Portland Hipster White Liberal Blues

We put on our Independence Day Waterfront festival shoes, Spent a full four days on sleepwalk and snooze, Ignored our history with music and booze, And now We’ve got the Portland hipster white liberal blues. Ask yourself the question, “what here and why?” Why did so many redcoats and patriot soldiers die? But if you want to party and drink and ignore and confuse, Then you’ll come down with a case of the white liberal blues. Some think we're exceptional, the Light of the World The City on a Hill, see the flag unfurled We've appropriated their prophecies and superceded the Jews And replaced the Sabbath with the white liberal blues Others hold America to be exceptionally bad An empire that colonized the land others had But even the haters like to be amused And will compromise for the sake of the white liberal blues Listen to blues music and ask yourself “why?” What to a slave is the fourth of July? Frederick Douglass could've given you the news, But no, you prefered the white liberal blues. The point of this show is to suppress memory Since there's nothing to protest if there's nothing to see Avoid political displays that citizens might peruse And bury conflict and history beneath the white hipster blues I consider my hands and they look flesh-colored and pink, But we’re white on the census, and thats how we think. We inherit this status, just as accused, And we atone for the privelege with white liberal blues. We expiate the original guilt of our nation By enjoying a ritual of self-degradation Dancing and mourning together to confuse Our ability to discern, with the hip liberal blues On the very weekend when we ought to re-create A better culture, we ignore it, and try to assimilate To the black-afro experience we barely hear, sing, or say: A bluesy lament is the soundtrack for us to go play. Conspicuous leisure is how we ignore, The vagabond who is rapping at our door: Throw him a can, but admission refuse Leave him with the Portland houseless post-liberal blues. Its the way that’s been laid for us, if we’re sleepwalking or blind, Requiring that others feel and act like our kind. So I’ll go down to the river and kick off my shoes, Pray I might lose these hip lib white blues. Yeah I’ve been to St. Paul, I could giddyup or get down, I can ride like the wind or play the rodeo clown. But this Patriot pride parade merely inverses our sin They forget it all too, except the fact that they win. Lets have a civic assembly on the day July four, Declare the causes that started the war And Jigs, reels, waltzes, if you insist on your dance, Would you like Revolutionary tunes from Haiti and France? And lets also have Rhythm and blues on the day June nineteen, Learn the history now unheard and unseen, And teach the civic lessons that the festival refused, And get over these American white hipster blues. If our leaders would lead and our teachers would teach, Then this poem wouldn’t have to come at you to preach, But now heat-waves, and deaths, and riots are all the news, And you can’t drown it out with the white liberal blues. Yeah I enjoy music, and I know how to play, And the ladies here would dance with me almost any day, And I enjoy grooving with the woman I choose, But not to the Portland hipster white liberal blues.