On 8/29/05, frank scott <<a href="mailto:frank@marin.cc.ca.us">frank@marin.cc.ca.us</a>> wrote:<div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">granted, if he had written  it today ( this land is your land) , he might have mentioned all the identity groups the country "really" belonged to, but isn't it possible he simply referred to a collective people?</blockquote><div> first let me remind you of the context in which it came up, an die nachgeborenen posted that it was written by an outraged Guthrie in response to Berlin's god bless america. I asked which was the more offensive. Berlin wrote a song based on the relief his mother expressed at finding a haven from the Russian pogroms, Guthrie wrote a song about the inheritance of the working man, but it's in the voice of the european conqueror and  before Guthrie changed each verse's concluding line to "This land was made for you and me," he ended each verse with "God blessed America for you and me." Hardly an all encompassing camaraderie but my initial point was how can you be offended by one and not the other, were Guthrie's sentiments any different from Berlin's, both expected a god's blessings for a country built on attempted genocide at a time when idiginous blood was still on the hands of army and settlers. The industrial growth built by the honest labourer Guthrie lauds is at the great expense of native lives, men women and children were murdered to facilitate european immigrant expansion.I'm not condemning Guthrie for not singing about it, he wrote folks songs in the european tradition about migrant workers and we should recognise them for being that and not attribute meanings that arent there . </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> did the guy have to account for matters and issues that were less important in a time when collective humanity made more sense than it seems to, in the present? </blockquote></div>I don't quite understand this, at that particular time the world was in upheaval, humanity as a whole was at each others throats, no different from today Gary? ride si sapis