I'm not sure they read this column very regularly, but I'll say it anyway to the left-wing pressure groups trying to hound Fox News shoe-pounder Glenn Beck off the air: Three cheers for you! And you granola-heads boycotting Whole Foods since company CEO John Mackey traitorously said health care is not a right — go for it! Just one question, though: Does this mean we can start burning our Dixie Chicks CDs again?
If there's been a single salutary effect of the "hey it's Monday let's spend another trillion dollars" Obama presidency, it's the rediscovery by the American left that economic boycotts are not a fascist threat to democracy but a legitimate form of First Amendment speech. That is what the boycotts against Beck and Mackey mean, isn't it, guys?
Beck got things started last month when, while making a guest appearance on another Fox News show, he called President Barack Obama a racist who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Colorofchange.org, a black spinoff of the left-wing political group Moveon.org, immediately called for a boycott of advertisers on Beck's program. A couple of dozen, including ConAgra, Geico and Procter & Gamble, have yanked their ads.
Whole Foods' troubles began a couple of weeks later when Mackey published an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he cautioned that greater government control would not necessarily lead to better health care, then added: "A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care." Within a week, a group called Boycott Whole Foods had 23,000 members on its Facebook page posting photos of grocery receipts to prove they were taking their business elsewhere.
When a handful of Beck defenders protested that there's something a little creepy about using the power of giant, government-regulated leviathans like ConAgra to stifle a critic of the president, the lefty press and blogosphere practically tripped over themselves invoking their free-market credentials. "The right to free speech means you can say what you want when you want to," lectured a blogger at Reddit.com. "It does not mean that you can say what you want, when you want to and expect the public and the corporate world to not shout back."
I couldn't agree more, but I'm a little surprised to hear that coming from the left side of the political spectrum, which for the past few years has squealed in outrage over politically motivated boycotts. Clean-up-TV groups like the Parents Television Council are routinely labeled censors and worse when their members threaten to stop buying from advertisers on programs heavy on sex and violence.
When ABC canceled the talk show "Politically Incorrect" after advertisers fled in droves following host Bill Maher's idiotic salute to the supposed courage of the Sept. 11 hijackers, The Humanist magazine labeled it "a public crucifixion" and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin called it "McCarthyism."
And then there were the Dixie Chicks, who outraged country music fans in 2003 when a member of the group cracked to a London audience that they were ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush. When fans began boycotting Dixie Chicks concerts and trashing their CDs — in turn leading some radio stations to drop them from play lists — liberals called it jack-booted censorship. "A chilling message to people that they ought to shut up," fretted California's Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Added Bruce Springsteen: "For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out, is un-American."
Actually, using economic pressure to crack a political whip is as American as apple pie. One survey showed 78 percent of us have, at one time or another, boycotted a product for political reasons. And more often than not, the boycotts have been launched from the left. American progressives have been applying economic screws to political enemies at least since the late 18th century, when abolitionists urged consumers not to buy sugar in an attempt to break up the slave trade.
In my adult lifetime, we've been asked to boycott lettuce and grapes in support of farm worker unions, and not to drink Coors beer in order to punish the owner for his support of right-wing causes. There have been boycotts against Nestle for marketing infant formula in Third World countries, against Budweiser for not having enough black distributors, against Coca-Cola as the flagship of American cultural imperialism and against the Boy Scouts as the spear-carriers of American homophobia.
Now liberals are at it again. Fine by me. But anybody who stops buying Puffins at Whole Foods over John Mackey's theories on Obamacare has no right to criticize Cuban-Americans for burning the singer Juanes' CDs over his affection for Fidel Castro. And if you want Fox News to kick Glenn Beck off the air, you can't complain about Clear Channel doing the same to the Dixie Chicks. That shut-up-and-sing stuff goes both ways.
Glenn Garvin is a columnist for the Miami Herald. E-mail: ggarvin@miamiherald.com.