Sunday, March 2, 2014

If I Had a Hammer - and Sickle


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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