… Oh, If I Had A Windbag …… Oh, If I Had A Windbag …
~ Evil Shaidle: If I Had a Sickle
~ I MUSTA BEEN A weird kid. Surrounded by hippies, various kinds of flaky music, the drug culture, artsy-fartsyism and all that miasma of the 60’s, and I just found it off-putting. Including some of the music. It was a visceral thing.
Seeger? No thanks. Even as a kid I found his music (endlessly repeated at camp & church) creepy, dumbed-down, and not convincing. Now, I’d say that was my honest and intuitive reaction to too much pedantry, mingled with his patronizing smugness, contempt for ordinary people, and ‘Look At Me’ folk royalty crapola. It just somehow irked me.
My father introduced me to Tom Lehrer. To this day, if given a choice between geezer folk-commies, and sarcastic smart guys, I prefer Tom Lehrer’s satiric ‘Folk Song Army‘, or NatLampoon’s brutally funny “Pull the Triggers, Niggers”, taking on tiresome folk-madonna Joan Baez [Net Worth, $14 million ]. Which queen of folkies is still not dead yet, and was recently spotted on January 31, 2014 singing for rich Democrats & HRH Michelle Obama: “The sold-out event attracted about 600 supporters, who paid from $500 to $32,400, according to the invite“. You read that correctly.
Irony, thy name is rich old folkies, dancing attendance on the elitist American nobility you formerly despised. But it’s OK, because rich bad people on the non-Republican side are the new good guys, in 2014.
Sadly, too many artists, actors, and musicians on the Left have for decades and decades cheerfully ignored, apologized for, or openly embraced the tyrants and regimes who made the lives of their own people a living hell. Wealthy Carlos Santana can wear his pricey Che shirt, apparently blissfully unaware that the mass-murderer Ernie Guevara hated and outlawed rock & roll, hated blacks, gays, fair trials, and many other approved elements of progressive ideology. But hey– what a kick-ass and edgy t-shirt, right? Even Che’s daughter might like a cut of that action. Forget the gulags– we must to be commies, and wear t-shirts of commie-isms!
Regarding Seeger’s squishy and vague 2007 criticism of long-dead monster Stalin, one can only imagine that Uncle Pete’d still be prostituting his talent for ideology if Western Europe had fallen under the Iron Curtain, and a few millions more had been vanished off to the Gulag, and his utopian daydreams been confirmed. Funny thing how espousing evil– from a comfortably safe distance– made him rich and famous and revered as some kind of living legend. Me, I’ll read and weep with Solzhenitsyn; I’ll remember the countless Christians massacred in the name of Communism; and sorrow for the dead babies and starved people of China and North Korea.
May God have mercy upon Mr. Seeger’s soul, for he served the cause of cruel evil, soul-crushing state power, and all from the rich comforts of an America he worked hard to subvert.
Facts and realities and awkward truths are pesky things. And God does not forget.