As a mathematician, I’ve spent my entire adult life surrounded by people who enjoy Tom Lehrer (and crossword puzzles and science fiction and NPR and boat shoes) far, far too much for my tastes, but the truth is, many of his songs are incredibly clever, and his live album is very funny. Ben Smith has a fantastic long piece on Leher today.
I had never thought of Lehrer as part of the pre-counterculture left, though I guess I should have given his popularity about professors emeriti. Apologies for the long excerpt, you should read the whole article:
But his left was the square, suit-wearing, high-culture left. His circle at Harvard included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the renowned historian, JFK biographer, and then-nominal chairman of the Cambridge chapter of Americans for Democratic Action. His political hero was Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, the man whom Richard Nixon damagingly dismissed as an “egghead.”
Stevenson’s losing battle marked the end of a political tradition, and also the beginning of the end of a kind of Ivy League liberal intellectualism’s place atop the Democratic Party. What was coming was the New Left and the counterculture, something whose aesthetics Lehrer couldn’t stand, even if their politics weren’t necessarily at odds.
“It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffeehouse or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on,” he deadpans in his introduction to the whiny “Folk Song Army” on That Was the Year That Was. “We are the folk song army / Everyone of us cares / We all hate poverty, war, and injustice / Unlike the rest of you squares.”
The New Left agreed with Lehrer on Vietnam. His last public performance, in fact, was on a fundraising tour for George McGovern in 1972. But the singer — who saw himself as “a liberal, one of the last” — felt less at home in the new Democratic Party. In the end, Stevenson’s party, and Lehrer’s, lost — and with it, at least to Lehrer’s mind, a prevailing sense of humor. “Things I once thought were funny are scary now,” he told People magazine in 1982. “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”
Cervantes
Lehrer.
Raven
“We advise you Viet Cong to get the hell out of here”!
ThresherK
Anyone else thinking what I was thinking when I saw that headline about a man of his age?
Schlemizel
I have loved Leher’s work since I first heard it in 1962. I broke down and bought the CD compilation of all his work and listen to bits from time to time, there is something in his twisted sense of humor that lightens my load. I think he is a liberal because he sees the absurdity of the world and the potential for disaster. But I am not surprised that he may not have been on board with the late ’60’s left, he was, after all, a Harvard educated, atomic project working mathematician who would be more comfortable with the NPR crowd. We can all be allies.
Schlemizel
@ThresherK:
Yes, I was afraid he had died. He is very old now & it will happen one day not far enough away. I will be very sad that day.
J.Ty
You don’t like sci-fi? I would not have guessed.
I’m a huge fan of the live one, That Was The Year That Was. Some of his other stuff can be good too but that one’s just a classic 60’s satire for me.
And yeah, you could have extended the title a bit to make it look less like he died? “It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise, as long as you don’t let ’em in your school” is a bit long I guess.
Suffern ACE
If the hippies weren’t so sanctimonious, we’d have solved all those problems that everyone agrees with? Someone must be favoring war, poverty, and dirty water. There are rooms full of them somewhere.
PurpleGirl
@ThresherK: Yes. And I went looking to see if any thing had happened to him. He is a part of my childhood — I watched him on TV. He’s one of the reasons my brain was warped to a liberal bent quite early.
Walker
I really miss Doctor Demento. That was a great radio show.
Chris
Blame it on growing up with all the stereotypes of the post-sixties: that would never have occurred to me either. Primarily because at this point, The Narrative pretty much holds Ivy League Liberal Intellectual Elites and Those Dirty Fucking Hippie College Students as being the same thing, at least that I’ve heard.
NotMax
Bzzt. Wrong. Make that 1998.
ThresherK
@PurpleGirl: Heh. Me, too.
And I got introduced to him in college during the Reagan era. By a deacon’s daughter, nonetheless, at a not-too-big, not-too-urbane private college.
Of course, when that passing does come to pass, part of me thinks this post’s headline would be the cheeky black humor he’d appreciate.
@Chris: During my colleging, in the Reagan 80s, I remember an MTV personality asking assorted MTV viewers in the street if they thought the “liberalism of the 60s was passe (my word), old fashioned”.
Nothing asked about what the teens of the 80s thought of the firehoses and police dogs and taillight-smashing “conservatism of the 60s”.
Roger Moore
Doesn’t that sum up a lot of Democratic disfunction in a single aside? Totebaggers can’t stand to admit that the DFHs are right, not because they disagree with the DFH goals but because they don’t like their aesthetics.
raven
@Roger Moore:
HEY DICK
Whatever you think of us is totally irrelevant
Both to us now and to you
We are the present
We are the future
You are the past
Pay your dues and get outta the way
‘Cause we’re not the way you used to be
When you were very young
We’re something new
We don’t quite know what it is
Or particularly care
We just do it – You gotta do it
Higgs Boson's Mate
See you a Lehrer and raise you a Biff Rose.
