Margaret Killjoy
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
There's people that... will never get my pronouns right, who I suspect would kill someone who tried to hurt me. And there's other people who would absolutely always get my pronouns right and be super respectful and would be like, oh, no, a bad thing is happening if they watch me get murdered in front of them. You know? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I love his talking blues.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
They've probably driven stuff off of the road before.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
One of the first people I ever rode trains with, I haven't ridden trains nearly as much as it's going to make it sound like when I do these episodes, but was this folk singer named Ryan Harvey. And so that's why I have a lot of these associations with riding trains in particular.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But we used to sit around and sing Big Rock Candy Mountains, but change the words very slightly to be like modern anarchy. You didn't have to change much. And my favorite was, and the hens lay vegan eggs was my favorite line.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Just immediately like, no, he found this thing that sort of works.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, I guess it didn't really work. That's the other weird thing about it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He's got a nice jaw.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. He's better looking than Woody Guthrie if we go AB real quick. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I can tie this back to Italy in the 1870s, Malatesta and all these other anarchists in Italy in Benevento province would go and their idea of how to do propaganda of the deed was to go and they'd march on these small towns and they would destroy the tax and ownership records. And they were like, and then everyone would come out and be like, you have freed us.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The priest was like, came out of the church and was like, these people have been sent by God to free us. And then they all got arrested. But then they actually only spent like a year in jail because everyone was going so crazy in Italy at that point that they were like, you know, we better just let these people out. Yeah, we can't go too hard on these people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Everyone really likes them for some reason. And so that's like... There is a specific point. And if you're going to be a criminal, if you go hard enough and make everyone like you, there's a certain safety in that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That you probably wouldn't find today. Just to be clear, anyone listening, that you probably wouldn't find today. You will not find today.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's good. It's so interesting to me because I... If you'd say folk music in different places, you mean something so completely different, right? American folk music is this like Woody Guthrie kind of vibe thing, whereas in almost any other country, you're looking at stuff that's a little bit more like
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
technically interesting like like musically yes i don't know i have a lot of thoughts about like folk and folk instrumentation and music and all that but i think what he's describing is great and specifically that thing that it's like this is the stuff that people make up you know it's not fancy yeah and it's also how poor people without really any other idea of how to have a voice
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about like populist and popular stuff is it can really go either way. Yeah. But it's like, yeah, still on some fundamental level. Interesting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Just to keep going with all the weird family connections, my great-grandfather was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. And yeah, he just wrote music that he didn't own the copyright to. He wrote the B-sides for more popular musicians like
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, I mean, the internationalist newspaper stuff was pretty... Yeah. Sometimes they were better at knowing what was going on around the world than like a modern leftist is today. But he's holding the party line. They got told very specifically. I mean, this is the problem with the commenter in the Communist International. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Is that someone in the American Communist Party during this era is literally taking orders from Russia. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the parts that we don't want to talk about with the Red Scare, because the Red Scare was bad, right? Yeah. But when they're like, oh, these foreign agents acting under a foreign national... They were.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It turns out not, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The Communist Party was absolutely right about racial politics in the United States during this era. Yes, 100%. And they were one of the only non-black organizations. It was actually heavily black, but one of the only not majority black organizations that was right about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But actually, that's still like even when we talk about the way that people have arcs, right? One of the things I've read a lot, I've read a lot about the UK communists at this era where a lot of the communists left the Communist Party once they realized that they were just being mouthpieces for Stalin, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Strange bedfellows. Good piece of propaganda.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Oh, that was like a the government was putting that on machines to raise morale. And he took one of those and was like, I'm putting this on my guitar.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That makes so much sense. I never quite understood that. I always really liked, though, when people carve into their AKs wooden stock, this machine makes folk music.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It's a good line. All right. It might kill me. It's killed millions of people before. So it fucking goes. I'll be in good company. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
No. Is he going to heel turn again? He keeps dancing. It's...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, it's actually in the US, they're called vacuum towns, Vacuumville. That was good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And, like, famous men sex-pesting is fans. Famous men sex-pesting is, like, or everyone in your orbit, you just assume they want to fuck you. Which I guess he's, like, doing to this... No, yeah, the degeneration thing, that just makes sense.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Right. But the fact that it was out of the blue to her means that he probably kept his fucking mouth shut about the fact that he had a crush on her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Although in England, they had the, we put the D in bread campaign only a couple of years ago.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. Especially for someone who's at the kind of beginning, not the very beginning of recorded music, but like. Pretty close to it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. I knew so little about him. I knew about some of his music and it's been super influential, but that's awesome.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
She's already a good podcast dog, which is a hard level for a dog to reach.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Well, if you want Christmas every week, I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I talk about cool people did cool stuff. And then either this week or next week, depending on when everything gets released, I also will be covering the history of the song Bella Ciao, because I got excited by this recording last week of part one, and I thought, I'm going to do a song too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So next Monday, you all can hear me talk about the history of Bella Chao.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Merry Christmas and or whatever you want to have happy, happy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, I'd be a great Supreme Court judge.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I mean, it was the Great Depression. It was the Great Depression. Yeah. We see a lot of this now where like people are like, oh, I'm failing under capitalism. I must personally be a failure. And you're like, no, times are really hard right now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
You'd be great Supreme Court like 90% of the time, and then 10% of the time you'd be like, I think that everyone should have a personal nuke.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. Like migrant laborers come to the United States. They're not abandoning their family to try and. But they're usually not going out there to play guitar.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I mean, he's doing folk punk before it's folk punk. He's doing folk punk, right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It's interesting because country western, I had never occurred to me that those were separate categories.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
If you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and you're like, oh, I'm fine. I'm not on the West Coast. I have bad news for you. You're not fine. Slowly, more and more, the East Coast, including the Northeast, is being seen as a fire-prone area. And we're seeing an increase in fire out East as well.
