1951: Folk Music and Fred Trump

The other night a friend of mine sent me this song by Woodie Guthrie.

"I ain't got no home - Woodie Guthrie"

The song originally appeared on "Dust Bowl Ballads," but Guthrie reworked the lyrics to this song to include a part about "Old Man Trump" in 1951, a year after he had moved into one of Fred Trump's (father of Donald Trump) properties at "Beach Haven" near Coney Island. I then stumbled across these articles about Fred Trump, his real estate empire, and his actively racist past.

Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations:

https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026

In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/28/in-1927-donald-trumps-father-was-arrested-after-a-klan-riot-in-queens/?utm_term=.12c0fc0a310b
(The photos in this article have been blurred to the public...)

Needless to say, I was impacted by my findings. I reacted by writing the following response to my friend below.

OP ED by Alexander Cole

Image Courtesy of: adbusters.org

"I'm hearing this song played around me every day.

Its has impressed me to continually discover that throughout our relatively short-lived romance with Capitalism and our holy and sanctimonious belief in unfettered progress, there have been voices (literally) that provided an alternate perspective to that of the "Ethos of Endless Consumption for the Greater Good". If you would have had your ears open you might have caught on in Guthrie’s day, but perhaps only granted that you had access to ideas and people outside of the grinding Post-War Boom, or those few who were intelligent enough to make sense of what was actually happening in the United States and the rest of the World in a time of full tilt prosperity for the visible (and invariably Caucasian) majority...

I can only lie down and feel the burn of desperation in my own chest when I hear that harmonica, like the whole thing is coming up all around us but there is no way to stop it, like the tide coming in around our necks.

It makes me wonder to what point can all of this can keep continuing, but at the same time it seems like so many people have made their “investments" in the future. So it ebbs back a little and everyone is betting on it like its the roulette table, but nobody really knows where it will all shake out. Red or Black?

Feeling isolated; well I guess that was the whole point of this. They had to kill the family and replace the mother and father. We got the Market and the State instead. But we in America are like scared children and we don’t trust our new parents because they are too impersonal and we are instinctively threatened by the power they both wield over our lives.

None of us can really agree on anything as a community to any degree of certainty so, how are we as a macro-community going to be expected to resist the State, much less the Market and her milk filled bounty? Individuals have been exploited by markets and the states employ armies and police forces to persecute us as individuals instead of defending us. Not to mention we were born into a race divided “Country” of Capital fanatics with a painful history of heavy imperialism and slavery to genocide, complete with full scale indoctrination into a system that systematically murders billions of animals a year to feed us and sacrifices countless human lives throughout the world so that the minority of us in the developed world can live like kings.

Yet we’re not fully aware of it.

And for some reason this system still finds a way to work. It runs completely on the contrary to our collective nature as a species, which until the Anthropocene and Industrial Revolution, was survival through community. But now in the ideological “Westworld" Wasteland, we are all alone, and nobody wants to admit it because we are always still connected all the time. We voyeur into each other’s lives through our phone lenses like its our job to share every waking second so that we can prove that our lives are worth living. Its a sickness that I see all around me, it feels like cigarette smokers in the 20’s. Nobody seems to know any better. Everyone is running around on automatic, sharing and liking and tweeting, rinsing and repeating.

We are weaker without each other, and so in order to give us that sense of belonging so we could survive without the family, we have been neatly organized into Consumer Tribes and assigned our identities and our desires without our conscious knowledge. Any deviations from the Imperial standard ensure a life undoubtedly full of external misery and internal suffering. So good luck even if you do figure it out. And the hardest part for me to digest is that no one can ever truly attempt to define the characteristics of our society anymore, or this sickness(?), because the only thing we can be certain of is that it will all change. And sooner rather than later. The face of the thing morphs depending on the angle from which you decide to look at it. And I think everyone is genuinely freaked out because it has actually been peaceful for 70 years, give or take a few proxy wars, genocides, economic rapes, and race riots. Overall things are empirically much better than they have ever been in history for the Species of Humankind. So we take peace in that. But the battle has just been scaled up against individual; there is a target on each and every one of our backs, and we either find a way to keep up and consume or we end up totally consumed ourselves. If not by “our” supplied and sanctioned desires, then through the subsequent self censoring and complete rejection of our true selves. We force each other to die so we can be reborn into the perfect, cybernetic automaton, capable of consuming at light speed, from Earth to Mars and back.

We know there won’t be another war, but we are always half expecting it, and deep down I kind of feel like everyone is actually praying for one. I don’t think most people will want to admit it but at least it is something most of us are capable of understanding, and we can have a chance to feed our own ego and capture a true sense of purpose, a “real” enemy to fight.

It’s the combination of disbelief and indignation that continues to cripple me, yet for some reason I see our generation dragging ourselves over to our axes and hacking away at the trees like we're paving the Highway to Hell itself, but we aren’t the ones really doing the swinging. We don’t really know where its going, maybe we are instead building ourselves up to the Heavens. All we really know is that its a sloppy, God awful mess that very few people can seem to even begin to wrap their head around. We hope that the best minds have all gone to science, but we all know that it is the markets and the states that shape Science’s role in our lives and societies. All alone we are powerless but all together we are psychotic, reactive, without compassion or understanding; we are little more evolved than the Coliseum packed full with screaming chimpanzees. And its not because we don’t want to evolve, but because we have been programmed into our core human operating system directives. We all waiting for Apple to release the update, or is it Google’s version that we want? Or do we risk it and learn how to code ourselves and create our own OS, at the cost of public ridicule, non cross platform compatibility, isolation from the mother Market, and fate guaranteeing planned obsolescence?

So if in 1950, Woodie was playing these tunes, getting along one day at a time and not losing sight of what he believed in, and found a purpose in singing these songs to those lucky enough to actually hear them, then somewhere in all this madness there is a little hope for us in the Present. A little hope that these words still exist, and these ideas are still capable of breathing life into us while we are still here."

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What are your thoughts?

Let me know in the comments.

Reference Material

I recently finished reading the books and publications below, and have in some way affected my consciousness of our current social, political, and economic structures. They are fascinating and recommend anyone interested in learning more to check these out.

AdBusters Magazine
http://www.adbusters.org/

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310