You Give Me the Creeps.
If you’re so fucking clever,
Why is everyone laughing at you?
Are you really going to control us
That’s something I’d like to see you try to do!
The Crucifucks, “You Give Me The Creeps”
Ah, Doc Dart and The Crucifucks. The band that drove my mother crazy, with the disturbed (and often disturbing) singer, heir to the Dart Container fortune, whose voice sounded like a dentist’s drill (no one realized that Steve Shelly from Sonic Youth was the original drummer). Kelly Bray, one of my best friends in high school who I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years, introduced me to them: it’s his fault.
The Crucifucks rejected everything: religion, work, the Republicans, the Democrats, punk rockers, and society. It’s really nihilist stuff, but at the same time Doc Dart’s lyrics and delivery are as darkly hilarious as they are bitter and sarcastic.
I was on my way home from Drinking Liberally tonight, thinking about so many things: Pinochet’s death, the injustice of the war in Iraq, the fact that we have to deal with two more years of the Bush regime, and that whoever follows him will be just as much an asshole, Democrat or Republican, because (as Kurt Vonnegut points out in “A Man Without a Country”) only crazy people want to be President these days, self-absorbed crazy maniacs. I turned on the radio, and the newsreader said that Bush was traveling around getting alternative opinions to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations in Iraq, in essence refusing to be satisfied until he hears the recommnedations he wants to hear (not that the ISG’s recommendations are anything more than factasy, retread, and CYA for the US to back out of Iraq). As of December 11, Bush’s polls were at 31%, and falling, and these lyrics popped into my head.
I heard this lame duck “President” with ratings as low as Nixon’s and falling, who has lost all credibility, not only as a leader but as a person who has even a modest degree of common sense, talk about how he was going to “consider” various plans for Iraq, and I started laughing, because everyone knows that everything has gone off the rails, and that Mr. Bush has less of a chance than Casey Jones of avoiding a trainwreck.
The newscaster was just as ridiculous, a disingenuous, hyper-literal boob who parroted the administration’s claptrap, offering analysis as if this was a serious effort at anything other than lip service before the President and his people enact something they’d already decided on a long time ago. And I started laughing some more. Like everything else these guys do, it’s political theatre with all the subtlety of “According to Jim”
“Who do you think you are?” I said to myself, laughing alone in the van on my drive home. “NO ONE FUCKING LIKES YOU!! NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU SAY!” I shook my head and laughed, which is when Doc’s ranting songs started playing through my head. I’m listening to them right now as I type.
I’ve been told a thing a or two
By you
About nothing at all.
So if you believe in what you say,
OK,
Just go away.Don’t tell me I don’t understand
You paid us to put us in the palm of your hand…Washington,
You’re no fun, you’re no fun…
The Crucifucks, “Washington”
It’[s hard to laugh when the joke’s on you. It’s harder to laugh when the joke just isn’t funny.
And if Josh Marshall is right, things are about to get pretty ugly. I think I know why Poppy was crying.
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