This is as messed-up a time as I can remember. That includes the late 1960s. An emotionally stunted, psychologically damaged, wannabe crime lord sits tweeting in the White House while tens of thousands of Americans die from a deadly virus spreading virtually unchecked from California to the New York island.
Much of the rest of the world has wrestled the novel coronavirus to ground. But not here. Because freedom. Freedom worshiped as an idol. Freedom from responsibility to one another.
The political right has inculcated in its tribe such anti-government sentiment since the Reagan years that the very government defined by “We the People” is now its enemy. Whenever government is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the right’s preferred race and religion, that is. Now, when national coordination is required to save lives and livelihoods, our collective hands are tied. People who view “We the People” with suspicion tied them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed nearly 140,000 Americans and sickened 3.5 million, including the Republican governor of Oklahoma, home to Woody Guthrie. Rather than ensuring enough federal money is available to keep struggling citizens afloat as the virus turns a new generation’s dreams to dust, rather than seeing that enough tests are available to control the spread, the paranoiac in the White House is pursuing tests of another sort:
The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies, an exercise some of the subjects have called “loyalty tests” to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials.
It’s “an exercise in ferreting out people who are perceived as not Trump enough,” someone briefed on the meeting tells Politico.
Last night, I stumbled across some folk music that brought to mind a different America, one almost faded into history. In the 1950s, folk music was seen as subversive enough to draw the attention of a House Un-American Activities Committee intent on ferreting out people of that time not deemed Trump enough.
By the time I was old enough to listen, folk music’s subversive associations had been sanitized out enough for folk groups such as The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters, and The New Christy Minstrels to appear on TV variety shows. Not even my Bircher-curious father seemed to know what lay beneath some of those songs. The edgier lyrics got dropped on TV and left out of songbooks issued to school children.
This Land Is Your Land
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
I don’t think I heard the “No Trespassing” or later verses until I reached college. Pete Seeger often acknowledged the country’s colonialist past by adding another verse composed by activist Carolyn “Cappy” Israel:
This land is your land, but it once was my land
Before we sold you Manhattan Island
You pushed my nation to the reservation,
This land was stole by you from me.
The U.S. Supreme Court is just now acknowledging whose land much of Oklahoma’s is. U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo was at home in Muscogee Creek Nation territory when her husband burst in with the news:
I froze, caught on an inhale, in disbelief and shock. How could any Native tribal nation win any decision with this conservative Supreme Court? And at a time in American history like this when justice seemed so imperiled? My husband and I teared up.
[…]
The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land. I could still hear their voices as we sat out on the porch later that evening when it cooled down. Justice is sometimes seven generations away, or even more. And it is inevitable.
This land is still our land. All of ours. Even those who believe themselves gifted by their god with the right to dominate the rest of us and fearful of sharing it.
This Springsteen version of “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” began this reverie, woven as folk music is into American history. It’s stunning.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.