MosesWrites

You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.

For the younger amongst you, or for any not as devoted as I have been to 1960s US folk music, the line comes from Arlo Guthrie’s masterpiece, an extended ballad “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.”

Inspired by a real experience—the illegal if well-intentioned dumping of trash in a small Massachusetts town on Thanksgiving Day—the song evolves into a critique of the Vietnam War, and the draft in particular.

While the narrator tries to subvert the military’s psychiatric evaluation, saying, "Shrink, I want to kill… I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL," he’s foiled when a “sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, ‘You're our boy.’”

Instead, the trash saves him. When asked if he had ever been arrested, he recounts the saga from Thanksgiving. Off he goes to mingle with the unfit on the Group W bench, “all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people… Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!”

An official’s question about rehabilitation receives the searing retort, “you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug?”

Finally, he’s free to go, fingerprints sent to Washington as a subversive—yet still free to go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this song recently, as a well-spring of creativity and spontaneity, as to how satire works to capture current events while at its best speaks profoundly to deeper questions—of authority, of rationality, of narrative.

Satire, from Horace in Ancient Rome to Enlightenment manifestations like Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” and Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” refracts truth from an otherwise unexpected medley, true to the Latinate origins of the word. As with the bricolage of Claude Levi Strauss’ Savage Mind, a structure of meaning arises from apposite juxtapositions.

For all the codification of knowledge, for all the best intentions of curriculum, for all the erudition that comes from tracing traditions through rigorous scholarly inquiry, in some instances power reveals its arbitrary underpinnings with greater force than any positivist might like.

I’ve been thinking about Alice because I’ve been thinking about the nature of AI, and the profound gaps between expectations and potential, between what’s needed to use it effectively and how people—especially students—actually deploy it as a tool.

I remember early in my undergraduate days hearing a talk that included philosophy professor Marc Bedau, and an exchange about creating life from scratch and the nature of intelligent beings—well before AI was all the rage. From then on, I’ve always wanted to ask, before you give me artificial intelligence, can we first even figure out what intelligence, without adjectives or modifiers, might be?

I’m not a techno-skeptic in the extreme, though from my early childhood in the early 1980s, I’ve recurringly been over-promised and under-delivered by how my world would be totally revolutionized. Change, as it happens, tends to be messy, uneven, and unexpected—yet again as in the power of satire.

I love Google, and ChatGPT has certainly saved me time and let me do some things I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do so easily. Yet I’m also not so far from the amazing 29 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, published in 1910-1911, that I was incredibly fortunate to have on the shelves of my childhood library—something my parents, if I remember correctly, fortuitously purchased at a yard sale. I owe more to those problematic tomes than likely anything else I can lay claim to for inspiring my imagination and intellect—even to the great stacks of National Geographic magazines which I also loved.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant, the refrain goes, ‘cepting Alice, of course.

For now at least, I’m of a mind with AI, that you can get anything you want, ‘cepting intelligence, of course.

June 2025

Anything You Want