James McMurtry :: We Can't Make it Here

Phonogram Copyright 2005 Compadre Records

Lyrics and Music by James McMurtry

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The American Dream: you have to be asleep to believe it.
-- George Carlin

The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.
-- Bruce Duncan Phillips

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in? Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today? No I hate the men sent the jobs away. I can see them all now they haunt my dreams all lily white and squeaky clean. They've never known want they'll never know need, their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed. Their kids won't bleed in the damn little war and we can't make it here anymore.
-- James McMurtry

As economic design and market manipulation would have it, this song becomes ever more relevant with each passing year.

And, to make matters worse, in some cases, like the Veterans Administraton, lives continue to be lost by criminal incompetency within the system.

No one seems to really know what the actual unemployment numbers are, but it's a sure thing that the "official reports" offered up by the Bureau of Labor report numbers that are only a fraction of the actual number of people who have "fallen through the cracks" in the system.

But what is crystal clear are the images that McMurtry conjurs up about the situation we've found ourselves in, with rotting pallets piled up on loading docks, and with the empty storefronts in the many little towns out on the "great high plains" that have been gutted and emptied since the Clinton trade agreements came to town.

And, yes, as McMurty points out, there are people to blame for all the misery that the American public has been subjected to in recent decades. The American Dream, if it ever existed, has been hollowed out by the politicians in the pay of the "One Percent" who own nearly everything of importance in our nation and who control their sock puppet politicians to do their bidding.

Because it doesn't take a genius in economics to figure out that it's a race to the bottom to see which workers in which nation can work for the cheapest rate and squeeze out the biggest profit for those "One Percent" owners.

Yes, as McMurtry sings, you certainly can "read it in the paper" and "read it on the wall" and "hear it on the wind if you're listening at all" and the message is bleak.

No, though many are loathe to admit the very evident facts of the matter, many of us simply can't make it here anymore.

James McMurtry
(March 18, 1962 -- Fort Worth, Texas)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McMurtry

Видео James McMurtry :: We Can't Make it Here канала MiM Musicians in Mourning