Re Culture: Uniting and ... (cont. 5)

[cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Carrol Cox)]

                                ...."Deportee." It begins:
        The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
        The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps.
For my present purposes, these liens are preliminary (though for a
complete discussion, "peaches are rotting" should remind us that Guthrie
was a Depression poet). The next lines:
        You are flying them back to the Mexican border
        To spend all their money to wade back again.
I think that at one point the "Internationale" reads (I am quoting from
memory): "The men will only ask their due." It ought of course to have
read: "WE will only ask OUR due." In other words, for this phrase the
writer puts himself "outside" the working class, speaking "for" it. (See
Shelley's Song for the Men of England: same outside perspective--I don't
disagree with Alex's reply to me on Shelley, however.) Guthrie's two
lines  just quoted also take this perspective. He, not a deportee, refers
to the deportees as "they" and addresses the rulers as "You." You plus I
equals We. BUT: then we immediately get the Chorus:
        Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
        Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria...
The "you" of line 3 has gone, never to return, and the "them" has become
the "you" addressed, *and addressed by name*; moreover, he pays "them"
the supreme compliment of addressing them in their own language, "Adios
mis amigos." And Guthrie underlines the shift:
        You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
        And all they (!) will call you will be deportee.
    But we are far from done. Stanza 2:
        My father's own father, he waded that river,
        They took all the money he made in his life.
        My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
        And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
"They" reappears, but as his "brothers and sisters." He is *of*  the
deportees, not even addressing them now or saluting them as part of his
we, but literally *of* them. And then in the next stanzas, the deportees [oops


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