RE: America’s Most Successful Communist

I saw Pete Seeger perform several times while I was growing up. These were in small venues, sometimes less than a hundred people. In a couple of cases I was sitting so close to him I could have reached out and patted him on the shoulder. He seemed a little angrier each time I saw him. The last time, he was singing through clenched teeth almost throughout the performance.

Seeger's success was due mostly to a great deal of personal charisma. However, when he was singing his songs, they just sounded like hate-filled screeds. His banter between songs sounded like scripted propaganda. I could even pick that up the first time I ever saw him. I was probably no more than 7 or 8 years old.

With few exceptions, the political content of music today is no more than empty rhetoric. Musicians are political and leftist because that's what they think they should be. The biggest names in popular music are wealthy beyond the wildest imaginings of people like Pete Seeger or Woodie Guthrie. Most of them don't even have the decency to pretend to believe the tripe they spout. And they definitely fall into the category of useful idiots who will be the first to end up in the lime pits after the revolution.

I stopped supporting their dabbling into degenerate political and social ideologies several years ago. I guess I miss a lot of it. Bonnie Raitt was always one of my favorites. Without question these people are very talented. Too bad they choose to squander that in hypocrisy. Of course, their anti-establishment images are a sham. They aren't anti-establishment, they're just anti-Republican. Most of them are partisan Democrats and their shrill whining is nothing more than demagoguery. To whit: We didn't hear a word out of these clowns while American soldiers where dying in Mogadishu or Kosovo. And we sure didn't see a firestorm of protest while Bill Clinton was bombing aspirin factories or firing cruise missiles at Saddam Hussein.