Big Joe Blues

I included Pete Seeger in my list of Ten Worst Americans almost twenty years ago, when I was still picking up this blogging thing.  I acknowledge that this seems unlikely and is likely colored by my worship of the man when I was a teenager. The disillusioned have a special hatred, perhaps.

But not Seeger, I guess.  Even while denouncing Stalin in 2007 by writing "Big Joe Blues" he was rather tepid about it, concluding that though he claimed he was bringing us to a new tomorrow, he ended up bringing us back to the same old place.  Sure, which of us hasn't killed millions of people, after all.  The problem was that Stalin was a disappointment. Michael Moynihan at Reason magazine does the takedown well, noting that even while apologising, Pete Seeger had to kick Christians and Americans and everyone else.

I can't find record of it ever being recorded. You can read the lyrics and read about it, but it seems that few people (if any) ever heard the song. If someone links to it being sung - by anyone - I'd be grateful. 

The Wikipedia article on Pete is a classic whitewash. The uncomfortable bits are included, so that everyone can pretend there's no censorship going on here.  But they are excused with mild words and swept into the corner, in order to get back to the real business of assuming the worst about his enemies and apologising for tyrants.

As I head out for my reunion, which will include daily music reminiscent of the time, I felt I should include where my musical head was at as I left on a bus for college, 12-string by my side. Yes, I had other luggage, but it got sent to Nashville by mistake, switched in DC, and I wore the same clothes for 3 days of August orientation in coastal Virginia. An inauspicious beginning, perhaps.

 

Pete Seeger, 60 Years Later

I stand in amazement and admiration. Pete Seeger has publicly repented of his support of Stalin and even written a talkin' blues song about it.

Seeger was my hero when I was a young leftie, but I became disillusioned enough to include him on my list of Ten Worst Americans a year or so ago. Guess I'll have to rethink that.

The Ten Worst Americans -- Okay, Six So Far

The actual Worst Americans are people few of us will ever know, serial killers and torturers who seem barely recognizable as human beings. But their evils are nearly always limited by their own lack of power and influence. I choose my list from those whose actions had the worst effects, regardless of intent. Comparing baseness of motive is a fruitless task. Comparing results is relatively straightforward. Identifying the cruelest slaveowner might be interesting, but that person did not produce as much catastrophic effect as

Eli Whitney – the man who perpetuated slavery. Slavery was disintegrating as an institution because it was not economically viable when Whitney’s cotton gin gave it new life. Contrast the well-meaning Eli with the irascible Henry Ford, a miserable SOB who couldn’t give a rat’s posterior about black people, but made the elevation of the lower classes possible with his process improvements. In this era of Ray Kurzweil’s insisting that advances in technology will liberate us all, it pays to remember that even clever things can have dire consequences.

Al Capone – there have been many worse criminals in American history, but Capone’s organizational skills and ruthlessness established a model that others could, and did imitate. Would another Capone have arisen to carve out a place for organised crime in America? Probably, but likely with less effect. Ethnic gangs had been long known in American cities, but the wholesale import of Old-World corruption turned out to be a weed we still can’t eradicate.

Pete Seeger -- Seeger did not much influence popular culture directly, but he was an enormous influence on Leftiedom from WWII on. He was always willing to lie for The Cause, because the true stories weren’t such good illustrations. (See, for example Waist Deep In The Big Muddy, Walkin’ Down Death Row, and I Mind My Own Business.) Seeger’s self-righteousness and genial sneers trained an entire generation of lefties in what was proper to think and what a fascist or moronic rube you were if you disagreed.

Alger Hiss – with nods to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Henry Wallace. With all the spite one can still generate bringing up McCarthy, Nixon, HUAC, etc, it pays to remember that there actually were traitors in our government. That they saw themselves as gentle One-Worlders does not remove the fact that they lent active support and credibility to the social system which killed 200,000,000 in the 20^th C. None of them had illusions about how communists were operating worldwide, but they ignored that for the sake of a dream they wished to impose on the rest of us.

Lee Harvey Oswald – Political assassination had gone out of the American repertoire for decades until Oswald returned us to the age of anarchists with the assassination of Kennedy. This set off a string of further shootings and attempted shootings of political figures, including another Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

William March Tweed – Tammany Hall controlled the Democratic Party in New York City, and was the 800-lb gorilla of American politics for 70 years. Attempts have been made to minimize how damging this was and to paint it as a moderating influence on what could have been a more unstable situation. This is ridiculous. Corruption may be a common way station between servitude and freedom, but it is not the only way station nor a particularly good one. Boss Tweed was the sand in the gears of economic growth for decades, keeping immigrants in enslaving poverty.

The Greatest American? I’m giving the early lead to George Washington Carver. The man invented peanut butter. What tops that?

Odd Excuses

I was in a few comment threads on the occasion of Pete Seeger’s death.  Those have dwindled into pointless repetition – some of it mine – so I am turning the page on that in specific.  However, a particular argument kept coming up that I had forgotten about.

Seeger, and Baez, and the whole Folk Song Army didn’t criticise the USSR and China because there would be no point in that.  They couldn’t affect that.  They focussed on the evils in America because that was where they could make a difference.

My soul screams “Liar!” but let me calm down and try to refute that more dispassionately.

