The Big Fool Says to Push On
If you’re of a certain age, you may well remember one of the signal moments of the late ‘60s — the moment when, on a network variety show, a folk singer trashed a sitting president. It was in January of 1968, and pressure against the Vietnam War was building toward the bursting point that would come later that year in Chicago.
The “radical” Smothers brother, Tommy, had always been interested in providing more than mere laughs on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and now he saw a unique opportunity to whack Lyndon Johnson a good one upside the head — with Pete Seeger’s guitar. Seeger was only too happy to oblige, and after the lights went down he sang these pointed words about a foolhardy officer who’d pressed his men to risk their lives by crossing a river: “We were knee-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.”
Everyone knew what the song was really about: LBJ’s escalation of the war. Seeger left no doubt: “Every time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on: We’re waist-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.” We know how it all turned out for Johnson. Within a few months he’d declined to pursue the Democratic nomination for another term, and after a close election the nation ended up with a new president named Richard M. Nixon.
What’s the relevance to today? Well, Pete Seeger’s still around, bless his progressive soul, even if there’s no network host who would even consider asking him to come on to help torpedo “The One” (not that he’d ever do it). But with the evidence of President Obama’s disastrous mistakes piling up all around us, why not?
Obama’s health care plan becomes less popular and less credible, with its brain-dead policy and corrupt bargains, every time he opens his mouth to tout it. The voters of Massachusetts, of all places, have delivered an unequivocal verdict: “Drop it!” But the big fool says …
Obama’s homeland security policy, which takes a much more relaxed attitude toward “man-caused disasters” such as murderous jihadis and wants to shift the burden of the fight against them to the criminal justice system and away from the military, was very nearly blown out of the sky, along with what remains of his presidency, by the underwear bomber on Christmas Day. And yet the big fool says …
Ah, Saratoga Springs, where in the 1980s I saw Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie live. The finale, of course, was Alice’s Restaurant.
Progressives have been grumbling misgivings about Obama since Iowa 2008. That spring I happened to meet the writer of a mischievous anti-Bush book. Reading him, well, like a book, I asked him pointedly: “So. Obama…? Or Kucinich?” His face showed real pain. I felt real pity. For a moment.
“Oh the answer my friends is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind…” Cf: VA, NJ, MA, ……………
Don’t hold your breath.
Seeger, Springsteen, Baez, and company are in full scale denial about the disaster sitting in the Oval Office. They bleated for 8 years about how Bush was so bad.
We now face a leadership in the Presidencey, House and Senate that are a clear and present danger to our nation and these supposed speakers of truth are utterly silent.
Pretty much the way they were silent about the terrorists who are still a threat.
What’s Seeger sang about al Quaida?. Springsteen?
Are they so stupid as to not know how their own art form would be outlawed under strict Islamic law?
Oh. Right. They ARE that stupid. Silly me for questioning.
Never trust anyone over 90…
Are you serious? We are now in the third generation of teaching evil utopianist views exclusively. No libertarian folk singers can exist.
(BTW, Seeger wasn’t one either.)
You’ve got to destroy the teachers’ unions, replace the teachers and wait several generations to find one. Ain’t gonna happen in my lifetime nor yours.
If you do find one, =:obama will be replaced by a 21st Century Nixon. (I.e., just more of Obolshevism but with a right twist).
Protest singers are singularly anti-American. No one who formerly sang in protest of Nixon and Reagan would dare raise a note against Obama.
As a musician myself, I become incensed when I hear other musicians rail againt conservative politicians. They cite bumper sticker slogans as if they were gospel. But press them for specifics details on an issue and you’ll find out how uninformed they really are.
Of course, being of that “certain age” the author refers to, I’ve heard quite a lot. I prefer not to be preached to when I wish only to be entertained. In other words, spare me your vapid political views: shut up and sing.
Riding on your thought, why doesn’t some one take Admiral Mullen’s speech about allowing homosexuals in the military (“…so they won’t have to lie to serve their country…”) and dub in substitute words to allow Kenyans to serve as President?
BTW, Seeger has always been a Marxist and is a founder of the school the Kenyan went to for years. Obama, whose only goal is to destroy the middle class in America, is Seeger’s god because Obama has been able to accomplish more in one year than Seeger has in sixty.
The other old lefties on your list are just camp followers, folks who let the anti-war efforts of their fellow entertainment business comrades direct their efforts. Seeger was taking instructions from Moscow before the big war. Wasn’t Seeger the one who switched his songs from anti-European war to pro-war when the Germans invaded Poland and threatened Russia?
- Anyone care to pick up a guitar?
Unwittingly or not (I’d like to think not), these guys make the notion of Liberty cool, if only for three minutes and 22 seconds.
How about Ray Stevens’ “We The People”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc_-L4fyLUo
As far as I know, he hasn’t reached his 90th birthday yet.
Where have all the protest singers gone? Pete? Bruce? Anyone care to pick up a guitar?
Jeff Durstewitz should pick up a history book. Well, he needs to go beyond history books, because they don’t include the history of the folksong movement, without which Pete Seeger would have had no influence whatever on LBJ. By the time of ‘Big Muddy’, that movement had attracted thousands of young Americans on high school and college campuses, who were eagerly plunking out all sorts of songs and enjoying the liberation of The Pill as a bonus.
