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I'm not sure "McCarthyism" is the right epithet to describe what's going on these days. There's a lot less public pillorying and a lot more secret police-state-style harassment and intrusion than what Joe McCarthy and his cronies dished out.

Of course, McCarthy wasn't the only abuser of official power in those bad old days: Jim Crow and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI come readily to mind. Similarly, there's a new resurgence of officially sanctioned racism in the selective enforcement of immigration laws and the racial profiling of "terror" suspects. And we have only the barest clue of how much domestic spying is taking place in the name of the "war on terror", nor how opportunists in the Hoover tradition may find ways to abuse the information they gather.

But there are some hints of old-fashioned McCarthyism here and there as well. The nodding around the table at the Meetup the other night at Tim's comment ragerding the Dixie Chicks/Clear Channel brouhaha made me uncomfortable. If I can remember Tim's point, it was something along the lines of, "I support her right to express her opinion but then she has to expect to face the consequences." I can see both sides of that argument and I'm not sure how to reconcile them. Sure, as a practical matter, a figure in pop culture has to keep his or her public's fickle affections in mind whenever the cameras or rolling, and sadly that applies to expressions of politics as much as lifestyle choices or fashion statements: say the wrong thing and the yahoos who bought your last record might not buy the next one. On the other hand, as I said that night, when the near-monopolies who run the entertainment and media business start exercising their considerable power on the basis of your politics as Clear Channel did with the Dixie Chicks, that sounds to me like blacklisting. And yet again, who would propose to design or apply tests of political neutrality to Clear Channel's playlists?

Ultimately, the problem may be that Clear Channel has too much power. Artists may or may not have to remain beholden to their fans, but they certainly shouldn't have to be beholden to the moguls as well. In McCarthy's day as now, concentration of power created the conditions for the blacklist to work.

Am I the only one who sensed the irony that we were talking about this in South Austin, home of both the Dixie Chick in question and McCarthy-era poster boy John Henry Faulk? And right down the road from where Ruta Maya sits cheek by jowl with ClearChannel's regional offices, too.

(Say, what are the chances we could round up some of the usual blogger/EFF/peacenik suspects to get together at Ruta Maya for coffee and some friendly picketing of Clear Channel?)

Oh, and while we're on the topic of the Chicks, Nigel Richardson proposes a very sensible response to their pissed-off fans.