a little Pete for your Monday

Pete Seeger looks so happy, it makes you happy.  I enjoyed several minutes of uncynical nationalistic goosebumps watching this video.  He even included the sometimes-absent “relief office” and “private property” verses – go Pete! [eta: though the “grumblin’ and wonderin'” didn’t make it – I just noticed that]

My own response watching it this morning reminded me of this article from Slate about a psychologist studing the emotion he calls “elevation”: “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”  He had no luck triggering the emotion in his subjects with images of the grand canyon, but video of Obama’s acceptance speech apparently did the trick quite well.  Which at the time I read it itself reminded me of Victor Turner’s idea of communitas, that sense of oneness of community that can be part of rituals.  Which now today, full circle, makes me feel I should go watch the inauguration tomorrow with a bunch of other Americans, just to enjoy a little charge of that elevation again, before I go back to crying over the list of cabinet members the day after tomorrow.