May Day / What is GR?

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

    When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
    There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
    Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
    But the union makes us strong.

    CHORUS:
    Solidarity forever,
    Solidarity forever,
    Solidarity forever,
    For the union makes us strong.

    Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
    Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
    Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight? *
    For the union makes us strong.

    It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
    Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
    Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
    But the union makes us strong.

    All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
    We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
    It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
    While the union makes us strong.

    They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
    But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
    We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
    That the union makes us strong.

    In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
    Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
    We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
    For the union makes us strong.

*non-violently, I hope they mean

mike bailey

 "you must never cross a picket line" - Billy Bragg
 
 PS The above would be on-topic for Vineland; but GR as well ("They" have taken untold millions that They never toiled to earn)

PPS Pete Seeger singing SF...goose bumps!


-- apologies to Dave for inadvertently replying to him an unedited version of this post 

-- 
What is GR?
"Pynchon's Inferno" a la Dante
War is hell

didn't I read he attended daily Mass?
Isn't it true that Catholic spirituality is very sophisticated, polished to a lapidary sheen by extreme (by any standard) devotees over centuries (but that's a Good Thing), and flinches not from the details, extreme and far-ranging though they be, of this world (The Pope has no quarrel with Darwin, for instance, and I think the Church recently took Galileo's work off the Index; a-and my Catholic neighbor back in Michigan who cast my sister's and my horoscopes told us the Vatican Library has the largest collection of books on astrology in the world)

...Vineland as his Purgatorio, and M&D as an intermezzo, or the upper layers of Purgatory; and the upcoming work to begin to represent Paradiso in this schema); the different narrator voices in GR that we've noticed could be Pynchon and his Virgil(s), who might be?? (Dante himself, Nabokov, Wernher von Braun...)

(touching my Miraculous Medal as I type)