Dreaming of Pete Seeger

The past 48 hours on anti-social media have been so eventful, I had to write an essay about it.

It was long before cell phones were commonplace, in the spring of 1995.  I don't know how he got my mother's phone number, but it was Pete Seeger on the line.  I happened to be visiting my mother at the time, across the New York state border, in Connecticut, maybe an hour's drive from Beacon, where Pete lived.

I had written a song that I hoped he might like.  I had his PO Box number in Beacon, it was easy to find, I think he included it in his columns in Sing Out! magazine.  I had met him before, briefly, at gatherings of the People's Music Network.  I didn't mention that when I sent him a page with a song lyric on it, and I didn't expect to hear back from him.

Over the years around that time, when Pete was still only in his seventies, he supported my career in lots of little ways.  We played on the same stages a few times, he wrote nice things about my music, sent an unexpected check in the mail one time, to order all of my CDs.  (I saved the check for a while, but saving anything isn't very practical when you're living in a pickup truck, so I deposited it eventually.)  That spring of 1995 it became pretty evident, over the course of that phone call, in any case, that he wasn't calling so much about the song I had sent him, as he was calling someone who was a potential recruit to the movement.

What movement is a matter of opinion, or definition, but it was the case for decades at least that there were a whole lot of people who commonly made reference to "the movement," which later people started calling "the movement of movements," to emphasize the point.  Pete had his fingers in all kinds of pots.  This recruitment call covered a bunch of them.  

He informed me about local festivals I should attend, he invited me to sing with him at one of them, he informed me about how often the Beacon Sloop Club met, and how I could get involved with the Clearwater Sloop action on the Hudson River, and he told me about the Bruderhof.  Pete called these folks living communally in various northeastern states "Christian communists."  

He warned me that they're very socially traditional, with women wearing different color dresses depending on their marital status and things like that, but that politically they were really radical, and they were big supporters and spiritual advisors of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  They were going through a period at the time of trying to be more open to elements of the outside world, and Pete was on a mission to acquaint them with interested folks from the outside world, and vice versa.

It was a valiant effort on Pete's part with regards to the Bruderhof.  What I witnessed over the course of the next few years was the Bruderhof's efforts at being part of a broader movement in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal being often met with derision and intolerance on the part of various of my leftwing colleagues from the outside world, who were appalled at the sexism and homophobia they saw in this community of German-speaking Christian communists.  By the turn of the century, the Bruderhof had understandably withdrawn again, shut down the wonderful magazine they were funding (called Blu), and largely returned to their communities.

This effort failed, but not because Pete and many others didn't try to make it work.  The notion that the participation of the Bruderhof in the solidarity movement for political prisoners should be welcomed with open arms would seem to be a no-brainer, and certainly was for many.  But not among others, and it seems to me, looking back, it was the toxicity of the intolerant leftists, of which I was one, that made this alliance, and to a large extent the movement for political prisoners with it, collapse.

Pete's orientation, and that of so many movement-builders of what I used to refer to as the 1930's generation, was the right one, the kind that has a serious track record of success wherever applied on a large scale, the one involving solidarity, and finding common ground, in the massive and obviously necessary effort to radically transform our unsustainable, capitalist, largely impoverished society into something we can all prosper in.

Pete's orientation to meeting new people was to recruit them into the movement.  He was not alone in this, and in fact he was following in a tradition that was well-established before he was born, with social movements like the Industrial Workers of the World.

Pete's orientation to meeting new musicians was the same.  Which is why he was one of the folks who started the People's Music Network, and helped keep it going, while he lived.  He was part of a long left tradition of running summer camps and holding conferences and festivals to do popular education and foster movement-building, community, culture, and optimism.

Pete's basis for making his movement-recruiting phone call that day was that I had sent him a single song lyric.  He probably knew nothing else about me, but that itself was enough.  Come join us, we're doing all kinds of things, you come be a part of it.  Unspoken but understood is that along the way you'll also learn a few things, in the course of being part of this movement, and that's how we help build the movement for the next generation.  There was no vetting involved, no background check.

As hopefully is clear from my mention of the Bruderhof, the nineties were not a golden age for solidarity and movement-building, by any means.  There were all kinds of elements within what we might call the left that were more interested in the moral perfection of their particular silos than any notion of a broader movement or a movement of movements.  But at least at various times in the past, this element wasn't always dominant.

As a movement musician, I'd do tours around the US, from the 1990's through around 2013, usually organizing tours to build for a big protest somewhere, to recruit people to go to the protest, and to do popular education through music about the issues at stake.  As with the other musicians doing similar work at the time, no one appointed us to these roles, it was just an obvious thing to do, following a tradition established long ago.

