WHILE the people of Baghdad await the arrival of Wal-Mart and Starbucks, the American celebrities who spoke out against the war have been taking stock. Or, I should say, tending their wounds.

In the absence of an old nobility, thrown out along with George III in 1776, Americans have elevated celebrities to form a modern aristocracy, an unelected, disparate group who inspire by example. Since using their influence to oppose the war, a number of them have become sharply aware that, like the appeasers in the Cliveden Set, there is a price for being on the losing side of a public argument. This week, for example, it was Susan Sarandon’s turn to be fêted for her achievements at the Film Society at the Lincoln Centre in New York. The event, traditionally an apolitical love-in, this time had an air of protest. When Sarandon came on stage at the end of the eulogies, she said: “Thank you for not cancelling.”

The large crowd of fans, friends and admirers did not tell the whole story. When tickets were sent out to Film Society donors at the height of Iraq fever, they were sent back wholesale with the message: “Not this actress, not at this time.” The event went ahead with fewer big givers than in previous years and the society will have to raise money in other ways to meet its budget.

Other peaceniks who have gone back to work include the Dixie Chicks, who began a tour of 51 American cities on Thursday. The tour was sold out before the war started. Since then they have declared themselves ashamed to come from the same state as the President and have seen their records crushed by steamrollers.

This week two disc jockeys were suspended for playing Dixie Chicks records despite a ban imposed by their station manager. America has not seen anything like it since John Lennon suggested that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.

There will still be plenty of rednecks, stetsons and “yee-hahs” in the Chicks’ audience, but dabbling in politics does not suit the country crowd and the Chicks may find that their position as crossover artists — moving from the confines of a blue-collar country audience to a more affluent one — has made it difficult for them to please both.

In New York this week Bill Maher began a one-man stage show, Victory Begins at Home. He was an early victim of speaking out when, six days after September 11, on his television show Politically Incorrect, he pronounced that the high-technology weapons used by American troops did not demand as much courage as that needed to fly an aircraft into the World Trade Centre. So much for comic timing. The ABC network, owned by Disney, pulled him off the air.

Maher is one of the few celebrity protesters who may have enhanced his career by speaking out. At a half-empty matinee of his show last Sunday, the management were packing the house with passing tourists, just the sort of middle Americans who have never heard of Bill Maher and have little truck with sophisticated anti-war arguments.

Yet once Maher had started his rapid-fire schtick — “I am for mad cow disease. I think No sometimes means Yes. I think Vegas was better when it was run by the Mob” — the audience warmed to his suggestion that the war was launched under a false pretext, that no weapons of mass destruction will be found, that President Bush was motivated by a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein for trying to kill his father and that the war was at least partly to do with the President being re-elected.

At both the Sarandon and the Maher events, it was declared that freedom of speech was an American right and that condemning those who opposed the war was an un-American act.

Mr Bush, whose allies have relentlessly traduced dissenting entertainers, says that protest is a two-way street. “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind,” he said. “They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out.”

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