Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Is It Possible to Love the Artist, but Hate His Politics? The culture clash over Pete Seeger's legacy.

This is a good reprimand to those of us who only know of Seeger as a communist sympathizer and look no deeper into the man than that. These thoughts could have also applied to Springsteen had he practiced his art in the early to mid-twentieth century instead of today. I disagreed with Seeger, but knew he was for real; I cannot help but see Springsteen's music - excellent as it is - as shtick  .  TD
Heller cartoon: Pete Seeger
By Rick Moran at PJ Media  "Communist activist and troubadour Pete Seeger is dead. The outpouring of vitriol on the right and hagiography on the left is entirely predictable and, with few exceptions, entirely banal. Turning Seeger’s death into another clash in the culture wars somehow seems tiresome, like two old boxers coming out of their corners for the 12th round. Battered, beaten, bloody, all they have left is the instinct to try to destroy each other. Whatever art and artifice they possessed disappeared long before the bell clanged for the last round.

"Must we reduce everything in America to a right vs. left Armageddon? One longs for a more complicated, less knee-jerk combative analysis of people like Pete Seeger. Actually, there has been no one like Pete Seeger, and future historians will brush aside most of the shallow, venomous assaults on his memory — as well as the one-dimensional paeans that whitewash his execrable politics — and look at the totality of his life and judge his monumental contributions to American society."

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