Okay, I stayed up all night meditating about this. Let me see if I've finally got it straight.

If you first got interested in folk music because you heard the Kingston Trio on the radio or in your parents' record collection, learned everything they ever recorded, then went on to learn more songs from the records of Peter Paul and Mary and the Limeliters and the New Christy Minstrels and Trini Lopez and Jimmie ("Honeycomb") Rodgers, and you now play in a bluegrass group, support the American economy by voting against such socialist corruption as increases in the minimum wage, and are willing to undergo any kind of violation of Constitutional protections of private citizens in the interest of frustrating what George W. Bush calls "evil-doers," and want to see all Arabs put to the sword, and generally talk like you swallowed a septic tank, and are eager to savage anyone who suggests that the Kingston Trio didn't invent folk music in the basement of their frat house back in 1958, that means you are an upstanding patriotic hard working American citizen and a credit to the country.   

If you learned the songs you sing from the early records of Burl Ives, Ed McCurdy, Jean Ritchie, or from the Smith "Anthology of American Folk Music," or from Sandburg's "American Songbag" or Lomax's "Folk Songs of North America," or from a dog-eared copy of "Song Fest," and if you know who Francis James Child and Cecil Sharp were, and you are aware that "They Call the Wind Mariah" is not a folk song, that it came from a Broadway musical, and even if you thought the Kingston Trio was a pretty good group, you never bought any of their records to learn songs from, that means you are a left-wing peacenik liberal dope-smoking commie hippy with the sex habits of an alley cat (probably gay), even if you used to sing along on "Hava Nagila," are anti-Semitic, haven't bathed since 1948, and never support the American economy by shopping at Wal-Mart, that makes you a folk singing PURIST.

Yes, I think I've got it now.

The Deli (make that sandwich corned beef) Lama