Where Have All the Lefties Gone?
Augustine
By Lauren Weiner
[You may find the comments on this article worth reading:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/12/where-have-all-the-lefties-gone
]
During the 1950s and 1960s, when Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds
coaxed classrooms full of kids to join them in the singing of folk
songs, no one paid much attention—not even those who, in the middle of
the Cold War, saw America’s “singing left” as a threat to the
republic. “They never thought there would be a problem with Pete
Seeger singing to six-year-olds,” Seeger’s biographer, David King
Dunaway, wrote. But considering the baby boom those six-year-olds
turned out to be, Dunaway’s later observation made sense: What was in
the offing was “an American folk music revival that I think we have to
give the FBI credit for helping to establish.”
The law of unintended consequences gave a quirky twist to the relation
between the Old and New Left and, in the process, lent peculiar
accents to America’s musical and political culture that we can’t seem
to get rid of even today. The folk revival—a fad sandwiched between
the beatniks and the hippies—may have been brief, but it was also the
baby boomers’ coming of age, and its echoes have been lasting. Bruce
Springsteen made a splash in 2006 with his Seeger Sessions. Ry Cooder
paid homage to Woody Guthrie in the 2007 release My Name Is Buddy.
Sheryl Crow told Billboard magazine that her song, “Shine Over
Babylon,” is “very environmentally conscious, in the tradition of Bob
Dylan.”
It’s curious how much the postwar children of prosperity enjoyed
hearkening back to hard times. Dylan’s early compositions were full of
Dust Bowl references. Odetta was on television rendering the sounds of
the chain gang while bathed in a glamorous cabaret spotlight. The
Gordon Lightfoot song “Early Morning Rain” (1964) complained that “you
can’t jump a jet plane” as easily as you hopped a freight train back
in the good old, bad old days. “Green, Green,” Barry McGuire’s 1963
top ten hit, had the perky coeds of the New Christy Minstrels belting
out the plea of the Great Depression: “Buddy, can you spare me a
dime?”
The Appalachian murder ballads, convict songs, and Dust Bowl laments
of the 1960s did prompt some debate about authenticity, but the
rescuers of old-time music cheerfully exposed themselves to the charge
of dilettantism. “Some of my favorite songs I’ve learned from camp
counselors,” admitted Pete Seeger. Dave Van Ronk—whose disarming
memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, was published posthumously in
2005—recounts that many years after he had helped popularize “House of
the Rising Sun,” he actually went to New Orleans, only to learn that
the original establishment was not a bordello, as he had supposed, but
a women’s prison. Another staple of Van Ronk’s repertoire, “Candy
Man,” had been taught to him by a master of ragtime guitar finger-
picking, the Reverend Gary Davis. The straight-laced Davis was loath
to join him on “Candy Man” before an audience—eventually Van Ronk
caught on that the song he’d been performing was about a pimp.
Superficiality did not hinder the music. It sold like hotcakes (at
least until the Beatles arrived and made rock ’n’ roll king), and the
secondhand quality escaped those of us working up third-hand versions,
strumming along with our phonograph records. From my own spot in the
Great American Middle—a subdivision of ranch houses newly erected on
flat farmland west of Chicago—I couldn’t see the pretense in “Tom
Dooley,” as the preppy-looking Kingston Trio impersonated a poor
Confederate soldier who hung down his head and cried. Struggling to
play and sing—my elders on their Silvertone guitars from Sears, and I
on my baritone ukulele to accommodate the small hands of an eight-year-
old—we were disinclined to delve into questions of provenance.
These were borrowed tastes, but nobody seemed to mind. As Van Ronk
observed, “One of the first things that must be understood about these
revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always,
there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever
that might be—is the operative thing.” Capturing all of the
contradictions, the historian Robert S. Cantwell wrote that this was a
time “when the carriers of a superannuated ideological minority found
themselves celebrated as the leaders of a mass movement; when an
esoteric and anticommercial enthusiasm turned into a commercial
bonanza; when an alienated, jazz-driven, literary bohemia turned to
the simple songs of an old, rural America.”
That part about an “ideological minority” being “celebrated” by
somebody had gone over our heads, too: We did not know that the folk
boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American
music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of
cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero
of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the
Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea
chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from
entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the
cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and
companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my
parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been
summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept
the details to themselves.
Even today, this back story is not well known. But it should be, for
it sharpens our view of several interconnected matters: the communist
controversy in the United States, market capitalism’s ability to
absorb and soften extreme ideas, and the decades-long domination of
our cultural scene by the “forever-young” generation born during and
shortly after the Second World War.
Many who inspired that generation to make folk music had been in the
orbit of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). War and depression shook
Americans’ faith in capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and in
reaction, broad swaths of the intelligentsia were smitten by “Pan-
Sovietism” (to borrow Murray Kempton’s phrase), either joining the
party or becoming fellow travelers. Among those who saw trouble in
this development was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who warned in Life
magazine in 1946 that “the wildly enthusiastic communist claque for
certain types of phony folk art has lowered the standards of many
Americans not themselves party members or sympathizers.” In the
Atlantic Monthly, the Harvard professor Carl Friederich called
“strictly subversive and illegal” the repertoire of the Almanac
Singers (the group formed in Greenwich Village by Pete Seeger, Woody
Guthrie, and others, some of whose members later became the Weavers).
Were Schlesinger and Friederich crazy? Not really. From the nation’s
founding, through the beginning of the twentieth century, when the
Wobblies printed their pamphlet of Songs to Fan the Flames of
Discontent, political themes had made their way into popular music.
Without question, however, the most concerted effort at politicization
came from the CPUSA. Go out and make antifascist alliances with
liberals, Georgi Dmitrov ordered in Moscow in 1935, and so the
communists obediently fanned out into the American labor movement and
civil-rights activities.
And a few headed for the hills, musically speaking.
The most important example is the Seegers. In the 1930s, Charles
Seeger, a classically trained musicologist, was one of Manhattan’s
leading cultural lights. He and quite a few of his fellow artists,
including the composer Aaron Copland, saw in the Russian Revolution a
harbinger of international peace and the abolition of class conflict.
And so, in 1934, they formed a “Composers’ Collective” to urge their
countrymen to join the revolutionary struggle. As Seeger wrote—in the
Daily Worker, using an alias—music would be “one of the cultural forms
through which the work of humanizing people and preparing the
proletariat for its historic tasks operates.”
The collective first tried bringing high-brow modernism to the masses.
