GLENN: All right. The reason why he's bringing this up is because last night we were talking about the land grab that's going on, and I don't know if you saw the map from the TV show last night, but is that stunning? Stunning how much land the United States of America owns out west. Stunning. Only 2% of Nevada is not federal land. That's crazy.
PAT: 2%?
GLENN: Wasn't it?
PAT: Was it 98% of Nevada?
GLENN: Yeah.
PAT: 98%?
GLENN: Wasn't it? Stu, do you remember?
STU: I don't know.
GLENN: E mail Tiffany real quick.
STU: I will do that.
GLENN: I'm pretty sure it's 2%.
PAT: That seems high.
GLENN: Does it? 70 doesn't sound high?
PAT: No, 70 sounds very high. 60 sounds high in Utah. So 98? I mean, that's
GLENN: It's crazy what's going on.
PAT: It's criminal.
GLENN: And they're grabbing more land. Now, so we were talking about this because the president is doing a couple of executive orders, one on fishing, one on land, another 15 million acres of land. And something else, too. And we were talking about it and somebody said, you know, This Land is Your Land, this land is my land. Now, I had never I mean, I had heard people talk about, you know, Woody Guthrie and everything else. But it wasn't until that moment that I heard and I thought, oh, my gosh. This Land is Your Land, this land is my land. This land was made for you and me. In other words, we both own it. There is no owner. It's all of our land. There is no, there's no sign of trespass. Do you have the whole thing with all the lyrics, Sarah? How long is that? Because if you listen to the last let's see if we can listen to some more of it here in a second because there's, the final stanzas of this thing are clearly about social justice and no property rights.
STU: Really? I never it's one of those things you just never listen to.
GLENN: It was written in 1940. He was a communist.
STU: I did not know that.
GLENN: I didn't, either.
STU: It says here that he, the concert the guy's talking about says this is from USA Today, concert and folk singer Pete Seeger and Springsteen led the crowd in Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.
PAT: Yeah. Was Arlo there? Was Arlo Guthrie there, too? Do you know?
STU: That sentence is the entire amount of knowledge I have about the concert.
GLENN: So play the rest of this. Here's Woody Guthrie.
(Music playing)
GLENN: Stop. The original line was God has made this land for you and me. God has made this land for you and me. Scratched out. This land was made for you and me. Took God out of it. This is where he's breaking it down.
PAT: Taking out the jams.
(Music playing)
GLENN: I mean, he's really got it going on.
PAT: Clearly rocks.
GLENN: Now, it's the next two, it's the next two verses. Keep going. It's the next two verses that you have to hear.
(Music playing)
GLENN: I didn't know it was this verse. It's the next two verses.
(Music playing)
GLENN: Oh, jeez. All right. Please be this verse.
(Music playing)
PAT: He's going to get laughed off American Idol.
GLENN: Stop. He's not going to do it. He's not going to do it. The last two stanzas, and I'm pulling this off my out of my head. I can't remember the beautiful, beautiful rhymes and the lyrics, but it's basically, I went walking and I saw a sign and it said no trespassing. The other side said nothing. That side of the sign was made for you and me. So in other words, you don't have a right to say no trespassing. You have it?
STU: Yeah. They went walking, I saw a sign there and on the sign it said no trespassing but on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me.
GLENN: Okay. Now read the last stanza.
STU: The next one is in the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people. By the relief office I seen my people. As they stood their hungry, I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me? And then the last one is, nobody living can ever stop me as I go walking that freedom highway. Nobody living can ever make me turn back. This land was made for you and me.
GLENN: He was at the relief office and he saw his people. And he wondered, is this land still made for you.
STU: And in the shadow of the steeple as well he was. Is that like the church wasn't doing something? They weren't doing anything, either?
PAT: Probably.
GLENN: Well, the shadow of the steeple he saw his people there by the relief office.
STU: Right. So at the relief office was helping.
GLENN: The government was helping but the church was not.
STU: Is that what he's saying?
PAT: Of course.
GLENN: I haven't smoked enough dope to know.
STU: (Laughing).
PAT: (Laughing).