Behind the Bastards
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The people in California that you're talking to?
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Interesting. With water, you turn it off by moving it perpendicular. I've never messed with a gas line. I've lived weird and off-grid instead.
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Which you can just kind of imagine as like when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh, that's how the gas and water can flow through. And then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now it's blocking it. That's how I remember.
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And it seems like that's probably a like city versus rural or like city to city kind of divide. You should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing.
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Yeah, you're probably going to turn it off your water. Yeah. But if you do need to, it's just a pipe going into your basement that you turn the valve on.
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We're now talking about city water again, right? Municipal water.
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Let me let me go to the shelter. And you can get something called a water key or a silcock key. And I have a thing. I have not personally used it. I have a thing called an eight-way key. Sometimes they're called four-way keys. Depends on how many little wrenches are on them. And these are just cheap things that have basically all of the weird wrench-style things that you would never otherwise use.
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All the weird triangle things. They can get you into the... boxes on a subway car and they can turn on and off water. Like I carry one in case, you know, you're in the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water at a rest area. You know, that kind of thing. I first learned about these from squatters who would just move into houses and then turn the water on.
Behind the Bastards
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And they're built in specialized ways to try and prevent squatters from doing exactly what I'm describing. Yeah.
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They're also not very high quality. This isn't the kind of thing you're going to want to use over and over again. They're usually cast and they break. Yeah, it's like pot metal. Yeah, exactly.
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Also, if my house is about to burn down and you go steal all my stuff, good.
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We're going to start a whole interior design thing when I teach James interior design.
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Unless they inherited it from their parents and in which case they still also, yeah. Right. They have like one plate.
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Yeah. Yeah. Can I actually just kind of like really quickly run through some, if you fire protecting your house, there's two things you're gonna do. One is the, oh, I'm gonna run away now version, and then there's the ahead of time version. The really quick, basic version of the ahead of time is that, and this is more applicable rurally, But you want to have a defensible space.
Behind the Bastards
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Everyone's going to give you a different number, but like 100 feet from your house. You don't want densely packed trees, especially conifers. The one tree is okay as long as it's a little bit further from the other. You're going to want to clear out yard debris.
Behind the Bastards
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Even though leaves on the ground is overall good, you kind of want to create this space where there's not a lot of leaf litter and things like that. Directly under your house so that the eaves don't catch, you want to make sure that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there.
Behind the Bastards
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And if, like, if I was fleeing my house in a hurry, I would be pulling all the stuff away from under the eaves that I should have pulled away from under the eaves months ago. If I were to design my house better, there would be basically a three-foot, like, gravel line around the edge of my house, right, of landscaping. Yeah. But...
Behind the Bastards
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The other things that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for how embers can get in through the vents and stuff, like in your roof area or under wherever. And you're going to want to basically make sure, and it might already have that, but you want to make sure that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think you want quarter-inch mesh covering those things.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, that makes sense. If your porch is wooden, you have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it. And so you can keep your wooden porch, but you want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming debris from going under there. And then if you have a wooden fence, consider... having the first 10 feet or so of the fence be brick or something like that, I can't afford this.
Behind the Bastards
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But imagine you can. Then you would want the first chunk of it to be that way. If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want a wick that brings fire to your house. So if the forest around you is burning, you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves, catch the eaves on fire, and now you have a structure fire.