I was in the Folk Song Army, singing at coffeehouses and small wannabee festivals, listening to the records and hanging out with the other folkies.  At no time did anyone say “Gosh darn it, I wish we could bring some of this protest and scorn to Czechoslovakia or North Vietnam and try and change their minds! But we’re stuck here trying to improve this pretty good place. I wouldn’t mind the danger or anything of leading a chorus of ‘We Shall Overcome” outside the Lubyanka, but what good would it do?  They wouldn’t listen.”  I know this is hard to believe, but it's true.  No one ever said that, or even hinted it, wink-wink.

No, the tone then was moral equivalence at best. Any criticism of Russia as a police state would be greeted with assurances that we did the same thing right here in America.  Any noting of military agression from the Soviet or PRC side would unleash a torrent of examples of how the US was arming right-wing strongmen in Countries A, B, & C.  And then, of course, the subject would have successfully been changed, so that the minuses of tolerating a Marcos or a Pinochet would occupy 100% of the field, and all discussion of whether Mao or Breshnev should be shipping AK-47’s to Allende or Ho would be conveniently off the table.  Because that’s equivalence.  I will note, not for the first time, that the American excuse for arming bad guys against rebels was that we were only responding to the Soviets assisting worse guys there.  The USSR said they were only there because we were.  In 1970, if you squinted really hard, you could call that mutual finger-pointing unresolvable, I suppose.  However, we have new data since then.  The Iron Curtain collapsed and stopped sending money to the Shining Paths of the world.  Since then, the US has not been particularly involved in the revolutions and counter-revolutions of those places, and they have had whatever good or bad governments they want. Plus, we have lots of inside KGB info that was unavailable before, which substantiates who the aggressors were all along.  The Russians certainly felt that they were only responding, and didn’t see themselves as the instigators, but we now know they were frigging paranoid.  So you can stop squinting – it was never equivalent after all.

There is a new, improved version of this which asks “Well, is that our standard, just to be better than Russia?  Can’t we aspire to be something more than that?”  Well of course.  Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Like, at Woodstock or something.

At the next level down, was it even true that no good could be done?  A gentleman on the board over at The Nation keeps repeating that until Gorbachev, the noble Mikhail, declined to invade breakaway countries from the USSR, no protest would have had the least effect.  (I had also forgotten how much leftists needed to give Gorbachev all the credit. Talk to some actual Eastern Europeans about that, please.) How this squares with the other progressive (Gandhian/MLK) Civil Disobedience strategy being adequate to all circumstances he doesn’t say.  I can help him out there.  Peaceful appeals to morality sometimes work on people who already have morals. But the folkie claim was never that the communist countries were immoral (except when they just had to because we had driven them to it) and thus beyond the appeal of reason, but that we in the West were; particularly the Anglosphere.  I mean, they went nuts when Reagan called the USSR the Evil Empire. The modern revision is that Reagan was unwise because such things dangerously escalated tensions.  Yes, that was said at the time; but far more energy was put into the complaint that this black-and-white  characterisation* of the struggle was stupid and a cause of the problem.Damn conservatives only made it worse.  No one, apparently, ever made it worse on the communist side, until Gorbachev finally made it better.

Yet outside of any left-right, Whig-Tory, orange-green divide, it can never be true that a nation is unaffectable in one moment and collapses in the next.  It may look that way in the moment, as we become surprised by the unexpected vulnerability of Orthanc.  Regimes can be hard but brittle. Notice, if a regime was brittle in 1482 it was most likely brittle in 1481, 1480, and quite far back.  The Soviet Union did not suddenly become vulnerable in 1989.  We just didn't know it was vulnerable.

Solzhenitsyn,  the Samizdata movement, the PlasticPeople, Vaclav Havel (see his The Power of the Powerless ) and thousands of others all believed that some good might come of their protests.  The very fact that protest and criticism were put down so quickly suggests that the secret police and other authorities shared their view.  Those seemed to live in perpetual fear that it could all go up in flames if a spark hit dry tinder at the right moment.  Of course.  That is in fact how those governments came to power.  They were proved right at the end as well, with the Ceaucescus of the world speaking before wildly cheering crowds one month and executed the next.

Pete Seeger went to Russia in 1968. He acknowledged in retrospect that he should have asked about the Gulag. One cheer for that.  Notice it does suggest that he himself thought such a question might have done some good – which some of his defenders don’t acknowledge even now. The difference is not how much effect one can have? but how safe is it, and how much fun is it?  I don’t fault him particularly for not speaking out if he had come back and said “Are you kidding?  I didn’t dare.” It would raise questions about why you bothered to go in the first place, but reasons for that could vary.  As to the fun, well it just is.  It’s a hoot to feel persecuted without having any actual danger. 

One level deeper still. Even if our protest is pointless, do we still have an obligation to protest, even at a cost?  That gets trickier, I think.  We do not know ever absolutely know that there is no chance of change.  There’s that.  Also we admire the courage of those who do speak out, if only to provide a record that someone objected, though they are themselves destroyed. May I point out that if one takes the view that declining a pointless protest is morally defensible, then that courtesy should be extended to those who didn’t speak out against the Holocaust, or against slavery or civil rights abuses when those presented? 

Still, a case could be made that we have no moral obligation to protest when there is no possible hope.  I grant that.  I just don’t think it applies here.

