[Red Badger]

Typically leftist by calling the ‘union people’ snakes that crawled away?

As for the people of Allentown, they eventually gave him the Key to the City as a reward:

From Wiki:

Reaction to song in Allentown
Allentown, Pennsylvania, for which the song is named, 2010

The song was met with mixed responses in Allentown. Some criticized the song as degrading and full of working-class archetypes.[4] But when Joel returned to the area following the album’s release and the song became a hit record, he was awarded the key to the city by Allentown’s mayor, who praised it as “a gritty song about a gritty city.”

Before a sold-out crowd at Stabler Arena in neighboring Bethlehem, People magazine reported that Joel was greeted enthusiastically with a five-minute standing ovation as he closed his third encore with “Allentown.” At the end of the song and extended ovation, Joel was greeted with even more sustained applause when, in an apparent defense of the song’s meaning, he pointedly told the Allentown crowd, as is his wont at the end of every one of his concerts: “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allentown_%28song%29

[9thLife]

Guess you schooled me. All I remember from that time was the aforementioned uproar but you know what, I was a headline junkie in those days. I believed what I read. And I stopped reading (and caring) sometime between 1982 and whenever he got that standing ovation.

Though I did see the show (in Florida) and do remember him saying, "Don't take any sh1t from anybody..."