Behind the Bastards
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So what you're going to do... as you open the gates if you're leaving. And then, for example, my plan, because I have a wooden fence that goes all the way up to my house, is that if I have more than like five minutes to flee a fire, if I have a half an hour to flee a fire, I am taking the chainsaw and I am cutting down about 10 feet of that wooden fence before I leave.
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And that should dramatically increase the chances that my house will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move. And... And then another thing with the pool thing, and it's a thing I've read about, but there's no version of my life where I'm ever going to have a pool. If you live in a fire-prone area, they actually make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water into a fire hose.
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And they have saved a lot of rural areas, and probably city areas too, by having that accessible to firefighters immediately. Your pool can become a resource for the people who are coming in to try and keep your house intact.
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That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England.
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One and also being horse poor is you have a horse, but you don't have any money. And you're like, you're partly poor because you have the horse because horses are incredibly expensive to maintain.
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You also probably want to chip your dog also, or chip your pets.
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And also particularly rabies vaccination is like the thing that you need to make sure that you have with you. There's a lot of places you can't go with a pet like Canada unless you have.
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Yeah. I think that choosing to be in charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow. Yes, I would agree.
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Yeah, but I guess there's probably... I mean, you see, for example, I know we're going to talk about livestock in a second, but people have had to let loose some of their horses because they can only personally escort so many horses or whatever, right? Yeah.
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Yeah, I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to.
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Which is literally why I actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans need to include people with disabilities who are in your area, not just in your house, but elsewhere. Yeah, 100%.
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If you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair, then you should be considering for your only vehicle a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. This is the kind of thing that I think that plans need to include people who are at different levels of ability.
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Yeah. If you have like older folks who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that, you know?
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Which, since it's England, is actually the second floor to Americans. Yeah.
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It was the ground floor. You had to hide on the first floor.
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Especially because you try to Google what do American lifts do and they're like, what the fuck is a lift?
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I'm sure I'm the only person who does it. I'm sure it never comes up.
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And then this is actually a decent regular prepper practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh, I'm just about to have to run out for a fire. This is like every six months or every year or every time you get a new weird expensive thing that you put in your house, make this video so that it's easier to prove all of the stuff that you had that needs to be replaced. Yeah.
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If you do that on a regular basis, there's a little bit of security of where do you put it? Do you really want... But it's honestly, for almost all people, probably totally fine to just have that on the cloud.
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Although they do make P100 masks that are more like, they look more like COVID masks. They're just a little bit thicker.
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Although I'm kind of a 3M girl, I got to admit. Oh, controversial. Okay. I know. So one of the things I did during 2020 was a lot of testing of protest gear. And if you want to see, I've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly everything about masks and body armor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But...
Behind the Bastards
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In general, when you think about masks, there's sort of three levels that actually matter or are useful. There's the version that we kind of see as a COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you wear it around your face and you make sure you get a rated one. An N95 is better than nothing for smoke, but a P100 is better. And then there is a half mask respirator.
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Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because they do not filter the exhale. They're better for your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half-mask respirator than a fabric mask.
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And you can switch out the cartridges, and unfortunately, almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters. And the bayonet mount is the 3M style. There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw-on kind. So you can get a half-mask respirator Or you can get a full face respirator, which is more or less what looks like a gas mask.
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But those come in kind of civilian styles that are using the same 3M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges. Or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in. The military style is kind of overkill in terms of it'll position you oddly socially.
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I think that a thing that is worth everyone having are these respirators, a half mask respirator, or depending on your life, like if you use them a lot or you're going to be protesting or, I don't know, there's a lot of different reasons. You might want a full face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported.
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Although maybe if you're listening to this in the future, you can't get it imported, but yeah, They work fairly well. They're just not quite as good. I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that. I think that half masks are great. I keep a half mask in my truck literally for wildfire smoke.
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Because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out west, I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing, just really quickly, they make these for dogs as well. Oh, cool. They're more like COVID mask style and my dog hates it, you know, but you could train your dog into not hating it. I just haven't.
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I just keep it around to be like, well, if it really, if we had to sleep in the vehicle in a smoky area, my dog would hate it and he would put up with it, you know, and he would survive. Yeah, yeah. I like masks. Yes. They're great.
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Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds and all of that stuff. Yeah. I'm actually kind of curious because it's like, I see why it matters the most to have the physical originals. For most crises, a lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes at banks are kind of the way to go for stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis.
