Were we wrong?
This is presumably a typo, but it is true!
I think so. Busy Friday?
'Sokay Louis, she still looks pretty cute in this picture, wouldn’t you say? Sure, she’s never going to look like this again, but neither are any of the rest of us.
Well, that about uses up your allotment of it for the year then, yes?
And just in time, because the rest of your argument is the usual bullplop (“look, I can pretend to know enough about the military to snow you all with nonsense and have it sound plausible!”). If they had said “geezus, Mellencamp? No one here cares about that” you might have had a point. But he was invited for a concert, and he picked someone to play with him. If it had been a complete no-name performer folk singer, I have a hard time seeing them turned down. I very much doubt they turned down whatever random drummer Mellencamp hired to play with him because “geez, sorry, no one has ever heard of this guy: get that dude from the Roots instead or no drummer at all!”
Not only that, but recent acts/people/bands that have entertained the troops have been people like Connie Stevens, Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band (who play mostly covers of 70s and 80s songs), Charlie Daniels (who is even older than Baez), Wayne Newton, and Daniel Rodriguez (yes, the tenor). Does anyone really still think Baez was left out because she wasn’t Jay-Z?
Nah, they just don’t like having their pop culture things thrown back in their faces by their children or people young enough to be their children.
Especially when they’re well over 30.
Hey, my first ever slap in da face by a Mod! My cherry is busted!
::Please don’t tell me your Mod hat was off either, 'k? I’m kinda living on that right now::
I guess I’m not making my point clearly, or just possibly blurring it with my taste in Baez - the demographics of the VA hospitals mean less to my statement than do the likelihood (or not) that the same people that would go see Mellencamp would care about Joan Baez. I’m not going to get all exorcised looking up stats to back up who is and who isn’t in VA hospitals, because this is the Pit, where I stand firmly by my right to spout my little BS opinions, just as you might ignore them, and not GD, where before I spout off, I have to fact-check.
And Mr. Calling People Geezers Because My Mod Hat is Lost, I am NOT Geezer, in fact just now as I was cutting the grass with the I-Pod firmly attached, “Blood on the Scarecrow” came on, and I turned it UP. As in loud. Then proceeded to perhaps start banging my head to and fro, in a vaguely rhythmic fashion, much to the amusement of the neighbors I suspect. Then, because I was on shuffle, the very next song was something obscenity-laden by 2 Live Crew, to which I continued said rhythmic flailing, until the Wife came home and made me stop.
And best. How about we agree to forget she ever recorded that song?
“Until the Wife came home”? “The Wife”?
Boy, that is a geezer talking. Even I don’t refer to “the Wife,” and I can remember when we invented dust.
Hey, how is that a young kid like you knows that song? 
Sorry, but those two statements contradict each other. Unless you are an indentured teenage offspring working off the household chores, or a hot twenty-year-old with great pecs and no shirt employed by a lawn care company, if you are cutting the grass, then you are a geezer.
And as tom notes, referring to “the wife” just further confirms your geezerhood. So does spelling “iPod” as “I-Pod”. Sorry, gramps, but you have to face up to it sometime.
I told you, history class.
No seriously, he actually played that song for us so we could hear the type of music he was talking about. Many, many, many people in the class had never heard that song before.
Got it.
BTW, that’s an old Pete Seeger song from the 60s (or maybe even the 50s) that he wrote based on an even older Ukranian folk song. I’m not sure if Baez ever did a cover, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Most people probably only know the Peter, Paul, and Mary version. But that’s for tomorrow’s lesson, my young whipper-snapper!
2 Live Crew? I was recently informed by a 13-year-old that The Roots are Old School. 2 Live Crew might as well be from Carthage.
Like his '07 CD? Featuring a duet with Joan Baez?
Not quite, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
CMC fnord!
"I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Guilt.
Yeah, I remember buying used dust from you.
Or something he said as he slunk into the mist…
And yet the military bent over backwards to get Henry Rollins to forward areas in Iraq and Afghanistan to perform, as well as accommodate his visits to both Walter Reed and Bethesda military hospitals.
Does anyone believe that the exclusion of Joan Baez was political?
Until we get something approaching a straight story from the Walter Reed administration, I am willing to withhold judgment.
OTOH, while I do not believe that the military would make an issue of events from the 1960s, or that the VA would have any official policy regarding exclusions or blacklists, it would not surprise me to discover that some VA civilian administrator with a long (if corrupted) memory might decide to interpose a bit of spite into the credentials process.