That Side Was Made For You And Me

Lately I’ve been listening to the music of Woody Guthrie to get me through these turbulent times. Songs that are over 50 years old. Songs that inspired Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, who inspired my dad.

My point, I guess, is I’m a long way from Woody Guthrie’s world; yet his words, his emotion, his idea of what it meant to be an American, his tireless defense of social justice, and expressions of brotherhood transcend time and inspires me today. Five minutes to Doomsday.

It’s not just the works of Woody Guthrie which gives me hope, but his life, the sense of freedom he experienced; travelling the country, living on the rail, and singing for spare change. Woody Guthrie was a real-life troubadour. Not just that but he stood up for his beliefs over and over, a true working class hero.

From Wikipedia:

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, who was elected president in the 1912 election the same year Guthrie was born. At age 19, he left home for Texas, where he met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. He used his musical talents to earn money as a street musician and by doing small gigs. He left Texas and his family with the coming of the Dust Bowl era, following the Okies to California. The poverty he saw on these early trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by the working class. He frequently donated money made from his music gigs and busking to help various peoples and causes.

It’s easy for someone born in the last quarter of the twentieth century to wax nostalgic about the Dust Bowl. Some of the allure, to me at least, is the seemingly desperate freedom that existed. When so many people are hungry a low level of anarchy ensues. Labor camps. Riding the rails. Communal living. From the safe vantage of the 21st century these acts seem romantic and exquisitely American. I imagine that seeing what Woody Guthrie saw, what Tom Joad saw, a vast land of plenty being squeezed by the few, leaving the rest hungry and restless, caused him to pen the best folk music this country has ever seen.

Woody Guthrie was best known for This Land is Your Land,

In February 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land.” It was inspired in part by his experiences during a cross-country trip and in part by his distaste for the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America”, which he considered unrealistic and complacent (and he was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio).

But not for two verses which are most often left out of the recording.

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?

The inclusion of these verses changes the whole song. It can almost be interpreted as a revolutionary call to arms. What sounds like a patriot, campfire sing-along turns into a a brave screed against class inequality where Guthrie questions the government and hypocrisy, standing up for the working man.

The way this song was manipulated reminds me of Reagan’s misuse of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA in 84. When the power structure feels threaten the quickest way to extinguish the threat is adopt it. That’s why most of us are Christians instead of, unfortunately, Pagans.

Another one of Guthrie’s work that seems as relevant today as when he wrote it half a century ago is the song Deportee.

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ‘em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

Guthrie tapped into almost Buddhist-like universality of suffering. He saw hunger and woe and didn’t distinguish to what extent his heart should reach out based on the coloration of a person’s epidermis. In other words, he wasn’t a prick.

I wonder what Woody Guthrie would say about George Bush’s America. About the Minutemen, Schwarzenegger, American Idol. This is what keeps me going. Thinking about what Woody Guthrie would do, Jack Kerouac, Mother Jones, Emperor Norton, if they were alive, that’s what inspires me.

Guthrie’s later years are a tragic tale of sickness and madness. He wound up spending more than a decade in psychiatric hospitals across New York.

By the late 1940s, Guthrie’s health was worsening and his behavior becoming extremely erratic, showing signs of chorea. He left his family, travelling with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to California, where he married for a third time and had another child before eventually returning to New York. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), before he was finally discovered to be suffering from Huntington’s disease, the genetic disorder that had caused the death of his mother.

Guthrie was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Due to his failing health during the final years of his life, he was unable to enjoy the renewed interest in his work during the 1960s folk revival. He died in 1967.

I like to think that Guthrie would have enjoyed the 60’s if he weren’t sick all those years. The expression of independence and reclamation of identity that marked the 60’s were also integral parts of his message. The notion that skipping the rat race wasn’t only okay but preferred was common in Guthrie’s music. He was the original hippie. My favorite of his songs is Talking Fish Blues, and a-hear it goes:

I went down to the fishing hole,
And I set down with my fishing pole;
Somethin’ grabb’d my hook and it got my bait
And Jerked me out in the middle of the lake.
Huh it was some jump boy,
I got sunk, kinda baptized on credit.

