If she’s trying to be the Cindy Sheehan of soft rock, Barbra Streisand has failed miserably. For all of the anti-war sentiment she spews on her website, you might expect her new track to be an angry sermon on the misguided war in Iraq rather than a sentimental ballad ready-made to leap to the top of the adult contemporary charts. “Stranger in a Strange Land” is like popping a quaalude in order to forget that more than 1,800 soldiers have been killed and thousands more Iraqi civilians. The U.S. plans to keep troop levels over 100,000 in Iraq for at least four years, so these homecomings we see in the video, now streaming on Amazon, are some kind of pipe dream, making this ugly war (and the past ugly wars of America) into a Hallmark card with a message too disingenuous to even bring a tear to the eye. If Barbra’s so angry about this war she should donate the proceeds from this single to anti-war efforts.
I will concede, however, that she and Barry Gibb do sound like buttah.
