"For some in the US This Land is Your Land is an alternative national anthem. And when you’re faced with a threat to democracy and liberty like Donald Trump..."

"... to find out that the guy who wrote it was on to this shit 70 years ago, it gives you the sense that we are right to take a stand. There’s a connection here between Trump Sr and Trump Jr, and that connection is the exploitation of working people. And at the moment Trump Jr is exploiting working people’s fears. He’s a classic blowhard."

Said lefty songster Billy Bragg, talking about Woody Guthrie, who, long ago, was a tenant in a building belonging to Donald Trump's father Fred. Well, just about nobody loves his landlord, and now we're seeing Guthrie’s "series of bitter missives, which have only just come to light, accusing his landlord of having encoded in his contracts regulations evincing not just a cynical treatment of the working class but a bigotry towards black Americans." I'm quoting that from The Guardian, which gives us no actual quotes from what Guthrie wrote in what I take it are songs about his landlord, not "missives" in the sense of letters to the landlord.

That makes me think of "Dear Landlord," which sounds like the beginning of a letter, but is a song lyric, by Bob Dylan, who seems to be the one person who did love his landlord, the landlord in question being — if I'm reading this thing right — God.

Anyway, here's a NYT piece about the Woody Guthrie/Fred Trump connection, and we are talking about songs, songs with lyrics like: "I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/Just how much/Racial Hate/he stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line/Here at his/Eighteen hundred family project...."