Several cities want to cancel the concerts of the musician Roger Waters. Our author thinks: democratic self-respect is to endure such a thing – and if in doubt not to go to the concert.
I saw Roger Waters once, so a concert by him. In 2016, in Palm Springs, it was a kind of veteran rock festival with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney. The Who had also collected them somewhere and the day before Waters played, or rather, Neil Young raged for two hours in his own bad mood about “Rocking the Free World”. All of this was what nobody really expected at the time, a few weeks before Donald Trump’s election victory. So the air was politically charged, but not as flammable as elsewhere on the warm nights of the Coachella grounds in Palm Springs and liberal California.