Arbitration & Mediation

Blawg Review Thanks Giving # 188 at Alice's Restaurant with New York Personal Injury Law Blog

By Victoria Pynchon

You have to be of a certain age, an age I myself am barely tall enough to be (right, 23 in 1975) or of a certain nostalgic hippie-era state of mind (right again) which Eric Turkewitz must himself be since he cannot have lived nearly as many years as I have, to celebrate Blawg Review #188 with an authentic Alice's Restaurant Thanksgiving dinner.

That's what Turkewitz did, imagining all of us sitting in the back of a patrol car, driving to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote; telling us about the biggest crime of the last fifty years, so big that everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it.

Talking about how

and with a few nasty words to the cop on the side, bailed the Thanksgiving guests out of jail, went back to the church, had a another thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to court.

It was a typical case of American blind justice, Turkewitz suggests, and there wasn't nothing we could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence.

We were all fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but that's not what Turkewitz came to tell you about.  Didn't come to talk about the draft either since he can't be old enough to remember  the building they had down New York City called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.

But he's always wanted to be the all American kid from New York who tells the army shrink I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL" so that a sargent would come over, pin a medal on him, send him down the hall, say "You're our boy."

Wanted to see himself getting sat down on the Group W bench where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, with all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench! Mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench.

Turkewitz talked about everything being fine, imagining everyone could smoke cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant came over and asked  "KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?") so T could say  "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."

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of T's fingerprints. And the only reason he's singing his Blawg Review song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement. And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar.

With thanks to Eric Turkewitz, apologies to Arlo Guthrie and fond remembrances of the idealism of my youth.

Next week, Colin Samuels' fourth Blawg Review at Infamy or Praise.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).