I've got a CD ("Celebrities Most Embarrassing Moments") that's got a snippet of Frank and Dean Martin crudely heckling Sammy Davis Jr. from the sidelines of a Rat Pack show, which comes off as chatter symptomatic of something entirely different. You know, the guy could sing and everything, but let's not get carried away with the revisionism: it's useful to recall what modern-day Frank would think of the ideas espoused on this list
Jon Fine (who also grew up in New Jersey)
>I can't dispute the information on Sinatra's
>left-wing sympathies, and nobody here can
>read his mind, but the words of "The
>House I Live In (That's America To Me)" are
>explicit and not quite pure left. I would
>call them democratic/patriotic, which goes
>back to a basic reality I have noted in prior
>posts: the roots of popular, progressive insurgency
>are more populist than Marxian. By Marxian
>I mean the categorical rejection of the
>institutions of markets, capital, bourgeois
>democracy, religion, and nation-states, to
>name a few items. The Cultural Front was
>populist, by and large; ties to the CP are
>not pertinent in this context, since the
>CP's concessions to popular sentiments need
>no exegesis. Regardless of whether you think
>that's good or bad, it was real.
>