Beer Summit a "kumbaya moment" for Obama

Pete Seeger (photo credit: AP Photo/Evan Agostini/File)

It was inevitable that President Obama’s Beer Summit last week would be cynically labeled a “kumbaya moment.”

Sure enough, Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist—not to mention author of Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity—used it twice on one MSNBC news show segment, and he was certainly one of many.

But “Kumbaya”—the ultimate folk song for anyone who grew up in the 1960s--has been a catch-all condemnation for quite a while now. Liberal blogger Jane Hamsher last year wrote that Joe Lieberman was able to retain his chairmanship atop the Homeland Security committee because then President-elect Obama and a handful of senators, “in the light of Obama’s campaign messaging,” were able to “reduce the vote to an act of kumbaya."

Other memorably cutting kumbayah comments include that of former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who joked at a 2006 farewell White House dinner for his outgoing antagonist U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that “nobody sang ‘Kumbaya,’” not to mention President Bush who reportedly told Turkish President Abdullah Gul in a phone call that in dealing with the then current Turkey-Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq crisis, “It’s not kumbaya time anymore--just talking about trilateral talks is not going to be enough. Something has to be done.”

Bush’s late White House press secretary Tony Snow was particularly adept at dropping the k-word, describing meetings between the president and members of Congress thusly: “Everybody assumes that when we talk about bipartisanship that it’s just sort of happy-face kumbaya stuff, and [that] we’re really lying through our teeth. And the fact is that these meetings may not be happy-face kumbaya, but they have been very constructive in the sense that people are talking respectfully about important issues and expressing their ideas.”

Snow had variously scorned the song previously: “When you have General Casey going in and trying to brief a prime minister, nobody is singing ‘Kumbaya’”…“The idea that somehow we would have an endless string of kumbaya moments is sort of one of those things that you might wish were the case”…“I hate to be kumbaya, but we’re going to be kumbaya, because I got help and advice from a lot of people before I took this job.”

Then there was a Republican commercial showing an impersonator of Clinton Administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright singing “Kumbaya” to terrorists--even a hip-hop bubblegum spot where campers rejected their hippie counselor’s “Kumbaya” sing-along request.

Even Obama himself has used it scornfully.

“The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function,” he said during a campaign low point, clarifying why he said that Hillary Clinton Camp claims of the demise of his politics of hope were “just silly.”

So they didn’t hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” at the Beer Summit. They certainly embodied the song’s spirit.

For “Kumbaya,” as anyone who gathered around a campfire during the ‘60s knows, is about someone singing, laughing, crying, praying, sleeping—being human, essentially.

“I’ll tell you the history of it,” said Pete Seeger in a conversation concerning “Kumbaya”’s origins. “I introduced it as an African song, then I found that Marvin Frey, who was a member of [notorious 1920s and ‘30s evangelist] Aimee Semple McPherson’s church, said he wrote it as ‘Come By Here.’ But I went to the Library of Congress and heard some recordings of it from the ‘20s. As so often happens subliminally to songwriters, he must have heard it and written a version in 1936 that he taught to some missionaries leaving for Angola—and it became very popular all over the West Coast of Africa as ‘Kumbaya’—the African pronunciation.”

Hardly the stuff of hippie artifact.

But “Kumbaya” was also a civil rights and progressive church hymn, popular at a time of struggle against war and injustice. It was recorded by folksingers like Seeger, his legendary folk group the Weavers, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary—all artists who sang songs in and of community for a large segment of a baby-boom generation that grew up on them and saw value in joining hands rather than raising fists.

Of course, the values of the baby-boomers as symbolized by “Kumbaya” have long since been mockingly marginalized by the succeeding “me generation”--not to mention the post-9/11 us-against-them mentality—as idealistic and naïve. And the song itself, with its innocuous humanistic sing-along lyrics, is an easy target for touchy-feely derision. So, maybe, is Seeger’s anti-war classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” for anyone who might fabricate a “Flower Power” connotation.

But no one would dare make fun of “Kumbaya”’s sister movement/church anthem “We Shall Overcome” or John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” or Ashford & Simpson’s “Reach Out and Touch.” Or better yet, Nick Lowe’s (made famous by Elvis Costello) “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?”

So Mr. President, et al. Let’s all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” Please.

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