> So, I want to put as much conceptual distance as I can between me and
> that fucking USA.
No you don't. You want to participate in putting as much conceptural distance as possible between _us_ (to be defined) and "that fucking USA." I agree that the names, "USA," "America," "This Land," don't name the people, they name an ideological (i.e. common or spontaneous sense) mask of the horrors you name. The outlook is quite bleak for the world, for everyone, unless loyalty to that construct can be dissolved in enough of those residing between the Pacific and the Atlantic north of the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande.
Guthrie was damaged, as all u.s. politics for the last 65 years have been damaged, by the popular front, and several of his songs (particularly those great Colombia River ballads) show that damage. But Justin is I think wrong to cite "This Land is Your Land" in this thread. That song was written in a fit of rage and revulsion brought on by hearing Berlin's song, "God Bless America," and neither he nor his producer believed that very many people would like it. Guthrie's greatest song (poem, rather, for he never sang it or wrote music for it), and one of the greatest works by any American poet, is "Deportee," which doesn't rhyme so well with some the thrust of many lbo posters on this general topic.
Deportee by W Guthrie
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps.
You are flying them back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
My father's own father he waded that river,
They stole all the money he made in his life.
My sisters and brothers come working the fruit trees
And rode the truck til they took down and died.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains,
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river -- we died just the same.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon --
` A fireball of lightning which shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just . . . deportees.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit --
To fall like dry leaves, to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
A song worth looking at closely, Guthrie's final testament as it were. (_Possible_ sand in the gears. I'm depending on the text printed by Seager & Reiser in the songbook, _Carry It On_. I've seen versions of the text which have different pronouns in stanza one. But I've read and reread Guthrie for years, and I think the kind of pronoun play in the text used here is prominent throughout his work.) I've written various versions of this post over the years, and I'm not satisfied with any of them - but I've got other things to do so I'm sending it as it is.
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps.
You are flying them back to the Mexican border
The deportees are "them," and G addresses the deporters directly, and if "You + I" equals "We," then we have Fatherland Patriotism operating here. We are getting rid of the dregs.
To pay all their money to wade back again.
But those dregs are insistent. Perhaps we should think of Cuchulain and his broom. The You of the first stanza strive to sweep back the sea.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Still third person, but now the nameless have a name. (Incidentally, I know very little of the "Postcolonialist" literature -- does Guthrie commit some sin in speaking for the subaltern?) This naming of the nameless runs throughout Guthrie's work.
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
The pronoun reversal begins: Guthrie speaks directly to the named nameless, and in their own language. (As Dante let Arnaut speak in his native Provencal.) And they (not the "deporters" -- who are never named) are addressed as You in the next line
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
"They" are now -- who? The pilot -- he's dead (and Guthrie allows him to rest in obscurity). Concretely, merely a radio journalist
And all they will call you will be deportee.
The syntax of the opening stanza is now reversed. But the perspective continues to shift radically:
My father's own father he waded that river,
They stole all the money he made in his life.
"They" again -- stealing the singer's grandfather's very life. The word hardly appears in "This Land Is Your Land," which is perhaps part of the explanation for its popularity exceeding Guthrie's expectations. "They" (the You of the first stanza) loom1 ever more threateningly in their anonymity as the poem progresses, and as the anonymous they of that stanza come more aggressively to life.
My sisters and brothers come working the fruit trees
And rode the truck til they took down and died.
Three generations riding the trucks and dying among the fruit trees. And this is not the same person who spoke the opening stanza, whose only relationship to the nameless ones was through a radio broadcast. This is common in Guthrie: "I was right there in Boston the night that they died." (The 'actual' Guthrie was a teenager in Oklahoma the night that they died.) Of course "sisters" and "brothers" have long become mere formalities in the labor movement (even by 1941), but in Guthrie's hands commonplaces are often triggered to life.
Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
The land is not their land. (We have a sort of echo of this in the earlier ballad, "End of the Line": "There ain't no country extra fine / If you ain't on to the power line." The explicit reference is to being one mile beyond the reach of the electric line from Grand Coulee.)
THERE AINT NO COUNTRY EXTRA FINE, or, "all they will call you will be deportee."
"We died in your hills," not they, not just "you" (i.e., "my brothers and sisters")but WE:
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains,
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river -- we died just the same.
Both sides of the river - "There aint no country extra fine" - both sides of the river. In his last and finest work Guthrie names "America" for what it is, the Nation of Death. (That red glare is no longer over Fort McHenry - it rains down on the Philippines, Haiti, Korea, Afghanistan.) Those valleys and hills beckon back to "from the mountains, from the prairies, from the ocean, white with spray." "Both sides of the river, we died just the SAME." "We," the same we both sides of the river. Though its true we must fight our battles within national borders (hence the fatuity of Hardt & Negri), Marx & Engels were right - workers have no nation, and only when workers grasp this do they grasp that they are workers. -- and they are nameless. Deportees have no country.
Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just . . . deportees.
And then the great mystery which ends the song. The "they" of the first stanza has become first "you," then "we," and that we has grown to include all who (knowing it or not) are deportees. But now a new "we" appears and, more astoundingly, a new I ("my")
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit -
This is the general theme of "This Land Is Your Land" - our big orchards, our "good" fruit. Who who is this we exactly? "We" have all died -- in your hills, in your deserts, in your valleys and on your hills. This land is not "our" land -YET, is "your" land, the land of the first stanza: the You of "You are flying them back to the Mexican border" -
To fall like dry leaves, to rot on my topsoil
Who? "MY topsoil"? This is an I that does not yet exist. My topsoil, both fertilized and affronted by the deaths of all those nameless ones. One of Guthrie's unpublished songs in Bragg's CD is curiously on Whitman. Whitman too claimed to BE the land, with I think less warrant than Guthrie.
Justin wrote the other day: "But I actually got choked up when I visited Little Round Top on the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago, and saw flowers heaped where Joshua Chamberlains' 20th Maine Volunteers held off Hoods Alabamans and Texans the second day of the battle, then charged with bayonets with they were out of ammo, probably saving the Union." I can understand that, but what "chokes me up" every time is that last stanza of Deportee, and that last repetition of the chorus.
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
The 20th Maine Volunteers are in a way remembered. That is fine. But it is all those nameless ones that haunt me.
Carrol