Fishin’ down on th’ muddy bank,
Felt a pull an’ give a big yank,
I drug out three old rubber boots,
A Ford radiator an’ a Chevrolet coop
(Nothin’ but Junk, so I handed it in
For National Defence).

Settin’ in a boat with a bucket of beer,
Hadn’t caught nuthin’ but didn’t much care,
I guess I was pretty well satisfied,
Had my little woman right by my side
(Takin’ it easy, just waitin’
Worm been gone off-a that hook for a couple of hours.
I was busy).

When you go fishin’, tell y’ what to do,
Go set down by the grassy dew,
Take a piece of string, tie it on yo’ pole,
Throw it way out in th’ middle of th’ hole.
Find you a good shady tree and then just set down.
(Go to sleep, forget all about it
Can’t catch nuthin’ here anyways.)

Woody, you’re alright.

Drive-Thrus Come to China

While the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is getting the boot, the first drive-thru McDonald’s has landed in Beijing. And just because the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is being pressured from its location isn’t going to stop them from opening hundred more across China in the next couple of years.

China is changing big time. The bicycle is out. The drive-thru is in.

Out with the old. In with the new.

The old in this case being the Starbucks located at the Forbidden City, and the new being a two-story, drive-thru McDonald’s recently opened in Beijing. Granted that Starbucks was only 6 years old, but the fact that it is in risk of losing it’s operating permit, ending it’s brief but surreal existence within the Forbidden City, is a significant indicator that as China moves forward there will be Nationalistic backlashes along the way.

Or maybe having a Starbucks in the Forbidden City in the first place was just plain stupid.

Anyway, these two events represent the tug and pull of modern China.

BEIJING (AP) — McDonald’s Corp. opened its first drive-through in Beijing on Friday, launching a partnership with a major Chinese oil company to exploit the country’s growing taste for both cars and Western fast food.

The Beijing drive-through is the first in McDonald’s venture with China Petroleum and Chemical Corp., which McDonald’s China CEO Jeffrey Schwartz said would open 25 to 30 more in the next 12 to 18 months. Both gas stations and drive-throughs are booming as car purchases by newly affluent drivers speed China’s change from a bicycle culture to a car culture.

I find it telling that McDonald’s is opening these drive-thrus in conjunction with Chinese Oil companies. The two feed each other. The more people are convenienced needlessly in their automobiles, the more they will no longer drive. People in LA won’t even walk three blocks, they are programmed not to by endless drive-thrus and valets and satellite radio. By the way, drive-thrus didn’t turn out so well for America.

While America is slowly waking up to the true costs of cheap food and an automobile-centric culture it seems China is just getting into the game. What are we going to do as a planet when there are a billion Chinese living as wastefully as us? The planet will not take it.

I’m not arguing that we prevent the Chinese from living the same standards as us, that would be cruel, selfish, and immoral. I’m not saying we revert to third world status either. That would be impractical as well.

I’m proposing the world develops an eco-conscious alternative path to our current one. One I’m calling the Second-World. A model of living that stresses an environmentally sound approach to business, where we sustain our resources, develop alternative energy sources, and marry the GDP with a higher quality of life, and create new industries, an imaginative new approach, utilizing arts, music, leisure pursuits, tourism, and public transportation. Business for the sake of making money alone should not be idolized and exalted. Greed IS NOT good. That way of life got us nowhere but rich and unhappy and addicted to painkillers.

You reap what you sow. Right now America’s culture is prefabricated on an assembly line in some third world country and breaks the day you take it out of the box. In other words it’s crap. Imagine how creative society would be if it weren’t ran but the stuffed suits on Madison Ave but by the cats at Burning Man.

Everybody thinks Globalization and the future is about the Third World catching up to First World standards, perhaps the real trick to its success, and the planet’s survival, is the First World trimming down its own demands. Meeting the Third World halfway.

Bush originally opposed Environmental treaties because it would only apply to us while China and India were free to pollute their way into the First World. Scientists call this the “tragedy of the commons”, where a resource is plundered unnecessarily by competing fractions because each participant in the plundering was afraid that if it wasn’t going to be them to reap the benefit than someone else would, so everyone dug in until a resource is depleted.

