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| Home Front: Politix |
| Brigadier General James Taylor? |
| 2015-01-19 |
| [NationalReview]. Let us call the roll of national badasses: the 75th Ranger Regiment, USMC Force Reconnaissance, the SEALS, Delta Force . . . James Taylor? What sort of warriors does a weary nation facing a savage enemy turn to? "The Quiet Professionals," "Semper Fidelis," "Death from Above" . . . "A Churning Urn of Burning Funk." The spectacle of the Obama administration's dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to "share a big hug with Paris" as James Taylor -- who still exists -- crooned "You've Got a Friend" is the perfect objective correlative for American decline: The pathetic self-regard of John Kerry and James Taylor's Baby Boomers meets the cynical, self-serving, going-through-the-motions style of Barack Obama's Generation X as disenchanted Millennials in parental basements across the fruited plains no doubt injured their thumbs typing "WTF?" It is the substitution of celebrity for power, of sentiment for analysis, of sloppy gesture for clear-headed commitment. We're responding to barbarism from the seventh century with soft rock from the 1970s. James Taylor may in fact be the quintessential man of his generation. He is the son of two highly accomplished parents, his father a physician and dean of the University of North Carolina medical school who served in the Arctic with Operation Deep Freeze, his mother a soprano who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. A child of affluence bringing up the rear of the Age of Aquarius, he was in a mental institution by the time he was of high-school age, and then tried to launch a musical career but launched a career as a full-time junkie instead. His fortunes turned around when he inherited money and used his new status to move to London and exploit his social connections to link up with Paul McCartney and become rich and famous with a catchy song about what a complete screw-up he had been his entire life. At some point, this man who is so colorlessly country-club that he makes the Fox News weekday lineup look like the original cast of Hair declared himself a "churning urn of burning funk." For the next few decades he proceeded to burden the world with a burgeoning catalog of insipid mediocrity until, finally, he descended to the lowest point a musician ever reaches, three steps down from busking in subway stations: He became a hired hand for politicians, playing with MoveOn.org's "Vote for Change" tour through swing states on behalf of -- small world! -- John Kerry, our national personification of vanity, a kept man, dilettante, and Democratic time-server whose career was both launched and sustained by self-serving accounts of his service in the Vietnam War, a conflict that Taylor avoided by being declared mentally unfit to serve. In our hour of need, the French gave us Lafayette. In theirs, we sent them the guy who drained all the sugar out of "How Sweet It Is" and substituted saccharin. A word of advice: Next time, send Slayer. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #7 Thanks Mr. Kerry, for the first time I my life "I am Ashamed of my Country". |
| Posted by: Harry Angomoth4592 2015-01-19 22:04 |
| #6 Krauthammer remarked that it was like a gag on The Onion - except that is was really our government looking like absolute fools. Send In the Clowns indeed. |
| Posted by: Lone Ranger 2015-01-19 21:49 |
| #5 "Don't fear the Reaper" - Blue Oyster Cult |
| Posted by: Warthog 2015-01-19 09:37 |
| #4 "Won't be fooled again..." The Who? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-01-19 09:25 |
| #3 Should have been Judy Collins, "Send in the Clowns". |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2015-01-19 08:01 |
| #2 Could have been worse. Springsteen. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2015-01-19 07:43 |
| #1 You have to understand. Carole King, JT's ex who originally did the song, was unavailable. And she's jewish, so it would have set the wrong tone. We're actually lucky Kerry didn't drag Arlo Guthrie over there and have him do 'The Alice's Restaurant Masacree'. Although that probably would have been more entertaining. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2015-01-19 07:40 |