Pete Seeger: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Metaphor, it's a big fat muddy metaphor!

pete seegar wrote this about a commanding officer who told a private to march into a puddle of water not knowing how deep it was and the man drowned soon thereafter. thats what he was talking about, remember this was in 1942 people

@1958seltaeb Is this a joke? Can't you see the principle of this song?

Absolutely wonderful, God Bless Pete Seeger!!!!!

Prove me wrong, moron.

I watched this live on TV in early 1968. (I was a high school senior at the time.) Every viewer understood that "the Big Fool" meant our tall Texan president, Lyndon Johnson. A few weeks after this show was broadcast, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, running as an antiwar candidate, gave Johnson a drubbing in the New Hampshire primary and forced LBJ to withdraw from seeking reelection.

This was a very courageous performance, but Pete was also expressing what millions of Americans felt at that moment.

I can't read his mind, of course, but it looks to me like he's what you might call a practical pacifist: deeply committed to peace, but not so absolute and dogmatic to deny that there is such a thing as an evil so great that war, horrible as it is, is the better choice.

Of course, the same argument has been used to justify unjustifiable war, but the principle is, in the abstract, sound.

His disgust with Stalin after having supported him in his youth bothered him too.

elkrobber and DavidAC, your comments about Seger don't tell the whole story. Seger did serve in the Army after Pear Harbor, and did make the comment about not being a pacifist, but this was early in his carrer, prior to 1960. Seger has spent the rest of his life working with the Nonviolence movement and making his feelings about war and the military pretty clear in his songs, as in this very clip from the Smothers Brothers show