Firehose #127: And We Gazed Upon the Medals of Freedom Flashing

Also: Feel the Semiquincentennialmentum!

Jan 05, 2025

The above drawing to the right was produced, unbidden, by the pictured child, who had never ever (I swear!) glimpsed the above-left famous piece of art by Milton Glaser. Further, she drew this while the adults were listening in a separate room to various versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (Coco firmly favors The Byrds.) This means, as the Gypsy foretold, that y’all are cursed with another six weeks of Robert Zimmerman discourse…. And sure enough! As I was about to hit “send” on this posting, across the transom came a new Moynihan essay….

* So: Ol’ Hollywood talks about Hollywood in a new piece for The Free Press, “The Truth About Bob Dylan’s Fallout with Pete Seeger: The ’60s folk singers didn’t hate Dylan because he went electric, as ‘A Complete Unknown’ suggests. It was because he didn’t care about their lefty politics.” Even listeners who would rather plug their own fingers into the wall-socket rather than hear more Boomer-music talk might enjoy the commie-stuff from this excerpt:

[Pete] Seeger’s gentle cadence and friendly countenance are matched perfectly by Edward Norton, but viewers are left unaware that his anger toward Dylan could be divined from his slavish devotion to a particular strain of totalitarianism. Perhaps a line or two indicating that Seeger defended Joseph Stalin throughout the genocidal Ukrainian famine, the bloody purge trials, the antisemitic “Doctor’s Plot,” the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany, and their subsequent dismemberment of Poland.
In his memoir, Seeger half-heartedly apologized for supporting Stalin, who he had variously called a “heavy-handed,” “hard driving” leader who engaged in an “awful lot of rough stuff.” This was wrong, he acknowledged in 1993, amplifying the criticism only slightly, because he turned out to be “a supremely cruel misleader,” too. (Historian Ron Radosh, who took banjo lessons from Seeger and maintained a contentious friendship with him over the years, criticized his former mentor for singing about Nazi concentration camps but ignoring the Soviet gulag. After the Cold War ended, Seeger would ultimately concede the point to Radosh. “I think you were right,” he wrote in a 2007 letter, including in his letter the lyrics to a new anti-Stalin ballad. But he would never perform the song publicly.) […]
A few months after Newport, Seeger would leave the controversy behind, as he headed out on a tour of the Soviet Union.

* Did ya hear the one about the still-governing Joe Biden giving out 19 semi-controversial Presidential Medals of Freedom over the weekend to everyone from Bono to Magic Johnson to Mitt Romney’s long-dead dad? I thought it might be fun to link to some Fiftastic interactions with some of the recipients, starting with Kmele’s interview with Jane Goodall:

Bill Nye the Science Guy once came on The Independents … hoo, boy:

Hillary Clinton got a PMoF, too! I once wrote a Reason cover story on her, headlined “Hail to the Censor! Hillary Clinton’s long war on free speech.” And Moynihan back then talked about her (and other issues) on Real Time With Bill Maher along with such co-panelists as … Salman Rushdie!

And I’ve written a bunch over the years about George Soros, including “Open Season on ‘Open Society,’” (2003), “Temporary Doves” (2004), “Soros to Vanquish Whatever Market Fundamentalists He Can Still Find” (2009), “Glenn Beck's Ridiculous Misreading of George Soros Might Not Be As Inappropriate As Busting a 14-Year-Old's Balls for How He Behaved During the Holocaust, But It Still Sets Back the Cause of Human Understanding,” (2010), “Politics Has Made George Soros Dumber” (2011), “Why the Right Loves to Hate George Soros” (2018), and plenty besides. I also apparently participated in, and do not at all remember, a 2010 BloggingHeads debate on Kochs vs. Soros with Matthew Yglesias….

* Was some spirited discussion in Episode #484 about the late James Earl Carter’s execrable March 4, 1989 New York Times op-Ed, “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult.” As I mentioned, the Western response to this Middle Eastern threat on liberalism was a key jumping off point for one of Fifdom’s favorite books, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, by Jonathan Rauch (veteran of #323). Reason made a cover story out of a Kindly Inquisitors excerpt in April 1993; here’s one key section:

The attack itself was not so very singular; fundamentalists have made a hobby of harassing the unorthodox for centuries. The surprise was that the reply from the liberal democracies was muttered and utterly incoherent. A long week of silence passed before President George Bush got around to saying, unimpressively, that the death threat was "deeply offensive."
In the end the Rushdie affair showed us graphically two things, one that we already knew and one that we did not know at all. What we already knew was that fundamentalism—and not just religious fundamentalism but any fundamentalist system for settling differences of opinion—is the enemy of free thought. More frightening was what we had not known: Western intellectuals did not have a clear answer to the challenge that Khomeini set before them.

* Also briefly mentioned at the top of #484 were my recent forays into Revolutionary War material. These include the highly-Coco-approved 2014-2017 AMC series Turn: Washington’s Spies; George C. Daughan’s 2016 Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence, and Robert Sullivan’s fun 2012 My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and the I-78. More recommendations, please! That Semiquincentennial ain’t gonna celebrate itself!

Semi-related? Bill Schulz (#79) celebrating an NYC bar-centennial:

* Let’s use that as an excuse to go early to our perhaps-prescient Comment of the Week, from FloppyFrog:

Oh my goodness “The Fifth Column Presents: Cargo Shorts History” better be a future project.

* Throw up a hand if you’re ready to hear about a different OK Boomer musical legend? Good: The latest Political Beats episode features a discussion about the 1961-1971 phase in the career of (mostly Little) Stevie Wonder, as broken down by the inimitable Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184).

* Was there really gonna be a national Dylan moment without the intervention of Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379)? Nah. Here the doctor of literature interviews political scientist Jeffrey Edward Green, author of the new book Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God: