Dana Goldstein

In Defense of Pete Seeger

Reason's Nick Gillepsie isn't happy about Pete Seeger's participation in yesterday's We Are One inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial, writing about Seeger's Marxist past and initial opposition to American engagement in World War II. (An erroneous position, I might add, held on both the left and the right at the time, including by some in Congress). Seeger changed his mind when the Soviet Union was invaded. Of course, as a libertarian, Gillepsie takes offense at this particular verse from the song Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed yesterday, Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land:"

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there. And that sign said - private property. But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!

I'm going to defend Pete Seeger, and not just because I think his music is classic -- how can you not love "If I Had a Hammer?" It probably won't shock you to learn that I attended Jewish sleep-away camp in the Catskills for several summers as a kid. This was not fancy camp with horseback riding and Olympic-sized swimming pools. It was more like hippie camp, with daily guitar sing-alongs and mandatory early morning swimming in a frigid lake. Every Saturday afternoon counselors led us on hikes into the woods, and on one such trip, a group got lost. About 20 pre-pubescent campers and their terrified teenage counselors wandered right onto the private property of American folk music legend Pete Seeger, who invited everybody in, served the kids cookies and milk, and played some guitar for them. The camp sent vans to Seeger's house to pick the kids up, and when they returned that evening, they were just delighted with their adventure. Later in the summer, Seeger visited camp to perform for us, something he did every year.

So yeah. Pete Seeger's politics may not always have been the most sophisticated, but his music is wonderful and he lives out his ideals. As you can see from the video above, he certainly looked thrilled yesterday to be participating, at the age of 89, in the inauguration of the nation's first black president.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Any Ani Fans Out There?

Ani Difranco's new retrospective album, Canon, will bring you back to those formative moments when her music was just everything, you know? She's going back out on tour this fall and winter less than a year after the birth of her daughter. Way to get back out there, Ani! I'll be psyched to see her in D.C. in November.

Check out the new versions of "Both Hands" and "Overlap."

Do I Actually Agree With David Brooks?

That's what Reihan Salam of The American Scene claims here, in a very smart and dense post that I will attempt to respond to at least in part.

First of all, an admission: I actually have a soft spot for Brooks. I heard him speak at Brown when I was a student there, and he entertained an audience of several hundred with a fast-paced talk combining social observations with information gleaned from meaty, contemporary sociology and political science. After the talk, I thought Brooks was perhaps better suited to this freer format, in which his pop culture references took the back seat to his obviously considerable grasp of history and contemporary work.

It was fun to see that Brooks missed the fact that the young pop stars he held up as evidence of moral failure were actually married, striving themselves to live out a "traditional" ideal. But I didn't point this out just for laughs. Rather, the youthful marriages of people like Pink and Avril Lavigne, or even Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, are just as powerful of a cultural influence on young women as the lyrics of songs, if not more so. Fairly tale weddings and virgin brides are still very much held up as the gold standard in a country where millions of school children sit through abstinence-only education, but 95 percent of us have premarital sex anyhow. Young women are caught between a rock and a hard place. It's tough to read a column like Brooks' because young men are hardly ever subject to this same hand-wringing about sexual values. Boys will be boys, right?

Reihan suggests I devalue non-market labor ("homemaking") by seeing progress in women's emancipation from responsibility for the domestic sphere. He describes one of my favorite political philosophers, Susan Moller Okin as a "maternalist" who just wanted to see women's domestic labor better appreciated in the public sphere. This I have to take issue with. Okin believed passionately in the idea of two-income families, meaning two adults engaged with the public marketplace and equally dividing domestic responsibilities. In her wonderful Justice, Gender, and the Family, Okin suggests a number of practical ways to incentivize work for women, such as high quality government child care, health care, and the like. But for women who persist in choosing a "traditional" stay-at-home role, Okin proposes mandatory 50/50 income sharing, in two separate bank accounts, between a working spouse and a stay-at-home spouse. She endorses such a radical intervention into the "private sphere" because she accepts that domestic labor is not and likely never will be as highly valued as marketplace labor. This is because an individual divorced from the market economy will have a very hard time gaining political or cultural influence in our profit-driven system.

So while I might agree with David Brooks that stable homes are good for kids, gay marriage should be legal, and our society doesn't do enough to support families, I think I'll continue to disagree with his method of lighting a fire. Angry women, decades of dating, and premarital sex don't scare me. I don't think they are evidence of cultural malaise. Rather, they're signs of progress: Young people today are waiting longer and preparing themselves better to make some very tough decisions about who to love, when to reproduce, and what to do with their lives. 

I've Figured It Out!

David Brooks' real problem with Pink must stem from her awesome song, "Dear Mr. President." Sample lyric: "Let me tell you about hard work/Minimum wage with a baby on the way/Let me tell you about hard work/Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away/Let me tell you about hard work/Building your bed out of a cardboard box."

Pop Music and Matrimony

Over at TAPPED, I look at this strange David Brooks column, which criticizes female pop stars such as Avril Lavigne and Pink for angry lyrics that perpetuate scary ideas. You know, like women should be independent from men, deserve not to be cheated on, and shouldn't have their asses grabbed (non-censensually) at bars. Brooks believes Avril and Pink are promoting an ideology hostile to marriage, at least before the age of 30.

News-flash: Pink, 28, is married. So is Avril, 22.

Like Sleater-Kinney?

Check out the new album from the Mary Timony Band.

Independence Day

I was lucky to watch the Macy's fireworks tonight from a rooftop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn that just happened to have a view. And even luckier, I was in the company of friends of friends visiting from foreign countries who were truly wowed by New York City and our celebration. So if you'll pardon me taking a brief ride in the way back machine, here are lyrics to Ani Difranco's "Indendence Day," a song I returned to today after many years, and which seemed appropriate for July 4, 2007:

We drove the car
To the top of the parking ramp
Fourth of July
Sat out on the hood
With a couple of warm beers
And watched the fireworks
Explode in the sky
There was an exodus of birds from the trees
Cuz they didn't know
We were only pretending
And the people all looked up and looked pleased
And the birds flew around
Like the whole world was ending

I don't think war is noble

And I don't like to think love is like war

But I got a big hot cherry bomb
And I wanna slip it through the mail slot
Of your front door
You can't leave me here
I got your back now
You'd better have mine
Cuz you say the coast is clear
But you say that all the time