If I Had a Hammer:
I was burned out from exhaustion,
buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes
and blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile,
ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give ya
shelter from the storm."
-Bob Dylan, Shelter From The Storm
"If I had said what Boxer said about a black woman secretary of state in a Democratic administration I'd have a pack of libs calling for my head."
-Tony Snow, White House Press SecretaryQ That's the impression you're giving from the podium.
MR. SNOW: I am not giving - when we are talking about investigations that could lead to capital prosecutions, nobody is singing "Kumbaya." And when you have --
Q And that's not what I referring to now, either, and you know that.
MR. SNOW: And when you have General Casey going in and trying to brief a Prime Minister, nobody is singing "Kumbaya." You know what they're saying? They're saying, let's figure out what the facts are and let's work together to secure peace.
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Snow:
But I think it is important to remind people that there is an ongoing war on terror, that the United States is determined to make sure that democracy succeeds in Iraq; that the President does support Prime Minister Maliki, that he's happy to see the Prime Minister is busy putting the finishing touches on a government, that he's shown, in the initial stages, the kind of toughness and character that are essential to leadership.
So if you're going to hear about Iraq - yes, you'll be hearing about it, and I think you'll be hearing good and bad, because it is - I think Jim was on to something. If you try to sort of "Kumbaya" about what's going on -- people know it's a war. It's tough. And you can't play "Kumbaya." What you have to do is to take on the harder and more practical business of winning a war and securing a democracy.
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White House press secretary Tony Snow said Bush's meetings with lawmakers were more than just window dressing.
He said, "The fact is, these meetings may not be happy-face, kumbaya, but they have been very constructive."
...Though originally the song was associated with unity and closeness, it is now usually referenced with ironic intent today.
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Kumbaya apparently originated with the Gullah, an African-American people living on the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia.
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...recent research has found that sometime between 1922 and 1931, members of an organization called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song from the South Carolina coast. Come By Yuh, as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the Creole dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Also, there is another version which was preserved on a wax cylinder in May 1936 by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of what became the American Folklife Center. Gordon discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing Come By Here with a group in Raiford, Fla. Various opinions on the issue can be found here. [1] The song enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960s, largely due to Joan Baez's 1962 recording of the song, and became associated with the Civil Rights Movement of that decade.
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Al Capp was a very popular cartoonist in mid-20th century America, he drew the comic strip Li'l Abner which appeared all over the country in the daily papers. He did a series in that strip in the 60's ridiculing Joan Baez, using a character called "Joanie Phonie". This was at a time when Joan Baez was an icon of the civil rights/anti-war movement.'Twas in another lifetime,
one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue
and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness,
a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you
shelter from the storm."
-Bob Dylan, ibid.
Pretty much anytime someone gets up in front of the big mass and starts moving things in a different direction than the pig compass is pointing, their lives get subjected to the microscopic suck that makes anyone human look weak and compromised. Even Ghandi.
Martin Luther King had lovers, Jesse Jackson has a multitude of personal flaws not the least being outsized ego and ambition. But let's keep in mind Jackson gets ridiculed constantly today, not for his flaws but because he's still a constant threat to the powers-that-be, the powers that have given us planetary fever and ceaseless war.
Keep in mind that Baez was getting death threats at the same time Capp was laughing at her from the safety of his highly paid drafting table. Keep in mind that "Kumbaya" is on a continuum with songs like "We Shall Overcome" and "Blowing In The Wind", and when Snow and John Bolton and others of their ilk sneer at it they're ridiculing people who had nothing else to unite them but singing and holding on to each other against tides of vicious madness that were actively evil and dangerously violent.
There's a sense in this country today that the civil rights movement was something like the anti-smoking movement - first there was a bunch of people making a mistake that even a little kid could see was wrong, and then some people told them that it was a mistake, and then they stopped.
No problem. It's over now.
People laid their lives on the line for the minimal victories of the changed laws that still only went so far, and they sang as they went to the line.
They sang as they came out of jail, and they sang as they went back in. They sang in front of the White House, and they sang as they marched through the Main Streets of White America. And they got their asses kicked.
And people like Tony Snow were snickering at them then. People like Tony Snow were not getting their asses kicked.
Laughing at Kumbaya, for all that it's a cowardly cheap shot against a mostly pacifistic target, is force and aggression, war by another means - dressed up like adolescent sarcasm, but there's real suffering in back of it, just like there's real death behind the policies Snow's job has him defend.
