Mr. Steyn, I am outraged and offended by your recent denigration of Pete Seeger, one of Amerikkka’s greatest living Americans. If you had done the slightest bit of research before penning your petulant screed, you would have found that there are many of us — marching, marching! — who reject your characterization of ol’ Pete as a mere “banjo Bolshevik.” As I myself wrote on this website more than two years ago:
You wouldn’t believe how heartily I celebrated Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday yesterday. As is well known, Pete’s songs of outraged protest against the fascist, racist United States of America and his comradely sympathy for the late, lamented, egalitarian, utopian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are some of my fondest childhood memories. For a time there, in the aftermath of the now blessedly forgotten Reagan Revolution — it took not one but two Bushes to leave the Republican party the leaderless, rudderless, intellectually and ideologically incoherent wreck it now is; thanks, guys! — Pete’s pioneering work was praised largely in musicological terms (folk revival, American authenticity, voice of the people, blah blah blah), but now that my man, Barack Hussein Obama II, is in the White House, we can drop that fan-boy pretense and use Pete’s music as the soundtrack of our ongoing Glorious Revolution. Vsya vlast sovyetam! All power to the soviets!
I don’t know about you, but when I saw the Dear Leader and Teacher, BO2, in front of his adoring chorus known as the “fiercely independent Washington press corps” the other day, I realized that at long last Pete’s vision, which was passed on through the collectivist mother’s milk to my father, the sainted “Che” Kahane, and thence, via my mother, what’s-her-name, to me, has finally been realized. Turn, turn, turn: Yes, my friends, the yeoman’s work performed by the glorious Fifth Column that stretches from Major Andre and Benedict Arnold to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss is now proudly out of the closet.
And did I mention marching, marching? Grab a hammer and get in lockstep, tovarish.