This involved, among other things, holding a contest for best original
May Day marching song. (Copland’s entry took the laurels; Seeger
countered that his was more singable and, anyway, the workers weren’t
likely to have a piano handy during their protest marches.) The effort
was a bust. But it led Seeger, family in tow, to roam the rural
southeastern United States, exploring the music played by the regular
folk and groping for a way to turn these demotic musical expressions
in a politically helpful direction.
By the time Charles’ son, Pete, came of age, the record laid down by
the “people’s democracy” in the Soviet Union had lengthened to include
show trials, the forced collectivization of agriculture, a well-
developed police state, and the takeover of neighboring countries.
Nonetheless Seeger fils, the next-generation wandering minstrel, stuck
with his inherited “Pan-Sovietism” through a long and successful
musical career. (The historian Ronald Radosh, in a public exchange
with him in 2009, elicited a rueful comment about having stood by
Josef Stalin despite everything.)
Pete first took up the banjo as a twenty-one-year-old, sitting on
front porches across the South and learning from the old masters of
the rural tradition. Sometimes those masters balked at city slickers
glomming onto their music. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolinian
who mounted what may have been the first “folk festival,” detested
Seeger for his communism. (As the historian Ronald D. Cohen notes,
Lunsford once introduced a folk act at his Asheville festival as
“three Jews from New York.”)
Seeger and his friends were undeterred. Their duty, as they saw it,
was to convert the middle class to their way of thinking. Besides,
they genuinely loved the music. By Van Ronk’s casual estimate, half
the folk revivalists were Jewish, and they “adopted the music as part
of a process of assimilation into the Anglo-American tradition.”
By the 1940s, folk singers had become a ceremonial part of Communist
Party meetings. And at nearly all of them, one would find Pete Seeger
playing, under the revolutionary pseudonym “Pete Bowers,” with the
likes of Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Burl Ives, Josh White, Saul
Aarons, Bernie Asbel, Will Geer, and a new arrival on the East Coast
musical scene, Woody Guthrie.
To achieve the effect they wanted—music that was “national in form and
revolutionary in content” in Charles Seeger’s conception—they dipped
into the past for their material. “Jesse James,” “Wayfaring Stranger,”
“Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” and “On
Top of Old Smokey” were brought to urban settings, in some cases for
the first time. Topical songs—many written for the Henry Wallace
presidential campaign of 1948—were political editorials often set to
old hymns and folk tunes: “Capitalistic Boss,” “Join the Union
Tonight,” “Oh, What Congress Done to Me,” “Defense Factory Blues,” and
“Marcantonio for Mayor” (for the Stalinist Vito Marcantonio).
Use was made of old English ballads (“Jack Munro” became Florence
Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”), together with slave songs (“My
Darling Nellie Gray” became “The Commonwealth of Toil”). Children’s
ditties got recycled: “Polly Wolly Doodle” turned into “The Picket
Line Song,” for instance, and “The Farmer in the Dell” was no longer
about the rat taking the cheese but a captain of industry whose
spoiled son drove a Cadillac (merely a different kind of rat, come to
think of it). It was all part of an effort to connect with factory-and-
farm America while proffering “an answer to the misery that was
clearly around us,” in the words of singer Ronnie Gilbert, the sole
female member of the Weavers.
The best adapter of the bunch, and one of the better vocalists and
guitarists, was Woody Guthrie. Several of Guthrie’s best-known
offerings were built on borrowed melodies. “There once was a union
maid,” sang Guthrie, “who never was afraid” of the “goons and ginks
and company finks.” The melody was from Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer”
by way of “Red Wing,” a popular 1907 song that began: “There once was
an Indian maid, a shy little prairie maid.”
The most beloved Guthrie recasting is, of course, “This Land Is Your
Land.” It was a response to “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin,
which Guthrie found complacent and cliché-ridden. His original
manuscript contains verses that denounce property rights, but the
standard rendition cut that material, and the strong and simple melody
goes back at least to “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine,” a Carter family
song based on a Baptist hymn called “When the World’s on Fire.”
The critic Leslie Fiedler used to write about what he called “the
Popular Front mind at bay,” and the phrase gives us an inkling of the
strangely divided sensibility of people like Guthrie. It enraged this
man, with his American ancestry, to be “accused of being a Russian
red.” The Soviet Union was nonetheless the final arbiter of all that
mattered to him, in politics and even aesthetics. The same person who
scrawled indignantly in the margin of his scrapbook that “I ain’t out
to spread no foreign ideas amongst the people over here” also enthused
in a letter to Lee Hays, his fellow Almanac Singer, that: “the Soviet
consul member was there, Nichi Somebody, and he listened to our
songs. . . . He’s gonna send a big batch of them over to the Soviet
Union. . . . If they take a sudden notion to produce these records
over there, naturally, you know what that might lead to—hell, we might
sell a whole flock of them. It’s damn good to hear that the Almanacs
and Union Folks over here in the USA guessed so close to the Real
Truth in selecting and choosing to back this kind of music.”
The style of these Bolshevik balladeers was heavily influenced by Alan
Lomax, assistant director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library
of Congress. Like Pete Seeger, Lomax was a second-generation music
man. His father was John Lomax, a southern folk-music hobbyist and
pioneer in the techniques of sound-recording, who took his son with
him on his journeys. Their travels had taught them that black people,
some of whom they recorded in rural prisons, were making distinctive
music that deserved to be brought forward.
And there was something else—something that irked even leftists, if
they were noncommunist. “However loathsome and psychotic” J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI was, according to Dave Van Ronk, they “got one thing
right: The CP [USA] was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no
more, no less.” Alan Lomax, broadcasting down-home American music over
the radio, did his bit to promote Moscow’s interests, at least in
small ways. A Lomax-produced radio show out of CBS in New York called
Back Where I Come From, for example, was the stuff of Arthur
Schlesinger’s nightmares. Guthrie was a regular, as was an ex-convict
and twelve-string guitar wonder, Lead Belly (Huddy Ledbetter).
Premiering in August 1940, Back Where I Come From featured, according
to historian Robbie Lieberman, “socially conscious songs and stories,
even though not explicitly ‘left’ stuff. For example, someone would
sing ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and Lomax would comment, ‘ There was a war
that was worth fighting’”—implying, the American Civil War was good,
but England’s fight against Stalin’s 1940 ally Hitler was bad. One
could trace in Lomax’s comments “the CP line during the period of the
Nazi–Soviet pact,” writes Lieberman. Lomax’s comrades were even louder
on the point: While the pact was in force, Seeger and Guthrie wrote
vitriolic anti-Roosevelt songs for the Almanacs to sing about the
pointless sacrifice that lay ahead should the president send American
boys against the Nazi war machine.
