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THIS LAND WAS MADE FOR YOU & ME

Saturday is the Solstice Parade in Fremont (Seattle’s most self-regarding neighborhood). A lively, colorful hippie parade with 2 rules: no printed words in the parade, and no mechanized transport (no motors or engines), unless a parader is disabled and requires mechanized transport.

The funniest thing I ever saw in the parade was a group of protesters, angrily waving blank white placards, and silently shouting slogans.

There are often spectacular Bread-and-Puppet style papier mache creations, often leftist political yang yang.

And usually some hoppin’ bands.

And the famous nude bicyclists.

This year a group of people my spouse & I know are putting together a gang to sing “This Land Is Your Land” while pulling a float with large (8 or 10 feet tall) wooden cutouts of North and South America, with 3-D things screwed on illustrating What Goes On In Different Places, like a ‘60s-style souvenir plate with a map of Your State. I’ll be playing guitar. Should be fun. Come down and join us if you’re in the Seattle area and you’re free. We’re hoping everyone will sing along. Our float is the last in the parade, so everybody can join us and march along.

(Just finished reading Paul Hemphill’s “The Nashville Sound” from 1969. The chapter describing the tour of a huge country star of the time whose stuff I’ve never heard, Bill Anderson, talks about how he closed his sets at that time with a patriotic speech supporting the war in Viet Nam, and then “God Bless America,” and then “This Land Is Your Land.” A song that has been embraced by Americans of a variety of political stripes.)