Guthrie Publisher Lets Cartoon Use Song

Wed Aug 25, 7:06 PM ET

By TIM MOLLOY, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES - This song is my song, this song is your song. That's the agreement reached between the publishers of Woody Guthrie's classic "This Land is Your Land" and JibJab Media, creators of an animated Internet short that uses the tune in a comic sendup of President Bush and Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaigns.

[ ... ]

The creators also agreed to provide a link on their Web site to the song's original lyrics and to donate 20 percent of any profits to the Woody Guthrie Foundation.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040825/ap_en_bu/bush_kerry_spoof
http://www.jibjab.com/default.asp

WOOHOO!!! That's what it's all about!

The music belongs to the PEOPLE! The song was written in response to 'God Bless America' because Woody wasn't happy about the self-serving attitude of that song. He gave the copyright to anyone who wants to sing his song.... Betcha Woody is really happy about this! (BTW does it bother anyone else that politicians make a habit of closing their speeches with the words 'God Bless America'?

And it's great news for the Woody Guthrie Foundation, too! Twenty percent of any profits could be significant!

Yeah Wyld, it does bother me a bit, I'm so used to Australia now which is known as a secular and multi-cultural county. I say live and let live,each to their own, and don't include everybody in everything.And I particularly don't like hearing Dubya say it after what he has done. Did you know that last Friday was the anniversary of Dubya's DAD saying (I think it was '88) something like "Atheists cannot really be considered citizens"

Howdy Louise!

I consider myself to be Neo-Pagan. Wonder where that puts me & mine in "Bush World"? Well, actually, I've got a good idea from some of Dubya's past comments. Maybe it's time all of us disjointed/disgruntleds organized, unionized, socialized and activized.

Capt. Zap

What exactly is a Neo-Pagan? Is there rituals and stuff? I heard some Christians eat bodies and drink blood, that is pretty scary stuff!

Hey PS,

Ummm! I don't think they literally eat bodies & drink blood. Probably symbolic of becoming "one" or "communing" with their deity (hence, "holy communion", maybe?).

Neo-Pagan, to me, is a nature centered spirituality. It's sort of open to interpretation, depending on the individual.

I'm a Christian & we don't eat bodies and drink blood. I think that maybe a part of the Satnist stuff. Don't know much about that but maybe someone else knows...

I am sorry. i mean no disrespect to Christians. This notion of drinking blood and eating bodies being associated with Christianity followed Christians around the world as they became acquainted with new cultures. One of those rumor type things. Have you seen Christians, They ride on floating wood and huge animals and eat bodies and drink blood. Stuff like that. There is always another perspective out there!

But religion is always a hot topic, why people kill each other over that stuff.

One of my favorite songs is

Heres to them old Druids
For they drink fermented fluids
and dance naked in the woo-ids
And thats good enough for me!

Hey PS,

Pardon my inquisitiveness, but where are you located (country)? It sounds like you're not up on your "Comparative Religions" studies.I am not a Christian, but I can assure you that they do not practice cannabalism.
I believe that the bread and wine taken during the Catholic Holy Communion as part of their mass is, as I said previously, symbolic of the body and blood of their deity. The consuming of it symbolically equates to having the god become a part of the participant. (Man! Is this getting off topic or what?)

As far as cannabalism goes, I don't believe that it's a part of any religious ceremony these days. Satanism is a relatively new religion, started in the 1960's in a sort of nose-thumbing manner towards Christianity. I don't believe that they're doing any body eating or blood drinking, either.

I believe that among the last areas of where this was practiced was some remote area of the South Pacific (I may be wrong on the location). Family members would dine on a deceased relative's body to have the dearly departed physically and literally become a part of them. This practice had to be stopped by the authorities as
it was causing the spread of a form of spongiform encephalopathy (a sort of human version of "Mad Cow Disease").

Most of the crap that gets dispensed these days is from movies and television. Real life is usually (but not always) a lot less sensational. Believe it or not, if you'd like a pretty balanced overview on most religions or spiritual paths, look for a copy of the U.S. Army (or Armed Forces) Chaplin's manual. There may even be a source for that online somewhere. I was amazed on how even handed and fair it was.

