In honor of this NPR tweet, and the pinkness all over:
Folk singer, songwriter and activist Pete Seeger would’ve been 100 years old on May 3.
To celebrate, Smithsonian Folkways is set to release an expansive collection, featuring 20 previously unreleased tracks. https://t.co/Aa7bXeFypw
— NPR (@NPR) May 2, 2019
I’d like to kindly point readers back to the following:
Michael Moynihan on Pete Seeger:
‘Seeger never really did abandon the dream of communism, despite the inconvenient fact that it had long since (starting around 1918) transformed into a pitiful nightmare. So it was unsurprising that in 1995 he would provide an effusive blurb for a book of poetry written by Tomas Borge, the brutal secret police chief and interior minister of Sandinista Nicaragua (“An extraordinary collection of poems and prose”).’
I was hoping for a piece that would note Pete Seeger’s songwriting talents and decency in dealing with people, but push back against the hagiography and highlight, you know, the Communism.
All together now, 1, 2, and a 1 2, 3, 4…
Wait a minute, wasn’t Bill de Blasio sympathetic to the Sandinistas?
You know, I remember reading a piece at the NY Times about Trotsky’s great-grandaughter, the neuroscientist Nora Volkow:
Free will is a tricky concept:
‘Dr. Volkow generally forswears any interest in politics per se, but midway through a long day of meetings last month she sighed and acknowledged, “science and politics are intertwined.” We think we have free will, she continued, but we are foiled at every turn. First our biology conspires against us with brains that are hard-wired to increase pleasure and decrease pain. Meanwhile, we are so gregarious that social systems — whether you call them peer pressure or politics — reliably dwarf us as individuals. “There is no way you can escape.”
This brought me back to Frenchman of The Left Bernhard Henri-Levy’s piece before the 2008 election:
“And one of the reasons I am so much in favor of [Senator Barack] Obama is that his election might be, will be—because I think he will be elected—a real end to this tide of competition of victimhood, and especially on the specific ground of the two communities, Jews and African Americans, who were so close in the 1960s”
…”The Obama election would reconstitute the grand alliance.”
Hail the grand alliance!
Samuel Bronkowitz may have gotten there first to celebrate the black-Jewish Leftist alliance in Hollywood.
It seems to me you’ve got a few options once you’ve become a member of a favored identity group, as like pretty much all of life, the clock is ticking.
- Game the identity system by using it to full personal advantage to try and escape its orbit (understandable, but maybe not the most honorable because of the bad people and the bad in people which come to lead, even if you just want a leg-up because you actually are poor and oppressed).
- Play the identity game and pursue your ambition within its orbit. After all, there’s meaning and purpose in treating enemies as evil in a War and the game of politics as rigged. Retreat to the ideological purity of your group when attacked and advance upon the enemy positions whenever possible. Until larger failures and/or the money runs out, rinse and repeat.
- Wait around long enough until the same underlying logic is used against you and/or your group, religion and/or ethnicity (Jewish folks seem to be on the outs lately, Muslims in—Asians being disfavored at elite schools). The identity politics game marches onwards towards utopia, against the oppressor. Being forced to choose between model failures or seeing the world anew outside your model, generally choose to project your personal and group failure onto your enemies, because after all, you’re Human, all too Human.
———————
It’s not race, it’s class. It’s not ideology, it’s settled science. Look at all this equality!
What do you mean by equality, exactly? How will you achieve that?
See Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s… for a rich account of the times
Related On This Site: What about black people held in bondage by the laws..the liberation theology of Rev Wright…the progressive vision and the folks over at the Nation gathered piously around John Brown’s body?: Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’……Robert George And Cornel West At Bloggingheads: “The Scandal Of The Cross”…
A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama
From FIRE.org-’Federal Government Mandates Unconstitutional Speech Codes At Colleges And Universities Nationwide’
Greg Lukianoff At FIRE.Org: ‘Emily Bazelon And The Danger Of Bringing “Anti-Bullying” Laws To Campus’