The party line changed when Panzer divisions rolled across Russia’s
western border in June 1941. This had musical ramifications. Guthrie
quickly began inserting anti-Hitler lyrics into his old songs. (He
also joined the Merchant Marine, and Seeger was conscripted into the
Army.) On the radio there was The Martins and the Coys, with music by
Alan Lomax’s wife, Elizabeth, and Lomax as arranger. Folk historian
Ronald D. Cohen describes this 1944 show as “drawing upon traditional
stereotyping of southern culture,” with “two feuding families”
resolving “their quarrelling to join the war against fascism.” Why
join now? Because now it was the Red Army trying to fend off the
Wehrmacht. Cohen stops short of calling The Martins and the Coys a
patronizing piece of agitprop, contenting himself with this dry
comment: “Although it was recorded in the Decca studios in New York,
no domestic network would air the program, so Lomax shipped it to
London for broadcast on the BBC.”
Here was proof of the counter-subversives’ clout. In fact, the
American Legion and local groups, such as the Christian Anticommunism
Crusade picketed the appearances of folk singers who had been named as
communists in such publications as Red Channels and Counterattack.
Lomax himself went eventually to England to escape the blacklist and a
bad marriage. That, however, was after the summit of musical Marxism-
Leninism was reached, with the creation of an organization by the name
of People’s Songs.
Founded in New York in 1945, People’s Songs sprang from the publicity
arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a part of the
labor movement in which communists were heavily represented. Lomax and
Seeger were the group’s leaders. They intended it to be a radical Tin
Pan Alley—a factory of musical creativity that could draw workers into
CIO unions (instead of unions affiliated with the reactionary American
Federation of Labor) and citizens into the voting booths to pull the
lever for party-preferred candidates. Their big electoral cause was
the presidential bid of Henry Wallace in 1948. Wallace’s Progressive
Party aimed to knock the Cold Warrior Truman out of the White House—
and Alan Lomax, naturally, was the Wallace campaign’s musical
director.
People’s Songs—which lasted from 1945 to 1949—ginned up a host of
musico-political activities, sprouting fifteen chapters around the
country. The labor movement was coming into its prime, and the
People’s Songsters aimed to be the singin’ and strummin’ shock troops:
trolling for new musical talent, making folk recordings, producing
film strips for the sing-alongs—they called them hootenannies—that
were part of union-membership drives. Seeger went on the campaign
trail with Wallace to enliven the Progressive Party’s rallies.
Surviving photographs show neatly dressed People’s Songsters posing
with their instruments, their grins a mile wide, with Paul Robeson,
elder statesman of Stalinism in the arts, looking on in approval.
An official newsletter—forerunner of the communist-run folk magazines
Sing Out! and Broadside—dispensed tips to aspiring songwriters.
“Parodies of favorite old songs are the easiest to write,” the editors
advised, and by coming up with “new ‘socially significant’ words—[for]
a satire on a political opponent or a treatment based on a legislative
issue—you can create a potent weapon.” Civil rights leader Bayard
Rustin’s brief membership in the Young Communist League overlapped
with his stint as first tenor in the Carolinians, which featured
People’s Songs star Josh White. The Chicago chapter of the
organization boasted a young folkie by the name of Studs Terkel.
All this youthful energy, devotion—and, in some cases, talent—yielded
a pretty dreary output. Even as sympathetic an observer as Robbie
Lieberman—the daughter of People’s Songster Ernie Lieberman—points to
lyrics that were “only likely to have meaning to the Communist Left.”
When, for example, the People’s Songsters offered paeans to the Office
of Price Administration (the Reds’ pet federal agency because it had
charge of rationing, wages, prices, and rent-control), their weapon
fired blanks, as it did with a song deploring the allegedly unjust
provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. Even songs condemning racial
prejudice threw in criticism of the effort to block Soviet domination
of trade unions in western Europe. (“We don’t want no Marshall
Plan. . . . Henry Wallace is our man!”)
A few of the catchier songs did reach a larger audience. That included
counter-subversives, though, producing more skirmishes in the culture
war that was the communist controversy in America. There was the Joint
Committee Against Communism, led by Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, which went
after Columbia and RCA Victor for releasing “Old Man Atom.” It was a
musical warning by Vern Partlow, of the People’s Songs’ Los Angeles
branch, of the danger of letting the United States maintain its
monopoly on nuclear weapons. The rabbi’s campaign caused Partlow’s
song to be withdrawn from distribution and apparently dissuaded Bing
Crosby from recording his own version.
According to the historian David Everitt, a housewife named Edna
Johnson Buchanan lugged her phonograph to community assemblies so her
fellow citizens could hear “The Banks of Marble,” by the Weavers. It
was a throwback to hard times, for by then (1950) the Depression was
long gone. The song’s refrain was an invitation to the weary miner,
the put-upon farmer, and the unemployed seaman to “make a stand” and
then “we’d own those banks of marble, with a guard at every door. And
we’d share those vaults of silver, that we have sweated for.” Mrs.
Buchanan was outraged that her husband, a Marine who saw combat in
Europe, was now off fighting the communists in Korea even as these
domestic Reds racked up big earnings by attacking the system he was
risking his life to defend. She and her father, Laurence Johnson, were
part of the popular groundswell against the Weavers that sidelined
their act by the early 1950s.
Nearly as disagreeable—for a different reason, of course—were party
apparatchiks not of the musical persuasion. As Lieberman relates, many
of them found the notion of a “hootenanny revolutionist” absurd. What
could this cornpone do to bring down the system? Malvina Reynolds, a
People’s Songster from northern California, quit the CPUSA out of
anger that its leadership “had no concept of what I was doing or what
effect it would have.”
As it turned out, People’s Songs didn’t have much immediate political
effect. Henry Wallace received only two percent of the vote, and the
movement as a whole had already crested. As the Soviet challenge to
the Western democracies grew after the Second World War, the CPUSA’s
bid for supremacy on the Left waned. The CIO unionists aligned
themselves more firmly with Cold War foreign policy—helped along,
after Truman’s reelection, by a purge of communists from the CIO
leadership (under the hated Taft-Hartley Act). The Progressive Party’s
collapse demoralized Seeger, who retreated to New York’s Hudson Valley
to build, Thoreau-style, a home in the woods for his family.
Folk music did not go away with the political marginalization of Red
folkies. A revival was now underway, nurtured by the increasingly
profitable Sing Out! magazine (whose commercialism irked Pete Seeger,
one of its editors) and the records being churned out by Moe Asch, the
producer and former People’s Songs patron, on his well-regarded
Folkways label.
