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On Thanksgiving, 1965, Arlo Guthrie, an 18-year-old leftist singer songwriter, went to a local Massachusetts landfill only to find it closed and instead dumped some trash on a hillside. The event inspired ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, Guthrie’s anti-war song which gets played every Thanksgiving.
The recent death of Alice Brock, the inspiration for the titular Alice, ahead of Thanksgiving inspired a rash of new stories about the song and ensures its relentless airplay over the holiday weekend.
But the real relevance of the song doesn’t come from the Thanksgiving weekend or Alice’s death, but Trump’s resounding victory earlier in November. And the aging liberal boomers and a younger cohort with no clue about the song understand all too little what it really says about the modern Left.
The same lefties smirking at Officer Obie busting a young Arlo for dumping garbage at the bottom of a cliff (actually a hillside) would applaud as EPA stormtroopers rampaged through the home of anyone daring to not only dump garbage on a hillside but violate one of a million environmental regulations.
Before the election, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, a fancy name for the trash police, tore apart a private residence in search of a pet squirrel and raccoon, and decapitated them to test for rabies after one of the beleaguered animals bit the trash police. The details of the 5-hour raid by a convoy of environmental police vehicles serving a surprise warrant and escorting the owner to the toilet is the sort of insanity that makes Alice’s Restaurant seem like a polite greeting.
59 years after Guthrie wrote a hit song complaining about being busted for dumping a load of trash, cities and suburbs have garbage police whose job is to poke through people’s trash and check to see if they’re putting tin cans (recyclables), leftover chicken (compostables) and regular trash in the same bin.
“We came to a side road, and off the side of the side road, there was another fifteen foot cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better ‘n two little piles,” Arlo nonchalantly jeered. Today his fans support fining anyone who mixes up the colored bins so that one small bagged pile of trash doesn’t get mixed up with any other piles of bagged trash.
In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the original setting for Alice’s Restaurant, potential penalties for trash violations include having your license suspended, your car seized and fines of up to $15,000. 80% of waste ban violations were for “improper disposal of cardboard.” What would the progressive government have done to Alice and pals today for deciding “they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time” and just letting it pile up in an abandoned church before dumping it on a hillside?
They might have made an exception to their opposition to the death penalty for that set of offenses.
Guthrie’s current home in Brevard County has trash regulations longer than the extremely long lyrics of Alice’s Restaurant. The recycling regulations specify that mouthwash bottles must be rinsed, deodorant must have its cap on, newspapers must be kept clean and phone books must be cut into 1 inch thick sections. Whatever the 18-year-old Arlo would have made of this trash regime whose obsessive compulsive trash policing puts the Stasi to shame, his senior self appears to be fine with it.
Alice’s Restaurant’s spends a lot of its time mocking Officer Obie, a zealous law enforcement officer who tracks down the men who dumped a “pile of garbage”, but every progressive city, suburb and state now employs an army of Officer Obies whose job is to look through your trash every week.
Officer Obie is ridiculed for documenting the trash dumping with “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.” Today trash police, officially ‘code enforcement officers’, wear bodycams to document inappropriate trash placement. This is needed because the trash police have been caught faking violations by rearranging the trash in the bin and then writing citations for them. Failure to respond to a citation can lead to an arrest. People have had to hire lawyers and fight court cases over how many feet a recycling bin was from the curb.
And no one has bothered to write a song about it.
But if Democrats want to understand why they took such a beating in the election and why members of their base defected in such numbers to Trump and the Republicans, they might want to contemplate how they went from sneering at Officer Obie to turning into him.
Kamala tried to run her campaign on ‘joy’ but where’s the joy in eight pages of recycling regulations to determine which bin your trash goes that are enforced by trash police wearing bodycams?
Joy isn’t being told what to do, it’s a sense of freedom. Who represented real freedom more: the rogue billionaire or the lifelong public official? Which one was truer to the spirit of Alice’s Restaurant: the man being prosecuted by the feds and state authorities for offenses that no one could even understand or the woman who wanted to ban cars, health insurance, guns, and politically incorrect speech?