A case can also be made that we each have our assigned place and duties in the world, and an American might legitimately say “It is irrelevant to me what evils they do in other countries.  I live here, I have some responsibility for the place, and my energies will be devoted to improving my little corner.”  I think this is not only permissable, but wise and elevated.  I think this is the real moral principle that was (and still is) being used as a screen; a truth twisted ninety degrees. I believe I can fully enter into this line of thought.

Yet when I am in that line of thought, it seems distasteful and inappropriate to me to operate by sneer and by parody.  One doesn’t sing “Little Boxes” in such a mood, nor “Talkin’ Ben Tre.” Most of Seeger’s songs don’t fall into that category, but that was the genre.  In fact, it was a technique recommended by CPUSA, to take old hymns and folksongs, redo the words and repurpose them for revolutionary aims. It gives the listener a sense of comfort, softening him up for unfamiliar ideas.

*Reagan did believe they were evil, but not that we were all good.  He stressed that it was not so important that we claim God is on our side, but that we be on His.  He spoke often of where America had fallen short of her own ideals. That is an important humility.

Better Folk Songs

I asked Alexa to play "Wild Mountain Thyme," and she chose a version by the Chieftains, an Irish group. She went on to play "similar" music, and she is told to do. The next six songs were all Irish folk songs, not Scottish. If you ask for Scottish music, you get bagpipes, mostly marches. It is curious now that the Scots and the Irish play up their cultural similarity now - except in Northern Ireland. 

Scottish folk music has some rebellious tunes, about being oppressed by the English and fighting them. But the Irish simply have many more, in and amongst the songs about "The girl I left behind" and "Isn't Ireland a beautiful place." The Irish also have songs about being oppressed by the Scots and fighting them, right there at home. Such songs appeal to leftists, such as the Foggy Foggy Dew. Whether they are fighting the English or the Scots-Irish is conveniently flexible. 

The Irish have lots of these songs and get much more sympathy worldwide than the Northern Ireland Protestants.  

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.  

GK Chesterton "The Ballad of the White Horse"

If the Batistas had great songs in Cuba, they never made it to the US.  Pete Seeger and other folkies picked up Guantanamera and made it a Castro song masquerading as a peace song.

Seeger was especially good at transforming folk songs into political statements. All parties in Europe tried to do that, but the communists tended to be better at it, and in the Anglosphere it was no contest. I link to Tom Lehrer's Folk Song Army from time to time, which makes fun of the shallow but noisy support for peace and justice, but the left just had better political songs throughout the 60s, and more of them. Draft Sighing for peace is a good, reliable gig. 

English miners had Blackleg Miner, The Bells of Rhymney, and a dozen other songs. Mine owners don't write songs, I guess. Where would they play them?  At the local pub?

 

Little Folkies

Originally published September 2007 and is one of my Top 20 visited of all time. It is actually two posts in one - my original takedown of the song and its singers, and then a contentious comment section. I got nasty in response to being attacked.  Perhaps that is entertaining even now.

********

Tom Lehrer called "Little Boxes" the most sanctimonious song ever written. I hadn't stated it so bluntly, but the sentiment has been in my mind for some time. The lyrics deplore the sameness of 1962 suburbanites and their houses, which "are all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." It is supposedly Levittown that inspired Malvina Reynolds to write the song. Many others have recorded it, but Pete Seeger's version is the best-known.

I thought it was snide, and perhaps a bit unfair, when I first heard it years ago. But it was snide and unfair to the right people so I really didn't mind too much. Offending bourgeois sensibilities was what being a folkie was all about. Looking down on such people was what reminded us how superior we were.

I am uncertain what prompted my slow reverse on the song; perhaps becoming a homeowner myself had something to do with it. But long before I left liberalism I had decided that this song revealed a rather poisonous attitude of contempt. Maybe all these suburbanites weren't all fascinating and eccentric people, I reasoned, but they were decent working folk, bringing up families and enduring the difficulties that life brings. What was Reynold's beef with people who wanted to own homes? Many were likely children of immigrants who had never owned property in America. A modest house on a little plot, with a bit of garden and some shrubbery - what on earth is the problem here?

I eventually decided that the reverse was true. People in Levittown gradually added dormers and carports, porches and fences, and made the little boxes individual. Homes. The Malvina Reynolds of the world, however, changed not at all, and spent their time in mutual self-congratulation with other folkies. Reynolds was a PhD in English from Berkeley, and a communist organizer left over from the 30's. Just regular folk, y'know? Friend of the working man, and all that. Seeger, product of a fashionable Connecticut boys school and journalism major at Harvard, is drawn from the same pool: Arts & Humanities Tribe, with contempt for the Business Tribe, and Science & Technology Tribe. Hoping that they were burgeoning communists if they could just be made to see the light, folkies were good to the Union tribe, at least up until the 70's.

That's all we folkies ever were: A&H snobs who really believed that bad poets were worth more than good homebuilders - though we said the opposite.

The song "Little Boxes" has lingered in the back of my mind, hated but hummed, these forty years. Perhaps I can exorcise it with this parody.