SiubhanDuinne
@ThresherK: I’ve been wondering for the past week or so why there’s suddenly such a rush of Lehrerism. Several YouTube clips of some of his classics have recently shown up on my Facebook feed, literally just in the past few days, and now this long read by Ben Smith (which I have not yet read, but will). I still have his original album, which I bought when it first came out, when I was in junior high or maybe younger (sometime in the 1950s, I believe). I think I could still sing every verse to every song on that album by heart. He’s a genius, although IMHO he never again quite measured up to the brilliance of “The Old Dope Peddler,” “The Hunting Song,” “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” “The Irish Ballad,” “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” and the inimitable “Lobachevsky.”
Chris
@Roger Moore:
I don’t know a lot about Lehrer, but that’s what occurred to me while reading the excerpt too.
Hippie punching, because we simply can’t endure the humiliation of admitting that they were right about everything.
Villago Delenda Est
@Suffern ACE:
There are auditoriums filled with them. Like in Tampa Bay a couple of Augusts ago.
The Dark Lord has many followers.
different-church-lady
@raven: So we set the world on FIRE-YAH!!!! ON FIRE-YAH!!!!
(Which, by the way, is one of my desert island tunes, in the sense that I’d willingly strand myself on a desert island if it guaranteed I’d never have to hear the damn thing again.)
Higgs Boson's Mate
@different-church-lady:
I am the god of hellfire.
Bob In Portland
That’s not my department.
About Christopher Simpson’s BLOWBACK: As the story of Andrija Artukovic, the high-ranking fascist Croatian who found refuge in the United States, and books by John Loftus, Howard Blum, and others tell us, a disgraceful chapter in U.S. Cold War history lies in the systematic use of Nazi and fascist war criminals to help the anti-Soviet aims of American intelligence and national security agencies. Germans and East Europeans were eagerly recruited into and rose to key positions in the Cold War crusade. Simpson’s careful researchwhich underscores the part of the Catholic Church and reveals the role of George Kennan in this policyraises profound questions for scholars, lawmakers, and citizens alike. Henry Steck, SUNY Coll. at Cortland
Believe it or not, things are happening in Ukraine this morning, although the MSM seems to be averting its eyes.
pete
Sure, Lehrer would punch hippies. And folkies. And hunters. And lovers and bankers and polluters and … he punched everyone. But it’s worth noting that during the years of Bush the Lesser, he did one interview (a rare event) in which he explained that he didn’t write snark anymore because “I don’t want to satirize them, I want to vaporize them.”
If you are not familiar with his oeuvre … YouTube has lots.
raven
@different-church-lady: I didn’t think it was from Mau Mau Amerikon!
The Raven on the Hill
I think quoting “Folk Song Army” as proof that Lehrer disliked the New Left is silly. Satirists sometimes satirize their own side. The old folkies were often part of, or connected with, the liberal establishment of the day. And, like the old folkies, Lehrer’s career began its end when rock emerged.
But Stevenson…what went down in the 1950s was the old American socialist and anarchist tradition. What did it in, of course, was the massive red scare of the 1950s. Then as now, fierce attacks were leveled at anyone even moderately left of center. They were of perhaps more effect—it was possible to blight someone’s life entirely by claiming a Communist connection.
To continue the parallel…the USSR led by Stalin was a terrifying enemy. While subversion was nowhere near as widespread as the 1950s right claimed, the 1930s CPUSA was funded by Moscow and shot through with Soviet agents. But the US left was never the subversive threat that the right of the period believed. The American left was far-flung and had a strong anarchist tradition—there was never much chance that the American left would fall in behind a Soviet-style revolution. Stalin discredited himself with most of the rank and file by making an alliance with Hitler. But the spiritual ancestors of our radical right—including the father of the Koch brothers—were afraid, and they mounted a massive defense. Stalin died in 1953, yet the USA made no effort to end the Cold War. It is hard for me to escape the sense that the Cold War might have ended during Khrushchev’s time, had the USA been willing.
Turning to the present, a strong effort has been made to turn Islam into the new threat. Again, the threat is less than imagined. Again, the USA makes huge and violent mistakes in response to the threat.
History repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The Raven on the Hill
@pete: “I don’t want to satirize them, I want to vaporize them.”
Leading to the thought that, if he had been born later, Lehrer would have been a punk rocker.
smintheus
It gets really tedious to be surrounded by people hanging on your every word, and even worse to have them waiting for you to say something witty and convinced that every single thing you say is some kind of joke. I wouldn’t be surprised is this was one of the main reasons Lehrer just decided he’d had enough of being the public funny man.
Elmo
@SiubhanDuinne:
Nothing beats the virtuosity of all the “-ility” words in “When You Are Old and Gray.”
An awful debility
Of lessened utility
And loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I’ll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability.
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of – futility.
So let’s act with agility
While we still have ability
For well soon reach senility
And lose the ability…
Chris
@The Raven on the Hill:
Yep. The economic hard left was killed in the fifties, and never came back. We’re worse off for it.
