And There... on the other side... in the middle of the other side...

I was listening to Alice's Restaurant the other day.  Not really an unusual thing for me to do, considering that I used the chorus of that song as the only notation below my senior yearbook picture, but I hadn't really listened to it all the way through in a while, so when it came up on the shuffle play mode of my iphone, I started reciting/singing the massacree with the four part harmony and all that kinda stuff.
For those of you who were not hippies, or the progeny of hippies, Alice's Restaurant, is not the name of a restaurant, it's the name of a song, by Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie.  And it's not really a song in the traditional sense of the word, it's more of a rambling story spoken over a catchy little guitar line with only the chorus being sung at rather unpredictable intervals: You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant.
The song is really a sort of 1960's parable, it embodies the open, idealistic attitude of youth, yet with a profoundly cynical slant when it comes to authority and institutions, which is why I like it, and why I liked it a whole lot when I was 17 years old.  Arlo got the hippie thing down pretty well, but he also inherited some of the anti-fascist, proletarian ideals of his old man.
The first part of the song is a narrative of how he and a friend of his get arrested for dumping garbage illegally  on account of the dump being closed on thanksgiving.  It's funny, and strangely prophetic in a world where small time offenses seem to always get caught while large scale atrocities often go unpunished.  The second part of the song is the story of going to Whitehall street to register for the draft, "getting injected, inspected, neglected and rejected."  Arlo runs into a problem when the Armed Services want to know if he's ever been arrested and he has to say yes, "for littering."  But then they want to know if he's "rehabilitated himself," and that is a little too much to bear.  The question of, "whether or not he's moral enough to join the army... after being a litterbug."
At that moment the anti-war punch of the song comes through loud and clear.  But Vietnam was over before I was born, so that punch doesn't really hit home that solidly for me.  What it did hit this week is the question of morality.  See I just rambled on for quite a while before I actually got to the point, which is just what the song does, it disarms you with humor and absurdity and then it smacks you with a real question: What exactly is morality.
I would be willing to surmise that there has never been a completely immoral or amoral person, ever. There have been lot's of people whose moral standards may not be the same as yours or mine, but they have morals none the less. What exactly are bad morals?  They are usually defined by the culture in which you are located at the time.  For instance Guthrie's rant about how absurd it was that littering could morally disqualify him being a soldier, is based on the assumption that killing, and perhaps war in general, is an immoral activity.  However, soldiers, at least good soldiers, are some of the most moral people you will find anywhere.  Their morality is defined by adherence to a very particular code and a very well defined set of principles.  When violence and killing takes place in a war, it is by most definitions moral.  When similar activities take place in an elementary school, they are decidedly and tragically immoral.  Sorry Arlo, context really does matter.  You can take issue with whether or not the war in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq is moral in principle, but you cannot accuse the soldiers of immorality for participating, unless they break even the unusual conventions of warfare.
Context always matters in defining morality.  Behaviors and even ways of dressing that would have scandalized society 50 years ago have become par for the course, and in due time will probably lose the stigma of immorality altogether.
Technology has increased the speed with which cultural mores shift.  Mores are the foundation of morality, they are the principles underneath our moral code.  For example, in the song, the protagonist is doing his friends Alice and Ray a favor by helping them clear out their house, a very moral and upright thing to do.  They try to take the trash to the dump, but for some reason the dump is closed.  They end up littering, breaking the law, and getting arrested.  Even though their overall intent was kind and moral, their behavior was out of bounds.  This is called utilitarianism in ethical practice; the ends justify the means.  In the pursuit of doing a favor for some friends you break a law.  Not a big law, just a little one, just a minor infraction, but an immoral act all the same.
It's not as simple as Arlo would lead you to believe.  It's not just "the Man" trying to keep down the young folk.  Without certain mores, society will break down.  When Europeans came to the new world, they encountered native peoples whose moral code found the idea that a person could own land absurd.  Native Americans thought they had encountered the biggest fools that ever walked the earth, and the early settlers thought the natives were nothing but brute savages who had no sense of culture.  Neither assumption was correct and the clash of moral systems became a tragedy of epic proportions.
We need to be careful when we judge the morality of others.  There is no such thing as immorality or amorality, but there are many different moralities out there.  They all have their own way of seeing things.  To a radical hippie, an overzealous police officer or an army recruiter was an absurd creature with a completely foreign way of seeing the world, and vice versa.  It didn't always go well.  Clashes of morality are often very dangerous, and in melting pot like the USA, we are walking smack into them all of the time.
Being able to laugh at ourselves, and sometimes sing stupid little songs, truly might be the only way we can avoid killing each other.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.
You can get anything you want... at Alice's Restaurant.
Walk right in, it's around the back, about a half a mile from the railroad track,
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.