As a movement musician constantly touring around this country for many years, it was a wonderful way to be a part of so many different efforts and struggles in different parts of the country, and to have a pretty good idea about what sorts of things were going on in different places.  Since 2013 or so, when for various reasons it was no longer financially viable to tour the US the way I had long been doing, it's much harder to be really familiar with what's going on everywhere, and impossible to play the role of movement-builder and popular educator the way I used to do it.

I can't imagine that the landscape of the left-leaning parts of society is nearly as bleak as it appears on anti-social media, but without the ability to see in the real world what's happening everywhere, it's hard not to be influenced by it.  And then realizing that most people were never in a position to be traveling around the country all the time in the first place, I can only try to imagine what kind of picture most people must have of other parts of the society they live in, when most of it is being seen through the terribly distorted lens of anti-social media algorithms.

The past 48 hours or so, taken as an illustration of where our communications are at, and to some extent where the US left is at, seems typical.

Two mornings ago I posted on my usual variety of anti-social media platforms that I had just heard Oliver Anthony's song, "Rich Men North of Richmond," and I thought it was great.  

People then began to mention a couple of the problematic lines in the song I hadn't noticed on my one listen, and I agreed with those commenting that those lines needed to be improved.

I revised those bits of the song, recorded myself singing the revised version, and posted it on the same social media platforms.  Later I posted an essay and podcast on my largely sympathetic analysis of every line of the song.

In the course of the day I also shared another song of Oliver Anthony's (his latest, "I Wanna Go Home") on the same platforms, as well as a song of my own about this date in history, when the White House was torched, on August 24th, 1814.

The post that got the least attention, the fewest views, the least engagement, was the one about this date in history.  These posts rarely get much attention, they're rarely seen, since they don't tend to generate controversy.

The post about Anthony's latest song has barely been noticed, since the comparatively few people who have heard it have loved it, and have found nothing to complain about in it.

The posts of or about "Rich Men North of Richmond" got engagement, however.  The one that got seen and responded to the most was the one where I shared Anthony's video of the song.  Because the post was generating so much controversy and therefore attention, most of the people commenting were not people who had been looking at other comments to see what the conversation around the post might be about.  They were just throwing in their thoughts, which were a mix of positive and negative, and then lots of arguing between those posting with different viewpoints.

My revision of the song, and my essay on it, both generated controversy, and therefore attention, but less than the post where I shared the original song.  Of the hundreds of people who commented on multiple platforms, many liked my version of the song, and my essay about it, and many others expressed horror at my profound ignorance, and inability to recognize a fascist when I see one.  Others expressed horror that I could possibly post a link to a song that I only heard once, and hadn't carefully read all the lyrics first.

My interpretation of the song was roundly rejected by this crowd, who are all convinced that the songwriter couldn't possibly just mean what he says, but every line must be some kind of code for a longing for the good old days of the Antebellum South.  In order to buttress their arguments, some of these folks looked through Anthony's prior activity on YouTube, and discovered documentaries he had saved on a playlist that he shouldn't have.  A random guy in Virginia creating a playlist on his YouTube account, we are to believe, must mean he is promoting all the content on any of the documentaries he's got in there.

He is a "grown man," one commenter informed me, who knows what he's doing, and is aware of every alleged racist dogwhistle contained in his poetry.  He is, I was informed, a tool of the right.  Had I not read what other leftists had written about him and his song, before I dared to share my own opinion of it?  Had I not consulted the gatekeepers of history to analyze his lyrics from the right vantage point of settler-colonialism, approved by PBS and IGD?

He is a tool of the right, many agreed.  We should just let them have him, then, and condemn him as a racist who also hates people on welfare and dreams of a return of the Confederacy.  His other songs and his life experiences are irrelevant, but his viewing history on YouTube matters, and defines his politics, along with the bleakest possible interpretation of any line of this song.

Not to overstate the negative reactions -- once again, a large number of reactions and comments, and certainly the most eloquent ones, were very supportive.  Many had a favorable impression of Anthony, though they shared my feelings about those lines I updated.  Many also thought the basic orientation of embracing this brilliant new discovery, and emphasizing the overwhelming positives involved, made lots of sense.

The numbers of people expressing very different views from those, however, were significant, across the platforms.  What I find among this broad element of the social media universe that is most disturbing is the readiness so many people have to seek flaws and then reject people completely based on one of them.  The tendency towards exclusion, towards blocking, towards purging, is overwhelming, while those calling for solidarity and finding common ground are literally reviled as fascists, or at best, unwitting tools of fascists.

If only the time and place were not the one it is.  If only I could wake up and it not be true.  But it is.  I can't provide an example of what a movement musician does, because I can't afford to tour in this country anymore.  Pete Seeger died a long time ago, and no one today has the pleasure of getting a movement-recruiting phone call from him.  Instead, we can all just shout past each other on Facebook and Reddit.  It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to.