Johnny Cash, pacifist

Rosanne Cash talks about getting angry letters for her opposition to the Iraq war:

Through songs such as “Like Fugitives” and “World Without Sound” — which asks, “Who do I believe/Once they put you in the ground?” — Cash lets loose on the difficulties of having to share her grief with the public. “There are some fans of my dad’s who have this sense of territorialism about him,” says Cash. “I had a guy come up to me and say, ‘Do you love your father?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘No. I love your father!’ It borders on the psychotic, I’m telling you.”

Compounding the problem was her public opposition to the war in Iraq, which angered many of her father’s admirers. “I got so much hate mail,” Cash says. “Invariably, they would say, ‘Your father’s a real American, and you should go sleep with Sadaam.’” Ironically, Johnny Cash himself was adamantly against the war. “It broke his heart, it really did,” she asserts, claiming that her father was “addicted” to war coverage on CNN during his last months. “We talked about it in every single conversation we had,” she says. “He was almost a Quaker in his pacifism. He thought there was never a reason for war — and he had felt that way, he told me, since the Vietnam War.”

(Via Reason)