It was sometime in the mid to late 1980s, Ronald Reagan was President, and a small venue in Roslyn, Long Island, NY was a popular place to see live music. If you were on LI back then, My Father's Place is a name that would be very familiar to you. I had the pleasure to see Arlo live at My Father's Place a few times back then. On one night, around Christmas time, he changed part of the "Alice's Restaurant" story and added a bit related to what was being called the "Star Wars Program" being pushed by the current administration. I don't remember the exact words, but the audience was entertained when he spoke of how the US Military was secretly training the youth of the day through video games (mostly played in mall game rooms or video arcades back then). Although back then he joked that the youth were being trained to fight aliens from another world one quarter at a time, he still gave the picture of all the machines feeding scores to computers hidden in the basement of the Pentagon. Of course, when you got a high score, you happily punched in your name, initials, or whatever into the game. This helped the government keep track of the best players.
So how is this prophetic? Well last night I was watching a show on the National Geographic Channel. It was about the use of the unmanned aircraft (Predator and Reaper drones) in the war against terror in the middle east. Okay, not invaders from a distant planet, but in a command center not too far from the nation's capitol, members of the military fly these unmanned aircraft and attack targets thousands of miles away. It's as if they are playing a video game. As I watched the show, my mind flashed back to that one particular rendition of "Alice's Restaurant" that I heard years ago. And I thought to myself, "My God, Arlo predicted this!".