Capt. Zap

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Captain Zap:


(Man! Is this getting off topic or what?)


Capt. Zap<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


it may be topic off topic but it's an interesting one. i'll let the moderators decide what to do if anything, even if it's telling me to shut up!!

"there are three things i've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the great pumpkin.."---linus

Hello Captain Zap

Imagine about 1500AD in the wilds of New Mexico. Your an ancestor of Anasazi living in a pueblo. The Nomadic Apache types are coming around to trade for corn or whatever and they tell you of strange men coming from the south. They are white men who came across the water on big wooden vessels and ride on strange animals called horses. They have holy men who claim to literally drink blood and eat the body as their religious ritual, Not that drinking blood and eating bodies was uncommon in those days particularly as part of a ritual cause the Aztecs had some peculiarities of their own. i was once at this place called Gran Quivera in New Mexico where the ruins of a mission (from the early 1500's) was surrounded by Giant Kiva's. Imagine the prayer parties they must have had! It was one of those spectacularly awesome places that makes your mind wonder about all kind of stuff. For miles around there were no stones in the fields because they had all been gathered and brought to the building sites (there was a set of three missions in the area). There is another spot like that in Oklahoma in the Witchita mountains called Charons Gardens. The boulders are piled high as it is one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world and it is mostly huge red rocks left behind as the lose material has washed away. The hike in is pretty spectacular with wild buffalo herds and such. This is where they stuck Geronimo after he ceased to fight. When I was young on occasion we used to get cactus buttons and hike in there to spend the night. There is an old place called Spanish Cave that is really a hollowed out boulder that gives a view across a valley of these huge red stones. On the right nights a big full moon would fill the valley with light and we would open these buttons and scrap out the fuzzy stuff cut the remainder into small pieces and wash it down quick with a swig of water. We would sit on the ledge (usually groups of five or six) and not say anything. We would just listen for sound in the night, the locust and frogs and things) and hope the mosquitos wouldn't be bad (they feed on buffalo there). It was quite mellow and cosmic. Sometimes, about 3 or 4 in the morning the army would get inspired to train boys how to shoot big guns. the cave looked out across the worlds largest artillary traing range and they would boom into the night.

That was long ago when I was young and i have developed a pretty healthy sense of religion since then although I don't know how it compares?

This land is your land
This land is my land

<center><FONT COLOR="#000080">--- Edited 1 times, lastly by PSBeaty on Nov 17, 2004 ---</FONT></center>

Hey PS,

By "Comparative Religions" I meant the study course of the same name that is offered in some schools or colleges. From what you've written, I'd say your sense of religion compares just fine. Sounds like you've had an interesting life, so far.

I reckon the problems with religions come when somebody figures that theirs is better than somebody else's. Then it gets worse when they try to force it upon people or use it to influence or control them.

I have a book titled "Seven Arrows" by Hyemeyohsts Storm that some friends gave me for my birthday about thirty years ago. He wrote about the Medicine Wheel. He wrote that if we were sitting in a circle of people and an object, like a drum or a feather, was placed in the center of the circle, each person would see it differently even though everyone was looking at the same object. Some might have poor eyesight. Some may have their view obstructed. Some might choose not to look at it. And no one would see the entire object, but just the side that was facing them.

I think that spirituality is something like that. But I also think that too many people confuse religion with spirituality. Religion comes from without you. It's what somebody else is telling you to believe. Spirituality comes from within. Whether that means a god or goddess, Mother Earth, the laws of Nature or whatever, it still should come from inside you and not what someone else tells you that they think it should be. I guess that I think that it's believing in yourself.

One of my favorite Bob Dylan songs is "Tangled Up In Blue" because of the last line of the song:

"We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from
a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue"

Peace,
Zap

Hey Captain Zap, interesting words you placed on the page!

