It's rare to find a news story that incorporates many
different social elements and demonstrates how widely
divided we are as a society. But the events involving the
band Mifune, the Tri-C Jazz Festival and their performance
at Tower City is a humdinger on all fronts.
The jazz festival, which receives funding from Tower City,
booked an Afro-beat band from Cleveland Heights named Mifune
to play an hour-and-a-half set at Tower City on April 28.
The band took the stage wearing white shirts with President
Bush's face, circled in red, on them. A red slash
through the president's face symbolized the message,
"No George Bush."
Twenty minutes into the set, in the middle of a song called
"Supercrush," which criticizes the
president's economic policies, a Tower City official
told members of the band to remove their shirts or turn them
inside out.
Band members asked if they could discuss the request at the
end of the song. Tower City officials insisted and turned
off the power, ending the show. The band had 30 to 50 fans
and friends in attendance. In the rest of Tower City, it was
business as usual, people milling about and shopping.
According to the band, a JazzFest official called to the
stage expressed disappointment and admonished Mifune for
wearing the shirts. The official later told The Plain Dealer
that the festival backed Tower City's right to enforce
the rules of the venue.
I called all the parties and tried to get to what really
happened and why. Here's what I gathered: Because the
Bush administration is such a hot-button issue these days
with fanatical supporters and detractors, a Tower City
manager panicked at the prospect of offending perhaps half
of its customers.
Because Tower City is a generous benefactor of the
festival, the JazzFest rep feared losing Tower City favor.
But when the story hit the newspaper and the Internet and
garnered a letter of concern about free speech from Rep.
Dennis Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat, the JazzFest started
to backpedal and point the finger at Tower City, according
to the band.
Let's review. Tower City doesn't want to offend
shoppers. JazzFest doesn't want to lose financial
support but also doesn't want to look like it's
caving to corporate pressure. The band wants to play the
music it always has played and was hired to play.
It's not really about the Bush administration and its
policies. It's about financial survival for the
shopping center and for the music festival and anything that
might endanger the relationship between the two.
But in this overheated political atmosphere, while
Americans are dying half a world away for a much-debated
cause, gas prices are rising, and New Orleans is struggling
to rebuild a year after Katrina, the country is torn apart.
There are two sides. One says we went to war on false
pretenses and have been playing a losing game of catch-up
ever since. The other says the rest of history will take
place in the Middle East, and we have to establish ourselves
there now.
Back home in Cleveland, irony abounds. Those Mifune
anti-Bush T-shirts? Guess what? Selling like hot cakes.
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