Little folkies on the hillside, little folkies made of ticky tacky
Little folkies, little folkies, little folkies, all the same
There’s a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one
And they’re all made out ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

All the people who are folkies all know how to say “diversity”
But they all think in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there’s artists, and there’s journalists and there’s teachers of social sciences
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

They believe the TV newscast and the newspaper editorials
But they never believe conservatives so they can’t be "taken in."
Now they don’t all wear gray ponytails and they don’t all wear Birkenstocks
But they do wear them on the inside in the boxes in their brains

And the houses look like summer camp and they all buy organically
And they don’t have any children, except okay, maybe one.
There’s a Green one and a Pink one, an old Red one and a Rainbow one,
But they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

Patriotism

My relationship with the concept has been uneven over the years.  As preteen, I had the same reflexive belief that everyone does that Our People were the Best People, and at the time that meant our nation was the best nation with the best history with the bravest soldiers and the smartest thinkers and the prettisest girls and the best tomatoes and, and  just everything. I always find it annoying that people who want America to act differently, both conservative and liberal, rail against children being taught that we are good, or almost good enough if only or whatever. We were and are taught those things, but this is mostly because it is all we can hear.  We would believe this whatever we were taught in school.  Children believe we are on the Good Team, even the Best Team Ever, and it is usually only the schools and textbooks even in the early grades that cast the slightest doubt on that at all, that we did some things wrong in the past (But we're better now!  We've learned!).

Blaming the teaching of patriotism is just virtue signalling, because we would have believed such things anyway and would hear nothing other.  My sons from Romania, born before the Revolution - and even ten years after - believed that Romanians were the best in many things, even though they were a small and oppressed nation. Their teachers believed that Romanian education was superior to American.  I did not contradict them, but I sat in a couple of classes, and we observed later that our son in sixth grade did not know his tables of three. He picked up enough math under our tutelage (mostly my wife's) that summer to survive seventh grade, and eventually finished HS at slightly below-average level.

Yet I digress, as I often do. But you take the point, that we all have a natural tendency to think our own people's ways the best.

Somewhere around seventh grade, whether by seeking coolness, or natural contrariness, deciding that aggressively seeking other viewpoints, or the virtue signalling of trying to be more Christian than the average bear, I became something of an anti-patriot, considering it a low form of morality and myself easily above that.  My eighth-grade teacher wisely assigned me The Man Without a Country, which was heavy handed and not great literature, but made its point clearly. Then I listened to Pete Seeger claiming that he and his Folk Song Army were the real patriots, quoting his supposed relative Alan Seeger who wrote "I Have an Rendezvous With Death," which Pete co-opted for his own purposes.* Ah, that's the ticket!  I'm the real patriot here, you bastards. It has been used very effectively by many, including, most irritatingly to my eyes, Barack Obama lauding America for what it could be and its (unfortunately failed) aspirations, which were an entirely an echo of the Democratic National Committee. I have a brother who thinks this way still. 

Still, I did see that there were those who were reflexively supportive of American behavior and deeply committed to America First. I would argue with them online, suggesting that if just maybe, in a hundred years or so**, America was not really American anymore, couldn't you see where your patriotism should no longer be granted...? So Pat Buchanan was deeply supportive of economic protectionism because "who cares if it hurts the economy overall, these are fellow Americans," and "immigration hurts low-skilled blacks, who we have a greater obligation to" but was also deeply opposed to American foreign wars and consider America an increasing force for evil in the world, focused on empire, not nationhood.  Was he a patriot?  The question started to become increasingly interesting. 

So what if a major political figure wants America to dominate, but the sort of domination they want strikes us as ambiguous, or even not in accord with what we consider to be core American principles? Patriot or No? Who, in fact, of our current major figures does not fit that picture? Once in power, they so quickly confuse their own interests with American interests. To oppose them is to be unAmerican, so they therefore have the right to do unAmerican things to preserve their power.

I wrote a rather acerbic review of the book True Patriot many years ago. I liked rereading it, and I miss Terri. It expresses this in more detail, with more gripping writing. Sigh. I wonder if I have merely reverted to my grammar school self.  I root for Americans at the Olympics (dammit!), I think our country more beautiful, despite its many ugly places.  Our foods are tastier, our women are prettier, our core character, when the chips are down, is just better. Right? Two of my sons went into our armed services, and I thought them noble. Yet one of those has lived in Norway for thirteen years, and one could fairly say he is both the least and most patriotic of the five. If you draw him out, he is irritated at both the governments and the national character of Romanians, Norwegians, and Americans. 

What does it even mean now?  Release the hounds, as Tigerhawk over a decade ago.

* This was a communist training tactic, to use songs, poems, and images that people already loved and change them to The Cause.  "We Will Overcome" was a hymn based on Galatians 6:9 that became s union song, then a civil rights one, "We Shall Overcome."

**A hundred years. Heh. Well, that was quick, wa'n't it?

Using the Term "Fascism"

 Fascism Can't Mean Both a Specific Ideology and a Legitimate Target By Scott Alexander at ACX. We must not forbid the term, for it has a meaning and a use.  Yet it is now reduced to a vague meaning and Americans are increasingly saying it is alright to silence them, to do violence against them, and even kill them. When a target becomes more general, and violence against it more acceptable, we will see an increase in violence.

Dr. Alexander is even-handed as usual.  He is a liberal but criticising the left more strongly on this one.  He does not let people on the right off the hook and gives examples of where they have done the same. But in the end he concludes that we have reached a danger point and it is getting worse.

