why dave bergman is neat

Been following the latest horrifying stories from what Amnesty International calls the “gulag of our time”? John Kass of The Chicago Tribune was outraged by the news that records by Christina Aguilera had been played at Guantanamo at full volume in order to soften up detainees. He thought they should have used “Dance, Ballerina, Dance” by Vaughn Monroe, over and over and over.

Well, readers had plenty of suggestions of their own, and so the Tribune’s website put together a list of “Interro-Tunes” — the most effective songs for aural intimidation, mood music for jolting your jihadi. A lot were the usual suspects - like the Captain and Tennille’s blamelessly goofy “Muskrat Love”, which, as I recall, put the Queen to sleep at a White House gala, though the Duke of Edinburgh sat agog all the way to the end. Someone suggested Bob Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned”, which even on a single hearing sounds like it’s being played over and over. I don’t know what Mr Kass has against “Ballerina”, which is very pleasant in the Nat “King” Cole version. But he seems to think one burst of “Dance, ballerina, dance/And do your pirouette in rhythm with your aching heart” will have the Islamists howling for the off-switch and singing like canaries to the Feds. Who knows? I sang “Ballerina” myself once on the radio long ago, and, if it will discombobulate the inmates, I’m willing to dust off my arrangement and fly down to Guantanamo, if necessary dressed liked Christina Aguilera. If they want an encore, I’ll do my special culturally sensitive version of that Stevie Wonder classic, “My Sharia Amour”.

By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, “That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.” But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others” (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the “atrocities” the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ “Springtime For Hitler” does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”.

# posted by Eric : 4:41 PM