Neil Young - ISIS is ok, American tanks pollute

Good ol' Young.

It's easy to laugh at his glaring hypocrisies. He joins a harmony group to ruin their harmonies. He walks out after more than 30 years of marriage (including the raising of a defective son, which couldn't have been easy) for aging sexpot Daryl Hannah. He mostly grants interviews to fawning journalists and the ritual is to drive them around his huge California compound for an hour so that a) they'll know when the time's up and b) that he can avoid making eye contact.

What else? Plenty else, but he's only human. He's not that educated and he's got a swelled head from being a superstar...the more he broods and sneers the more he's loved. His ego gets stroked by Deadheads who need somebody else to admire now that Jerry Garcia is gone. His ego gets stroked even more by pseudo-intellectual rock writers who champion him because they can't get noticed when they write about Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Elevating Neil Young to the level of genius songwriter...less competition but still so Liberal.

So here comes Daniel Greenfield, writing for some website/magazine. He's picked up on an amusing hypocrisy. Neil Young is Mr. Ecology, but does have huge tour buses spewing carbon monoxide. With all his equipment he needs five of 'em. Worse, and less easy to defend, Neil figures that it would be better to ignore Isis and their growing ability to take over entire cities...because Army vehicles pollute the air!

Mr. Grumpy is in overdrive at the moment, since he has stuff to sell beyond the usual sold-out tour. He's pushing a book and an album. So pardon him for going on radio and being opinionated in some foolish ways. When you get down to it, most rockers are just idiot savants. Dylan is well read (it's well known). But Neil Young? Part of his charm is his near illiteracy...his jingle simplicity: "Only love can break your heart. Try to be sure right from the start." Rock stars can be incredibly ignorant...as we see from the anti-semitism of Brian Eno, Roger Waters and Peter Gabriel. So here's Neil Young. Maybe he should just play some dates in Syria and between choruses of "Rockin' the Free World," explain to the audience that oil pollutes the air and they should all switch to solar energy. And stop being millionaires by exporting oil. And stop fighting with each other for the power of owning that oil.

Then go to China and tell 'em to stop making babies and building factories...when they're used to wearing masks over their faces due to the air pollution. Sing to them about how rotten America is:

"We got department stores and toilet paper.
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer.
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive.
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.
Keep on rockin' in the free world..."