Some kept singing—and wrote ditties about Red-hunters coming after
them. Betty Sanders did a jaunty 1952 rendition of “Talking Un-
American Blues” about the subpoena (eventually canceled) that she and
her coauthor Irwin Silber received from the House Un-American
Activities Committee. Alan Lomax and Michael Loring sang (to the tune
of “Yankee Doodle”): “Re-pu-bli-cans they call us ‘Red,’ the Demmies
call us ‘Commie.’ / No matter how they slice it, boys, it’s still the
old salami.”
This was a new, coy art that was to grow in significance: ridiculing
one’s adversaries for correctly discerning one’s politics. The
demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy and other anticommunist excesses
provided the opening. The 1962 song “The Birch Society” by Malvina
Reynolds has the typical Pop Front blend of brazenness and coyness—
with an extra dollop of sanctimony, a Reynolds specialty. “They’re
afraid of nearly everything that’s for the general good,” she sang,
“they holler ‘Red’ if something’s said for peace and brotherhood.” The
fact that they also hollered Red if somebody actually was a Red got
lost in the shuffle. For here, at last, was a rallying point—anti-anti-
communism—with a potential for wide appeal. It became fundamental to
the politics of nearly everyone who was left-of-center and was adopted
by legions of middle-class young people unmoved by concepts such as
worker ownership of the means of production.
Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” appeared in Broadside
magazine’s inaugural issue in the same year Reynolds did her satire. A
1964 variant had Dylan singing a line in protest of Pete Seeger’s
exclusion from the ABC television show Hootenanny on political
grounds. Both that song and “Society’s Child,” a plea for interracial
understanding written by a teenaged Janis Ian, came out of the musical
salon that had formed around Broadside. And Broadside had formed
around, or at least at the behest of, Malvina Reynolds. Concurring
with Seeger that Sing Out! had lost its political edge, she had coaxed
Popular Front friends into starting the rival publication. In their
Red Dust and Broadsides (1990), Sis Cunningham and her husband Gordon
Friesen describe vetting songs monthly in their New York apartment in
sessions frequented by Dylan, Ian, Phil Ochs, and others.
Ochs in particular was a master of social observation. His topical
songs courted instant obsolescence, being so closely trained on the
news of the day. Yet there were times when his special talent—
skewering liberals—shone. According to Dave Van Ronk, Ochs “had
believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him.” From out
of this disillusion came “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” and “I Ain’t a
Marchin’ Anymore,” which rip mainstream Democrats for being materially
selfish, lukewarm to desegregation, and, worst of all, Cold Warriors.
“Now the labor leader’s screaming when they close the missile
plants. / United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore”—a more concise
indictment of the military-industrial complex was never penned (nor
sung in as oddly compelling a tenor voice as Ochs’).
This generation thought of itself as wholly original—and it’s true
that the New Left had little taste for pro-Soviet bandwagoning. But it
did absorb the Old Left’s opposition to American foreign policy. Its
real uniqueness lay in a self-absorption of the most open and frank
kind. The baby boomers took up a welter of causes—ban the bomb,
respect mother earth, civil rights, stop the war, feminism—but what
stands out is how much they loved picturing themselves in the act of
banning the bomb, praising mother earth, and the rest. In the eloquent
non sequitur of folksinger Fred Neil: “I’ve been searching for the
dolphins in the sea, and sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?”
With his beatnik-inflected meanderings, Neil was one of the first in
Greenwich Village, according to Van Ronk, to start doing the
“personal, subjective stuff.” Bob Dylan, among others, quickly picked
up on it. Dylan was not the first of this new breed—the “singer-
songwriter”—but his self-confidence made him the trailblazer. While he
retooled traditional songs in the Guthrie manner, and (according to
his biographer, Joe Klein) even made his Village debut literally
wearing an old suit of Guthrie’s clothes, Dylan was not resting with
the Old Left model. Sis Cunningham’s and Woody Guthrie’s music
contained not an iota of introspection—a well-known bourgeois
pathology. That didn’t matter to Dylan. (His failure to adopt the
Party line disappointed his mentors—a harbinger, perhaps, of his
flouting of all of folkdom when he switched to an electric guitar with
rock accompaniment.)
Filthy lucre may have been counter-revolutionary but few of the old
folksingers declined opportunities to distribute their work. Seeger
wanted folk music to compete with the products of a rapidly expanding
and corporatizing music industry. To find his opportunities, Seeger
had to be resourceful because he was blacklisted by the primetime
television networks. He got himself on television, at least in a small
way, by mounting a self-funded show on a local New York educational
channel and landing a half-hour show that played on Canadian
television. Moreover, the primetime ban did not stop him from signing
a recording contract in the early 1960s with Columbia Records and “a
prosperous musical marriage” it was, according to Ronald D. Cohen.
In 1962, Seeger’s conviction for contempt of Congress (he had refused
to cooperate with HUAC) was overturned on appeal. The system—that
hated thing—had vindicated his right to his views. But primetime
producers did not relent. He made do, as his biographer, Dunaway,
points out, by performing on college campuses. Seeger was not the
first to go on the university circuit. Back in the World War I era,
Carl Sandburg was adding folk-singing interludes to his lectures.
Seeger began doing it, however, just as the music industry was being
absorbed into a burgeoning youth culture. Cohen quotes a 1963 trade-
publication article on the new “role of the nation’s colleges,
universities, civic organizations, and other such basically non-show
business institutions in shaping entertainment patterns.”
Even as Seeger was bringing old-time music to students, and making the
campus concertizing that is common today look viable, television was
taking notice. Hootenanny was ABC’s attempt to cash in on the folk
craze. Segments were taped at colleges across the country featuring
Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins, and other prominent acts. All except
Seeger. An effort by performers led by Joan Baez, among others, to
boycott the show in protest did not last long—nor, in fact, did the
program—but the Seeger affair became a high point in the 1960s
generation’s demonstration to itself that it took a stand for civil
liberties. And, not incidentally, for anti-anticommunism.
Oldsters like Seeger also influenced the music. He and Malvina
Reynolds, for example, pioneered the practice of asking ingenuous
musical questions to prod the Establishment to change. His “Where Have
All the Flowers Gone?” was followed by Reynolds’ “What Have They Done
to the Rain?”—a song about nuclear fallout made popular by Joan Baez
in 1962. Eight years later, John Fogerty wrote the Vietnam protest
song “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”—a hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival—
and Cat Stevens chipped in “Where Do the Children Play?” By then, the
oh-so-simple interrogative that catches “the straights” flat-footed
was compulsory for assorted flower children and countercultural types,
hallucinogenic drugs only having reinforced this tic.
