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A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE EARLE (continued)
PM: Help me out. I'm disturbed that after the events of 9/11, the best I can seem to do at the moment is "Let's find all those people and exterminate their asses." Now I also know that that's not necessarily the answer. What's your take on it?
SE: Well, you know, I've spent a lot of time on the death penalty issue in this country, so I'm dealing with exactly that emotion all the time. You have every reason in the world to be that angry, and to be that hurt. My feeling and opinion -- and those are two different things, how I feel and what I really think about it -- is that a line exists between feeling that way and what you do about it. I think that we start to diminish ourselves as soon as we start acting in anger, or acting from hurt. I don't think Osama Bin Laden's in Afghanistan, or that he's been there for weeks. Would you stay if you were him? He got on a goat, and he went to Pakistan or somewhere.
PM: Like a turkey through the corn.
SE: I also don't believe that we're looking for Osama Bin Laden. The hunt for Osama Bin Laden is making politicians appear like they're doing something for us, doing the job that we set them up to do. They're gonna go into Iraq, that's what this is about. And it's not even about Saddam. We decided we were gonna get Castro in '58, he's still there. We decided we were gonna get Kadhafi in the early 80s, he's still there. We decided were gonna go get Saddam 7 or 8 years ago, and he's still there. So, obviously either we don't really mean to get these people, or we're not really very good at getting them. We've gotten Diem, and we've gotten other people. But I don't think it's about anything that they say it's about.
As far as what happened on the 11th...no one's asking "What did we do to make somebody fly an airplane into a building and kill so many people?" Focus on the guy doing the flying, that's not a cowardly act. Leaving a bomb in a crowded place and running away, that's a cowardly act. There's no way that those guys were cowards, and only the most extreme hate could make someone do something like that.
PM: It doesn't hurt to have a belief system that tells you such an act reserves your place in heaven.
SE: Well, that's true. But there's propaganda involved in that, too. They probably are told that. But what did we do to be able to convince somebody that that would be a good thing to do? What did we do to make them hate us so much? Nobody's asking those questions. There's stuff that goes on in Saudi Arabia that made Osama Bin Laden the way he is. That doesn't mean it's justified, just means that it wouldn't have been that hard to predict. And we trained Osama Bin Laden, and we trained Saddam. We trained Noriega too, though we did manage to get him, he's still in jail.
PM: Do you have plans that involve movies, acting or making a movie?
SE: That's one area of art that really repels me. Great films are great films. But for the most part, the film industry...I deal with it all the time, and I'm getting ready to stop. Every time I'm asked to write some music or contribute some music to a film, I end up pissed off at somebody. Though there are exceptions, they mostly think about music last, and then they want it Now. There's so much money involved, there's almost no way that it could turn out right.
It gets back to the way we think. They're watching 9/11, and licking their chops. Their deal is, let's kill every movie that has the World Trade Center in it, like Spiderman is gone. But as soon as they think the coast is clear, they're going to apply the formula. They're making some of those movies right now. The central formula in this country, and I've brought this up before when dealing with the death penalty issue, is that you have a guy that gets the shit kicked out of him for two thirds of the movie. Then, two thirds through the movie, he starts killing everyfuckinbody. That's the foolproof formula. All American movies are about that. If it's a family movie, then it's the cats against the dogs, and no one actually dies. We survived two terms of a President whose favorite movie was Rambo, and he watched it over and over and over. All these kids around us were raised during that time. It's scary. continue
