The stories Seeger tells are spellbinding, full of the stuff of a life lived in playful improvisatory protest against stupid waste and stubborn injustice, and full of the kind of courage and commonsense that defies the obscenity of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) on the First Amendment ground of freedom of association; that amends the closing cadence of Dorothy's "Over the Rainbow" with "why can't you and I?" thus transforming a wistful individualist pining for escape into a hymn for progressive utopian solidarity; that protests Vietnam on Prime Time television with the song of a soldier mired in the deep muddy (a gesture still all too painfully apt); that changes the "will" to the more resonant "shall overcome" in a song sung one day to Dr. King...
And it was quite striking after an hour of wonderful stories like these when in closing Seeger turned to the discussion of technology and announced that in the midst of the world's palpable distress he was more hopeful than ever. Here's the passage I have in mind:
PETE SEEGER: On the other hand, these are exciting times. There's never been such as exciting times. And win, lose or draw, it's going to be very, very exciting. And I applaud what you are doing. I think what Democracy Now! is doing is just fantastic. This couldn't have been done half a century ago, could not have been done.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
PETE SEEGER: Well, they didn't have the technology for it, I guess. So as I say, technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.
Now, it is very clear from the conversation that precedes it that Seeger doesn't mean by "technology" the slow accumulation of a technoscientific toypile like the one the corporate futurists promise us in ads for bland boxy indistinguishable cars and age-defying skin-creams slathered on seventeen year old cheekbones, the promise that the statisticians and bomb-builders will satisfy our wayward wants and some of our needs if only we patiently and passively accept our duties and their dole. No, he means by "technology" a creative collective appropriation of countless minute, modest, and sometimes monstrous knowledges and tools directed by education, agitation, and organization to democratic, sustainable, consensual, fair, expressive ends.
Seeger might seem a tricky technoprogressive icon, if it weren't for the appeal of tricksters for sensible technoprogressives. In his conversation with Goodman, he complicates somewhat the story I had heard that he protested Dylan's electrification of folk -- pointing out that others were doing the same already and that he was enthusiastic about the development, but that in Dylan's case, it seemed to him at any rate, the shift was made at the expense of lyrical intelligibility (which obviously would matter enormously to Seeger). Seeger famously likes to quote his father, saying, "Plagiarism is the basis of all culture," and together with his enthusiasm for the FLOSS (free-libre-open source) ethos of Democracy Now!, all this is a bracing embrace of the technoprogressive politics of copyfight, access to knowledge (a2k), and peer-to-peer (p2p) democratization. Nevertheless, he seems quite pleased to pay his taxes each year with proceeds from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," despite the fact that he notes he is at best a collaborator in the creation of a piece with deep roots in the creative commons and its fullest flowering in versions other than his own.
It is intriguing that he catalogues the damage of long-lived body before turning to the subject of the hopefulness he finds in this technoscientific age. A long-time crusader against catastrophic technologies like nuclear power, Seeger is no facile dupe for technophiliac hype. But he seems to share my own sense that digital democracy and medical self-determination hold out real hopes (as well, of course, as literally unprecedented dangers and obscenities) for human emancipation in our own era. Although I am skeptical of the rosy scenarios spun by many advocates of rejuvination medicine as they scout about for public grants and private investors, and although I am suspicious of the authoritarian cultural work that gets stealthed under cover of the denial of death, it is also true that I find it deeply moving to contemplate from the perspective of my own secular and social democratic conviction the possibly proximate prospect of an incomparably healthier and longer-lived humanity no longer bedeviled in its hopefulness and generosity by the intimate insidious closeness of pain, infirmity, and death. What will it mean to the song of a planetary human freedom to sing, with hopefulness rather than rue,
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
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