Thursday 28 April 2011

Get your Royal Wedding souvenir barf bags.



Your choice, in Contemptuous Blue or Liberal Red.


Also available in a limited deluxe version, in gold and purple.


As well, here's something that might lead to Memories of heaving and *throning up*.

Remember #SHithead's performance of John Lennon's Imagine, during the first week of the election campaign?


Whoops! Sorry about that. No, he hasn't attempted an encore of that song, but a terrific opinion piece by Geoff Olson about that exploitative photo op recently surfaced.

The first time was last December, on the anniversary of Lennon’s death, when the rockin’ leader played a few bars on the piano at the annual Tory convention party. This time he went all out, singing part of the tune in a YouTube-destined duet with 10-year-old Maria Aragon.


Obviously, the man could not have picked a song more opposed to his stated beliefs — religious, cultural and political — than Lennon’s 1971 hymn to secularism, socialism and world peace. [...]

Reporters usually don’t get any closer to the Prime Minister than Somali pirates to an American destroyer. Yet with all the camera flashes and shutters going off in the YouTube clip, it’s clear that this was a tightly scripted photo op. The Harperites already have their “base” onside—the evangelical crowd, the oil patch, Washington and Wall Street. There is little need to convince them of Conservative intentions.



However, they have a public relations problem with voters in the centre, particularly women, who see Harper as a hybrid of cold fish and cold warrior, running with scissors through the social safety net and toward an ecological cliff. The Tories are clearly desperate to humanize their leader.



When the wheels will have finally stopped spinning, the shrieeeking silenced and the last celebratory tweet re-tweeted, a veritable army of pundits will descend upon Harpocalypse to point fingers.


From my perspective, Contempt Party leader's foolish attempt to co-opt this hymn to peace will stand alone as the most MASSIVE Con job FAIL of the campaign, a pathetic attempt by the ReformaTories to make a flesh-and-blood statesman out of an amateur economist and world-class manipulator.

1 comment:

Niles said...

Not only did he dare to sing a song completely antithetical to everything he espouses, but he did it so damn *badly*. Teeth grindingly, the-emperor-has-no-vocal-range-but-no-one-dares-shut-him-down BADLY.

Watch the vid with the sound off and watch the body language of Ms Aragon and the Captive Laureen. Neither of them are there because they want to be. Tight, closed in limbs, hands trapped, faces frozen in forced attention. Don't interrupt Daddy's moment.

I still remember a version of Imagine from a tv show called "Quantum Leap". A time traveller played by Scott Bakula, who popped around as a possessing spirit into other bodies in time to 'right'...well, you get the picture. The character pops into his own younger body to stop something in his own family and he finds himself engaging with his sister of the past. He actually tries to convince her he's from the future and she challenges him to prove it. Her favorite Beatle is John so he sings Imagine for her. It's intimate and convincing, suited to the character and scene. A *role player* connected with the song and gave it to the viewers.

Steve didn't connect with it. He mouthed it as if it tasted bad. Off key and out of range, but with a captive audience. Pretty much sums it all up.

The British Royals have it all over that. They're sincerely matched and they're shifting attitudes in gender, since they must be the ones behind daughters being granted primogeniture rights of inheritance. They're customary tribal leaders who at least are looking forward; from a privileged spot, but forward. More than I can say for Harper.

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