Still, as an entirely supererogatory matter, I personally won’t be using this word (fascist) when I can avoid it. 

Update:  Based on the comments, I am adding this video. It is best known as a union song that Pete Seeger sang, but it quickly broadened.  As Seeger was a communist, that was quite possibly his intention.  Plausible deniability was a specialty of his Oh, we're just trying to organise a union here, and they call us communists...We're only here because we're against the Vietnam War and they call us communists...We only want to clean up the environment and they call us communists.  A lot of those present each time were indeed there for only that one thing. But the stark message was still the same: you were good or you were evil, and you either joined in with the singing and you didn't. 

This is ten years old, and in 2025 many are now willing to criticise Obama for not being communist enough.  Others believe that but will keep it under wraps, knowing he is still idolised by many on the left, especially among the older people who are sometimes the only ones you can count on to show up for protests. But the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. I am a dinosaur with no influence, but at least I know it. My gentle liberal friends on FB haven't yet figured out that they are speaking only to each other, unfriending a few more each year, used only as decoration in the revolution.

For all that, I don't the revolution has a snowball's chance of succeeding. I just worry about a lot of pain before it settles down. If ever.

 

Ladies' Auxiliary

I heard the song over forty years ago, covered by Pete Seeger, who included discussion that the women had complained to Woody that he always sang about the union, but never the Ladies' Auxiliary. So he wrote this. People chuckled over it, but it always rubbed me the wrong way. He's making fun of them specifically - and not especially good-naturedly - and of women in general for other reasons. Maybe you get a pass when you're a folk icon or something. But it's just mean

Pete Seeger – Little Boxes
2. Discussion
Part IV - Social Pressure
The technique of using social pressure to keep each other in line leaks out into the foreign policy idea that we can shame other nations into doing the right thing by appealing to their better natures. If it doesn’t work, it’s only because we didn’t give it enough chance. Sometimes we must speak a little sternly, but if we could only inspire those other people enough – if we could only get them to see – if they would only dare – then they would begin to negotiate with us. Check out these key sections of Obama’s Cairo speech – they are hard to beat for vacuity. This issue has been a source of tension between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question now is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build.
I recognize it will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve. There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point. This is not simply about America’s interests. It’s about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.

Pete Seeger – Banks of Marble

3. If you have ever worked hard (or smart) for something and achieved what others did not, you will wonder why you ever doubted that effort and skill were dominant, nor why anyone else doubts that. On the other hand, if you meet a person who has had a disadvantage not of their own making – an illness or accident, a troubling background, belonging to a less-favored group – you will wonder why you ever thought effort and skill are all-conquering. Both things are true, and there is no getting around it. Part V - A Thought Experiment Yet most people will be happier in the long run if they believe the former. We fear that some will be damaged by the idea, coming to despair in the end – but the human power of rationalization is usually much stronger than that. For those who believe in their own agency, despair is temporary.

On the other hand, such an attitude can lead us to look down on others. It is good to think “There but for the grace of God go I.” How then does a society structure itself so that it teaches everyone that their effort is everything, but nothing? We have the Calvinist Arminian split cut along different lines here. (For those not up on that, the Calvinists paradoxically worked harder than anyone else in order to reassure themselves that they were one of the elect, who didn’t need to work for their salvation. The Arminians believed their effort of conversion was key to salvation, but once that was done, a lot of them tended to fall into disrepair and not make so much effort.). Paul’s words in his first letter to the Corinthians is likely the closest we can come to expressing both halves of this paradox.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not
without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 1 Cor 15:10

I’m not sure that any society has ever got that contradiction resolved, though America has perhaps done best at it. The school where I have learned this best has been family relationships. Being a husband; a son and stepson; natural father and adoptive father; brother, uncle, grandchild, in-law. When you have divorce, estrangement from parents, childlessness, distance, you are greatly hampered in learning how this contradiction plays out in real life – how someone can work like a dog for wealth but give self and treasure away humbly.

Single mothers and couples without children vote overwhelmingly Democratic. I don’t know how closely that stacks up with the Democrat subcategory of Liberal, but I’m guessing there’s considerable overlap. People can learn a way through this contradiction other ways than family relationships, but it is a powerful disadvantage.

No one fully understands the complexity of value, wealth, worth, and honor in a society, but liberals understand it considerably less well, and haven’t a clue about it. Their confidence that they understand more when they understand less is what makes them dangerous.

3a.
Ray Stevens – Mr. Businessman

Absolutely true. Part V-A - A Thought Experiment - continued The other wealths that progressives tout are indeed more valuable. So why are they so angry, then, if they’ve got it so good? If money isn’t the key to happiness, why are they so resentful of other people having it? If businessmen choose to waste their lives, why should Ray Stevens be so pissed?

Ah, we know the answer, don’t we? The excuse that others are starving and impoverished by it is certainly not true in this country. That wealth destroys the environment is a popular shorthand, but ultimately weak idea. The objection to some people being much, much richer than others means two things: it means that liberals don’t have top status in our society, and it means that the machine is not running smoothly. (see #4). And if the machine is not running smoothly, it can never usher in the vision (see #5).

Pacifism, Militarism, and Jesus.

