Saturday, February 26, 2011

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.   

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