FISH GOTTA SWIM, BIRDS GOTTA FLY: The Left Is Forever ‘Timely’ In Warning of Corporate Fascist Doom:

A conservative critic can locate a fascinating ideological subtext in several articles in the Weekend Arts I section of Friday’s New York Times.

That subtext is that the Left’s warnings about impending corporate fascism are forever timely, even as they are wielded by dead Communist screenwriters, 75-year-old hippie folk singers still nostalgic for Vietnam, ’70s rock singers who had wrote anthems for the Sandinistas, and cool-tempered crackpots from MIT.

Let’s begin with the 75th birthday concert for Joan Baez, and Times music critic Stephen Holden praising over the peace-loving diva’s magnetism. Her all-star concert of duets will air on the PBS series Great Performances, a typical display on the taxpayer-funded sandbox for leftists:

Mr. [Jackson] Browne, playing the piano, sang his prophetic ‘70s anthem “Before the Deluge” with Ms. Baez, who glumly observed that “as we head into the abyss” this expression of apocalyptic foreboding is even more relevant today than when it was written. A weary sense of impending doom was a persistent undercurrent throughout a concert that tried and mostly failed to conjure up a ‘60s-style inspirational fervor.

My favorite “expression of apocalyptic foreboding” is still Naomi Wolf, after advising Al Gore to don earth toned togs in 2000 to bring out his inner alpha male and before becoming an ISIS truther in 2014, writing a marvelously paranoid screed for the Huffington Post in the fall of 2008 that, as NewsBusters paraphrased, “Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin to Usher in Rovian Police State.” But then, as German intellectual Günter Grass once said, “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

Perhaps because, even though “Progressivism” has been the dominant political ideology in America since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, as the Z Blog noted last week, “an integral part of Progressive mythology is the struggle. Despite being in charge for close to a century, Progressives still think of themselves as an insurgent minority at war with their oppressive overlords. Elizabeth Warren is worth millions, yet she spends her time in the Senate ranting about the one percent. Her neighbors in the one percent cheer her on. It’s false consciousness.”

And the ideological version of Dr. Strangelove wrestling with his own out-of-control hand. Fight the power — even though you are the power!