Union Songs
I Want To Be A Right Winger Now
A Song by Smokey Dymny©Smokey Dymny 2002
- [play]
Woke up this mornin' wonderin' why I was so poor
Didn't have no money to step outside the door.
So, I wandered downtown into the Stock Exchange
Told the boys there that I sure would like a change.
I said "I wanna be a Right-winger now,
I don't like Socialists no-how!
I'll study real hard, to be an M.B.A.
I'll vote Neo-con till I'm in my marble grave."
Well, they looked at me funny & they laughed out loud a lot.
Someone muttered something nasty 'bout a leopard changin' spots.
But I said I'd be back with a new haircut & suit,
They gave me a hundred bucks & they said I was real cute.
I said, I wanna be a Right-winger now,
I want to have that Rosedale house.
I'll drive my Porsche around, with a cell phone in my hand,
I'll hang with rich men's daughters in the best clubs in the land.
Well, I walked to Harry Rosen's to buy me that new suit.
They looked me up & down & they gave me the boot
I yelled "I have a hundred, from the Stock Exchange."
They handed me a necktie and fifty cents change.
I said, I wanna be a Right-winger now,
I'm gonna make my mark somehow,
They said, "Here's a broom you can sweep the men's room,
But don't talk to the gentlemen, your speech is much too rude."
A sadder, wiser man is standing here tonight.
They don't want me in their clubs & that MBA's a crime!
The girls up at Holt's threw me out into the street.
When I landed on the curb that Porsche squashed my feet.
Now I want to bring those right wingers down!
They know nothing more than scorn & put-downs!
They got no brains, got no sense, just a big, fat inheritance,
Their daddy stole from your daddy & his pals.
(Highway robbery Capitalism!)
Notes
Many thanks to Smokey Dymny for permission to add this song to the Union Songs collection.
Smokey Dymny writes
"Just before my fellow Youth Workers and I were laid off from the Toronto School Board I thought I'd recant, sorta like Joan of Arc, in the last minute, but they burned us anyway. Youth workers, that's what we were called in the last two years. For twenty years before we were called Streetworkers. I was one of the first streetworkers in Canada. Our job was to entice the street youth back into school, get them stabilized by whatever means it took, and get them to graduate from secondary school. (Called high school, locally) Once, there was a homeless youth from the east coast living in squat he had built on the roof of a building in our colourful Kensington Market in downtown Toronto. He climbed up to it via a television antenna mast. He had an electric light bulb up there courtesy of a wire he had led up to the roof from the empty rock club below. His whole sleeping platform - which was the majority of his squat, was laid on top of three feet of insulation. His roof panels were lined with layers of discarded bubble wrap. Because of his superior insulation job the single light bulb kept him warm all night thru the Canadian winter. A professor from the school of Architecture at the University of Toronto, brought a class of his up there to study what this young man had built. This kid did not want to collect Welfare from the city. He walked each day to our school, a distance of two miles, to partake of our free breakfast and lunch programme. That's what got him to come to us, our free food. As a result of the free food inducement, he graduated and went on to work at an organic cattle ranch in Lethbridge, Alberta. When I visited him there, one summer, he was enrolling at a College, paid for by his employer, to learn diesel and heavy equipment repair. Later he moved back to his home province of Nova Scotia to work on diesel engines in ships. He hated it there 'cause he saw how racist his province was in comparison. Going to an Alternative High School had changed him.
Notes to song:
1. M.B.A: this degree is a license to rip off the poor and suck up to the rich.
2. Rosedale is an upper class Toronto residential enclave.
3. Porsche: a small, expensive, noisy, polluting car
4. Harry Rosen: a rich man's suit maker, who can't live up to Lou Myles' international reputation.
5. Holt's: Holt Renfrew, a rich women's designer store on Bloor St.
6. Porsche again: the drivers with cell phones stuck to their ears are often a parking and traffic hazard in the city.""Smokey's voice is a pork chop with a little bit of road dirt."- Art Farquharson
http://radio3.cbc.ca/#/bands/Smokey
http://www.newunionism.net/solidarityidol.htm
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$17 Cdn, to this address, includes postage.
Smokey Dymny
Box 745, Quathiaski Cove, B.C.
V0P 1N0, Canada
phone: 250-285-2447
union songs..........a selection by mark gregory