Jewish Steel
That was quite interesting. I thought the author’s “conclusion”*
was asinine. Ben Smith cannot imagine someone finding the pursuit of wealth and fame worthless. Kinda sad.
*is the three part essay the future of writing on the internet? i’d like to turn in my laptop now.
Keith G
Duh, just fucking duh!!
Next thread: The sun is warm.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elmo: Yes! Ranks right up there with William S. Gilbert’s finest (from me, that’s high praise, although I know there are some in these parts who have no use for G&S).
scav
I’ve a cetain fondness for his Electric Company ditties, and heard his other stuff as a callow child performed by hard-core folkies mixed in with old English and mining, etc songs, so any antagonism seems to have been one-way. Our Rabbits were Dying all over the Place at school right before the stuff was thrown into the Bay and ate for lunch in San Jose.
tybee
@raven:
blows against the empire
trollhattan
As a wee kid I knew Lehrer was a genius on listening to his cleverly crafted songs, even as most of the references whizzed on by, ungrasped–there was still enough to parrot to my uneddycated frients. Nichols and May and Bob Newhart were also revered for clever, topical, biting humor.
Comedy albums, what a concept.
Bro went to MIT when Lehrer taught there but never had the chance to take his class. Still regrets that.
Anoniminous
@Chris:
From the get-go through to ill-relevance the CPUSA was controlled by the New York organizations staffed and peopled by first or second generation immigrants who were altogether too enthralled by their points of origin and the Soviet Union*. As a result and despite all the prattle about “objective conditions” they never, in the words of Robert Sheer, “took the building of an indigenous popular radical organization as their main task.” When us New Lefties came along our stumbling attempts to do that, as evidenced by the Port Huron Statement, was stymied by in-fighting between SDS and its sponsoring organization the League for Industrial Democracy (essentially moribund by 1960) and then obliterated by the Viet Nam War and all the foo-foo that dragged along; the result was SDS didn’t do the hard work of building a indigenous popular radical organization either. When the SDS destroyed itself** nothing else has come along to provide the necessary structure and financing.
* The destruction of existing indigenous radical movements starting with the Abolitionists through to the Progressive Party, IWW, American Socialist Party, & etc. by a combination of government repression and the affects of the Bolshevik Revolution is another disheartening discussion.
** And a Good Thing, too. By 1968 the national leaders of the SDS were off in their own little La-La Fantasy Land. (Revolutionary Youth Movement my ass.)
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Roger Moore:
It cuts the other way just as strongly. One of the reasons I don’t hang around here as much as I used to is the constant denigration of people of moderate temperment whose main crime is that the just don’t want to be assholes.
pete
@The Raven on the Hill: Quite likely! This is a man whose sensibilities were formed in the 1940s, and wrote The Old Dope Peddlar in (IIRC) 1952. One suspects he would have been ahead of the curve in any era.
Fair Economist
It’s a pity he’s so private. Great as his songs are, there has to be a lot to the inner life of somebody so bright, perceptive, and talented. But we’ll never know it.
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yeah, it’s the communal mind or something. I saw an offhand reference about 2 weeks ago and felt compelled to spend a few hours Googling and Youtubing his work. And being amazed, of course, even though I’ve heard it all many times before.
jake the snake
DougJ, are you the world’s youngest curmudgeon? Your opening paragraph sounds like a lot “get off my lawn.”
What is wrong with boat shoes? ;-]
I am not that familiar with Tom Lehrer, and can’t do a crossword puzzle worth a shit, but I do like science fiction.
I was first radicalized by reading “The Space Merchants” at 12.
Raven on the Hill
@Anoniminous: And also the unions, which were one of the strongholds of the indigenous left, having been losing battles since 1948. I have a lot of quarrels with the Left, new and old, but the destruction of US unions was not their work.
Chris
@Anoniminous:
I was thinking less of the CPUSA, and more of movements that were more popular and more solidly implanted. As noted above, Bolshevism was pretty much a non-starter in the U.S. – socialists and anarchists went a lot farther. But I was thinking more of things like the populist movements of William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long, which whatever they might’ve been socially, were fairly radical when it came to economics; or the more radical parts of the labor movement, like the people the U.S. Army was called out against at the Battle of Blair Mountain (as Raven points out, the unions were key).
Visceral
@Roger Moore: Because it’s not just about politics. It’s also about identity, values, lifestyles, etc. The right has that figured out. Yuppies aren’t going to stop being yuppies any more than rednecks are going to stop being rednecks and while both are open to a better way of doing the same old thing, they’ll resist any attempt to fundamentally change the way they live.
The Raven on the Hill
@Chris: what about Eugene V. Debs, labor union leader, socialist, and politician? He won 6% of the votes in the 1912 Presidential election. Imprisoned under the Espionage Act in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson, he ran for President in 1920, getting nearly a million votes as a write-in candidate, some 3.4% of the votes cast in that election.