The catchy thing about this lyric that no one seems to have snapped to yet, is that the left right & center wording is ambiguous. Applying political meaning can go either way. "The one on the right is on the left" could mean either that the guy was standing on the right side of the stage and was politically liberal(left), OR that he was politically conservative(right) and was standing on the left of the stage. So you can get many different interpretations depending on how you assign meaning. Its similar to those pictures that show two different images depending on whether you notice the the solids or the voids. This is a very clever semantic puzzle. The only line that's NOT ambiguous in this way, is the guy in the rear. No wonder there are so many differing interpretations in the comments so far.
Maybe this was intentional...??? You can make the song mean whatever you want it to mean. People who argue politics are arguing two different opinionated views of the same fact, each refusing to see what the other sees.
I like to interpret the ending of the song in the ironic way: each guy ends up doing the opposite of what one might expect. The one on the left( the liberal) ends up working in a bank, in finance, a solidly conservative job. The one on the right, the conservative, turns into a late-night rock-n-roll radio personality, probably grows his hair long & smokes a lot of weed. The centrist becomes a trucker....whatever that means. Maybe it means sitting on the fence leads nowhere. Except I know truckers listen to a lot of NPR and talk radio, and you never know WHAT their politics might be, they're all over the map. And the guy in the rear - I see him as a kind of pacifist hippie protester - he gets drafted and has to learn to fight beside the ones he protested against.
The catchy thing about this lyric that no one seems to have snapped to yet, is that the left right & center wording is ambiguous. Applying political meaning can go either way. "The one on the right is on the left" could mean either that the guy was standing on the right side of the stage and was politically liberal(left), OR that he was politically conservative(right) and was standing on the left of the stage. So you can get many different interpretations depending on how you assign meaning. Its similar to those pictures that show two different images depending on whether you notice the the solids or the voids. This is a very clever semantic puzzle. The only line that's NOT ambiguous in this way, is the guy in the rear. No wonder there are so many differing interpretations in the comments so far.
Maybe this was intentional...??? You can make the song mean whatever you want it to mean. People who argue politics are arguing two different opinionated views of the same fact, each refusing to see what the other sees.
I like to interpret the ending of the song in the ironic way: each guy ends up doing the opposite of what one might expect. The one on the left( the liberal) ends up working in a bank, in finance, a solidly conservative job. The one on the right, the conservative, turns into a late-night rock-n-roll radio personality, probably grows his hair long & smokes a lot of weed. The centrist becomes a trucker....whatever that means. Maybe it means sitting on the fence leads nowhere. Except I know truckers listen to a lot of NPR and talk radio, and you never know WHAT their politics might be, they're all over the map. And the guy in the rear - I see him as a kind of pacifist hippie protester - he gets drafted and has to learn to fight beside the ones he protested against.