Uncle Pete is dead (fuck your nuance)

Days ago I was writing my own Pete Seeger eulogy. It would have been sentimental and I honestly don't know how interesting it would have been, since it would have contained a few of the bare facts of his life plus the things that I remember most vividly about him and also my feelings about him. I wasn't making much progress between sniffling and getting frustrated that what I had to say was not more interesting.

Well. I think a lot about how Pete Seeger used to say there were only really five tunes in the world and all the differences were just wonderful variations. He didn't mean "oh everything is all of a sameness and it's boring:" he meant "it's accessible and you can own it and make it yourself." He made a bunch of movies about that: how to make a steel drum, how to play a banjo. He popularized the banjo as a mainstream folk instrument on purpose because it's relatively easy to make a beautiful sound on it, it's flexible, and you can make it fit into a lot of different kinds of music. A good "people's instrument." Yes, andf even a good banjo is less expensive than a lot of other instruments -- more so in those days. So there's that.

And there's Pete Seeger and the HUAC meetings. Where he did not take the Fifth and did not sell out his friends and did not repudiate the Party (though I'm pretty sure by that time he was already turning away to do other things: if not, it happened not long after). Where he said "You do not have the right to ask me these things, and you do not have the right to call me a traitor and an anti-American because of the work I do." That's a thing.

And there's Pete Seeger's songs. Simple and sweet and kind and brave and singable. And --

Well, I was coming to this, while I was struggling to write about the fellow and his times and the things he did, when I saw in Making Light's sidebar that Patrick Nielsen Hayden had linked to "Steven Brust, canny and nuanced, on Pete Seeger."

I like Steven Brust. And "canny and nuanced" are nice words. But mostly I was curious: where's to be nuanced about Pete Seeger? I know there was a period when folkies would tend to be all hipster on Pete because his music wasn't authentic and gritty enough. But they were a little sheepish about it even back then because he'd pretty much always done the right thing, or one of the right things that was available at the time, and because even at his corniest Pete was fun to listen to and sing along with. So maybe he was going to do that? But isn't it a bit late to bother with all that?

It turns out it's just stupid. Sorry to say, but Steven Brust said something stupid in the name of being canny and nuanced, and in the process he demonstrated that he doesn't really get what the counterculture of the thirties, forties, and fifties was actually doing. And where I think he was intending to sound wise and all that he actually sounds condescending and knee-jerk anti-communist, the second of which is kind of an ironic and surprising and dumb thing to happen, considering everything. I mean, Steven Brust has kind of a nice record on that kind of thing, as far as I know from reading his stuff.

You should read the whole eulogy for yourself because it's mostly okay and every word that Steven Brust writes should be read even when it's not up to standard.

Here's the paragraph that I object to: "He was a Stalinist, and it showed more and more as time went on. You could see it in the way he did songs that carefully explained everything and drew their morals out plain as if the audience couldn’t be trusted to understand; you could see it in the way that, especially after his involvement with the Civil Rights movement, he would gladly hop onto any cause the pseudo-left embraced, the more middle-class the better."

as if the audience couldn't be trusted to understand

No. This shows a complete lack of understanding about what that kind of music is for. Pete Seeger explicitly said, over and over, in many contexts, that he actually thought his audience knew damn well what was going on, and understood the issues just fine. He wasn't up there educating anybody when he sang. He was giving people songs to march to and to sing along to and to use as work songs, that expressed things they already knew and felt. The power of a Pete Seeger type of song is not that it tells you something new. It's that it gives you a singable tune with a memorable refrain that says what you've already got on your mind.

I can hardly remember what the fuck words like "pseudo-left" mean anymore. I figure it's whatever movement the speaker thinks doesn't have the cred, or the analysis, or the right alignment. But I know it has a more precise meaning and it probably includes both the kind of "if you scratch the surface, you find a conservative" liberal types and also socialists who aren't far left enough and also probably Stalinists (about which more later: there's a disclosure due, which I'll get to). Or some subset or combination of subsets of these. Somebody, probably a Trotskyist, will come along and tell me I'm wrong and why. That will be okay, because as snarky as I've been in this paragraph, I would actually prefer to have a correct understanding of the term.

Here's a link to a bit of a bio for Pete Seeger: not really adequate. Highlights of his later involvements: working against the war in Vietnam; benefits for unions; support for cleaning up the Hudson River -- I guess these are what Steven Brust means by "the more middle-class the better." And pseudo-left. Because?

I'm stalling on getting to the Stalinist part. I want to talk about something else first. But I guess I have run out of other things to say. So here's the disclosure: my parents belonged to the Communist Party of the USA, and left it only gradually because they decided, in my mother's words "it wasn't going to change with all those men in charge of it." And I joined a Stalinist-flavored left-wing communist party called the Communist Labor Party for several years in my twenties. And I don't repudiate it, even though I do criticize some of the things we did, including the weird thing we did about Stalin where we tried to cherry-pick stuff like The National Colonial Question while distancing ourselves from everything else he did. Why don't I repudiate the CLP? Because most of us in the CLP, like most of the people who joined the CP or any of the other parties around, joined in order to engage in coordinated efforts towards making things better on a broad range of issues, and honestly we did that. At least in my area, we organized support for labor struggles, resistance to war and intervention, we walked the picket lines and packed the boxes of books for libraries and painted the signs and went to the farmworker barracks at four in the morning with reading material. We did a lot of good work and we were generally honest. I could, point-by-point, discuss all the ways that we were wrong, but frankly I am not that interested in it. I'm only bringing it up nopw because if somebody doesn't like what I'm saying today, they should not also think I'm hiding that I have this particular history. Of course it affects what I'm interested in and what I think and feel about it.

Pete Seeger's history is different. He was a public person and everything he did had wider ripples. For me, quietly not talking about my former CLP membership means the issue doesn't come up and I don't get punished for it. For Pete Seeger, it meant that people would call him a Stalinist for forty years or more afterwards. He didn't repudiate his Communist Party history as he moved away from it because it would have been cowardly to do that at the time. He would have had a much simpler life throughout the fifties and early sixties if he had made a public show of distancing himself. When he finally did write a song about how bad Stalin was, it was when it no longer could bring him any real benefit.

So anyhow. I'm not being canny and nuanced here. Not canny, because I'm utterly partisan about Pete Seeger and also probably pseudo-left, if I understand the term at all correctly (oh wait I already admitted I probably don't, but I'm probably pseudo-left anyway). And not nuanced, because I don't recognize that because a person has Stalinist connections in their history their actions and their work must necessarily be tainted and lesser. Oh right, and not nuanced, because I think sometimes a song should just goddamned say what it feels.