I dislike the Fourth of July sermon about religious freedom that is preached every year, though today's was better than others.  While we should cultivate gratitude for any good thing which comes into our lives, individually or corporately, Americans, especially evangelicals, too easily equate freedom of religion with the gospel. It has been going on for decades, maybe centuries, and I see no way to undo it.

The opposite error, that Jesus was rather obviously pacifist and nationalism an especial danger irritates me as well, and I have discussed it here before.

Rather than just taking potshots at other people's ideas, however, I think I should make some statement about what the real Christian doctrine is.  It is always easier to criticise others than it is to craft a postion oneself, which then becomes subject to analysis by others.

Today's text was from Psalm 144

¹ Praise be to the Lord my Rock,
    who trains my hands for war,
    my fingers for battle.
² He is my loving God and my fortress,
    my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield, in whom I take refuge,
    who subdues peoples under me.

Yet Jesus said to turn the other cheek. We could multiply examples on both sides.  We often quote the verse about beating swords into plowshares in our current thinking.  Yet there is also a verse about beating plowshares into swords. (Joel 3:10) The issue is not simple - reality seldom is - neither historically nor theologically.

I believe that the Gospel is pushed forward in the long run by the counter-intuitive, self-sacrificing aspect of Christian teaching. However, that may only be in the longest of long runs, and in a fallen world we should not assume that God has left that open to us in every situation.  And especially, we should not assume that those who do not take that route are less pleasing to God.

Which pacifists do, as you may have noticed. Even more, those whose god is internationalism are very prone to disdain for those who defend nations. That may be a deeper darkness and hypocrisy.

War is a holding action, in terms of the gospel.  It does not advance the faith, except in a superficial sense.  But it can prevent the faith from being overrun in the short term.  We all live in the short term, after all.  If I seem to be damning militarism with faint praise by calling it a neutral, a stop-gap, a Plan B or C, understand that medicine is also a holding action.  Firemen, mechanics, policemen, nurses, EMT's, counselors, occupational therapists, and editors all fix things rather than build them, and are analogous to those who go to war to prevent evils from growing.

This is not pure, certainly. Surgeons deal with pathology, obstetricians help life come along; there are plumbers who fix and plumbers who build; military special forces try to win hearts and minds but are prepared to destroy things. Fixing fairly often means destroying before building. Still, while there is a distinction between fixers and builders, both are worthy. God does not seem to have forbidden any type of fixer, even if destruction is part of their deal.  Nor does He seem to have singled out builders for especial praise.  Educators, engineers, artists, parents, inventors - these are not described as closer to God.  St Paul does tell us that some parts of the body have greater honor than others, but is a bit vague about exactly which those are.

When we picture soldiering as one of the fixing professions, we see that even aggressive military action might be justified, or even commanded by God. Modern Christians tend to shrink from this idea. Doubly so since our opponents might possibly be socialists. If Communism is essentially a Christian (or possibly Jewish) heresy, it is revealing that some Christians are quite sure we must be wrong if we want to fight them.  As the old criticism goes, perhaps they are not really neutral, but just on the other side. (Ron Radosh on Pete Seeger.)

I believe that religious freedom ultimately doesn't get us anywhere, if no one is there to preach about Jesus.  Being free to believe mostly-untrue religions does no man good.  In the short term of our 80-year lives, I suppose it's better to have freedom than not, but it's ultimately for nothing. Nor is an American Christianity likely to be less of a heresy than German Christianity was, if allowed to go where it pleases. We started higher and closer, perhaps, but our fall would therefore be greater and more tragic.  I believe that the message of the martyr is ultimately more powerful, and earnestly to be desired. Yet not in all times and all places.  It is good to preserve good, and evil to throw goodness away unnecessarily, for an idolatry of martyrdom rather than the cause of Christ Himself.

God may call one person to war, and another to forego war, even in the same household.

Great North Woods

Update:  Correction in the comments.  I am leaving my post unchanged, but it contains an error, acknowledged.

We are off to the Great North Woods for a couple of days.  We will take time out for covered bridges and historical markers we have not seen, both of which will be plentiful.  We will be staying in the Republic of Indian Stream, which may be an idea whose time has again come.

I have heard grumbling for years about larger conservative sections of states seceding from the biggest city's control of their state - which sounds more like expelling, but you take the point.  I have never taken it seriously. Unless they get to keep the name and kick the other guys out there is just to much emotional weight to tradition for conservatives.  Which is fine, and as it should be.  It should take a lot to overcome a tradition that has generally worked, and most states think their identity has worked. I can't quite say I value being a Newhampshireman over being an American, as some of my ancestors around 1800 might have said, but I think I at least have some understanding of the idea.

Now there are grumblings from liberals about states seceding from the Union, and I don't take that seriously either.  These are merely statements of "Yeah, we've got all the good and important stuff, which you rubes take for granted! You couldn't live without us." They aren't going anywhere, they are just being insulting in order to compliment themselves. They should follow the Tolkien rule of secondary creation though if they are going to fantacise about such stuff. The rules of an alternative world can't be arbitrary, they have to make internal sense.  If the blue states put together a package to leave, their own states are really purple.  They might attract some liberals from Utah or South Dakota to move and join them, but those folks aren't going to bring much in the way of territory.  If everyone is already splitting things up along state lines, a lot of those states will separate from the huge Democratic-majority cities and put the rest into the stay-American pile. The NYC metro area might greatly desire to join California, DC, and Massachusetts.  But they might not even keep much of their own states of NY, NJ, CT, and PA. They might also find that - funny thing - when push comes to shove they retain a certain affection for being American and 90% of them vote against leaving. Even the 20th C immigrants.