Reynolds’ achievement with her 1962 song “Little Boxes”—heard today in
many versions, most prominently as the theme song of Weeds, the
Showtime television series—was to bend the People’s Songs manner of
editorializing into something more general: a critique of the
bourgeois lifestyle. The earliest versions of fast food drew Reynolds’
ire, too, and while that send-up was less than tuneful, it
represented, as well, the kind of approach that was taken up by the
folk and folk-rock songwriters who came after.
Yet, as we know, many in the new generation, even politically active
ones, aimed more for personal liberation than for liberation of the
masses. The output of folk and folk-rock artists—the painterly
romanticism of Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen’s driving dirges of
existentialism, for example—mostly reflected a personal-liberation
kind of Leftism, not a Marxist-Leninist kind. To be sure, the role
assigned to these people by their large and now aging audience was a
serious one. The likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen,
Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Carole King
were looked on as more than entertainers. Their work was imagined as
“philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm” (the title of a book on the subject).
That means, of course, that, in investing so much meaning in their pop-
culture favorites, the baby boomers have more than a little in common
with their predecessors. Americans have not marched, singing, to the
barricades. On the other hand, successions of young adults have for
decades been singing and tapping their feet (and occasionally
sustaining eardrum damage) in the auditoriums of academia—after paying
good money to get in—following the practice that a Bolshevik balladeer
helped establish. And when America kicks back, turns on the tube, and
watches a “hip” show about an upper-middle-class widow selling pot out
of her suburban home—proving the utter hollowness of the American dream
—it hums along with another Bolshevik balladeer. It’s enough to make
you think that one day soon they could replace the Francis Scott Key
tune that is our national anthem with Guthrie’s song. The “Star-
Spangled Banner” is way too hard to sing, as everyone knows, so to
cling to the status quo is to stand in the way of progress. And that
is downright un-American.
Augustine
> Why don't you just post a link to some article, and then add a few
> paragraphs describing your reaction to it? Your fringe-dwelling,
> religion/right-slanted resources probably would appreciate getting some
> hits.
>
> I see the site's top story right now is hand-wringing over William/Kate
> living together before marriage. Oh brother.
Is there a premium on obnoxiousness?
Listen, you've already made it clear that you're incapable of offering
much beyond personal attacks. No need to keep reinforcing the point.
really real
for the downtrodden in the USA. The musical tone of the times is
wimpyness and self pity. But Paul Simon has just released his best album
in ages, and it begins with a very political song. Bob Dylan has
declared, in a recent album that he is a union man, and he's sung, in
Workingman's Blues, a song about the proletariat, even if he pronounces
the word wrong. And Elton John showed up at the royal wedding with his
husband.
And don't forget Rage Against the Machine
really real
>
> Listen, you've already made it clear that you're incapable of offering
> much beyond personal attacks. No need to keep reinforcing the point.
Augustine, that kind of quote about poisoned rose will get you into the
famous Poisoned Rose file. Well done!
Augustine
> Don't count the left out completely. Admittedly, these are tough times
> for the downtrodden in the USA. The musical tone of the times is
> wimpyness and self pity. But Paul Simon has just released his best album
> in ages, and it begins with a very political song. Bob Dylan has
> declared, in a recent album that he is a union man, and he's sung, in
> Workingman's Blues, a song about the proletariat, even if he pronounces
> the word wrong. And Elton John showed up at the royal wedding with his
> husband.
I agree that in fact the left is far from dead. It's just that because
their victory has been so complete, and is now so entrenched,
spectacular leaps and bounds into the abyss are things of the past.
These we'll no longer see. It'll be incremental slippage from here on
out.
The United States of America has long existed in name only. The
subversion is complete. This is a fundamentally different country than
that of the founding. The house has burned down. Gone. Ashes. Thus I
find myself at odds with those like Glenn Beck who are constantly
screaming about putting out the fire. The fire has already done its
work, Glenn. The house is beyond saving. Our task now, as it ever was,
is to attend to our own salvation with fear and trembling.
really real
>
> I agree that in fact the left is far from dead. It's just that because
> their victory has been so complete, and is now so entrenched,
> spectacular leaps and bounds into the abyss are things of the past.
What are you talking about? What did the left win in the last 50 years,
aside from gay rights and getting rid of the draft? I guess
environmentalism has made a somef progress in some areas, and they got
rid of the draft, but basically, we now see union rights slashed,
poverty rates way up, and we can't even tax the rich anymore.
marcus
> Where Have All the Lefties Gone?
I'm right here. What do you want?
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your mask
Augustine
> What are you talking about? What did the left win in the last 50 years,
> aside from gay rights and getting rid of the draft? I guess
> environmentalism has made a somef progress in some areas, and they got
> rid of the draft, but basically, we now see union rights slashed,
> poverty rates way up, and we can't even tax the rich anymore.
Briefly:
Men without chests; wombs without fruit; laboratory babies;
'compassionate' killing; all entertainment, all the time; all sex, all
the time; sexualized children; plugged-in 24/7; screens everywhere;
silence intolerable; indifference to the highest things; debasement of
all things glorious & elevation of all things subterranean; mass
permanent adolescence; mass shamelessness; modesty dismissed as
prudery; humans as technological objects, experimented upon &
described as 'wired' etc.; everybody drugged; bovine self-branded
(tattooed) herds of counterfeit individuals; roses bred without scent;
unhappiness pathologized as 'depression'; religion relativized &
cheapened as mere 'spirituality'; broken families called
'dysfunctional,' not sinful; countless solitaries everywhere; the myth
of progress universally embraced; chronological snobbery at every
turn; delusions of man as perfectible & sufficient unto himself;
plastic faces; plastic souls; human life itself consumerized on the
sacrificial altar of Choice and convenience; Mustapha Mond elected
President....
Friend, the Brave New World is a steamroller; its business is the mass
production of flat souls. Are you conformed to it? You don't care? Be
assured then that you are. For those who still care a bit, do what
must be done to resist the processing. Start simply: turn off the
television. Protest the removal of those kneelers. Embrace silence, or
only the heights of music. Spurn those pitiful gods of neopagan
emptiness: celebrities. Watch. And pray. Or be another dead soul whose
horizon is limited to lawn care, football, the nightly tv lineup,
celebrity gossip....In short, drown in the shallows of the anti-
culture, become so immersed in it that with your last dying gasp you
can only say, like the fish, 'Water? WHAT water?!'
No. No! A thousand times, NO!! Arise!!!
