The Presidents of the United States of America


How have we not listened to The Presidents of the United States of America? The band, i mean. They made 6 albums, but i only care about their self titled debut. They were originally a punk rock busker duo whose schtick came from Sandman, a series of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. No, i'm being told it was Mark Sandman, the frontman of Morphine. Morphine was one of those super famous and influential bands no one ever heard on commercial radio. Regardless, the gist is that you take one guitar and fit it with two bass strings, and another guitar and fit it with the 3 thickest guage guitar strings you can find. Tune it all down to C# so you have essentially one 5-string bass, write songs about the most mundane topics possible, and eventually hire a drummer. It's the 90s so you got Smurfs, obscure regional supermarkets, getting scratched by your cat, finding your pet lizard dead under the furniture, a dune buggy, and canned peaches. Oh, and an MC5 cover. Realistically, nobody wants to be naked and famous, and in spite of trying our damnedest to not make it, we seem to keep stumbling down the seemingly never ending, dramatically ironic Republican rabbit hole. 

To all my Republican friends, we already live and work in your ideological paradise. The things you are mad about are the parts that suck about that socio-political structure for everyone, but you're so busy fighting the people who want to make those parts suck less that you don't realize it will still suck for you too. You'll still have to sit at the little kids table and eat the same sun-baked, salmonella-flavored potato salad as the rest of us, while Uncle Harvey talks about space hookers and car parts. Apologies if you have an Uncle Harvey, i didn't mean him specifically.

As you might expect, this band tended to side with Democrat candidates; the dune buggy is little and blue, after all. Why? Because the Republican party is garbage. I hope you understand me well enough by now to not be personally insulted by that statement, but the party is feather plucking insane. Whether you like it or not, America is a decidedly right-wing country compared to the rest of the whole world. Please keep in mind, i'm way down in the lower left hand corner of the political compass with Noam Chomsky and the actual Marxists/Anarchists. Politically speaking, even Biden and Obama were too right-wing/authoritarian for my liking. Sanders (even though i dislike him for many other reasons) is barely left of center, with believe it or not Teddy Roosevelt. These are actual political compass rankings determined by analyzing actual speeches and policies, by the way. 

My point is that all that stuff about "the extreme left" and "cancel culture" and "oppressive political correctness" is an ideological war between the authoritarian right and the radical centrists. If that's confusing to you, then we'll just go back to Lord of the Rings and i'm back in the second age saying "hey guys, you just gonna let all of us over here on Numenor drown? Oh, ok, rings of power and whatnot? Well, have fun with that gurgle gurgle."

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