Resistance moon: The voice was chanting

We’ve reached the end of National Poetry Month, another journey through humanity and the universe we inhabit as seen through the lens of those we trust to distil it down to its most basic chemistry. Coincidentally we’ve just passed Day 100 of the Kleptocrat’s rule—a point at which we were promised we’d see great things, believe me. And then, in the past couple of weeks, we were told that the first hundred days are a completely artificial construct, so unfair, so we’re not to expect…well, whatever it was we were told we’d be getting by now.

What a maroon.

I’m grateful to have had the poems to focus on these past 30 days. To remind myself that we as human beings have endured worse than the Kleptocrat—even we as Americans. Letting the poets deconstruct both repression and resistance down to the basics has been therapeutic. A crowd of sorrows, an artillery round, a politician’s spit, a bear’s DNA, a Green Card, a mansplaining bishop, an order given in Polish—these are the building blocks of both the good and the evil that we contain within ourselves. It’s up to choose, as Anne Sexton pointed out so succinctly, how we’re going to face it.

Well, this is the end of the month, but not of the road—pretty sure that the Gauleiters have more tricks up their brown-shirted sleeves, and we need to soldier on. As the abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips said in 1852, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”

It’s not clear to me why this sentence is not being repeated at every public gathering these days. It’s also depressing as hell to realize that this kind of crap—power taking from the many to give to the few—keeps coming around and around.

So to close out this month, I’ll give you something that dates from the last big national crisis in the 1930s and 40s, from another man of the heartland. Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was from Oklahoma, which—as I hope to God you know—was one of the hardest-hit areas of the Dust Bowl. When I was a kid my mother, a third-generation Californian, still sniffed about the Okies, who’d flooded the state decades before. (One of the best takes on their welcome to the Golden State is in Guthrie’s “Do-Re-Mi”, and one of my favorite takes on that is by John Mellancamp.) Guthrie drifted restlessly from one end of the country to the other, walking, hitchhiking and riding the rails; it was from these travels that he distilled the essence of America that became “This Land Is Your Land”.

Like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “This Land Is Your Land” is a whole lotta wrapped up in unadorned paper: straightforward melody, four chords, easy harmonies. It’s a simple—albeit revolutionary—concept, too: America belongs to all of us, not just the propertied and the powerful. Yeah, it even belongs to the ignorant, the fearful and the aggrieved (although I do wonder what Woody would have made of his heirs in the red states now, voting against their own interests and swallowing in great gulps the claptrap dished out by the plutocrats who got them into the current state of affairs and intend to keep them there)—just not exclusively. It belongs to all of us.

Guthrie was the mortal enemy of fascism. If you enlarge the photo above, you'll note the sticker on his guitar. He would have been at the front of every protest against the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and the spineless, lickspittle Repugnants in Congress. And while he was in jail waiting for the ACLU and the twelve gazillion GoFundMe campaigns to get him out, he'd write another shedload of songs about it.

I was at a pub sing a few weeks ago with a roomful of people who perform for pleasure. We were singing largely Anglo-American-Celtic pieces with varying degrees of enthusiasm and confidence. When “This Land” came up, pretty sure the walls of the pub vibrated. Back in January, when the Kleptocrat issued his first failed executive order on banning immigration from select Muslim countries that don’t host any of his business interests, protestors at Philadelphia’s airport sang “This Land”. I cannot imagine a more appropriate choice.

As with “Blowin’”, everyone’s sung “This Land”. Every folk group, starting with The Weavers. Pete Seeger must have sung it about a squillion times in his lifetime. Bernie Sanders—yes mam. Ani DiFranco, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga the Mormon Tabernacle Choir… Springsteen called it the greatest song ever written about America. (He and Seeger sang it at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the inauguration of President Obama, the event that set off the racists and gave the Kleptocrat traction.)

Here’s Springsteen again, in a recording that melds Woody into his son Arlo’s voice, with Little Richard, Bono, John Mellencamp and Taj Mahal from a PBS show called A Vision Shared, about Guthrie and Leadbelly, the two iconic folksong writers of the Depression.

This cover contains several verses that have been airbrushed out over the years—like the one about the No Trespassing sign and the one I think speaks loudest to me right now:

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.

Please carry that thought forward with you. It’s true.

Peace out.