political science
Aug. 25th, 2008 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
No one likes us; I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens
I first encountered Randy Newman's satirical song "Political Science" in 2003, through a great blog called Body and Soul. Jeanne quoted an LA Times article:
The years passed, foreign policy ebbed and flowed, spats with allies came and went, but the wonderful thing about "Political Science," Newman realized, was that no matter how absurd America's behavior toward the rest of the world seemed to people like him, it could never approximate his song's hyperbolic jingoism. "Nobody talked like that, not even [ultra-hawkish Vietnam-era general] Curtis LeMay."But in 2003, after September 11, Freedom Fries, and the invasion of Iraq, well, suddenly the satire didn't seem so broad.
I thought about all that when I found this video, whose creator seems to have taken Newman's narrator at face value.