But there's a
seamier side to this business that Dylan seems to have picked up on, and may
represent a collusional or - dare I say it - conspiracy to commit fraud on the country
music population of Tennessee and the exburbs of otherwheres. I could never understand the
popularity of "Lay Lady Lay." The false-tenor
voice that sounds like Jim Nabors, who was gay (NTTAWWT), crooning to a country
lass to lay down on a big brass bed in order to be laid on said bed, seems unlikely in the
ordinary country environs. Who the fuff can afford a brass bed in the burbs of
Tennessee, out in the backwoods, where still waters run deep? Plus, again, you'd be making love to Gomer
Pyle, a nutjob with drill sergeant voices coming at him inside his head, who will
reach orgasm moaning, "Golly. Shazam." Hmph.
If that
situation weren't bad enough, Dylan put out another song on the album that, in
hindsight, has to be an Up Yours to country music aficionados, "Country
Pie." Well, I ain't no genius, no Einstein or Freud, but the racy lyrics of
this song make country women look like so many pies. Check this stanza out:
Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime
What do I care?
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner, honey, I'll be there
Damn, we all knew Dylan was a cunning linguist, as they say, but damn that's nine pies in one stanza alone. Was he in a pie-eating contest with Johnny Cash? Long before Fanny Mae and Sally Mae, there was their forbear Ellie Mae. (Well, you're wrong, reader, it has everything to do with Eden and Creation stories and Fingers.)
XI. Richard Nixon (1968 - 1974)
Where do you begin with the many and myriad ways Tricky Dick gave the Up Yours to so many. Going short version, let's consider two decisions he made. Pictured above, Nixon flashes an Up Yours, here announcing his intention to fist-f*ck (see above) Laos and Cambodia back to prehistoricismness and archeological digs. All well known. But, less well known, and only recently revived, is legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's assertion in his new book, The Doomsday Machine, that the real reason Nixon wanted him taken out (Ellsberg actually feared for his life) was because he suspected that the RAND tank-thinker knew of specific plans of the president (and his secretary of state, and Nobel peace prize winner Henry Kissinger) to nuke North Vietnam, an act of such barbaric consequence that it's conceivable that it might have set off WWWIII and sent us all Up Yoursed and careening back to the Stone Age during the Stoned Age. He writes,
He plausibly feared that I could reveal and document his secret threats to North Vietnam of escalations, including nuclear attacks, aiming essentially to win the war. To avert my possible exposure of his secret demands and threats--which had already prolonged the war for two years, widened it to Cambodia and Laos, and which would ultimately add twenty thousand American names to the Vietnam Memorial--he had set in motion a variety of criminal steps to keep me silent about his secret policy.
While the MSM has focused on Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon presidency, they rarely inform the viewer that the Papers reported on previous administrations. Nixon's nuke plans go way beyond the casus smelli and dark fatalism of the Papers. Before Nixon, no president had engaged in planning for a nuclear strike. Nixon had set a date, according to Ellsberg.
The second self-destructive decision the president made that doomed him was his failure to appoint Mark Felt as FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover died. Felt was so incensed by being passed over for director that under the guise and guile of "Deep Throat" he went on to lead Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to "follow the money." The reporters had to know that Felt was Using "Deep Throat" to refer to Hoover, the infomaniac who spied on everybody, probably to be there if he found someone who knew of his secret homosexual predilections. Let's just say, his pal Roy considered J. Edgar a cohning linguist. Hmph.
Felt gave the president the Up Yours here. The other interesting thing to note here is that Ellsberg was considered a "leaker" by many at the time, while Deep Throat was considered a whistleblower. In any case, Ellsberg was alerting Americans to what would essential war criminality: If they'd reached conclusion they could win, but kept going on with the deaths anyway. And Felt was a disgruntled d*ckhead, if we may use the parlance of the context, who would have kept secret the doings of Tricky Dick had he been made director. Yet another time that the MSM has failed us over the years, and abrogated their duty to keep the public intelligently informed (their minimum mandate). The MSM Up Yours to Americans.
As an epilogue to his presidency, while making his final getaway from the White House, Nixon gave us his final Up Yours salute, as if to say, "Nah, nah, I got a pardon, I got a pardon. Nah, nah." We didn't like that much, the pardon I mean.
XII. Gerald Ford (The Pardoner)
Not much to say here. This weasel who'd
been on the seven-member Warren Commission that investigated the JFK
assassination, and spent his time there ratting out, to the FBI, other members
who were skeptical of the "facts," is the only non-elected president the US has
had. Everybody hated him for the pardon though, not for suppressing the fact
that 5 of the 7 members of the Warren Commission weren't convinced they had a
solid case for Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone gunman. Ford was in charge of
building Oswald's profile for the commission and, consequently, of pushing the loner-assassin theory.
Well, luckily, Saturday Night Live came on
TV and the hugely popular show saw comedian Chevy Chase practically make a career
out of depicting Ford as a
bumbling, stiff, one-man slapstick riff (see video above). It was an Up Yours for the ages. After Chevy did
him, Ford had no shot at being elected president in 1976 and lost to Jimmy
Carter, a peanut farmer for f*ck's sake, the biggest Up Yours to the Republican Party, well, ever.
XIII. Jimmy Carter (1976-1980)
After the evil of Nixon and the seeming
stiff buffoonery of Ford, fewer people than ever could stomach the Republican
Party, so they went ahead with that Lesser of Two Evil presidential election season
and took a cotton to Georgian governor Jimmy Carter, a populist peanut farmer
with a grand goober smile. A recent
film, Jimmy Carter: The Rock and Roll
President, which blurbs at IMDB, "Jimmy Carter's election to the presidency
of the United States in 1977 [sic] was helped by the links that this fan of pop music
had with stars," such as Bob Dylan, Charlie Daniels, Greg Allman, and Willie
Nelson. They raised lots of money for his campaign, and if the film is about
anything, it seems to be a Thank You to these stars -- way later. The most compelling
portion of the film is the oft-told tale of his growing up practically the only
living white boy in Plains, Georgia. One can't help but think of Steve Martin
in The Jerk
(1979).
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