New in PJ Media:
Oh, brother. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has sponsored a bill to stop members of the Chinese Communist Party from owning farmland in the United States, and has given it the name “This Land Is Our Land Act,” echoing the Communist folkie Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land.” Hawley’s reference to the song doesn’t sit well with the old Commie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, who is enraged that someone whom she considers an “insurrectionist” would dare appropriate her father’s Marxist, atheist anthem.
The Kansas City Star reported Monday that Nora Guthrie doesn’t mind when politicians use the song, as long as the use “aligns with the song’s values.” And Josh Hawley wanting to prevent Woody’s fellow Communists from buying up American farmland decidedly does not align with the song’s values: “In this particular case,” Nora Guthrie fumed, “the co-opting or parodying of the lyric by those not aligned with Woody’s lyrics — i.e. misrepresentation by autocrats, racists, white nationalists, anti-labor, insurrectionists, etc. — is not condoned. We do not consider Josh Hawley in any way a representative of Woody’s values therefore we would never endorse or approve of his reference to Woody’s lyrics.”
This is all just virtue-signaling, as titles can’t be copyrighted, so Nora can’t stop Hawley from using it, but at least now she has shown her fellow Leftists that she, like them at all times and in all conceivable circumstances, is not happy.
It’s useful to recall what exactly the “values” of “This Land Is Your Land” really are. The lyrics in the most popular version are vague enough for the song to be taken simply as a declaration of love for this country, and it often is; that’s likely why Hawley chose a name that recalled the song for his bill. However, it’s also a paean to atheism and Communism. In 2012, the centenary of Guthrie’s birth, NPR ran a feature about the song, noting that some people said it “a Marxist response to ‘God Bless America.’”
Woody Guthrie, who once said that “the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party,” according to NPR was “irritated by Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America,’ sung by Kate Smith, which seemed to be endlessly playing on the radio in the late 1930s. So irritated, in fact, that he wrote this song as a retort, at first sarcastically calling it ‘God Blessed America for Me’ before renaming it ‘This Land Is Your Land.’” Guthrie’s original lyrics were open Marxist agitprop:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.
There is more. Read the rest here.
