Country Music is Pro-Israel, When Being Pro-Israel Is Uncool

Ron Coleman of Dean's World provides a gratifying roundup of an almost unforeseeable pop culture event.  Thousands of country music fans yesterday, at the 2006 Hannity Freedom Concert in Jackson, New Jersey, broke into near-spontaneous chants of "Go Israel! Go Israel!" Comments Coleman:

This wasn't Hadassah, or the American Jewish Committee. This was mostly non-Jewish, American conservatives. They have taken up the cause of Israel as their own. It is visceral to them.

On the other hand, it's no surprise that it was a country music crowd -- who'd paid to see  headliners Hank Williams, Jr., Lee Greenwood, and Sara Evans -- that belted out such righteous cheers, especially since the Hannity Freedom Concert donates its proceeds to fund scholarships for children of injured and killed American servicemen.

What's not news, of course, is that this red-blooded American philosemitism is a marked contrast to the less-than-optimistic, left-leaning, rust-belt populism that rock stars typically dish out.  Just this week in Las Vegas John Cougar Mellencamp ruffled fellow Indiana native Dan Quayle's feathers when on stage he let drop an anti-Bush comment, prompting the former vice-president to get up and leave in the middle of the show. Also catching my notice is Bruce Springsteen's latest CD, a splotchy, sepia-saturated homage to Communist folk-starlet Pete Seeger, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.

This wildly exaggerated title is -- to those who know better -- pure provocation. Overcome what, Bruce? Barriers to organizing labor? Done. Jim Crow discrimination? Check. Ending Losing the Vietnam War? Got that one. (No, no, we can't take that away from you.) So, what's behind the folk kick?

In "America's Most Successful Communist" (a must-read article, IMHO), Howard Husock demonstrates Pete Seeger's capital importance in popularizing folk music, but at the price of injecting the otherwise apolitical genre with massive doses of Popular Front-style Communist Party politics. Seeger had joined the Party just months after Pearl Harbor. He hit the road for its 1948 Progressive Party puppet presidential candidate Henry Wallace, and in the 50s he defied a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena. By the 60s, he was poised to poison American popular music with idealistic anthems such as "If I Had a Hammer," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and "Turn, Turn, Turn." Pete Seeger was a soft-selling Stalinist patriarch who sired musical icons Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, then in the next generation Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.  These set the stage for the following generation's anti-establishment, multi-millionaire legends John Lennon and "The Boss," Bruce Springsteen.

Yet a cynical undertow, Husock argues, drags down their ideologically-freighted, folk-derived idealism, whether of the world-citizen, ex-pat variety (as with Lennon) or of the regional, rust-belt populist kind (as with Springsteen). I appreciate him tapping one of our best skeptics of "progress," the novelist V.S. Naipaul, for an illustrative quote:

You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless . . . you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. [from Naipaul's A Bend in the River]

This promotional video of Springsteen's version of "John Henry" which accompanies the CD's release provides a number of clues to that effect. There's Springsteen playing his part in a lumberjacky, plaid flannel shirt, with encroaching crow's feet, grizzled soul patch, and gleaming dental work to boot. Then there's his banjo-strumming, fiddling, bass-plucking back-up band, none of whom, I bet, ever swung a hammer in their lives. Not for a paycheck, anyway. Their callouses are on their fingertips, not on the meaty palms of their hands. Instead of "O brother, where art thou?," they make me think, "Oh, brother!" But why should I be made to feel any queasy discomfort when listening to a great American folk song?

The simple history behind this mystery is that by the 60s, as a force to be reckoned with in American politics the Communist Party was dead -- but its agenda lived on. It lives on today, both misleading and directionless, in cultural vehicles like Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. No wonder that in its current packaging The Boss's gritty-pitched, common-man moralism offers the record-buying public just a preachy and starry-eyed skepticism. Fortunately, as evidenced at yesterday's Hannity Freedom Concert, such skepticism is easily drowned out by the unabashed patriotism which runs though the American heartland and which doesn't miss a beat when it comes to taking sides with the the world's most righteous nation in the global war on Islamofascism, Israel.

Update (7/22, PM): After watching the "John Henry" promotional video, click over to YouTube and treat yourself to a live Lynyrd Skynyrd performance of "Sweet Home Alabama." Now, there're some people breaking a sweat in a hot sun.

Update #2 (7/22, PM): Atlas, who continues to set the pace for this yet-to-be-properly-named (and more importantly, -won) -war links in "Islamic Guernica in Spain" to an article from Ynet that will make your sangre boil. Just in case you had any doubts about how exceedingly uncool it is in Spain these days to be pro-Israel. . . .

Comments

[Lao Hu]

I know I'm reading a good post when I have to slow down and go back.

Thanks for deciphering various parts of the music world to which I will never pay the slightest attention.

[Jeremayakovka]

I was raised on Seeger's music, had some of his songs memorized, saw him and Arlo Guthrie live in concert, and heard them perform the anti-Vietnam ballad, "Alice's Restaurant." I also went to the same summer camp that Seeger did (many decades after him).

[Oceanguy]

Just remove the colon from the Springsteen Title.

[JMK]

haha! Took a second-and-a-half, but I got it!

[lonni]

i am so sorry you've gone to the truth-distorting right.

[JMK]

I'm so sorry you haven't introduced yourself so I can know who, in truth, you are.

[JMK]

Gentle Readers,
Whoever "lonni" is, the email s/he left is not functional. So unfortunately I can't properly engage him/her further.

A mere troll? Ex-friend? Spurned lover?

All I've got to say, "lonni", is that Ronald Reagan didn't register Republican until age 52. I registered at age 35. So -- look out!

[Mick]

A superb critique of the Left's successful strategy of wrapping their political agenda in the siren songs of folk and pop; thus hitting our spoiled, rebellious and politically naive youth right between the ears with a velvet hammer and sickle.

From what I can tell, most of them never knew what hit them. Many, in fact, to this day, bear an eerie resemblance to the pod people.

A classic, J. I'm linking to this on my site.

[JMK-II]

I'm sorry I missed this one earlier on, Jere and I'm glad Mick Brady linked to it (I saw it perusing his site).

It's telling that Lonni wouldn't engage you to defend his/her positions, but sadly that's entirely typical and expected.

The same people who today want to throw Israel (our only reliable ally in the Mideast) under the bus, because "it makes the Islamo-fascists angry," are the same people who embrace a fetid dependancy ideology (slavery to the state) ostensibly because "freedom is too hard."