Should we not sacrifice some of our GDP in adherence of tighter standards, creating a lower environmental impact, so that when China is ready our success and technologies could help it implement these changes? As the biggest source of waste and carbon emissions on the planet by far, can we morally argue that we won’t change because some of the countries with the lowest rate of impact (for the time being) won’t be held to our standards?

I’m not suggesting the First World should pitch itself in the dark here.

 

I’m just saying we should lead by example and start lowering our carbon emissions, our amount of waste, and our use of energy. Too many Americans have a Wild West mentality, a “log it or leave it” frame of mind. They believe in manifest destiny, and still think it applies, that we live in a land of endless bounty; and that to conserve our resources, or restrict our behaviors, is anti-American, is being a pinko communist.

Their thinking is myopic.

Anyway.

I wonder if they have the McRib in China? Or if they only release it every four years like here? Fish Fillet? Do they eat McNuggets with chop sticks? I’m kinda curious. Do they have a Royale with cheese?

No Starbucks In The Forbidden City?

6 years ago it was a startling news story that really highlighted the rapid change of China and globalization’s profound reach. A symbolic act that seemed to usher in the new millennium.

Starbucks opened a store in the Forbidden City.

Now it seems a Chinese newscaster is waging a campaign to kick the global coffee chain out of China’s most revered of places.

From Yahoo News.

A news anchor for China Central Television has led an online campaign to remove Starbucks, which opened in the palace in 2000 at the invitation of its managers, who are under pressure to raise money to maintain the vast complex.

The anchorman, Rui Chenggang, wrote in a CCTV blog that Starbucks’ presence “undermined the Forbidden City’s solemnity and trampled over Chinese culture.”

I have no love for Starbucks. I might harbor a secret love for their Caramel Macchiatos, but overall I find Starbucks overpriced, pretentious, a scourge upon locally owned roasters, and, most offensive, annoying. It shocked and saddened me to hear they moved into The Forbidden City in the first place. I kinda like to think of the place as more, I don’t know, forbidden.

I support multiculturalism, but the key word there is culture. I’m all in favor of socities protecting their cultural heritage. I wouldn’t want to see a Panda Express in the lobby of the Smithsonian.

In a rush to catch up to the West China didn’t stop to think that maybe the tourists wouldn’t dig coming upon such an American presence in the middle of China’s historical ground zero. Then again, it’s a communist country without the credibility of our outstanding press. Let’s just say that no one works propaganda like the Chinese.

CCTV reported on the controversy Thursday on its national midday news, though it failed to mention that the protests were initiated by one of its own employees. The report quoted an unidentified Chinese visitor as saying tourists found it odd that Starbucks was in the palace.

Perhaps the government just wants to replace it with a Chinese own franchise. That’s the problem with doing business in China. There’s really nothing to stop the government from doing whatever it wants. While America has transparent business laws that protect companies and corporations, foreign businesses in China just have to be content playing by their rules, and be prepared for the government’s whims. But Multinational Corporations will grin and bare it.

Why?

Just look at all those lovely customers:

In defense of Starbuck’s presence in the Forbidden City, via McDonald’s, and an argument for Globalization, I found this interesting perspective from Askedgeworth:

Picture now, the Chinese person who hears that a MacDonald’s is opening in Beijing. He is curious. He goes there to find out what kind of food Americans eat. He discovers that MacDonald’s food is fun, genuinely fun. (The vast majority of customers you see at a MacDonalds in China are local people.) He does not eat at MacDonald’s every day, nor does he make hamburgers a major component of his diet. But he enjoys going to MacDonald’s and his children like it too. I have talked to a number of Chinese about MacDonald’s, and this is the story I hear over and over again.

They like American peasant food.

Globalization isn’t totally black and white. Nor can it be stopped. Starbucks are still going up all over China. What this sounds like is an attempt to score points with nationalists by cleaning up the Forbidden City while distracting them from the wave of foreign influence sweeping through China.

Nevertheless, here we are.

Adios’ Starbucks.

Can’t say I’m going to shed a tear.