GLENN: Look, the point is when we start to look at our own traditions, our own history, our own the things that we grew up thinking, I mean, who thought, this land was made for you and me. Who thought? And I know there's a ton of listeners. "I've known that since 19..." I know, I know, I know. I got it. Some of us weren't paying attention. And we are now. I'm sorry. Historians that have talked to me and said, Glenn, you drive a lot of us nuts. Why? Because you're just discovering all of this and some of us have been toiling on this for years and years and years. And I said, I know. I don't mean to, like it's not like I'm taking your work and going, look what I've discovered. I know I'm not the first to discover this. But I think I'm more like the average person. We didn't pay attention. Because you were on the fringe side of history. What these people were toiling, I feel bad for these professors. How did they live? How did they exist? Knowing what the real history of America was, knowing what really happened and then not being able to get it out in the mainstream. I've had an equal number of professors come to me and say, thank God. We have not been able to get this out in the mainstream; nobody would ever listen because we have all of this academic research but nobody would ever do it because it wasn't accepted. I said, keep spooning it, man. Keep teaching. Keep going. Because now Americans are hungry. We didn't know you know, it's have you ever gotten up in the middle of the night and you've gotten up and you were so powerfully thirsty, you wake up and you're like, "Need water." Have you ever done that? Where you wake up in the middle of the night and you just have to get out of bed and have a glass of water? Now, my wife would say, "I told you you should drink more water. You can't just drink soda. You've got to have water." So I'm not going to tell her that I get up in the middle of the night sometimes and just like... "I've got to have water or I may die." Because what she'll say is... (mumbling). I get it. Now America's really, really, really thirsty and it's like 2:00 in the morning and we're waking up and going... (gagging), "Man, I could use a glass of the truth right now." So keep pouring it, brothers. Keep pouring it. Because people will drink the truth now. They have never really been interested because they didn't need it. Now they need it. Become a truth seeker and a truth spreader because that's what man, that's what I need right now.
(OUT 9:45)
PAT: You know, I think the reason that so many of us don't understand, we haven't come we're a little late to the party on the Woody Guthrie songs and all that, it was just all presented as patriotic to us in school. I mean, how many of us sang This Land is Your Land in school and they were like, well, yeah, that's just super patriotic and just a great song. How many of us go to the Fourth of July fireworks display, we see the fireworks blasting, exploding in the air and we hear Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen like, yeah, Born in the USA and then you get filled with patriotic pride and then you find out that Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA is anti American.
GLENN: Born down in a dead man's town. The first kick I took is when I hit the ground. You end up like a dog that's been beat too much. Until you spend half your life just covering up. Born in the USA. I got in a little hometown jam and somebody put a rifle in my hands, sent me off to Vietnam: Go kill the yellow man. Born in the USA. Come back home to the refinery. Hiring man says, son, if it were up to me. I go down to see the VA man. He said, son, you don't understand. Born in the USA. I have a buddy at Khe Sahn inviting off the Vietcong. They're still there; he's all gone. He had a little girl in Saigon. I got a picture of him in her arms. Down in the shadow of the penitentiary, out by the gas fires of the refinery, I'm ten years down the road, nowhere to run. Ain't got nowhere to go. I'm a long gone daddy in the USA. Born in the USA. I'm a cool rocking daddy in the USA. Born in the USA. Hmmm.
PAT: Yeah!
GLENN: Where are the fireworks?
PAT: Yeah, yeah. That's what it's all about. That's what America's about according to Bruce Springsteen.
GLENN: See, here's the thing that I think people don't understand yet. I think you do. That it is time for us to wake. People who have come from the Soviet bloc or Cuba, they are all saying, how do you guys not hear this? How are you not seeing this? Well, because we don't ever expect it. We've never what? Slowly, ever so slowly they've changed the meaning, changed the words, changed the images, changed the history. Slowly, ever so slowly. Progress. Step by step. Progressive. And because it wasn't done in revolution but instead over a 100 year evolution, we've gone numb. And everything is an empty tradition. Everything is a everything just meaningless. It's like I said stop with the flag lapel pin and stop with all of that stuff. That is not a question of your loyalty. What does the flag even mean? As we know, it can mean something radically different from you than Jeremiah Wright. We have to be based in more than just images, words, and names. Values and principles. More in a second.
