On August 6, that pseudo-conservative satirist Stephen Colbert
utterly failed to pretend to play a right-winger on TV. Colbert invited
on "legendary" radical-left folk singer Pete Seeger and treated him with
deep reverence.
"It's an honor to have you on. You are a living
legend. You are a giant. It's like having Paul Bunyan or Johnny
Appleseed on," he oozed. This is the same sultan of snark that exudes
zero reverence for his allegedly Catholic beliefs, calling himself the
"Pope of basic cable" as he has rudely joked that Cardinal Timothy Dolan
uses Viagra and mocked Pope Benedict for having "the face of an
angel...that got caught in a food dehydrator."
After
a six-minute interview, Colbert grew even more reverent as he closed
out the show by announcing with a solemn face that the 93-year-old
"legend" Seeger would now sing a folk song. There was no irony as this
leftist sang that "I know that you who hear my singing / Could make
those freedom bells go ringing." That's the pinnacle of the “anti-war”
agenda, "freedom"?
Behind
Seeger was a blown-up image of his banjo head, which carries the words,
"This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender."
That
sounds like a bad joke when you consider this is Comedy Central, where
hate and insults of everything Americans hold dear is what makes their
machine rumble. So it's downright strange when they grow deeply reverent
of anyone, as they did with Seeger.
After the gooey,
you're-a-giant introduction, the only real emergence of Colbert's
pseudo-conservative idiot character came when Seeger openly proclaimed
"I was a member of the Communist Party for a few years." Colbert
insisted: "I'm getting to that. In 1955, you refused to testify before
the House Un-American Activities Committee. Would you like to name names
now? I'll start. Pete Seeger, I gave one, now you give one."
In
reality, Seeger unspooled his old tales about his radical father
without so much as blinking, following the advice Colbert apparently
gives every guest: "My character's an idiot. Your job is to set him
straight."
At the Huffington Post, a Seeger-adorer named Peter
Dreier advocated a campaign to nominate Seeger for Nobel Peace Prize,
which faltered previously. What it really needs to succeed? Colbert,
“now that Pete has graced his show with his presence...By heading a
campaign to get Pete Seeger the Nobel Peace Prize, Colbert would
actually demonstrate that the forces of social conscience can triumph,
against the odds."
Seeger is most often revered on the Left for
appearing on the Smothers Brothers comedy show on CBS in 1968 to sing
his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” It contained a very obvious
rhetorical knifing of President Johnson for being a moron to keep
American forces in Vietnam: “Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a tall
man'll be over his head, we're waist deep in the Big Muddy! And the big
fool says to push on!”
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
contains the same arrogance about the military-industrial complex
wasting our stupid soldiers: “Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to
graveyards every one / When will they ever learn?” Colbert could only
see this work as a hook for a joke about the song could be used as a
jingle by Miracle-Gro.
Seeger fanatics will declare, as one
Occupy Wall Street protester named Larry Manzino declared last October
to The New York Times, “He’s a guy who never caved, a guy who had
integrity, a guy who stood up and said no when he had to.” Seeger’s
clearly a man who always hated America at war. In 1940, he was singing,
"I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won't be safe till everybody's
dead." And: “Wendell Wilkie and Franklin D. / Both agree on killing me.”
Even FDR was a “big fool” in the “big muddy” when Hitler was on the
march.
Guess who wasn’t a “big fool” to Seeger? The writer
Ronald Radosh was delighted to discover in 2007 that Seeger had written a
song opposing Joseph Stalin. “I should have asked to see the gulags
when I was in [the] USSR,” he wrote to Radosh, but he had never written
against that inhumanity when it mattered. Instead, he wrote a tribute
song to Vietnamese communist dictator Ho Chi Minh.
Colbert
should have read Mark Steyn before booking (and slobbering over) Seeger.
The Washington Post, he wrote, “with its usual sly elan, 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.’”
Stephen Colbert is supposed to be that boorish
Republican. But he’s ignoring the historical reality alongside every
other Seeger-adoring left-wing whitewasher. They are big fools, indeed.