Around our nation's capital There's a freeway 8 lanes wide White concrete ringed around the city For those who want inside Get on, get off Ignore everything to the sides In your midst I drive While homeboys in the back of the van make drugs
Wanna hide something like a crack lab? Just put it in plain sight Only stop to refuel and unload More poison to tear more lives apart Whole neighbourhoods are goin' psycho Gang wars like never before Better lock your doors, buy some guns And pray for martial law
On the Washington, D.C. beltway Around and around I go In the black van with no windows And a chimney puffing smoke Bloody headlines in the news each day Drug "crisis" everywhere So much comes in so easy It's as though someone wants it there
It would be a little obvious To fence off all the slums Hand out machine guns To the poor in the projects And watch 'em kill each other off A more subtle genocide is when The only hope for the young Is to join the Army or slowly die Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue The last roads left in the American Dream
Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue Only one road leads to this neighbourhood Little kids wanna sell drugs when they grow up
The folks might get just a little upset If they knew where that dope comes from From Columbia to the Contras To our Air Force bases, where we trade it for guns The moral equivalent of a serial killer And his CIA friends Call the shots from the White House But now that we own the media too Those stories just don't run
On the Washington, D.C. beltway Around and around I go In a black van with no windows And a chimney puffing smoke Same gang that ran smack in Vietnam Ain't got no reason to fear Just get a Vice President so dumb The crook at the top never gets impeached
That sure was easy wasn't it? That sure was easy wasn't it? More crack, more panic, more cops, more jails
You see emergency, total war You see emergency, total war You see a black face, you see a crackhead You see a black face, you see a crackhead You see a black face, you see Willie Horton with a knife You see Willie Horton with a knife
You've seen one Willie Horton you've seen them all They're everywhere, I know You asked for it - you've got it Drug suspects have no rights at all Property seized and sold before trial Labor camps on American soil Neo-Nazi bootboys That the cops never seem to arrest Prowl neighborhoods with baseball bats Why do they get so much press?
Mein Kampf the mini series Oliver North, "patriotic" hero The leader of tomorrow is yours today Finally gotcha psyched for a police state
On the Washington, D.C. beltway Around and around I go In a black van with no windows And a chimney puffing smoke My van's a mobile oven now That burns the bodies you never see Just like in Chile or Guatemala People just seem to disappear
Just like Rome We fell asleep when we got spoiled Ignore human rights in the rest of the world Ya might as well lose your own As the noose of narco-militarism Tightens 'round our necks We worry about burning flags And pee in jars at work To keep our jobs
But if someone came for you one night And dragged you away Do you really think your neighbours Would even care? Do you really think your neighbours Would even care?