"O age, thou art shamed.* O shame, where is thy blush?**"
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar,* Hamlet**"
Augustine
"Masters of War, for instance, 'is supposed to be a pacifistic song
against war. It's not an anti-war song. It's speaking against what
Eisenhower was calling a military industrial complex as he was making
his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I
picked
it up.'"
From:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2001-09-10-bob-dylan.htm#more
Augustine
RichL
news:prose9-34FFBD....@reserved-multicast-range-not-delegated.example.com...
> Augustine <anon...@aim.com> wrote:
>
>> > What did the left win in the last 50 years,
>> > aside from gay rights and getting rid of the draft?
>>
>>
>> Men without chests; wombs without fruit; laboratory babies;
>> 'compassionate' killing; all entertainment, all the time; all sex, all
>> the time; sexualized children; plugged-in 24/7; screens everywhere;
>> silence intolerable; indifference to the highest things; debasement of
>> all things glorious & elevation of all things subterranean; mass
>> permanent adolescence; mass shamelessness; modesty dismissed as
>> prudery; humans as technological objects, experimented upon &
>> described as 'wired' etc.; everybody drugged; bovine self-branded
>> (tattooed) herds of counterfeit individuals; roses bred without scent;
>> unhappiness pathologized as 'depression'; religion relativized &
>> cheapened as mere 'spirituality'; broken families called
>> 'dysfunctional,' not sinful; countless solitaries everywhere; the myth
>> of progress universally embraced; chronological snobbery at every
>> turn; delusions of man as perfectible & sufficient unto himself;
>> plastic faces; plastic souls; human life itself consumerized on the
>> sacrificial altar of Choice and convenience; Mustapha Mond elected
>> President....
>
> way you can go through that list and claim everything on it is 100%
> "left"-supported and 0% "right"-supported. Some items can't even be
> described as *leaning* left.
At the risk of legitimizing above blather, many items on his laundry list
have nothing to do with politics altogether. It's more an anti-modernity
rant than anything else.
I'll keep my indoor plumbing, thank you very much.
really real
> On Apr 30, 2:30 pm, really real<reallyr...@shaW.CA> wrote:
>
>> What are you talking about? What did the left win in the last 50 years,
>> aside from gay rights and getting rid of the draft? I guess
>> environmentalism has made a somef progress in some areas, and they got
>> rid of the draft, but basically, we now see union rights slashed,
>> poverty rates way up, and we can't even tax the rich anymore.
>
> Briefly:
>
> Men without chests; wombs without fruit; laboratory babies;
> 'compassionate' killing; all entertainment, all the time; all sex, all
> the time; sexualized children; plugged-in 24/7; screens everywhere;
Oh I see. You're a nutcase. There's nothing left wing about technology
And the plot to sexualize children is a right wing plot
> silence intolerable; indifference to the highest things; debasement of
> all things glorious& elevation of all things subterranean; mass
> permanent adolescence; mass shamelessness; modesty dismissed as
> prudery; humans as technological objects, experimented upon&
> described as 'wired' etc.; everybody drugged; bovine self-branded
> (tattooed) herds of counterfeit individuals; roses bred without scent;
> unhappiness pathologized as 'depression'; religion relativized&
> cheapened as mere 'spirituality'; broken families called
> 'dysfunctional,' not sinful; countless solitaries everywhere; the myth
> of progress universally embraced; chronological snobbery at every
> turn; delusions of man as perfectible& sufficient unto himself;
marcus
Yep, and the military industrial complex has had its hooks into us
(after they suffered a Sixties scare) for the past 35 years or so.
It's tentacles welcoming the Corporate Media, Radical Right and
Christian Fundamentalists into its willing and compliant army, going
to war against the poor and the egalitarian Middle Class, spearheaded
by Reagan.
marcus
> marcus <marcus...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Yep, and the military industrial complex has had its hooks into us
> > (after they suffered a Sixties scare) for the past 35 years or so.
> > It's tentacles welcoming the Corporate Media, Radical Right and
> > Christian Fundamentalists into its willing and compliant army, going
> > to war against the poor and the egalitarian Middle Class, spearheaded
> > by Reagan.
>
> buzzword rants to a supercharged version of Marcus need not be confused
> anymore.
Please explain why my statement is incorrect.
marcus
> crudely punched buzzwords. (Not to mention the queer inconsistency of
> using "it's"/"its" correctly AND incorrectly within a single sentence.)
>
> The formidable gravity you attach to the word "corporate" is ever
> hilarious. Eeeeevil. It's eeeeeeevil, I tell ya! Brrrr. Making
> money...BAD! Far out, man.
So, you don't dispute what I said, you just don't like the delivery?
marcus
> crudely punched buzzwords. (Not to mention the queer inconsistency of
> using "it's"/"its" correctly AND incorrectly within a single sentence.)
>
> The formidable gravity you attach to the word "corporate" is ever
> hilarious. Eeeeevil. It's eeeeeeevil, I tell ya! Brrrr. Making
> money...BAD! Far out, man.
So, in other words, you don't dispute what I'm saying, you just don't
like the delivery.
Augustine
> Anyone who wondered why I recently compared Augustine's self-righteous,
> buzzword rants to a supercharged version of Marcus need not be confused
> anymore.
You, of all people, castigating another for self-righteousness is just
too funny. Thanks for the laugh!
marcus
>
> No, that is not what I said in other words at all. I don't think all
> corporations and/or corporate media are inherently evil, and I don't
> paranoidly attach all blame for this and that problem to these
> theoretical mass groups you sweatily fixate upon.
Theoretical? Good God, Man, look beyond your L.A. haze, and see the
rest of the world around you.
So, are you saying there is no Radical Right element in this country
which has grown to significant levels within and without the
Republican party since Ronald Reagan took office?
So, are you saying Ronald Reagan didn't begin the consolidation of
wealth at the top, and orchestrate the year-by-year blows against the
American middle class which resulted in the Depression we have found
ourselves in since September 2008?
So, Christian Fundamentalists haven't been successful in banning
books, killing abortion-providing doctors, and vetting Republican
candidates for office?
So, major multi-national corporations, who before the 1970s didn't own
the major TV networks, magazines, and newspapers, have no input or
influence on what many Americans hear and see as their daily news?
Are, you deliberately being obtuse?
Are you so aloof from the day-to-day events of the world around you ,
that you have no knowledge of what has happened to America since the
Sixties?
Or are you just plain fucking stupid?
rwalker
wrote:
He is a bundle of laughs, isn't he?
rwalker
wrote:
>Or are you just plain fucking stupid?
