I think 'hemisphere below' can be East/West as well as North/South, because I'm seeing a lot of allusions to Vietnam in this song. The US has never really 'fired on' Central/South America, but they really unloaded on SE Asia.
Conscription is Congress 'offering the educated' to the war effort; 'Hang your collar up' is them having to give up their day jobs, 'hang your dollar on me' references the cost of the war effort. The 'forest for the fire' is deforestation via napalm; 'held and dyed and skinned alive' is the history of POW treatment in SE Asian wars. Sugar, coffee cup, copper, steel are all things that the US needed to source from the developing world in this era, and hence the real point of much of the conflict that they either started or got involved in.
About the song, well it's one of their best IMO, even more so considering none of the lyrics rhyme!
I think 'hemisphere below' can be East/West as well as North/South, because I'm seeing a lot of allusions to Vietnam in this song. The US has never really 'fired on' Central/South America, but they really unloaded on SE Asia.
Conscription is Congress 'offering the educated' to the war effort; 'Hang your collar up' is them having to give up their day jobs, 'hang your dollar on me' references the cost of the war effort. The 'forest for the fire' is deforestation via napalm; 'held and dyed and skinned alive' is the history of POW treatment in SE Asian wars. Sugar, coffee cup, copper, steel are all things that the US needed to source from the developing world in this era, and hence the real point of much of the conflict that they either started or got involved in.
About the song, well it's one of their best IMO, even more so considering none of the lyrics rhyme!