Celeb protesters, where’s the do-re-mi?

I knew that the effort to save L.A.’s Southside urban farm was getting serious when Fred Starner wrote a folk song about it.

The minute he heard that the farm was probably on the way to becoming history, he sat right down and banged out words to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land.”

The lyrics don’t sound right unless you’re actually singing the music, but trust me when I say it’s all there: poverty, tears, Jesus, greed and how “Horowitz don’t like gardening on hands and knees.”

Not exactly “We Shall Overcome,” but Hobo Banjo Fred, as he calls himself, is always in there giving the old do-re-mi to whatever social injustice rears its evil head.

Satirist Tom Lehrer called guys like Starner members of the Folk Song Army and sang of them: “So join in the Folk Song Army / Guitars are the weapons we bring / To the fight against poverty, war and injustice / Ready! Aim! Sing!”

I realize I quoted Lehrer’s words and not Starner’s, but that’s because no one wrote satire like Lehrer; they didn’t in the 1960s and they don’t now.

Lehrer went back to teaching when the fires of social revolution were damped, but Starner is still out there strumming away, keeping alive the spirits of the Guthrie boys and the old master, Pete Seeger.

Starner is probably at the farm even as I write, singing and mingling with the kinds of celebrities and eco-heroes who are drawn to civil protests like winos to a grape field. It’s like old times seeing Joan Baez in a protest again, up a tree in the 14-acre plot that 350 urban farmers are trying to preserve.

She was active 40 years ago in the anti-Vietnam War movement, when she probably could have scampered up a tree faster than a squirrel in heat, but she’s 65 now and had to be hoisted up on a sling. Well, it’s the thought that counts. Laura Dern and Daryl Hannah also showed up, along with Dern’s husband, rocker Ben Harper, who said a few words that someone described as “impassioned.”

Also coming around were legendary tree-climbers Julia Butterfly Hill and John Quigley. If you keep up with environmental protests you’ll recall that Butterfly sat in a redwood tree for two years and Quigley in an oak tree for 71 days in dual efforts to bring messages of ecological salvation to an otherwise disinterested public.

The deadline came and went for the farmers and their backers to raise $16.3 million to keep the land as an urban oasis in an industrial desert. Owner Ralph Horowitz gave them until May 22 to raise the money, which they failed to do. And now he wants his land back to plow under the fields of rhubarb, carrots and peach trees that helped feed the mostly Latino families in South L.A.

Something large and gray and smoky will probably replace what had been verdant and alive, but at least it will also put people to work who don’t have jobs. Priorities clash over the rich earth, and it’s too bad the millionaires among us aren’t more altruistic in their attitudes, but they’re not.

We live in a peculiar age of possessions, where the fact of ownership matters more than what we actually own; where we buy what we can’t really use and don’t really need; where we are quick to replace what we won’t repair; where dumps are filled with the debris of opulence and the trinkets of excess.

In this climate, it is little wonder that urban dreams perish. The value of property outweighs the needs of the people. It is the philosophy of kings to amass and armies to protect their possessions. Crown jewels are safe in societies of oppression, but not forever; never forever.

Had celebrity money instead of celebrity smiles come forth before the deadline, their presence at the urban farm at 41st and Alameda Streets might constitute a celebration of victory instead of a solemn coda of dwindling protest.

Eventually, Joan Baez will go home, Daryl Hannah and Laura Dern will get work, Ben Harper will go off on a gig and the tree-savers will march away to confront issues in other climes. And Starner will write another song for another outrage that is sure to come, and life will go on in its peculiarly uneven way.

Pragmatism will once more triumph over compassion in L.A., and we all ought to be a little unhappy about that.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.