Bull's eye!
Dr_dudley
thanks for your input, and for not allowing it to devolve into nanny-
nanny-poopoo-ism.
Here's an example of why i prefer to think of bob as a Progressive
rather than a Reactionary, even tho' that's not what i really think.
LIVE AID BOB DYLAN Feat KEITH RICHARDS & RON WOOD WHEN THE SHIP COMES
IN.mp4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI1NN-ANUDs
Here's where all the flowers have gone:
Marlene Dietrich - Sag mir wo die Blumen sind 1963
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TYJUsHVyjc
Now i know you haven't been hear lately, and those who have will go "o
no here he goes again", but illustratively to your point where have
all the lefties gone?:and which might clarify your query.
Understand, i don't know much but i do know that in order for an
aircraft to fly it needs a leftwing and a rightwing and a fuselage, as
well as a nose and a tail.
Additionally it needs, aerodynamically, thrust, drag, gravity, and
lift.
I might well be wrong on that, and those more knowledgeable might
correct me on it. Here we go.
Arlo Guthrie/I Can't Help Falling In Love With You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF89swJ9IU
a song i sing regularly to my darlingest luvr grandbaby grrrl Aubrey.
Like a river flows surely to the sea,
dudley
+++
Bob Dylan - Too Much Of Nothing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koA-8I3SMa8
Peter Paul and Mary, Too Much of Nothing, 2nd Video Version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpZt9cfLKg
Peter Paul & Mary (& Friends) - Day Is Done
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U9bKhXyNGg
it's all been done before
it's all been written in the book
Alfred Karnes - I am Bound for the Promised Land
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GogiVjoc3s
Doc Watson - 1991 - Don't Let Your Deal Go Down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbhhW54PItM
Augustine
> Augustine <anonc...@aim.com> wrote:
> My attackers always love to overlook just how many of my arguments are
> based on me endorsing open-mindedness and acceptance over an opponent's
> presumptuous, bombastic negativity.
>
> Who's scorning the majority of the world and its culture here...you or
> me?
A self-righteous response to a charge of self-righteousness.
Wonderful!
Augustine
>abortion-providing doctors
Sir, they're to be called "surgical hitmen." Alternatively, "surgical
terrorists" will do. They're unworthy to be called doctors.
Moreover, they don't "perform" or "provide" abortions. They COMMIT or
PERPETRATE them.
And, to fully sweep away every trace of the Orwellian varnish, it's
best not to speak of them committing abortions, but crushing the
skulls and sucking out the brains of their victims.
Thus:
"She hired a surgical hitman to crush the skull and suck out the
brains of her pre-born infant."
Moreover, keep in mind that those who hire surgical hitmen are co-
conspirators, not victims. The pro-life movement has been quite wrong
in characterizing them as victims. Both surgical hitmen and those who
contract with them need to be brought to justice.
I've made this for you:
http://www.zazzle.com/abortionist_surgical_hitman_bumper_sticker-128344058264308440
See my other items there as well. You'll love them all.
Augustine
> Dear Augustine,
>
> thanks for your input, and for not allowing it to devolve into nanny-
> nanny-poopoo-ism.
>
> Here's an example of why i prefer to think of bob as a Progressive
> rather than a Reactionary, even tho' that's not what i really think.
>
> LIVE AID BOB DYLAN Feat KEITH RICHARDS & RON WOOD WHEN THE SHIP COMES
>
> Here's where all the flowers have gone:
>
> Now i know you haven't been hear lately, and those who have will go "o
> no here he goes again", but illustratively to your point where have
> all the lefties gone?:and which might clarify your query.
>
> Understand, i don't know much but i do know that in order for an
> aircraft to fly it needs a leftwing and a rightwing and a fuselage, as
> well as a nose and a tail.
>
> Additionally it needs, aerodynamically, thrust, drag, gravity, and
> lift.
>
> I might well be wrong on that, and those more knowledgeable might
> correct me on it. Here we go.
>
>
> a song i sing regularly to my darlingest luvr grandbaby grrrl Aubrey.
>
> Like a river flows surely to the sea,
> dudley
> +++
>
> Peter Paul and Mary, Too Much of Nothing, 2nd Video Versionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpZt9cfLKg
>
> Peter Paul & Mary (& Friends) - Day Is Donehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U9bKhXyNGg
>
> it's all been done before
> it's all been written in the book
>
Thanks for the input. I'll look into these things.
Augustine
>
> See my other items there as well. You'll love them all.
Oh, I almost forgot. See my page here as well:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/RS7C62N1V3D96/ref=cm_pdp_sylt_title_2
Jolene
> Dear Augustine,
>
> thanks for your input, and for not allowing it to devolve into nanny-
> nanny-poopoo-ism.
>
> Here's an example of why i prefer to think of bob as a Progressive
> rather than a Reactionary, even tho' that's not what i really think.
>
> LIVE AID BOB DYLAN Feat KEITH RICHARDS & RON WOOD WHEN THE SHIP COMES
>
> Here's where all the flowers have gone:
>
> Now i know you haven't been hear lately, and those who have will go "o
> no here he goes again", but illustratively to your point where have
> all the lefties gone?:and which might clarify your query.
>
> Understand, i don't know much but i do know that in order for an
> aircraft to fly it needs a leftwing and a rightwing and a fuselage, as
> well as a nose and a tail.
>
> Additionally it needs, aerodynamically, thrust, drag, gravity, and
> lift.
>
> I might well be wrong on that, and those more knowledgeable might
> correct me on it. Here we go.
>
>
> a song i sing regularly to my darlingest luvr grandbaby grrrl Aubrey.
>
> Like a river flows surely to the sea,
> dudley
> +++
>
> Peter Paul and Mary, Too Much of Nothing, 2nd Video Versionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpZt9cfLKg
>
> Peter Paul & Mary (& Friends) - Day Is Donehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U9bKhXyNGg
>
> it's all been done before
> it's all been written in the book
>
Thursday morning, and this morning, I said to Bob, "Good morning Poo
Poo!!" (and laughed, and asked him how I could say that and retain
even an ounce of dignity)
marcus
> and screaming at passing cars.
>
> Your ranting fanaticism is just sad. And you sleazily debate with dopey,
> straw-man arguments.
>
> "Corporate media is all evil!"
>
> "That's a simplistic overgeneralization."
>
> "So what, you're claiming corporations have zero impact on news
> coverage?"
>
> Pure chicanery.
>
> You're unraveling yet again.
My views are shared by millions, even moderate Democrats, and yet you
portray me as some kind of iconoclast.
