"Pete Seeger: The Power of Song" is a documentary film about well, Pete Seeger. Now, I admit that I haven't seen it. And, frankly, I have had my fill of Pete all my life. So I guess I won't see it. Enough is enough. Let's say from the late forties on, when he and his folk group, The Weavers, were still singing "Tsena, tsena..." You don't know "Tsena, tsena...?" It was a song from Israel when the Soviets had reason to support the Jewish state as a crow bar to ply out the British from the Middle East. I'm told by all of the favorable reviews (one in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, another by Roger Ebert) I've read that the documentary is--they don't exactly use the word--hagiographic. Everyone to his own saint! Oh, yes, I forget, Seeger was guided in almost all his activities (except saving the Hudson River) by the Communist Party. And, yes, again: that old Communist Party that cheerfully supported Josef Stalin'segime, the cruelest regime in the twentieth century (imagine out-crueling Hitler) save for the even more cruel regime of Mao Tse-Tung, which Pete also thought was just and brave and kind. Now, my good friend who remembers everybody's sins but mostly his own, our Ron Radosh, has a complicated relationship with Pete Seeger. Seeger was his folksong teacher, and Ron has loyalty to his teacher, even those who have erred. Seeger was always a problem in Ron's life, and you can see this over the last few weeks. He wrote for us and for the Sun a piece when the movie came out, a critical piece. And, then, as destiny would have it, Pete wrote a song to his old friend Ron admitting something about having been wrong vis-a-vis the grotesque regime he supported for decades and decades. Well, it wasn't really that much of a regret and it certainly was a philosophical apology of the kind that Joan Baez made after the Vietnamese war about the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. What Pete wrote to Ron was something roughly like this: "When I went to the Soviet Union I should have asked to see the Gulag..." Ron wrote about this, too, also for the Sun. Frankly, I think RR made much too much of this "confession." But then Pete was his teacher and his teacher is by now ancient. I suppose at some point one forgives--I reflect: who besides God has the real power to forgive?--those who don't ask for forgiveness. That's another question. As it happens, Pete had a few regrets about his regrets. And he criticized Ron for making too much of his, that is, Pete's transgressions and also his confessions. I know you are, we are, not supposed to think Mark Steyn smart, but not even really clever. Despite all this, I've just read his devastating piece in the National Review, and I commend it to you. The American Left and even the mainstream of American liberalism (which includes TNR) has never gotten over its dalliance with Stalinism and its guileful romance with revolution. This is one of the costs of McCarthyism. But it is sadly true that some of the things Joe McCarthy believed and said were not false. As it happens, I heard Pete Singer sing deceptive IRA songs like "Kevin Barry" and stupid ballads like "The Banks of Marble." Maybe he wasn't dangerous. But he sure was a dupe.