From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:
A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight [June 24] recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”Long long long past. He’s really out of his mind.
It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.
[Some context: “Barbara-Ann,” with a hyphen, was written by Fred Fassert and recorded by the Regents in 1961. The Beach Boys covered the song, minus the hyphen, on their 1965 album Beach Boys’ Party! (considered to be the first “unplugged” album). The parody song (which I never knew existed) is from 1980, by Vince Vance and the Valiants.]
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A certain element of Barbara-Ann slipped in to “Lay of the Surfers” from Robert Calvert’s 1975 concept album ‘Lucky Leif and the Longships’ produced by Brian Eno. LL imagines how US culture might have evolved had the Vikings settled North America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_NHVtRyZg8
—Steven
An old Sally Forth cartoon had the daughter Hillary standing at the refrigerator and saying, "How can you tell when yogurt has gone bad?"
Recently Lawrence O'Donnell asked, "How can we tell if Trump has gone (crazy) ?
I guess we can't... as his staff value loyalty over truth.
What a song! I laughed at loud at ”watery grave.“ And “barbari-Ann.“
I think we can tell from the evidence of our eyes and ears — and when try to imagine any president doing what he does and saying what he says.
Ah, but what if the evidence doesn't count?
I'm still laughing at a sketch in the Steven Colbert show, in the Ed Sullivan theatre in New York, where they played Hail to the Chief and on walked a Black man in a nice suit. After saying they were only joking about him being Obama, the man proceeded to calmly repeat sentence after sentence that Trump has said, words that would have been a scandal for Obama... but from Trump the words don't count.
For some people, no evidence will be evidence, or they might be able bend it to fit their fixed understanding. Part of the problem with His Majesty is that people get inured. “Oh, that’s just grandpa.”
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