How do we judge the totality of an artist's life? Joan Didion wrote achingly beautiful prose but was everything the right has come to hate about the left. She was a harbinger of the "New Journalism," which combined beautiful writing with a less-than-strict adherence to the facts. How should she be remembered?
Pete Seeger spent "70 years traveling the country, picking up ditties, sea shanties, work songs, disaster songs, songs of love, songs of war and peace, songs of injustice, and songs that were just plain fun," I wrote after Seeger died in 2014. "Seeger toiled in near obscurity at times to lovingly preserve this priceless legacy of Americana." It was a monumental achievement rivaling anything the Smithsonian has ever done.
Seeger was a dyed-in-the-wool, radical Communist who loved Stalin. How should he be remembered?
Kris Kristofferson died on Saturday at the age of 88. Kristofferson's cross-over appeal led to a movie career that included the massive box office and cultural hit "A Star is Born" with another liberal icon, Barbara Streisand. He also acted in clunkers like "Millennium" with model Charyl Ladd. The concept of future humans snatching doomed planes out of the sky before they crashed was a little too much for audiences to accept.
But Kristofferson will be remembered as a country music legend and one of the most successful songwriters of the 20th century. Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, Bobby Bare, and two dozen other recording artists covered his songs.
Kristofferson was a rebel. He "was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a Golden Gloves Boxer, a forest firefighter, and an Army Ranger who flew helicopters and turned down a chance to teach at West Point," according to National Review. Like Seeger, he also admired Communists.
In 1979, he played the first Cuban-American rock festival, in Havana. The high point for the hand-picked audience of government flunkies came when he dedicated a song to Fidel Castro, praising him, Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, and Christ as great revolutionaries.
Later, he fell under the spell of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. A Washington Post profile in 1987 noted that the only spot of color on his all-black outfit was a small red button with the picture of Augusto César Sandino, the patron saint of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution.
Kristofferson also wrote a paean to Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega.
Sandinista, you can hold your head up high
You have given back their Freedom
You have lived up to your name
Sandinista, may your spirit never die
Hold the candle to the darkness
You’re the keeper of the flame.
Ick.
The album that wretched song was on bombed. One critic called Kristofferson’s effort “simplistic and heavy-handed, a perfect example of politics overwhelming art.”
And that's the problem sometimes with brilliant artists. They become so enamored of their own talent that they believe it translates to all other aspects of their existence. Kristofferson was a "useful idiot" and never quite got around to admitting it.
Kristofferson never commented publicly on the fall of the Berlin Wall, but when challenged on his views he sometimes gave as good as he got. In an interview with Variety’s Chris Willman in the 2000s, he said, “I saw some book the other day called ‘Shut Up and Sing’ (by conservative Fox host Laura Ingraham), and my only feeling was: I am singing, dammit — shut up and listen!”
But a few years ago, when an actor raised the issue of communism’s collapse, Kristofferson pleaded the passage of time, saying that the collapse was in the past and there were other things to talk about.
Leftists like Kristofferson were constantly bragging about being on the "right side of history." Indeed, when it came to civil rights, the Vietnam War, and many aspects of environmental activism, the left led the way.
But they were wrong then and wrong now about Communism. Not admitting it tarnishes their legacy.
Recognizing talent and the cultural impact that an artist has on the world around him needs to be weighed when judging a man's life. When the time comes to judge him, strip away the facade layer by layer and judge him in all his marvelous complexity and contradiction. Please don't take the one-dimensional track and declare him a failure based on his political beliefs alone.
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