It's very telling that you evade a direct response to the questions I
asked you.
Perhaps, you are out of your league and range of intelligence when
discussing politics, but when you accuse someone of being a guy on the
corner proclaiming the end is near, when in reality I have sound
observations of what has happened to Americans over the past few
decades, you better have a more substantial counterpoint(s).
marcus
> rwalker <rwal...@despammed.com> wrote:
> > >> Anyone who wondered why I recently compared Augustine's self-righteous,
> > >> buzzword rants to a supercharged version of Marcus need not be confused
> > >> anymore.
>
> > >You, of all people, castigating another for self-righteousness is just
> > >too funny. Thanks for the laugh!
>
> > He is a bundle of laughs, isn't he?
>
> a point I've made? Or has he done nothing but just burp into threads to
> drop some surly character shot that takes no stand whatsoever on the
> current issue? Does he even post in RMD for any reason beyond aiming
> contentless shots at me?
>
> It would be funny if somehow he could be forced to express support for
> the points I've been disputing. His head might explode.
Your "it's all about me" illusion is very evident to see here.
marcus
> of the species. Because you're a black-and-white thinker, with no
> concept of the gray. Because you believe that if someone says "the
> corporate media has some influence over news content," he's agreeing
> with you that the "corporate media" is something worth eternally
> seething about.
>
My views are not that extreme. Millions of people, have come to the
same conclusion as me. They have witnessed the buying up of the major
news outlets, and seen the censorship and self-censorship that goes
into US news coverage. Haven't you ever read Ben Bagdikian, or
visited Media Matters? Have you ever listened or watched Thom
Hartman? Have you ever watched, listened, or read Amy Goodman. For
God' s sake, have you ever opened up a copy of " A Peoples History of
the United States" by the late Howard Zinn?
>
> >
> > Perhaps, you are out of your league and range of intelligence when
> > discussing politics, but when you accuse someone of being a guy on the
> > corner proclaiming the end is near, when in reality I have sound
> > observations of what has happened to Americans over the past few
> > decades, you better have a more substantial counterpoint(s).
>
> ridiculously simplistic and slanted. All your proclamations are written
> in biiiig generalizations, about how all of these people think this way.
> And all of *these* people think *this* way. These people are good. These
> people are bad. Worthless bigotry. And your "questions" were straw men,
> so they was no need to answer them. I don't think you're even bright
> enough to realize they were straw men.
My viewpoints are not simplistic or ridiculous...they are shared by
many, and given the current economic times, more people are beginning
to realize the truth about how our lives have been played with by 1%
of the population that controls most of the wealth, how they pay no
taxes, and have our congress in their back pockets.
>
> And yes, bodies such as "Radical Right" and "Christian Fundamentalists"
> are theoretical groups. There are no set definitions for the group's
> membership...no universally agreed criterion for identifying someone in
> or out of those groups. No firm dividing line. They are constructs used
> by pontificating gasbags like yourself. It's also misleading to talk of
> these people as if all of them work in conspiring cahoots with each
> other, comparing notes and blueprints, but of course that's your rampant
> paranoia in play again.
Maybe in that walnut-sized comprehension of yours, there is no
"Radical Right" or "Christian Fundamentalists", but in the real world
there are...Birthers, Tea party members, violent anti-abortionists,
white Christian militias, all sponsored by the Corporatists, who
really don't give a damn about the aforementioned groups, but like how
they soe disharmony among the masses.
>
> Because unlike you, I debate fairly, I readily concede that you appear
> to have more nitty-gritty knowledge about politics than I do. But all
> the same, I can recognize a fanatical charlatan taking all sorts of lazy
> shortcuts to reach the self-serving conclusions he craves. You don't
> play fair. You stack the deck.
You don't debate fairly because everything is a debate to you, instead
of an exchange of ideas and viewpoints. Your whole life is based on
scoring points. One can imagine you reading Robert's Rules of Order
into the wee hours of the morning.
>
>Are "people who live in
> the metropolitan L.A. area" just one more enormous group whom you
> pompously consider your inferiors?
No, but you do...as you do with everyone else.
marcus
To help you come up to speed with milliions of others, so you can
achieve the same "nitty-gritty" knowledge I possess, I've assembled
some websites that you will find helpful.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html
http://www.howardzinn.org/zinn/
Your mentor,
Marcus
marcus
How convenient of you to ignore the references I posted.
>
> Maybe this would be a good place to remind everyone that you're in this
> newsgroup because you love Bob Dylan so much. Don't worry...it's only
> the Internet. No one will be able to see if you have a straight face or
> not.
I do love Bob Dylan...he is a national treasure...I hope he can write
and perform for many years to come.
rwalker
wrote:
>>
>> It would be funny if somehow he could be forced to express support for
>> the points I've been disputing. His head might explode.
>
>Your "it's all about me" illusion is very evident to see here.
His air of superiority is hilarious. I always wonder what it's rooted
in, because all I've ever seen him do is spit bile.
marcus
> On Sun, 1 May 2011 06:58:31 -0700 (PDT), marcus <marcus...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >> It would be funny if somehow he could be forced to express support for
> >> the points I've been disputing. His head might explode.
>
> >Your "it's all about me" illusion is very evident to see here.
>
> His air of superiority is hilarious. I always wonder what it's rooted
> in, because all I've ever seen him do is spit bile.
Most people with superiority complexes are masking insecurities. They
have to keep thinking they are better, or smarter than others to keep
the insecurities from taking over.
marcus
> marcus <marcus...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > His air of superiority is hilarious. I always wonder what it's rooted
> > > in, because all I've ever seen him do is spit bile.
>
> > Most people with superiority complexes are masking insecurities. They
> > have to keep thinking they are better, or smarter than others to keep
> > the insecurities from taking over.
>
>
> Now, hypocrite, tell us more about how you're so superior to enormous
> groups such as "Christian Fundamentalists," "Corporatists," "the Radical
> Right," everyone who shrugs off '60s songs used in commercials, etc.
I am not superior to any other human being, and no one is superior to
me.
However, my beliefs and concerns about the overall health, welfare,
and well being of the Earth and all of its inhabitants does not
contain the mean-spiritedness, deceit, and greed that marks their
credo and philosophy.
marcus
> marcus <marcus...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I am not superior to any other human being, and no one is superior to
> > me.
>
> brainwashed sheep who have been spoonfed this or that myth, etc. etc.,
> you are rating them inferior to yourself. Deal with it.
Your mistrust of my intentions, even when I lay them out clearly,
borders on paranoia.
You are confusing supposed "superiority" on my part with my
determination to not get fooled again,