MAY DAY. First, comrades, a musical interlude.

We next recognize a comrade of long standing. Singer Pete Seeger celebrates a 90th birthday. Another comrade hails him as America's Teacher.

The January concert at the Lincoln Memorial celebrating the inauguration of President Barack Obama offered many stirring moments, but perhaps its highlight was Pete Seeger leading a chorus of hundreds of thousands of people singing "This Land Is Your Land." This is where Americans expect to see Pete Seeger, raising his voice for change, even when it’s cold outside.

Seeger has been singing folk music for change for more than 70 years now, sometimes in the middle of storms, sometimes causing them. Defiantly leftist, pacifist, and for a decade or so, Communist, Seeger has embraced almost every major reformist cause of the 20th century.

That is, if one ignores lowering marginal tax rates, introducing tradable permits for pollution, calling on Comrade Gorbachev to tear the wall down, putting the public pensions on an actuarially sound basis, or deregulating the railroads as reformist causes.

It is no accident that the author is raising his own red diaper baby.

These days I like getting my daughter, KC, into the same room with Pete Seeger whenever possible. My theory is that hanging around with incorruptible people is a character builder. KC’s first Pete Seeger concert was a 2007 benefit. Pete walked on stage that night after being introduced, and hundreds of people popped up to give him a standing ovation before he sang a note. I've been talking to KC (who was then 8) about that ovation in the months since, about how the audience was saying "Thank you for living your life the way that you have, and for making the choices that you did." I’ve suggested to her that getting an ovation like that is better than being rich, since you can't buy it. What better reward is there for a teacher?

It is also no accident that the columnist is a professor of literature.

Reason's Hit and Run addresses the false consciousness, with questions about the cult of personality.

In honor of yet another Pete Seeger birthday, a roundup of previous Reason pot-shots at the cuddly old commie's politics, awful back catalog of NLF ballads, and his difficult 2007 decision to denounce Josef Stalin.

Gosh, that's growing in old age, to come to a conclusion that Leon Trotsky might have reached around 1927. But perhaps "America's Teacher" is not completely wrong. It was Mr Seeger who convinced me to give up on All Things Considered. It was not a difficult lesson at all. On Labor Day, 1990, the program let Mr Seeger close it by singing The Internationale. Let's do a quick rewind: during the summer and fall of 1989 the Hungarians, Poles, East Germans, and Czechoslovakians saw off their Communist masters. The Roumanians used more extreme measures around Christmas of that year. All Things Considered's coverage of these major reformist causes was amusing: the reporters had to cover it, because it was newsworthy, but the reporters didn't sound too enthusiastic, and the five-minute pieces with interviews of insurrection leaders and guitar music that regularly came out of Latin America in those days never originated from Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia, this despite the rich musical traditions of those lands. Letting Mr Seeger close the Labor Day broadcast epitomized denial. That's why radios come with tuners. Adios, All Things Considered.