They'd get VT and Hawaii. They would get Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and other blue cities. Not those states, though, I don't think. They would carry a 25-mile strip from Boston to DC or even Richmond (well, maybe only Fredricksburg. Dale City, anyway), throwing all those states into disarray if secession was in the air. Well, no matter about the details.  My predictive powers are demonstrably poor, and as I said, it ain't happening anyway. I just got carried away with the game. Returning to my real point, once secession is considered a real alternative, other dominoes fall. You have to play out such scenarios a week or two down the road, don't you? Heck, let's be radical.  You have to think about what people will actually do in response if you even start down this path.  And more meaningfully, once you have even pretended that secession is possible, just putting it out there as a rhetorical device, you are fueling hatred.

It's a funny thing.  Zachriel got the idea that I was saying songs didn't have any effect on things.  Oh, they do, they do, but not always the effects intended.  The songs of the Folk Song Army contributed greatly to increasing hatred in their day, and they may have set in motion some of the violence we see now. Admittedly, things have many causes at that distance and no one gets much blame or credit 50 years later. Most of the earnest people advocating all that good peace 'n love were mostly sincere and decent folk, though rather easily swayed by fashion to follow demagogues.

Others though, knew exactly what they were doing, sneering and deceiving intentionally. Seeger had to hurry back from his tour of Russia, where he asked no questions about the GULAG even though Solzhenitsyn's work was published, in order to sing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" on the Smothers Brothers show. Here's his take on being an American.

Pseudointellectuals

Someone quoted Frank Zappa* over at Chicago Boyz, and I replied that he may be the best example of a pseudointellectual to come out of 60s rock. This set me to thinking, of course, who his competition is for that honor. This seems like a group-participation project. Defend your choices.

I think I am excluding the true folkies, pre-Dylan.  First, they would sweep the field and there would be no one else standing when we got to the quarterfinals, so the game would be no fun.  Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, right out. Second, even though they occasionally had top-40 pop hits, they don't really qualify.  Folk-rockers are in the mix, though. So, Kingston Trio out, Bob Dylan in.  Dylan isn't going to be a strong nominee anyway. Even first-water intellectuals get ahead of themselves and say pretentious stuff sometimes, so I can certainly cut some slack to a guy who has been as generally original and interesting as Zimmerman has.

From the opposite direction, I don't think a band or singer who ordinarily didn't pretend to be any more than a rocker or a fun time should get penalised for a one-off attempt at Being Significant.  "San Franciscan Nights" by the Animals was execrable, but they usually didn't deviate from their brand as hard-luck teen years rockers. Few pop-country singers get over their heads like that, but it does happen.

I am uncertain what to do with someone like Joni Mitchell.  She used very interesting tunings and was a good lyricist. It was the vacancy of her ideas that irritated.  Perhaps that should be the definition of exactly what I am referring to when I say pseudointellectual. You have to have some intelligence to even get into the ring, so you don't get extra points for that once the competition starts.  Everyone on the list will have that in some form or another.  It is the half-baked ideas that are the issue.

Nominate, or discuss criteria, or both.  I want to hear yours before I give mine.

*Another quote of his. "You've seen 'em! You've seen 'em with their little FISH on the back of their cars!  Just remember: THEY ARE THE ENEMY!"  (Pro-choice rally, 1988)

Oleanna

 Like most Americans who are not of Norwegian heritage, I knew this song first from the Kingston Trio.  A few also learned it from Pete Seeger. I just sent it to my son in Norway. We'll see if they even know of it up in the northern sections.

More Old Links

Megan McArdle just after the Brexit vote. This holds up very well, and includes a structural weakness of betting markets and why some Americans care about Brexit. It was behind Bloomberg's paywall, so I got another link. June 2016.

Hmm, the old links are getting newer.

A Federalist review of Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops. August 2016

Just an FBI table I use when people don't believe my claims about crime statistics. It covers 2012.  I usually browse around for newer or slightly different things from this starting point.

When Netanyahu wasn't exaggerating after all. September 2016

Noel Field, Communist Quaker. An American elite Stalinist. I think of Pete Seeger when I read things like this. September 2016

Breitbart on Obama's Birth.  Andrew believed, as do I, that Obama was born in Hawaii.  But his own literary agent in 1991 claimed he was born in Kenya.  Barack played a lot of 3-card Monte with is history, depending on current need. May 2012

Washington Post Archive. There Is No Possible Way Donald Trump's Team Actually Believes This Is Their Path To 270. Thetone is unmistakable. October 2016

John Tierney, who was the NYT science editor, describes The Real War on Science.  Autumn 2016

Democrats three times more likely to unfriend people.  Some of us know this from personal experience.  However, as I am now off FB, I suppose I have unfriended everyone.  I don't miss it, BTW.  December 2016

Why Europe Rose. A longer article, popular academic, with footnotes.  The illustration at the top must be by Peter Spier, though he is not credited. You can tell by all the pretty, clean mud in the village. December 2016.

