<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold; ">As Woody Turns 100, We Protest Too Little</span></div><div><p class="txtauthor">By Lawrence Downes, The New York Times</p><p class="date">19 August 12</p><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p><img src="http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn-P.jpg" border="0">oor
Woody. The life and music of America's great hobo prophet, its Dust
Bowl balladeer, boiled down to this: He brought attention to the
critical issues of his day.</p><p class="indent">Maybe that's what happens to dissidents who are dead
long enough. They are reborn for folk tales and children's books and PBS
pledge drives. They become safe enough for the Postal Service. "For a
man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a
stunning defeat," Arlo Guthrie said in 1998, when his father was put on a
32-cent stamp.</p><p class="indent">Will Kaufman's book "<a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/65gpr5rm9780252036026.html" target="_blank">Woody Guthrie, American Radical</a>"
tried to set the record straight last year. The sentimental softening
and warping of Woody's reputation began early, even as he was dying, in
the 1960s. But under the saintly folk hero has always been an angry
vigilante - a fascist-hating, Communist-sympathizing rabble-rouser who
liked to eviscerate his targets, sometimes with violent imagery. He was a
man of many contradictions, but he was always against the rich and on
the side of the oppressed.... </p><div><br></div></div><div>continues >>>> <a href="http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13004-as-woody-turns-100-we-protest-too-little">http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13004-as-woody-turns-100-we-protest-too-little</a></div><div><br></div></body></html>