[Occupymendocino] As Woody turns 100, we protest too little.

[Richard Karch]

As Woody Turns 100, We Protest Too Little
By Lawrence Downes, The New York Times

19 August 12

 
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.

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.

Will Kaufman's book "Woody Guthrie, American Radical" 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....  


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