In an e-mail addressed to his family, Nick Berg describes going into the Iraqi jail and finding himself in with "Mother rapers. Father stabbers," a line from Alice's Restaurant, after the singer finds himself arrested for dumping garbage. .
For those who don't know, the song was by Arlo Guthrie and is about dumping a load of restaurant garbage off a cliff in the country, getting arrested by the sheriff for illegal dumping, and then finding that he is ineligible to join the Army because of his littering. You have to imagine all of this "sung" in a supercilious hippie folk-music drone.
Here are some words:
I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to
ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm
sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench
'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."
Nick is too young to have Arlo Guthrie phrases like "Mother rapers. Father stabbers" in his vocabulary (unless of course Dad still listens to that stuff). But... who's to say those emails are legit, i.e. unmodified. That sounds like 60's stuff coming out of the Birkenstock age... not from a 26 year old.
I remember Arlo... but wasn't a fan.
Yer bummin' me out, man...
Some background- I'm old enough to have been around when Alice's Restaurant first was heard... and it was kind of funny, way back then. Unfortunately, in those days I had a best friend whose mother ( due to pill & alcohol problems ) insisted that anyone who dropped by her apartment listen to that damnable album over and over and over again... I suspect I must have heard it a hundred times.
Lordy, I had not thought of poor old crazy Mrs. Riser in decades.
Darn, now I can't get that song out of my head!
The only people past the age of reason who don't know that "song" don't have to drive long distances to Grandma's house on Thanksgiving Day. They play it every year, which come to think of it isn't such a bad thing. It's cuts the appetite before dinner so after dinner I'm not doing my imitation of a beached whale. :-)