President should hear 'Big Muddy'
As an irrepressible supporter of President Obama, I hang on his every word trying to glean the secret of his usually unflappable zen-like demeanor. There appears but one chink in that demeanor, and it is when he speaks about our fairy-tail and failed wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the upcoming attack on Iran.
His eyes glaze over and he looks and sounds like a PR man reading the cue cards put in front of him by his puppet masters in the military industrial complex.
Someone should give him a history lesson about the Incident at Big Muddy, the 1942 training march of GIs in a Louisiana swamp, where an arrogant and clueless captain led his men through the Big Muddy, a stream that was the shortest way back to base. The men following the captain ascertained the foolishness of fording a stream that was clearly going to drown them with their heavy gear as the water rose from their knees to their waist to their necks. Then the captain disappeared and all that remained was a helmet floating past as they turned back to safety.
Pete Seeger wrote "Waist Deep In the Big Muddy" in 1967, ostensibly just about that incident but clearly an allegory to the impending doom of President Johnson's disastrous expansion of the Vietnam War. Seeger taped the song for a September, 1967 Smother Brothers Comedy Hour show but the CBS censors cut it fearing retribution from the public and LBJ. Seeger finally performed it for the Brothers and for us on February 25, 1968, just thirty-five days before LBJ threw in the towel in the upcoming Presidential election in recognition America's and his personal defeat in Vietnam.
President Obama should view a tape of Seeger's performance, arguably one of the most powerful anti-war songs ever penned.
Walt Zlotow
Glen Ellyn