When RFK Jr endorsed Trump, the media rushed out an outraged story about the Kennedy scion allegedly absconding with a whale’s head 30 years ago. The story describes how RFK Jr “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan” and then drove for five hours while “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car” and, as his daughter related, “we all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Which side of the story, RFK Jr or the media scolds, sound more like the ethos of Alice’s Restaurant? Which of them represents free spirits doing what they please and which one represents the authorities?
Alice’s Restaurant and the joy of color-coded recycling bins is just one symptom of a movement that pretends to be subversive but is fundamentally authoritarian. Every time lefties try to play at being subversive, it only lasts long enough for them to seize power and then they turn authoritarian.
That’s how hippies turned into Office Obie, free love turned into #MeToo, free speech became the speech police, civil rights became affirmative action quotas, and anti-government protests became government abuses. Take pronouns, which evolved from freeform sexual experimentation in the counterculture and along the way became a bureaucratic mandate complete with nametags.
Whatever one thinks of leftist ideas, it’s undeniable that every subversive counterculture impulse has long since become an oppressive cultural decree. And yet wokes act as if they’re Arlo ‘taking on the man’ rather than ‘the man’ demanding you color code your trash, state your pronouns and shut up.
You can’t actually get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. Even if Brock wasn’t deceased, the idea of running a free-for-all and serving food to the public under those conditions would be unthinkable under lefty government authorities. Her attempts at running actual restaurants failed and toward the end she lent her name to a restaurant that claimed to be using her recipes. The original church became the ‘Guthrie Center’ which has a gift shop and rents out space for weddings. Guthrie had to stop touring during the pandemic because regulations no longer allowed it. He didn’t write a song about that either.
Guthrie, predictably a Bernie Sanders supporter, backed a movement seeking a totalitarian America with even more government oversight, more regulations and a much bigger Obiesque police state.
Freedom is no longer on the menu, but then again it never was. The promise of freedom is a subversive bait and switch, the encouragement to young people to do what they want, to protest, riot, have sex, speak out, ignore the rules and dump trash is just there to undermine a sitting non-leftist authority. Once the Left takes over, it implements rules far more oppressive than those of the prior regime.
The Left runs on freedom and joy, but all that it ever delivers are tyranny and misery.
Another good one, Daniel. And that’s the name of that tune.
thank you Matt
…”Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
Only, as you stated, the new boss is much worse!
Correct. The left was always authoritarian in disguise. They put out so much misleading propaganda during that period that it is probably impossible to imagine how insidious it was if you didn’t experience it yourself. For example, I remember one book I read at the time describing Castro’s Cuba as a paradise’. It was very seductive propaganda, yet even at the time, in my unformed political state, I was suspicious of it.
Yes, you just had to watch how the people they lauded operate. Communists were the first to build walls to keep their people from escaping. Fact was, America was a lot more free then, and especially by the mid-70s.
Jeez, I thought Britain was over regulated.
The environmental hysteria and message of pending doom is not working, YOUNG people toss their energy drink cans into the hedgerows after their night of constant drug use.
The principle of the Left was and is to do what best brings or completes the Revolution. So the attitude toward peace, free speech, and everything else is situational. When the Left gets the upper hand, it shows its dictatorial self.
By the way, every method of Joe McCarthy was pioneered by the commies themselves. Different factions used these on each other.
Doesn’t Mr Horowitz state that inside every leftist is a totalitarian waiting to get out? So very true.
They never find a rule for other people that they don’t like
I’ma just sttin on the Group Dubbya bench with all the other “father rapers” , reminiscing…… 🙂
Find all those Apple Cores and Granola Bar Wrappers scattered about left by the typical Eco-Freaks
Funny how they can’t seem take 10 steps out of their way to use a trash can, much less haul their trash out of the woods..
I used to be a peacenik folkie (a lifetime ago) and “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” was one of my favorite tunes … insofar as it has a tune … it does, but only in the chorus. I still remember the words. It used to be played every Thanksgiving by one or another radio station. It’s been a long while since I’ve heard it on the radio, and I’m guessing it never gets played anymore.
