Moral?
General Peter Pace, USMC, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, needs to read his job description.
Arlo can help. Just listen to Alice’s Restaurant:
…and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:
(“KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?”)
I went over to the sergeant, said, “Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench, I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” He looked at me and said, “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington.”
4 comments
I think maybe the Joint Chiefs dealt with other kinds of joints in Arlo’s day…
Speaking of which, I read today (at ellroon’s? I can’t find it at the moment) that alcoholism and drug abuse by active duty military personnel has reached levels not seen since the war in Vietnam. Is anyone surprised? I need what an old girlfriend once called “food and drug administration” fairly frequently myself in the midst of this insanity, and I’m not even the one getting shot at, bombed, and forced to attack or abuse civilians. No wonder the troops turn to booze and drugs.
We are destroying another generation of young soldiers. Have we learned nothing in the intervening decades?
(BTW, thanks for the earworm… I think.)
Yep, this is nothing like Vietnam.
Just wait for it to come around on the guitar.
Dang, read Alice again and it still rings true. We certainly have progressed, have we not?
By the way, someone asked me the other day where the protest songs of today are. Where are the singers…where are the Pete Seeger’s and the Jonathan Edwards’ and the Arlo Guthrie’s and the Joan Baez’s. I think we are here, in the blogosphere. Using a different instrument, but still singing. Pass that hat, man. And that joint…chief of staff.
The songs are out there. You can hear some of them on my local NPR station [WUWF] on Sunday afternoon, but there’s no time for them on ClearChannel. Even the “oldies” format won’t play the protest songs from the 60s and 70s – don’t want to annoy the advertisers.
Blogs wouldn’t be as political if the media would do their job.
I had a hard time accepting it, but too many of my grandparents’ generation brought up the fact that newspapers didn’t report on the Depression for a very long time after it had taken hold. People thought it was a local condition and took to the road to find work, assuming there was work in other places.
The media is playing the same game today – let’s not report the bad news, it’s too depressing and people won’t buy things.