The Big Fool

The Ogre in the Oval leads us through the Age of Corona. He is now telling us that he wants us to go back to work by Easter, an arbitrary deadline that could make the first syllable of “deadline” the literal result.

Watching all this, I was reminded of an incident from over 50 years ago – Pete Seeger on the Smothers Brothers Show.

In 1968, in the midst of anti-Vietnam protest, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was one of the most popular shows on TV. This was an era where sitcom married couples had to have twin beds and mention of a bathroom, let alone a penis, would bring gasps. The Brothers, though, reveled in battling with the CBS network executives over how far they could push the sexual and political envelope. 

On one show, a skit that lampooned President Johnson so upset LBJ that he picked up his White House phone at three in the morning and complained to the founder of CBS, William Paley. Any reading about LBJ makes it a good bet that when he complained at three a.m., he wasn’t exactly calm. Eventually, of course, all this eventually got the Smothers Brothers fired.

Pete Seeger, as I’m sure you all know, was an icon of the folk music movement. Linked with legends like Woody Guthrie, his tunes, then called “protest songs,” were a large part of the soundtrack of the left for five decades. In the 1950’s, he was blacklisted as a communist. So, obviously, Mr. Seeger wasn’t exactly CBS’s idea of the perfect guest star. On the other hand, to the Smothers Brothers, he was exactly that.

Money talking as loudly then as it does now, in 1968, because the Smothers show was bringing in boatloads of cash, the Brothers had the power to get what they wanted. Seeger was booked. 

He sang a song called, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Seeger had written it earlier that year after seeing films of American soldiers wading through a deep river in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta. It tells the story of a platoon ordered by a foolish officer to slog through a mud river that is too deep to cross. The officer dies. The platoon saves itself by ignoring his orders.

The final verse goes like this:

Waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on

Waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to push on

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

After the show was taped, the network ran scared. They erased the song from the tape and aired the show without it.

We have a different media environment now, thank goodness. There are places where political positions, some reasonable and some incomprehensible, are free to be broadcast. We have our satirists and protesters – the Daily Show, the late-night shows, Full Frontal and others.  But, we find ourselves waist deep in the big muddy again, and, again, the big fool says to push on.

What we need again are our Pete Seegers. Music, somehow infiltrates our souls more completely than monologues. Could the “Trump Base” be penetrated by a scathing lyric and a strumming guitar much more effectively than from an Op-Ed? 

The platoon in Pete Seeger’s song was saved when their big fool went away. We have our chance in November. We can’t blow it. The mud is too deep.