http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.phish/2005-07/msg01047.html
AD: What is the story behind "Throwing Stones"? You wrote that in Cora as
well, right?
JPB: Yeah. That?s the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And
the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with ***
Cheney at that point, who I?d help get elected and been a pretty good
congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was
environmental stuff. We?d helped stop acid rain in the Wind River
Mountains and passed the Wyoming Wilderness Act together and worked out a
lot of the necessary compromises. He fished on my ranch and?we were
co-conspirators.
But then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction
that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means,
and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. The original idea of the
MX Missile was that it was a second-strike, retaliatory weapon that could
not be taken out by a first strike because it would be running around on a
vast railroad system kind of like a gigantic shell game, so the Russians
wouldn?t know where the MX?s were. And the MX itself is an extremely
destructive instrument. It has ten warheads, each one of which delivers
550 kilotons of explosive energy. And just for purposes of comparison, the
bomb that completely leveled Hiroshima and took out half a million people
in a second had only seventeen kilotons to give you some idea. So you can
to the math. That?s just one missile. And the plan was to base 100 of
them. And *** was instrumental in seeing to it that they were not based
in the original basing formula, which made them explicitly second strike,
but that they were basically first strike weapons. They were completely
naked and stationary and they were all put on launch on warning. And had
all of those missiles gone, because some cloud of geese flew over a radar
in Greenland, that would?ve been the end of all like on the planet. And I
got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political
battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet
Earth, that I felt like I had to say something?so I wrote that song. And
like I say, I owe *** a lot for that song.
AD: Would you consider yourself Republican?
JPB: At this stage? Yeah, I probably would except that I don?t consider
him one. I mean, I was raised to think that Republicans were about limited
government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets,
weariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement
to business. There?s a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party
was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are
categorically against every single one of those things. So if they?re
Republicans, I?m not. But I?m really not a very comfortable Democrat. The
Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to dithering pus%@#& and
it was pathetic. So I?m just waiting until one party or the other actually
gets a moral compass and a backbone.
AD: I hear ya.
JPB: I wasn?t tempted to vote for Bush, but I understand why people
did?because he obviously had integrity. A terrible kind of integrity, but
he does what he says and he means what he says. And what he says is
terrible and what he does is terrible, but he?s consistent. So I think a
lot of people in Wyoming who care so much about integrity that there
willing to choose somebody that has a monstrous willingness to do any damn
thing as long as he?s up front about it, but that?s really not quite
enough for me. I look forward to the day when I can be republican again.
I?m an Allen Simpson republican.
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