Scottish Independence

There is an article over at Quillette that won't stay on the sidebar forever about the SNP and independence. I defer to him on many things because my Scots-Irish heritage is 200 years old and his information is considerably more important, however much I like the Wallace Tartan. Nostalgia is not reality, and the current Scots seem much farther left than I am comfortable with.

There is a long comment by someone named Geary Johansen that I found quite informative, though you should apply the usual discounts that 1) he has a site he is trying to get you to visit, and 2) seems to want to revert to discussing Scandinavia a bit quickly. Still, I liked it. As a person who follows the yearly PISA scores, I was particularly interested in the info about Finnish education.

I am interested here in the phenomenon of the SNP appealing to very old sentiments in order to sell a new idea. I learned from CS Lewis many years ago*, though I did not believe it at first, that this is usual.  The CPUSA had a specific training of using the tunes from old Christian hymns and modifying the words just a bit to get folks singing along to socialist ideas. Think Pete Seeger, with at least two dozen examples, beginning with "Down By the Riverside" and continuing to "We Shall Overcome." But to get back to the Scots, I think we in America can guess at it immediately.  The SNP is saying "Bagpipes playing 'Scotland the Brave!' Kilts! The cursed English, and remember Robbie Burns!" We see it easily in others, not so well in ourselves. I have suspected all along that independence was a bad idea for the Scots, but he makes the case most strongly.  Of course, I also believe that groups have the right to make rules about their governance even if they are wrong.

*Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he may think about the Beveridge Report and talk about the coming of the kingdom. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress. ("Christian Apologetics" 1945) You should write this on your wrist and on your brow and place it like a mezuzah on your doorposts, for it is the great danger of the 20th and 21st C of the church.  Racism? Pah. Consider who is putting our focus on that third-level problem of the Church. Come back to Lewis and this thought in one month and one year and every year thereafter. This is where we are usually fooled.  Mostly liberals, but conservatives also in a different way, and if you do not apprehend that, take a long walk to figure out where that might be.  Or read more CS Lewis, which is the answer to all modern problems.

Cultural Liberalism and Conservatism

Glenn Greenwald's discussion with Shant Misrobian gets it right, and very much in the spirit of my many discussions of the Arts & Humanities Tribe (and Government & Unions Tribe) years ago.  I don't like Rogan much because of his liberal views, and am neutral about his emphatic regular guy shtick. A&H Liberals are very concerned with cultural feel and social acceptability, overwhelming even their actual political views, and I am not just being cute in calling them a tribe. These have largely been my people for all of my life, though I acknowledge having a foot in both worlds for much of it. They seldom see how predictable they are and how driven by popular opinion, because they choose to be dedicated nonfollowers of the most popular fashions of the masses (ugh), thereby proving they are discerning and above all that. I have provided many examples of that culture's heroes over the years, from Pete Seeger to late-night hosts, but Tom Lehrer's characterisation remains one of the best:

It's likely unfair to include Dylan so much, who displayed a fair bit of independence of thought after he stopped sleeping with Joan Baez.

It is fair to note that many strands of conservatism fall prey to the same overvaluing of the symbolic over the content-driven.  On that side there tends to be a sentimentalism rather than a social popularity that interferes with the strictly rational.

Blood On the Coal

Zachriel brought up the closing song to "A Mighty Wind" with its risque joke - exactly the sort of thing an earnest folksinger might have unintentionally missed at the time, or a smirking one done on purpose. On my only viewing of the film, I thought the dialogue and situations clever, with some holes. I was uncomfortable with the songs because I actually sort of liked them, and felt I was being made fun of myself. I mentioned this again years later. I wrote songs like this, and certainly sang many more. I like to think I had some perspective, even as a twenty-year old, and wouldn't be that far over the top, but...then I remember what I actually did sing, with my little cheat-sheet of the order of the set taped to the top of my 12-string. I didn't write any coal-mining songs, nor perform any I can recall. As a northerner playing in the south, I knew I didn't have the cred for that. OTOH, I sang lots of songs I didn't have the cred for.
Since seeing the movie I have gradually reversed field. The scenes and dialogue are a pretty good sendup, but ultimately, they are an oversell. But the songs. They got those right. I now think they got them just close enough for pain. Brilliant. Easy enough to imagine the Kingston Trio singing this.  Now imagine Pete Seeger singing a slightly different, "more authentic" version.

Pete Seeger

My hero when I was 13-30.  Sang out about opposing dictators, but couldn't denounce Stalin until he was dead almost 50 years - and even that was tepid.

"Should I apologize for all this? I think so." He went on to put his thinking in context: How could Hitler have been stopped? Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in '36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger's book, From Yale to Jail  At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader." I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She's part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let's look ahead.

We've all seen such apologies before.  "Yes headmaster, I was stealing from Johnson, and bullying the younger boys, but you'll remember that Edwards cheated on examinations last year, and Cartwright set the accidental fire at the boathouse. So let's just move on, shall we?"

I listed him as one of my 10 Worst Americans ever. I've written a fair bit over the years about him. Perhaps the best example (though Baez might be better) of an A&H Tribe urban sophisticate masquerading as a voice of the downtrodden. An evil hypocrite.