A few years after I left the company where I had worked with him, I visited him at his house. He had been retired for about two years and it was obvious that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—I could tell from his repetitions of things that he had said only minutes before, and his endless recycling of anecdotes.

I bring him up, that beloved old man, because he is a metaphor for PP&M. I always loved their music, but they reached the point where they were caught, like my old associate, in this terrible quicksand from which they could not free themselves.

Or perhaps would not. I have never understood how anybody can continue to embrace communism once the list of its horrors becomes manifest. RIP Mary Travers, but shame on you for not struggling against the imprisonment your beloved substitute for God brought you and for the endless suffering it brought upon humanity.

Years before she died, I felt sadness towards Mary Travers and PP&M . It saddened me to discover that the makers of such beautiful music could also be forceful advocates for repugnant politics, when they palled around with the Sandinistas in the 1980s.

My opposition to the Sandinistas also was the definitive piece in my falling out with the left, so PP&M’s embrace of the Sandinistas is something that sticks with me. Having lived and worked in Latin America, my intuitive stance towards the left was that it presented a bad solution to Latin America’s problems. Extensive library research before the days of the web proved the correctness of my intuition: just like Ronnie said, and I DON’T mean Ronnie Gilbert, the Sandinistas were a bunch of Soviet-embracing commies. (I will spare you the results of my extensive research.) They were not Soviet plants: they fell into the laps of the Soviets of their own accord. As I had been gassed in Berkeley during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations when Ronnie was govenor, to conclude that Ronnie was correct on some issue was a sea change for me.

At the end of the 1980s, I discovered that PP&M, a group whose music I had grown up on and adored, were on opposite sides of the political fence from me and Ronnie. PP&M hadn’t changed; I had.

( I conclude that PP&M were most likely always members of the Pete Seeger left, and it took Pete Seeger many years after the fall of the Soviet Union to admit that he had been mistaken in his embrace of Stalinism. PP&M were at least of the anti-anti-Communist left, if not guilty of pro-Stalinist stances, as Pete Seeger had been. See Almanac Singers in Wikipedia.)