What is scary enough to justify decades of FBI scrutiny?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Folk music.

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am not making this up.

In 1970, my brother bought a Phil Ochs album, and my mother heard it and CALLED THE FBI.

No shit. And they came and took it away.

My brother and I still laugh about that, but it's not so funny, really.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The reason my dad got deported from Canada basically came down to folk music.

We, of course, had material by Lomax.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Have you told this story? Because I don't remember it, and now I find myself keenly (and possibly inappropriately) curious.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Aw, that was disappointing.

I thought somebody had tried to crack down on folk music, and the article was all about Communism.

Rats.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You missed it.
Somebody did try to crack down on folk music.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Pfui.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Pfui, bcause you don't think there's enough evidence? Or because you don't think that leaning on bosses to fire people is hardass enough to count? Or what?

Alan Lomax is only the example under examination at the moment. They pulled the same and worse shenanigans with a whole raft of people. Then there were the people who were deported or who were forbidden to visit the country from elsewhere.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

"Pfui" because:

A ) We still get folk music, and

B ) I am an overweight guy who spends nearly all of his time in the house. (Though I do not raise orchids.)

--It did occur to me that the British Intelligence guy who gave him a clean bill of health might have been Kim Philby, but it turns out he was in another department.

I'm trying to have fun here.

Pfui.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

A) we stll have most of the things that people have tried to crack down on.

B) I am not a great reader of mysteries so the reference went over my head.

Speaking of orchids and fun, I discovered that the dendrobium kingianum I abandoned in the backyard after the nice fellow died not only is thriving and blooming, but it has been colonizing the other abandoned flower pots. I abandoned it because I could not take care of it (orchids being beynd me in the first place, and then the circumstances under which it became mine to deal with), so it's really nice to see it up and about like that, not needing my care.

edit for missing letter, again

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

We no longer have hilarious cartoons, useful chemistry sets, or a space program that actually sends human beings anywhere.

Cracking down works just fine on stuff that's good.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's a familiar story. The FBI investigates -- and often persecutes -- a broad range of people for often capricious reasons (and sometimes no really identifiable reason).

And the idea that the experiences and expressions of people in general are worth collecting, archiving, publishing, and promoting, is an extremely radical one, anyway, don't you know.


edited because I missed a letter. Laptop withholds letters from me unless I beat it hard enough, and sometimes I don't catch the passive-aggressive creature at its shenanigans in time.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me I may be on file.

I used to have ideas and mail them to suitable authorities.

One was for a very small nuclear power plant that reuses old fuel for higher steam pressure and greater efficiency, swapping them back and forth annually until the rods are dead. (Woulda worked, too. Still would.)

One was for a hybrid booster, solid fuel and liquid oxidizer, much more stable than either a standard liquid-fuel/oxidizer or the slowly-exploding bombs they later strapped onto, e.g., the Challenger. (Ignored. I put it into a novel*, at least.)

But it was the query about using an air-breathing liquid-fuel booster for model rockets that got me a visit from the Suits.

I was eleven. It was 1971. NASA was already a closed shop when it came to putting stuff into orbit, and nobody wanted to believe me when I said I hadn't been told about it by someone working at Goddard. (It was nearby.)

(Am I the only person who thinks the team on CRIMINAL MINDS resembles nothing so much as seven James Bond villains?)

EDIT:

*I forgot to put this in. THE GOLIATH STONE, Larry Niven and Matthew Joseph Harrington (tadaa), Tor Books, hits the stands June 25, buy a copy and make all your friends do it too. I also put an airbreathing booster in. Didn't have a place for the reactor. I'll find something.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the heads-up. I'd have picked up a copy because of Niven's name, but reading your small-minded diatribes here has convinced me to save my money for less odious authors.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Just as well. There's some big words.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It was ever thus. Art is powerful. "And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out? And friends they may thinks it's a movement."

For that matter, Jimmy Tingle used to have a great routine about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. You can find a variant of it at about 25:20 here.

And black market video tapes of American movies brought down the Ceaușescu regime in Romania. It's only reasonable to fear folk music.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

:D

Are you acquainted with the character Black Bolt of the Inhumans? Marvel Comics.

"You wanna end war, you got to sing LOUD."

Sometimes I wonder what Arlo Guthrie used to read.

[jwgh]

I've been told that my great-uncle Tony couldn't get a university job after he got his doctorate due to the Red Scare. He instead got a job at a private school and published a couple of books about folk music (among others).

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

There is a Neil Diamond "fan" who, about two or three times a year, goes off on rants about how Diamond is an "indoctrinated liberal Jew" brainwashed by Pete Seeger as a child.

There are several blogs that seem to consider Seeger a dangerous Commie who must be stopped at any cost, though it seems that horrible downfall the U.S. was going to suffer from the 1942 Almanacs album still hasn't arrived. Any day now, I'm sure.

Seeger will turn 94 on Friday! Go Pete! (Should I wave to the FBI? Hiiii FBI!)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my family had several run-ins with the "red scare". It drastically altered my uncle Richard's career when Burl Ives named him to the witch-hunters (though the online sources consistently talk about ending his career on the spot, whereas the records he recorded after that are the ones that are still available, and he toured domestically and internationally and performed regularly as long as he was physically able to).

And my father had a protracted legal fight with the Army, which wanted to revoke his security clearance because his best friend since grade-school had in fact been a communist for a while (back during the period when basically any decent human being had to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the communists since they were the only ones selling or even offering human rights action). Which my father eventually won, for no great benefit (none was expected, he wasn't regular army and didn't want to be, but he wanted to continue in the reserve after WWII and Korea); though it did delay, though not in the end prevent, his getting tenure at Purdue.

[seawasp]

My parents (and thus my brother and I) were part of the folkie scene for a long time. This kind of thing doesn't surprise me, as there's plenty of counterculture stuff going on there (not to mention a lot of drug culture was there long before the hippies and so on got hold of it).

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure my high school friend has an FBI record. She did, after all, study Russian at a Canadian institution, and then infiltrated herself into American society through the ruse of marrying a US Naval officer who worked on submarines with nuclear reactors!

Golly, I haven't seen her since her marriage in the 1980s, but her brother assures me she's still married (though in the intervening period her husband left the U.S. Navy).

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

"There's unsavory musicians
With their filthy pinko lyrics
Who destroy the social fabric
And enjoy it when they do
With their groupies and addictions
And poor broken-hearted parents
It's from them I would expect to hear
The F-word, not from you..."

-- Lou and Peter Berryman, "A Chat With Your Mother"