purity of American culture, they go silent. They don’t know what to say. That’s because Laredo, which really is part of the United States, is about 95 percent Mexican-American. About 20 percent of the population can’t speak or write English. Streets are named for Mexican and Spanish heroes. Store signs are both in English and Spanish. Many of the daily conversations are in Spanish. When I was growing up, no one cared about any of this. It was all very normal. I have no doubts that Linda Ronstadt would find all of this not only normal but also a wonderful confluence of cultures.
In fact, one day she decided that she wanted to do an album of the Mexican songs that her family would sing at home when she was growing up. Her record company strongly opposed the idea, telling her that she would be destroying her career. In her inimitable style, Ronstadt persisted.
When I read about that part of her life in her autobiography, I couldn’t help but think about the right-wing “English only” crownd in America. You know, the group that gets all worked up when they get a message on the telephone that says “Press 2 for Spanish.” I could imagine them saying,“This is America! If Linda Ronstadt wants to sing in Spanish, she should move to Mexico.” Of course, never mind that the “English Only” crowd continues to refer to places like Los Angeles, El Paso, San Diego, San Francisco, San Antonio, and other cities rather than using English.
Ronstadt’s album, Canciones de Mi Padre, became the best-selling non-English album in history. If you want a really fun, delightful experience, watch this video of Ronstadt’s concert “Canciones de Mi Padre,” which features not only Mexican songs but also Mexican dancing. It makes no difference if you can’t understand Spanish. I will guarantee that you will absolutely enjoy this concert. It helps to remind us of how enjoyable and harmonious life could be under a system of open borders.
Thank you, Linda Ronstadt, for your great music, for your courage, and for reminding us what life is supposed to be all about.