The Undocumented Mark Steyn (36 page)

Giving him a Kennedy Center Honor a decade or so back, President Clinton hailed ol’ Pete as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them,” which is one way of putting it. You can’t help noticing, though, that it’s all the documentaries and honors ceremonies and lifetime-achievement tributes to Mr. Seeger that seem to find certain things “inconvenient.”
The Washington Post
’s Style section, with its usual sly élan, hailed him as America’s “best-loved Commie”—which I think translates as “Okay, so the genial old coot spent a lifetime shilling for totalitarian murderers, but only uptight Republican squares would be boorish enough to dwell on it.”

Anyway, in
The Sun
, Mr. Radosh, a former banjo pupil of the great man, did dwell on it, and a few weeks later got a letter in response. “I think you’re right,” wrote Pete. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” And he enclosed a new song he’d composed:

         
I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe

         
He ruled with an iron hand

         
He put an end to the dreams

         
Of so many in every land

         
He had a chance to make

         
A brand new start for the human race

         
Instead he set it back

         
Right in the same nasty place

         
I got the Big Joe Blues

         
(Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast)

         
I got the Big Joe Blues

         
(Do this job, no questions asked)

         
I got the Big Joe Blues . . .

It’s heartening to see that age (he’s now eighty-eight) hasn’t withered Seeger’s unerring instinct for bum rhymes (“fast/asked”). Still, Ron Radosh was thrilled that, just fifty-four years after the old brute’s death, a mere three-quarters of a century after the purges and show trials, the old protest singer
had finally got around to protesting Stalin, albeit somewhat evasively: He put the human race “right in the same nasty place”? Sorry, not good enough. Stalin created whole new degrees of nastiness.

But, given that Seeger got the two great conflicts of the twentieth century wrong (in 1940, he was anti-war and singing “Wendell Willkie and Franklin D / Both agree on killing me”), it’s a start. I can’t wait for his anti-Osama LP circa 2078.

Mr. Seeger has a song called “Treblinka,” because he thinks it’s important that we “never forget.” But wouldn’t it be better if we were hip to it before it snowballed into one of those things we had to remember not to forget? Would it kill the icons of the left just for once to be on the right side at the time? America has no “best-loved Nazi” or “best-loved Fascist” or even “best-loved Republican,” but its best-loved Stalinist stooge is hailed in his dotage as a secular saint who’s spent his life “singing for peace.”

He sang for “peace” when he opposed the fascistic arms-lobby stooge Roosevelt and imperialist Britain, and he sang for “peace” when he attacked the Cold War paranoiac Truman, and he kept on singing for “peace” no matter how many millions died and millions more had to live in bondage, and, while that may seem agreeably peaceful when you’re singing “If I Had a Hammer” in Ann Arbor, it’s not if you’re on the sharp end of the deal thousands of miles away.

Explaining how Stalin had “put an end to the dreams” of a Communist utopia, Seeger told Ron Radosh that he’d underestimated “how the majority of the human race has faith in violence.” But that isn’t true, is it? Very few of us are violent. Those who order the killings are few in number, and those who carry them out aren’t significantly numerous. But those willing to string along and those too fainthearted to object and those who just want to keep their heads down and wait for things to blow over are numbered in the millions. And so are those many miles away in the plump prosperous western democracies who don’t see why this or that dictator is their problem. One can perhaps understand the great shrug of indifference to distant monsters. It’s harder, though, to forgive the contemporary urge to celebrate it as a form of “idealism.”

James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: “‘If I Had a Hammer’? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.”

Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself. Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they’re dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear “This Land Is Your Land” in American grade schools, but not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The invention of the faux-childlike faux–folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture. Seeger’s hymn to the “senselessness” of all war, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” combined passivity with condescension—“When will they ever learn?”—and established the default mode of contemporary artistic “dissent.” Mr. Seeger’s ongoing veneration is indestructible. But at least we now know the answer to the question “When will
he
ever learn?”

At least half a century too late.

CHANGING HIS WORDS

The National Post
, January 4, 2001

UNDOUBTEDLY
,
THE HIGHLIGHT
of New Year’s Eve was the first performance of the new Russian national anthem, which is the old Soviet anthem but with new words. What impressed me most about the new lyrics was the author, Sergei Mikhalkov. The same guy who wrote the old lyrics! And the lyrics for the version before that!

Comrade Mikhalkov’s first shot at the national anthem was in 1943, when he wrote it as a paean to his then mentor: “Great Stalin raised us to be loyal to the people / To labor and great exploits he inspired us.”

But Stalin died, and Khrushchev had him airbrushed out of the people’s iconography. So Mikhalkov was told to write some new words. Wary of hymning any more here-today-gone-tomorrow dictators, the versatile comrade confined himself to rhapsodizing about the more general virtues of Communism:

         
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free

         
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong

         
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people

         
To Communism’s triumph lead us on!

