My favorite French “commie” is gone...

Jean Ferrat (1920-2010) just past away yesterday. He was a French singer that I grew up with, particularly as a teenager. He was also politically engaged. Jew, he was saved as a kid by the French communists and never forgot; he always remained very close to the communist ideal and the extreme left, battling as hard as he could against communism's own contradictions and its eventual demise. He sung love, life, old age and the simple beauty of nature like no other.

Dead-set against capitalism and never “exported” out of France, the meaning of his lyrics was complicated in their simplicity and, while I grasped them superficially as a youngster, I finally had to find myself “stranded” in America to rediscover the richness of his songs and begin to understand them more profoundly as I often listened to them. His apparently simple poetry took a lifetime of experience to fully comprehend and his sometime idealistic beliefs were spot on against the recent perversions of capitalism seen during the recent Wall Street crisis and the Cheney-Bush reign. To me, this artist will always stand a model of integrity as well as a realistic and talented witness of life.