WHAT WOULD ARLO SING? Legendary folk song meets downtown TIFs?

A reworked anthem, when might makes blight

 

Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as an ode to America the Real, a place where natural beauty made beautiful music with natural people.  Woody's equally esteemed son Arlo would go on to craft a satirical philosophy about what made America great that took a delightfully peevish view of authority and bureaucracy.  His father, who died in 1967, would most certainly have approved.

 

A couple of years ago, Arlo Guthrie and the Boston Pops paid his dad tribute.  He sang This Land, after a few vintage-Arlo introductory quips that were at once comedy, philosophy, and a lament:  that the real meaning of this land, your land, our land might be getting lost. 

The comments below the YouTube video of Arlo's tribute reflect that lament -- talking about how Woody would feel if he were alive, in this age of taking private land for corporate development with the blessing of the Supreme Court.  (Poster compliments of Kevin Walsh).

 

It got me thinking how these two men might satirize this strange turn of events, in the spirit of that funniest of scenes in American cinema, when Officer Obie and the Authorities go after Arlo and gang in Alice's Restaurant for illegally dumping a "half a ton of garbage from the back of a red VW microbus" on Thanksgiving Day. 

If they lived in downtown Columbia, what might father and son sing about our latest strange push on the Road to Redevelopment?   Might they do a satirical take on that great anthem?   What if they rewrote the song through the eyes of a developer, who rephrases the idea that "this land was made for you and me?"  

 

As I went walkin'
Toward 9th and Broadway
I saw before me
Lakota Coffee

 

Got me a latte

Then kept a walkin'

 

Right toward the Hotel Regency. 

 

Okay now, everybody sing:

 

This land is blighted

That land is blighted

From Odle's Corners

To the Tiger Towers

 

But don't you worry

There are incentives

 

This blight was made for you and me.

 

Downtown I rambled

To do some shoppin'

But lost my morals

And then my safety

 

The blight had got me

Despite the cameras

 

This blight is bad for you and me.

 

This land is blighted
That land is blighted
From Odle's Corners
To the Tiger Towers

 

But don't you worry
There are incentives

 

This blight was made for you and me.
 

The sun come shining

City Hall came knocking

With a TIF incentive

And a Council order

 

A condemnation

Cheap acquisition

 

That land they're takin' just for me. 

 

Okay everybody -- sing it like you mean it!

 

This land is blighted
That land is blighted
From Odle's Corners
To the Tiger Towers

 

But don't you worry
There are incentives

 

This land was taken just for me. 

 

One line more -- and slowly, y'all

 

That blight done made it almost free.