Mack
Hall, HSG
If I Had a
Hammer - and Sickle
To
paraphrase an old wheeze, last month the world learned that someone named Pete
Seeger died. Before that much of the
world didn’t know he was alive.
Without
a doubt some journalism-school graduate will draw from his (the pronoun is
gender-neutral) big bag of filler-language one of the oldest and most erroneous
cliches’ of all: “his music defined a generation.”
Well,
no, Pete Seeger’s music did not define a generation. For one thing, Mr. Seeger’s career lasted
over seventy years, covering several generations. Second, there are always individuals who
refused to be defined by others. Third,
“generation” is an artificial construct, projecting stereotypes based on the
year of one’s birth.
Tom
Brokaw, for instance, has made good money defining other people by the
accidents of their birth. He invented
the expression “the greatest generation” and sold lots of books and articles on
that stereotype. And it is a stereotype
- after all, if everyone who survived the Great Depression and participated in
World War II are to be stamped with Mr. Brokaw’s label, then General Tojo,
Eddie Slovik, Lord Haw Haw, Robert McNamara, and Admiral Horthy were really
great guys. But stereotypes sell, and
Mr. Brokaw has profited greatly from World War II. Your grandfather didn’t, but Tom Brokaw did.
Pete
Seeger did not profit from World War II; he was drafted into the Army Air Force
and served in the Pacific as a mechanic.
He does not seem to have learned much about tyranny from the experience,
though. Before the war Mr. Seeger was
pleased to sing songs praising Hitler and Stalin for their (cough)
non-aggression pact. After the war he celebrated
one dictator after another with his banjo, and does not seem to have composed a
song about the Soviets invading Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania,
Hungary, Romania. Greece, and much of the rest of the planet, nor did he bother
to yodel about the gulags and mass executions.
And
he honored murderers so prettily: “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” “Turn,
Turn, Turn,” “If I had a Hammer,” and on and on. Nice, hummable, deadly little songs. They just make you want to get up and dance
on mass graves.
Pete
Seeger meant well, but meaning well is so often an excuse for subsequent
disasters. Pete Seeger perceived, better
than most, the inequities of American life in the early 20th century,
especially racism and the concept by some industrialists of workers as
disposable economic units. He took up
his banjo as an instrument of wrath.
The
tragedy is that Pete Seeger thought that only a fresh new set of international tyrants
would solve the problems of the old localized set of tyrants. Instead of The People submitting passively to
a succession of often inadequate but democratically-elected governments, Mr.
Seeger sang that they should submit passively to his sequential catalogue of fatherly-looking
mass-murderers: Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh.
In
a perhaps irrelevant aside, what is it with dictators and their love of facial
hair?
Pete
Seeger despised the American government until the American government began
giving him honors and medals. Then he
became the lap-dog of whatever president invited him to the White House to purchase
his soul with shiny things. As Becket
says in Jean Anouilh’s eponymous play, “A good
occupational force must never crush. It must corrupt.” The irony would have eluded Pete Seeger.
By
celebrating dictators, having no use for real workers, and accepting hollow
honors from a government he professed to despise, Pete Seeger insured that his
music would become as irrelevant as television jingles for fizzy sodas.
-30-
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