It made me think of a unique experience in my life that had to do with religion. I was just a youngster buck graduate from OK State University (I remember Eskimo Joes when it was just a bar) out looking for gainful employment. I went down to OKC and looked around and the only job available was with Kerr McGhee. So, I interviewed. I walked in the office and this scientific looking fellow said I looked appropriate for the task. They wanted me to test thousands of samples of dirt collected throughout New Mexico and sign my name on the line that they were not contaminating the environment with uranium. I did not even get to do the sampling!. Samples would come in prelabeled from the site and I would fill out the paperwork. This was about the time that a lady named Silkwood was in the news so I decided I would ramble up to Tulsa and look for work..

Well, I got me a job at the Oral Roberts Medical School. It was a strange experience for someone who had once set in caves all night with a full moon glowing looking out across a valley after ingesting cactus buttons but hey I needed the money. It was an interesting job, we did four rat kidneys a week and on Friday we would clean the lab. The protocol was pretty straightforward. Cut open the rat, canulate the artery to kidney and the urethra coming out, circulate an aerated simulated blood through the kidney containing radio-labeled salts, add drug and determine the effect on the retention or removal of salts from the liquid. (Now for the religious part) Before we added the drug we were supposed to pray that the effect we desired would occur. Well, the guy I worked with was East Indian and I got the feeling that his and Orals concepts of faith healing weren’t quite the same. Me, well I had sat in that cave, I was more into a communing with Wakantanka than begging some God to make my experiment work properly. So we would just look at each other, close our eyes for a second and add the drug.

In the lab down the hall they did cardiac drugs. I was walking down the hall one day and saw this German Shepherd opened from stem to stern with wires attached in his chest and electronic equipment piled to the ceiling with lights a blinking and bleeps a bleeping. There was about seven people gathered around holding hands and praying the drug, once injected, would hit its mark. Right then a secretary came into the hall and screamed the President had been shot. The commotion was tremendous because Reagan was a popular fellow at Oral Roberts (James Watt and all that). Well they left the chief cardiologist fellow all alone with his dog and congregated in a bigger room with more people and joined hands and prayed for the President. The Indian fellow said he was hungry and left to eat. So, I got a cup of coffee and wondered the empty hall looking into the big room with people speaking in tongues to save the President or in the little room where the guy with the dog was freaking cause he lost his research group and he did not want to disturb the prayers for the President (had the President died he might have gotten undo blame for interrupting the intervention, a real moral and ethical dilemma).

Just then the power went down. In the flicker of the emergency lights I looked into the eyes of a cardiologist who was in complete utter and total panic. He asked me to come in a massage this dog’s heart as he got a tube and inserted it into the lungs and took over for the respirator gizmo. The dog stabilized after about 5 minutes enough for me to leave the room (gladly). I entered the hall and looked into the small break room where the Indian fellow was casually eating a sandwich. Across the hall in the big room the crowd was in a faith healing frenzy. Candles illuminated everything (candles always miraculously appear at these moments) and they were gyrating and writhing and speaking in tongues as if the power outage was a sign from God that they had tuned into the proper wavelength and were on the verge of saving the President.

The ending is pretty anti climatic. The President lived, the dog died and the Indian fellow finished his sandwich. I drove past the new giant metallic green prayer hands in front of the unfinished Hospital of Faith and wondered if that dog was sacrificed by God as a stand in for the President (that book of Leviticus thing).

Talk about strange but true!!! (Twilight Zone Music)

Me, I'm still on the road
Headed for another joint

Neat & interesting stroy. Ya'll have more interesting lives then I do...

Hey PS,

Man! You really need to write this all down in a book! I'd buy it....well, provided I had some money at the time!

Your experiences with the rats and the dog sound like modern man's version of divination via observation of entrails. Pretty cruel and gruesome. I especially feel for the dog. I think that they're pretty much one of the best critters on the planet. Far too good for the likes of us humans. We don't deserve them. Funny that we commit such terrible deeds yet use the word "humane" to describe benevolence and "animalistic" for cruelity.