But times change more often than you think. So, when Vladimir Putin said Russia needed yet another rewrite, the eighty-seven-year-old Mikhalkov did his duty. After the “My kind of guy, Joe Stalin is” version and the “Commie, fly with me” version, Mikhalkov had no problem rustling up another set of
verses for the “new” Russia. Let’s see: no passing strongmen, no explicit political philosophy, best to stick to the lie of the land. . . .

         
Be glorious, our country!

         
We are proud of you!

         
From the southern seas to the polar north

         
Our forests and fields spread

         
You are unique in the world, inimitable. . . .

I’ll tell you who’s uniquely inimitable: Comrade Sergei. What a survivor! He could do an entire “And then I wrote . . .” evening with just the one song: “And now Sergei Mikhalkov performs a medley of his hit.” Is there no subject he can’t set to that tune? Go on, give him a call. “Hey, Sergei, love that melody! But I’m opening in Vegas and I’d love a couple of topical verses about Hillary’s new book deal.”

The wily old thing popped up on state television last week, and I thought we might get a little insight into his songwriting methods: “You know, when people ask, ‘What comes first? The words or the music?’ I always say: the regime!” But, instead, the Berlin of the Bolsheviks waxed philosophical: “The country is now different,” he shrugged. “Russia has moved along its own path.” He insisted he didn’t miss his earlier lyrics: This was one red who ain’t singing the blues. “What I have written now is very close to my heart. I wrote what I believe.” Really? Pinned to his lapel was one of his four Orders of Lenin.

His first set of lyrics—the Stalin one—was dismissed by a famous Russian actor as “shit.”

“So what?” said Mikhalkov. “When they play it, you’ll still have to stand up.”

The second version—the post-Stalin one—was dismissed by the dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko as “feeble.”

“Go home and learn it,” Mikhalkov said.

And now we have the third version, a lyric for the ages: “Loyalty to the Fatherland gives us strength. . . .” I suppose so, if you’re as boundlessly flexible
as Comrade Mikhalkov. . . . “Loyalty to the Fatherland gives us strength! / Thus it was, it is, and always shall be!”

Well, at least for a year or two.

MOON RIVER AND ME

Maclean’s
, November 23, 2009

         
We’re after the same rainbow’s end

         
Waiting round the bend

         
My huckleberry friend

         
Moon River and me . . .

WHERE IS MOON RIVER
? Everywhere and nowhere. But, if you had to pin it down, you’d find it meandering at least metaphorically somewhere in the neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. At one point, the town’s most celebrated musical emissary was Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah. But then the American Songbook’s huckleberry friend showed up: John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah one hundred years ago, November 18, 1909. The family home, the Mercer House, is the setting for the most famous book written about Savannah,
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, and Clint Eastwood’s film made the connection even more explicit with an all-Mercer soundtrack: Kevin Spacey singing “That Old Black Magic,” k. d. lang “Skylark,” Diana Krall “Midnight Sun,” and Clint himself taking a respectable thwack at “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

Johnny Mercer didn’t linger in Savannah—as a teenager he stowed away on a ship to New York and the bright lights—but a lot of Savannah lingered in him. To mark his centenary, Knopf has produced the latest in its series of lavish, handsome coffee-table
Complete Lyrics
. Mercer’s predecessors in the set are Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein—the Broadway guys who wrote songs for characters and plots. Insofar as there are famous lyric-writers, that’s who they are: Cole Porter “punishing the parquet” (in his words) as he paces his penthouse polishing
the polysyllables for a sophisticated triple-rhymed sixth chorus in the second act name-dropping all his Park Avenue pals. Mercer never had a real Broadway hit, but he’s the link between New York’s songwriting royalty and a more rural tradition. Like Hart and Gershwin, he was a fan of W. S. Gilbert and the Savoy Operas. Unlike them, he also had an eye for the great American landscape west of the Hudson River:

         
From Natchez to Mobile

         
From Memphis to St. Joe

         
Wherever the four winds blow

         
I been in some big towns

         
An’ heard me some big talk

         
But there is one thing I know . . .

“Blues in the Night” was written for some nothing film in 1941 that didn’t even know what it had. Harold Arlen’s tune is less a twelve-bar blues than a fifty-eight-bar blues aria, its harmony full of plaintive lonesome sevenths, and Mercer’s lyric eschews the blues device of repetition for a kind of lightly worn vernacular poetry:

         
Now the rain’s a-fallin’

         
Hear the train a-callin’

         
Whoo-ee!

         
(My mama done tol’ me)

         
Hear that lonesome whistle

         
Blowin’ cross the trestle

         
Whoo-ee!

         
(My mama done tol’ me. . . .)

He loved trains, hated planes. So he wrote great train songs: “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”; “(I took a trip on a train and) I Thought
about You”
;
“And you see Laura / On a train that is passing through. . . .” Ira Gershwin or Larry Hart would never have heard the music in that “lonesome whistle.” For one thing, it doesn’t even rhyme with “trestle.” It just fits in some strange organic way you can’t precisely define. That’s how he approached the job: music suggests a sound, a sound suggests certain syllables, and eventually a word or a thought will emerge and you’re in business.