Michelle Obama Vs Pete Seeger

I wasn’t going to comment on Michelle Obama’s newfound positive feelings about America. Enough others had, and what’s to add?

Michelle Obama and her husband Barack are categorized, generally, as very liberal.

She and he are, also, widely categorized as poorly schooled or experienced in the real world, despite their privileged stellar education and successful legal careers.

SEE “The truth about Michelle Obama's 'working class' credentials.”

Red diaper-baby, former communist, still proud Old Leftist Pete Seeger, lifelong in the trenches for change, offers a stark contrast in a comment in today’s Parade Magazine insert to Sunday newspapers across the country:

I am actually optimistic. My country has done wonderful things that nobody believed we would do: civil rights, women’s rights, freedom of speech. The nonviolent revolution will come next.

February 27, Seeger will be in the spotlight at PBS’ American Masters.

I saw a Pete Seeger live performance when I was a child, and I still remember it as delightful. I grew up with the deep tradition of American folk music, especially heavily the leftist variety during my social democrat upbringing and college years. See this 2005 discussion from City Journal.

The politicization of American pop dates from the 1960s, but it grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party’s “Popular Front” effort to use popular culture to advance its cause….

It’s tempting to dismiss the politicization of popular music as of limited consequence. But as the Popular Front keenly grasped, culture matters—and music matters perhaps most of all. Allan Bloom, glossing Plato, wrote that “to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or society, one must ‘mark the music.’ ” In America, popular music provides a soundtrack for growing up. And the lyrics of that music too often deliver the message that our leaders are “idiots,” that our politics are corrupt, that bourgeois life is purposeless, that this country is no freer than any other—and probably less so. How can we find ourselves surprised, then, by the cool indifference that typifies many kids raised in times of affluence, freedom, and peace?

For his part, Pete Seeger, who lives near the Hudson in Wappingers Falls, New York, continues to perform, now singing “Turn, Turn, Turn” as a protest against the Iraq war, a radical to the end. “I’m still a communist, in the sense that I don’t believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” he told Mother Jones last autumn. (The lefty magazine crowns Seeger “the grand old lion of the Left.”)

Happily, some have embraced the Popular Front’s legacy in ways that Seeger probably didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t likely approve. In March, a crowd in Taipei, several hundred thousand–strong, sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as part of a protest against forcible annexation by mainland China—and the prospect of Communist Party rule.

The messages of this leftist folk music may have been critical of American policies, but was optimistic in its tone and charge. The positive message is what lasts, encouraging even conservatives.

Michelle Obama’s pampered ignorance and indifference to even the heritage of liberal accomplishments, her negativity, stands her in a different strain of American: Dummy.

P.S.: For more about Pete Seeger, the good and the critical, see this Pete Seeger Appreciation Page, and search its links.