What Alice’s Restaurant Tells Us About Trump’s Win

On Thanksgiving, 1965, Arlo Guthrie, an 18-year-old leftist singer songwriter, went to a local Massachusetts landfill only to find it closed and instead dumped some trash on a hillside. The event inspired ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, Guthrie’s anti-war song which gets played every Thanksgiving.

The recent death of Alice Brock, the inspiration for the titular Alice, ahead of Thanksgiving inspired a rash of new stories about the song and ensures its relentless airplay over the holiday weekend.

But the real relevance of the song doesn’t come from the Thanksgiving weekend or Alice’s death, but Trump’s resounding victory earlier in November. And the aging liberal boomers and a younger cohort with no clue about the song understand all too little what it really says about the modern Left.

The same lefties smirking at Officer Obie busting a young Arlo for dumping garbage at the bottom of a cliff (actually a hillside) would applaud as EPA stormtroopers rampaged through the home of anyone daring to not only dump garbage on a hillside but violate one of a million environmental regulations.

Before the election, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, a fancy name for the trash police, tore apart a private residence in search of a pet squirrel and raccoon, and decapitated them to test for rabies after one of the beleaguered animals bit the trash police. The details of the 5-hour raid by a convoy of environmental police vehicles serving a surprise warrant and escorting the owner to the toilet is the sort of insanity that makes Alice’s Restaurant seem like a polite greeting.

59 years after Guthrie wrote a hit song complaining about being busted for dumping a load of trash, cities and suburbs have garbage police whose job is to poke through people’s trash and check to see if they’re putting tin cans (recyclables), leftover chicken (compostables) and regular trash in the same bin.

“We came to a side road, and off the side of the side road, there was another fifteen foot cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better ‘n two little piles,” Arlo nonchalantly jeered. Today his fans support fining anyone who mixes up the colored bins so that one small bagged pile of trash doesn’t get mixed up with any other piles of bagged trash.

In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the original setting for Alice’s Restaurant, potential penalties for trash violations include having your license suspended, your car seized and fines of up to $15,000. 80% of waste ban violations were for “improper disposal of cardboard.” What would the progressive government have done to Alice and pals today for deciding “they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time” and just letting it pile up in an abandoned church before dumping it on a hillside?

They might have made an exception to their opposition to the death penalty for that set of offenses.

Guthrie’s current home in Brevard County has trash regulations longer than the extremely long lyrics of Alice’s Restaurant. The recycling regulations specify that mouthwash bottles must be rinsed, deodorant must have its cap on, newspapers must be kept clean and phone books must be cut into 1 inch thick sections. Whatever the 18-year-old Arlo would have made of this trash regime whose obsessive compulsive trash policing puts the Stasi to shame, his senior self appears to be fine with it.

Alice’s Restaurant’s spends a lot of its time mocking Officer Obie, a zealous law enforcement officer who tracks down the men who dumped a “pile of garbage”, but every progressive city, suburb and state now employs an army of Officer Obies whose job is to look through your trash every week.

Officer Obie is ridiculed for documenting the trash dumping with “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.” Today trash police, officially ‘code enforcement officers’, wear bodycams to document inappropriate trash placement. This is needed because the trash police have been caught faking violations by rearranging the trash in the bin and then writing citations for them. Failure to respond to a citation can lead to an arrest. People have had to hire lawyers and fight court cases over how many feet a recycling bin was from the curb.

And no one has bothered to write a song about it.

But if Democrats want to understand why they took such a beating in the election and why members of their base defected in such numbers to Trump and the Republicans, they might want to contemplate how they went from sneering at Officer Obie to turning into him.

Kamala tried to run her campaign on ‘joy’ but where’s the joy in eight pages of recycling regulations to determine which bin your trash goes that are enforced by trash police wearing bodycams?

Joy isn’t being told what to do, it’s a sense of freedom. Who represented real freedom more: the rogue billionaire or the lifelong public official? Which one was truer to the spirit of Alice’s Restaurant: the man being prosecuted by the feds and state authorities for offenses that no one could even understand or the woman who wanted to ban cars, health insurance, guns, and politically incorrect speech?

When RFK Jr endorsed Trump, the media rushed out an outraged story about the Kennedy scion allegedly absconding with a whale’s head 30 years ago. The story describes how RFK Jr “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan” and then drove for five hours while “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car” and, as his daughter related, “we all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Which side of the story, RFK Jr or the media scolds, sound more like the ethos of Alice’s Restaurant? Which of them represents free spirits doing what they please and which one represents the authorities?

Alice’s Restaurant and the joy of color-coded recycling bins is just one symptom of a movement that pretends to be subversive but is fundamentally authoritarian. Every time lefties try to play at being subversive, it only lasts long enough for them to seize power and then they turn authoritarian.

That’s how hippies turned into Office Obie, free love turned into #MeToo, free speech became the speech police, civil rights became affirmative action quotas, and anti-government protests became government abuses. Take pronouns, which evolved from freeform sexual experimentation in the counterculture and along the way became a bureaucratic mandate complete with nametags.

Whatever one thinks of leftist ideas, it’s undeniable that every subversive counterculture impulse has long since become an oppressive cultural decree. And yet wokes act as if they’re Arlo ‘taking on the man’ rather than ‘the man’ demanding you color code your trash, state your pronouns and shut up.

You can’t actually get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. Even if Brock wasn’t deceased, the idea of running a free-for-all and serving food to the public under those conditions would be unthinkable under lefty government authorities. Her attempts at running actual restaurants failed and toward the end she lent her name to a restaurant that claimed to be using her recipes. The original church became the ‘Guthrie Center’ which has a gift shop and rents out space for weddings. Guthrie had to stop touring during the pandemic because regulations no longer allowed it. He didn’t write a song about that either.

Guthrie, predictably a Bernie Sanders supporter, backed a movement seeking a totalitarian America with even more government oversight, more regulations and a much bigger Obiesque police state.

Freedom is no longer on the menu, but then again it never was. The promise of freedom is a subversive bait and switch, the encouragement to young people to do what they want, to protest, riot, have sex, speak out, ignore the rules and dump trash is just there to undermine a sitting non-leftist authority. Once the Left takes over, it implements rules far more oppressive than those of the prior regime.

The Left runs on freedom and joy, but all that it ever delivers are tyranny and misery.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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