At the end of the song Arlo encourages everyone to sing a chorus at the draft board, in harmony etc. “If we did that why folks we’d have a movement and that’ what this is …” The problem came when he suggested that two guys sing a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant” and walk out … “Maybe they’ll think they’re both fαggοts and won’t take either of ‘em.”*
I used to be a draft counselor (another lifetime ago) and back in the day falsely claiming to be homosexual (I never counseled anyone actually do that) could get you out of the draft. Now, gays and trαns activists are suing to get into the military. Oh the irony.
And you can’t hear “Alice’s Restaurant” on the radio because it’s too politically incorrect; almost radioactive. The times they are’a changing’.
As for me … I’m still sittin’ on the Group W bench.
_____
* Oops. Did I just get myself cancelled?
That really good, and I’ve read a lot of comments, on this site.
Great article, but you left out one thing…
You forgot to replace the heroin OD with fentanyl.
💉
. ⚰️
You said it like it is.
The Left was against the government until it
ran the government and now we the people with Donald J. Trump
at the helm are going to run the government to bring America
back to sanity and start remembering normal again.
The 2024 election is the pinnacle of a massive sociopolitical paradigm shift. The Left now suffers a great burden of irony and hypocrisy. While still pretending to be counter-culture radicals, these poseurs have become part of the national establishment they so militantly opposed back in those days of sit-ins, street marches, and ROTC building takeovers. The rebels of yesterday have become the social and political status quo of today. And it’s nice to see that we’re now the ones sitting at the cool kids lunch table.
Kissing the professor’s ass is “edgy” …
Hippies make me sick…
They have no problem polluting the air with Skunk smelling pot.
But if I toss a dog a toss turd in the gutter, I have ruined the planet.
“free speech became the speech police”
Also going back to the old time 60s radicals – Mario Savio where are you now that we need you again?
“The Left went from an anti-authoritarian to an authoritarian movement.”
I disagree – the left has always been authoritarian. The “anti-authoritarianism” of the 60s and 70s was just a temporary strategy while they were in the minority. Once they became culturally dominant, they showed their true colors.
I do not recall everything from back then as I was too young for some of it. But, I do recall great conformity in the supposed non conformists. Clothing had to be a certain kind (work shirts for people who never did manual work, for example) hair had to be long. If you diverged from their supposed divergence you were not allowed at the party.. And everyone had to use drugs – cannabis for sure. I recall very smug and angry people who didn’t trust anyone over 30!( is it don’t trust anyone over 90 now?). Other changing mores cheated young women and children of a secure lifestyle. So the left feels the same to me then and now. Those were not the good old days, no!
As someone who began life at the bottom rung of society, I’ve heard and seen just about everything under the sun and the one thing I’ve always consistently noticed about leftists is that with few exceptions, they always come from well off families.
Even in college, I never encountered anyone promoting leftist ideology who came from a poor or working class family. I had to work my way through college so I never had the time or inclination to stand around and listen to their bullsh*t. Other people I knew with a similar background as mine had no interest in that leftist bullsh*t either.
Ergo, I have long since concluded that Marxism is the bailiwick of people with an idle mine, lots of money and way too much idle time. Other than being American citizens, they have nothing in common with average everyday people who work for a living and worry about the mundane things most working class people worry about.
My wife and me were just discussing this very topic. I’ve heard comedians, or a comedian, make jokes about the God size hole in every human heart. The hole is real, and people will fill the void anything. Dostoyevsky wrote about the young, idle rich who, a some time ago, wanted to teardown another country
That’s typical of the the left. They just “assume” that everyone else suffers from the same mental afflictions as they do without zero proof to prove it. That’s the very definition of self righteous. I would also append the word asshole to that.
But then, aren’t all liberal leftists self righteous assholes? I have yet to meet one who wasn’t. Anyhoo….! Perhaps I need to get out more and broaden my experience.
Truth be told, they would have far less mental afflictions if they would just pull their noses from up other peoples asses and mind their own G-D business. It works for everyone else.
The original coat of arms of the Fabian Society was a wolf in sheep’s clothing .
Arlo Guthrie was a red-diaper baby, son of Woody.