The Righties are spinning so fast they're melting into a puddle. (If you've read the terribly non-PC "Little Black Sambo" in its terribly non-PC version you know exactly what I mean.)
The story goes something like this. Somebody cuts a record that sounds like the Star Spangled Banner except it's in Spanish so nobody can understand it, except Spanish-language radio stations start playing it which makes it a threat to our national honor - the Star Spangled Banner being the national anthem - a threat to our national honor, I say, exceeding even that of crab grass. There ensues an outcry. In English.,
But wait! Condi Rice, clueless, announces she sees nothing wrong with a Spanish version of the national anthem, she herself having heard a Gospel version and a Country version, so what the hell. But wait! Into the fray flies (I'm not saying on a broomstick here, but flies) the ever-outraged Michelle Malkin to point out it's not a literal translation! It contains other words! Including Hip Hop! OMG! So it's, well, not the national anthem. But it sounds like the national anthem.
But wait! An admirer of Malkin now pens a parody (to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner) that begins "Jose can you see." Which is, outrageously, not the national anthem. So Rice now can say, well she's heard a Spanish version so what's the big deal? To which Malkin can object but it has other words!
A puddle. If you see what I mean.
Of course I might be biased here. My mother, a preacher's daughter who amused herself in her childhood through countless church services by making up alternate lyrics to hymns, taught me "Glady the Cross-Eyed Bear" and "Bless'd be the tie that binds / our collars to our shirts." So maybe it's just the way I was brought up, thinking a song is just a song. With other words.
2 comments:
i was thinking of disney's song of the touth the other day. the movie, with burl ives, which never got shown again after i was taken to see it as a tyke. why, i wonder now? i don't remember that the stereotypes were bad ones, just dialect ones. what's wrong with dialect? the assumption that those who speak it are somehow inferior? au contraire (cher.) the stories, the uncle remus ones, are simply updates of the african storyteller genre, with tricker and everybody, which we extol now, so what gave anyway, do you remember?
or was it something else i'm not remembering? i was quite little; so much so that i remember seeing it in a market street picture palace in san francisco, doubt it would have been the 60s yet.
Right. There was a book too - from the movie I suppose, not the other way around. "Don't throw me in that briar patch" is still to be heard when my sister and I are together but I doubt my younger brothers know the stories. Remind me to find out. I liked the stories and always thought of them as exemplary fables. I think of Sambo the same way. Of course I like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I guess there's no hope for me, huh?
There may have been some watermelon eating in the movie, or something equally dreadful. I don't remember either.
Post a Comment