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This wouldn't be a proof of documentation necessarily, but it might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and titles and things at a safe deposit box because then If your house burns down, it's still fine. LA wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right? Because then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And then if it's not on your property, you can't grab it and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall, I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff in a safety deposit box off-site. And then also I just want to shout out that fireproof safes aren't fireproof. Yeah.
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Right. They are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or your bed catches fire and your safe is under your bed.
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Right. When there is a structure fire and a structure is destroyed, fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally not protecting their contents. And that's not the fault of the fire safe. It's just they're not designed for that.
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And also just like scanning and having them on encrypted hard, like a encrypted USB stick. A little USB stick with all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing to have. It has some advantages too, right? Because sometimes you don't, want the originals of your documents. Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts. Yeah.
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The bank account numbers, your pins, your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have. But if you lost, you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies of that available to you.
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Also your like master passwords and all that terrible, horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick.
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Oh Lord. Uh, Change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like the kind of like travel toiletries. Because your go-back is like more like, sorry, it's not going to be a long tangent. Your go-back is like more likely I have to spend the night in my car than like I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the plains.
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And so the small little things like bring deodorant, even if you don't have deodorant in your daily life, because you might be crammed into a place with lots of other people.
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Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think whether or not you menstruate, you should have tampons, for example, in your go bag. And so I think that the basic toiletries, basic first aid slash survival stuff, and then like change of clothes and also like at least one or two morale items. I keep a Nintendo Switch in my go bag.
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Skyrim is, I need a Skyrim box in order to fight anxiety sometimes.
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That actually, I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID. And so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun from like the 90s was crucial to me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer.
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Having a little bit of food though, a little bit of shelf stable food. I really recommend bars you don't like as the food that you put in your go bag. Because if you put in bars that you do like, you're going to eat them when you're bored one day. Yeah. And you don't want to go to the store.
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I say this, literally all of the bars in all my bags have been eaten in the past week. But that's because there's been like a winter storm. So I haven't been out to the grocery store and I just have been like sugar craving. So I eat even the gross bars.
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So find the one that you don't like, put it in your bag. Just have a couple. It's not to keep you sustained. It's to keep you from being grouchy. Don't think of it as like, I need to put entire meals in my go bag. Think of it as like, I need enough sugar and whatever to keep my headspace right.
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When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my pack always because I knew no matter what, I had at least two days worth of calories in the bottom of my bag.
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I think that's a really good way to put it. It's the get out of town for the weekend bag. It's not the end of the world bag. I think that if you are more rural, you might want some basic camping stuff.
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But the average person probably doesn't. I mostly have this at the like, there's my go bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always in my truck.
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Yeah. And so, like, I am almost certainly not bugging out on foot from my house. And if I had to, then I would have to bring a... Not my go bag, I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know? Yeah. Most of the time, if you have access to a car and roads because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting to somewhere with enough civilization that you have...
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But I do, I will say have some water. Don't go overboard. Like I think that having like a little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle, you know, no reason not to. Yeah.
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Yeah, I use also like a single-wall steel canteen so that you can heat water in it. If you get the double-wall ones, then you can't heat them over a fire because they're vacuum-insulated or whatever. But then other people I know are like, well, they want the ability to have their insulated tea bottle. Yeah, sure.
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I will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again, you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes and you're more likely to need to keep your phone charged and other people's phones charged.
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Yeah. I also keep one of those, I don't know if it's the same one you're talking about, but it collapses up almost accordion style.
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Okay, I have the camping style one and I keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl.
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Yeah. And another thing that I keep in my go bag is I keep the meds that my dog is on and I keep some of the meds that I take in there. And, you know, it's like my dog only gets the meds once a month. So I go to my bag and I pull out the meds and I give them to my dog from my bag because why not?
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And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're not fully grown yet or are that you also take care of, you know, you need to make sure you have a little bit of their stuff in In there, like you keep a dog toy in your go bag.
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Oh, I forgot to mention that. Yeah, you need to trade. Rather than having a system of mutual aid, which we naturally do, instead, we should interject a complicated barter system, ideally on the gold standard.
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Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber in here.
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Having a paperback book, if you like that, it's not weight efficient, but you know what? Yeah, that's how you like to read. Morale matters.
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Yeah. And, and, and, and on RIP to David Wengro is a lot.
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I always feel bad when I just talk about Graver stuff and they talk about Don of everything. And then I don't talk about the other David.
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Yeah. Anyway, it's going to be okay, or it's not. But you know what? You weren't going to survive being alive anyway. And keep your car half full of gas. Like when you're on your way home, make sure that you fill up if it's less than halfway full.