Althouse: "Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?"

September 3, 2013

"Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?"

"To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil and be called by no name except deportees?"

15 comments:

Ann Althouse said...: Please read the linked article. I'm not just calling attention to the old song, but this story will be less interesting to you if you never knew the song.

I think of the old Joan Baez album with this song. Here she is singing it with Bob Dylan.; 9/3/13, 9:16 AM
Molly said...: The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'n'n. The oranges piled high in their creosote dumps.

I love that word "rott'n'n" and the color imagery of oranges against the creosote.

Is this the most poetic of Woody's songs?; 9/3/13, 9:17 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Miguel Negrete Álvarez. Tomás Aviña de Gracia. Francisco Llamas Durán. Santiago García Elizondo. Rosalio Padilla Estrada. Tomás Padilla Márquez. Bernabé López Garcia. Salvador Sandoval Hernández. Severo Medina Lára. Elías Trujillo Macias. José Rodriguez Macias. Luis López Medina. Manuel Calderón Merino. Luis Cuevas Miranda. Martin Razo Navarro. Ignacio Pérez Navarro. Román Ochoa Ochoa. Ramón Paredes Gonzalez. Guadalupe Ramírez Lára. Apolonio Ramírez Placencia. Alberto Carlos Raygoza. Guadalupe Hernández Rodriguez. Maria Santana Rodriguez. Juan Valenzuela Ruiz. Wenceslao Flores Ruiz. José Valdívia Sánchez. Jesús Meza Santos. Baldomero Marcas Torres.; 9/3/13, 9:22 AM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: "Today we are here to exploit an old tragedy for political gain. We don't actually give a shit about the people that died."; 9/3/13, 9:25 AM
Wince said...: Isn't the real scandal here the failure of Mexicans and the Mexican government to repatriate the remains of their countrymen in 1948?; 9/3/13, 9:40 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Here's Arlo Guthrie saying a few words about his father's song and then singing the song with Emmylou Harris.

Here's the Joan Baez version that I remember listening to over 40 years ago. Before finding this, just thinking about it, thinking about hearing it all those years ago, gave me chills.; 9/3/13, 9:43 AM
Ann Althouse said...: @Broomhandle It must hurt that your side doesn't have anything profoundly moving like this to win folks over.

Try writing a poem about how the illegal immigrants are hurting Americans. Strum a guitar. Put it on YouTube. Too bad you don't have 28 dead people to pretend to care about. So unfair!; 9/3/13, 9:46 AM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: I actually don't have a side. Unlike most of your commentariat I've worked with illegal immigrants. They're real people, not abstractions.; 9/3/13, 10:18 AM
traditionalguy said...: Migrant harvesting is honorable work. And it is done in the midst of food. Hunger is never an issue.

Mao made the educated ChiComs go work in the harvests a few years to understand it. I bet the Baez clique never spent a 12 hour day picking anything.

Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath exposed the racially equal treatment of harvesting. The Lettuce growers in Salinas Valley never forgave him.

Outside Oakland, there are only about .05% African Americans living on the West Coast. The poor Mexicans and Oakies did the harvesting here.; 9/3/13, 10:59 AM
Clayton Hennesey said...: What issues should we feel about on the basis of how songs that invoke our feelings on those issues make us feel?; 9/3/13, 11:40 AM
Crunchy Frog said...: Yet the INS agents and pilots have no odes and paeons written for them. They died too, but they aren't an exploitable story.

Dead is still dead. And 65 years later, had they not died in a plane crash, most of them would be dead by now regardless.

Broomhandle is right. Everyone who died on that plane had hopes and plans and dreams. They were real people. It was a real tragedy.

I refuse to cry crocodile tears for any of them however.; 9/3/13, 11:44 AM
Andy Freeman said...: >It must hurt that your side doesn't have anything profoundly moving like this to win folks over.

But who does it hurt?

"profoundly moving ... to win folks over" doesn't imply that said "folks" are being won to do something good.

Your late colleague Coase would suggest that these "wins" have been big mistakes.

Losing while being correct is nothing to be proud of but winning while being wrong is something to be ashamed of.; 9/3/13, 11:52 AM
Andy Freeman said...: Like Broomhandle, I've worked with illegal immigrants. I did farm labor and went to school with them. (I didn't do the migrant thing, but my father did.)

I don't think that the benefits that you got from "winning" is worth the horrors that said winning did to them.; 9/3/13, 11:57 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "I actually don't have a side. Unlike most of your commentariat I've worked with illegal immigrants. They're real people, not abstractions."

Okay, then I would appreciate your opinion on the topic of how everyone will use this issue politically to the extent that they can.

Sorry to assume you were on the other side.; 9/3/13, 6:56 PM
Ipswichie said...: I'm against the proposed House immigration bill. However, my littles can sing all the words of that song along with Woody or Odetta.; 9/4/13, 1:05 AM