March 28, 2008
Tom Lehrer: familiarity breeds contempt
Patterico spent some time the other night on YouTube, watching some 1960s-era videos of Tom Lehrer performing his satirical ditties.
I loved Lehrer when I was a kid -- still did, actually, up until fairly recently.
But, as with so many entertainers (although it's hard to think of him as one, given he's been retired for decades), familiarity breeds contempt; the more you learn about what they believe, the more difficult it becomes to set that knowledge aside so you can enjoy their act.
In Lehrer's case, his politics prove impossible for me to ignore.
'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."
[...]
He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians "because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side".
[...]
"They are calling [the Space Shuttle explosion] a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for one thing."
For all his intelligence and wit, it turns out Lehrer is a Bush-hating moonbat; a believer in moral equivalence, incapable of discerning any difference between terrorists and their victims; and someone who fails to recognize the bravery of our astronauts, notwithstanding the politics-driven shortcomings of their spacecraft.
Unfortunately, his albums just don't seem as funny, now that I know a little more about the man he's become.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 28, 2008 06:43 PM
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