The books don’t record the history of People’s Songs, launched in the 1930s by the American Communist Party in New York and some other cities, and of which Pete Seeger was an eager participant. His parents were collectors of traditional music and songs, very attractive in themselves. Seeger & Co. saw that attractiveness as the sugar coating to apply to far-left political messages, and the movement which grew out of that principle did include a whole spectrum of participants. Lots of those participants were in it for the music despite the politics, but the far-left political element enjoyed the symbiosis of a parasite and grew to dominate the folksong movement – a successful Popular Front tactic which continues to this day. If you’re a musician, you (consciously or unconsciously) will know instantly that the folk music world is overwhelmingly hard left.
So don’t think that some individual with a guitar could just make a YouTube recording out of the blue and wield the 1968 influence of a Party-supported Pete Seeger with thirty years of organizing behind him.
One can always hope. But the Woody Guthrie (another Party-supported animal) of today ain’t appeared yet – though possibly the Tea Party gang might provide the initial fertile soil to plant the seed in.
People like Seeger, et. al pretended to oppose the Vietnam War, as they later did the Iraq War, on moral and practical grounds, but they really oppose policy based on ideology.
America is bad. Marxists/Third-World “noble” savages/theocratic homicidal maniacs are good, if for no other reason than that they violently oppose the United States.
They cheer Obama–and cannot make serious moral or practical judgments about his policies–because he shares their ideology. They may complain about Guantanamo not yet being closed or that a “public option” is not yet part of Obamacare, but they understand that Obama must make small political concessions to the “bitter clingers.”
They could care less if Obama’s policies “work,” in the sense that you or I talk about whether something “works” or not, or whether they are “right” in the same sense that you and I talk about right and wrong. If unemployment hits 10%–or 20%–they don’t care, as long as the “fat cats” get they deserve.
Regarding a musician, what about Lloyd Marcus?
A talented guy with funny, clever songs..
there are conservative folk singers, joe bethancourt is one, but you have to look hard in odd corners, like sci-fi “filk” music. i don’t have the url handy but check youtube for his “we did it to ourselves” an anti-gun control song. there’s also leslie fish, she’s an old i.w.w. “wobbly” anarchist but she’s doing kipling’s poems set to music, like “the old issue”, very timely in this day of obama and his left marxist cohorts.
add: while musicians may be political music has a way of turning on them, as witness jeff’s use of “the big fool” here. neatly done.
I have a song that I have been mulling over since 1993 and the title of it is “My Take Home Pay Don’t Even Take me Home now I need good lyrics still working on it might talk to some other songwriters and performers here in Nashville maybe Toby Keith!
I say get TED NUGENT AND CRANK UP STRANGLHOLD!!!! Have him revise it with fitting Obama lyrics but I believe the song is befitting of the deep shit we’re in due to the material fact that he is the dumbest son of bitch on the f’n planet. If it is this bad already the next thing is the loss of OUR COUNTRY as we KNEW IT just two years ago. So I say make a run on all the banks and WITHDRAW OUR MONEY and institute a NATIONWIDE STIKE DEMANDING HIS RESIGNATION BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK! PERIOD!!!
“Knee deep in the Big Muddy.” Seeger certainly had Vietnam nailed. But who would have believed that another big fool would come along who didn’t realize that it was just as easy to get stuck in sand?
This is a GREAT, factual, non-ideological article about the folk movement by one Lauren Weaver. I’ve been looking for the right place to send it.
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/12/where-have-all-the-lefties-gone
Is Larry Verne still around? “Please Mr. Custer, we don’t want to go”.
The problem with Progressive politics is that you can’t get two people in a row to agree what the heck it is. All they know is that they want to be in charge of it. Not much different than a King when you get right down to it.
That First Things article is good:
E.g., ‘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’
#18 Joseph: “Seeger certainly had Vietnam nailed….” Yeah, the US ran guns to Ho Chi Minh in 1943-45 because he was fighting the Japanese.
The Reagan Administration sold arms to Saddam in the ’80s because he was fighting the Iranians (in a war Saddam started). Under Reagan, we also armed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan; what later in part became the Taliban; because they were fighting the Russians. We just never learn do we?
Wow, I rarely post a comment, but this article and the responces made me do it. How can anyone think the past 9 years were anything but awful. We lost our standing in the world as a leader in human rights, we attacked a country who had done nothing to provoke an attack. Oh, and we destroyed the global economy. Now, I am not going to defend everything I have just typed…I will just post a couple of questions and you tell me.
1. Who was President when gas prices went from 1.00-1.50 a gallon up to 4.00 a gallon.
2. Who was President when we unlawfully detained people in direct violation of the rules of war that were established in the Geneva Convention?
3. Who was President when our economy went tits up?
4. Who won the election in 2008 to become President and was left this huge mess to clean up?
5. Who has not done anything to help repair all the damage that was done to this country?
Just to make a point, I served in the US Army based in Ft.Drum NY, during the cold war, and I have worked factory, labor and generally blue collar jobs my whole life. I know what it is to be short and living paycheck to paycheck. Yet, I say, give Obama the time and freedom to fix what took 9 years to damage.
I’m with Gerry on this one.
Could we drop some of this rancor over who’s blocking what from saving the US (because honestly; both sides’ plans won’t do all of it by themselves) and focus on getting the economy back on track, getting the employed jobs, and fixing the darned huge debt. And please, no one respond to this by saying:
“Oh sure, if only we’d follow X’s suggestion. Then everything would be hunky-dory.”
Because it doesn’t work like that.