and the guy in the middle burned his drivers licens.

General CommentAs usual, several people have f**ked up interpretations, among other relevant facts, such as the song writer. 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. 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.

Maybe it means sitting on the fence leads nowhere. The centrist becomes a trucker.whatever that means. 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 one on the left( the liberal) ends up working in a bank, in finance, a solidly conservative job. 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. People who argue politics are arguing two different opinionated views of the same fact, each refusing to see what the other sees. Maybe this was intentional.? You can make the song mean whatever you want it to mean. No wonder there are so many differing interpretations in the comments so far. The only line that's NOT ambiguous in this way, is the guy in the rear. Its similar to those pictures that show two different images depending on whether you notice the the solids or the voids. So you can get many different interpretations depending on how you assign meaning. '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. Applying political meaning can go either way. General CommentThe catchy thing about this lyric that no one seems to have snapped to yet, is that the left right & center wording is ambiguous. The one on the right's an all-night deejay

Now this should be a lesson if you plan to start a folk groupĭon't go mixin' politics with the folk songs of our landĪnd if you have political convictions keep them to yourself Well, the one on the right was on the bottom This musical aggregation toured the entire nationīut political animosity prevailed upon the stageĪnd the guy in the rear burned his driver's licenseĪs thousands there were gathered to hear the folk songs of our land Well, the one on the right was on the leftĪnd the one in the middle was on the rightĪnd the one on the left was in the middle But political incompatibility led to their downfall

And the guy in the middle burned his drivers licens.