Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

We’re all gonna rock

To the rules that I make

I wanna be elected!

You think Halloween is the scariest day of the year?

No way, José!  The most frightening day of the year is ELECTION DAY!

The good news is that once we get past this Tuesday, it will be two whole years before the next election.

The bad news is that the campaigning for that election will begin on Wednesday.

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Mark Twain seemed to take special pleasure in satirizing the American political system.  The journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken – who was a great admirer of Twain – was even more cynical about the government.

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time,” he once wrote.  “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

H. L. Mencken

Mencken said you could always count on politicians to have a simple solution for even the most complex problem.  You could also count on that simple solution to be wrong.

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Mencken once defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

I don’t know what will happen in Tuesday’s election.  But however it turns out, I have no doubt that Mencken will be proven correct.  Sooner or later, we voters will get it good and hard.

Whatever the results of Tuesday’s election, many people will be unhappy with the outcome.  If you’re one of those people, there’s no use in complaining.  In the words of former big-league pitcher Joey Eischen, “You’ll suck on it and you’ll like it.”

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Alice Cooper’s “Elected” is a brilliant deconstruction of the psyche of the typical American politician.

The line that’s repeated over and over in the song is “I wanna be elected” – which is the only thing politicians really care about.

They will do anything to win – they will even help someone with the same name as that of their chief opponent to get on the ballot in the hope that confused voters will vote for the wrong one.  (That actually happened in Alaska this year, and there’s a good chance that the dirty trick will work.  Click here to read what the New York Times had to say about the sleazeball candidate whose campaign came up with that underhanded tactic.)

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The politician-singer in “Elected” has the b*lls to claim “I’ve never lied to you,” when everyone knows that politicians lie in the mornin’, lie in the evenin’, and lie at suppertime.  

There’s an old joke about politicians that goes like this: 

How can you tell when a politician is lying?  You can see his lips moving.

“I thought jokes were supposed to be funny,” you might be saying to yourself.  “What’s funny about that?”  

Good question.

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Actually, the worst thing about politicians is not their inability to tell the truth.  It’s their belief that they are smarter than other people – which means they have the God-given right to tell the rest us what to do.

These lines from “Elected” say it all:

We’re all gonna rock

To the rules that I make

I wanna be elected!

If Mencken have lived long enough to hear “Elected,” I think he would have found those lyrics to be spot on.  After all, Mencken believed that a politician’s claim that he or she is running for office in order to serve the public “is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”  

Go back to the first record chosen for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK – Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” – and you’ll find the appropriate response to the typical elected official’s “urge to rule”:

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me!

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Click here to watch the brilliant official music video for “Elected’ – the 13th and final song selected for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL SONGBOOK.

Click here to buy “Elected” from Amazon.

Frank Sinatra – "My Way" (1969)

I faced it all

And I stood tall

And did it my way!

Although “My Way” became Frank Sinatra's signature song, his daughter Tina has said that her father hated the song: 

He didn’t like it.  That song stuck and he couldn’t get it off his shoe.  He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent.

Ol’ Blue Eyes hit that nail right on the head – “My Way” is self-serving and self-indulgent as hell.  

“My Way” is so full of sh*t that if it had eyes, those eyes would be brown.  Which is why “My Way” belongs in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.  Because Americans are so full of sh*t that our eyes are brown, too.  

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“My Way” was originally a French song.  (Not surprising – after all, the French are even more full of sh*t than Americans are.)

The French version of the song – which was titled “Comme d’habitude” (“As Usual”) – was a hit in France in 1968.

The song’s publisher asked a young David Bowie to write English lyrics for the song.  Bowie did so and made a demo of his version of the song, but it was never released.

Paul Anka and Frank Sinatra

Paul Anka heard the original French recording of the song while vacationing in France, and bought the rights to it.  He rewrote the lyrics after having dinner with Frank Sinatra in Florida:

At one o'clock in the morning, I sat down at an old IBM electric typewriter and said, “If Frank were writing this, what would he say?”  And I started, metaphorically, “And now the end is near.”  

I used words I would never use: “I ate it up and spit it out.”  But that's the way he talked.  I used to be around steam rooms with the Rat Pack guys – they liked to talk like Mob guys, even though they would have been scared of their own shadows.

Anka finished the song a few hours later: 

I called Frank up in Nevada – he was at Caesars Palace – and said, “I’ve got something really special for you.”  When my record company caught wind of it, they were very pissed that I didn’t keep it for myself.  I said, “Hey, I can write it, but I’m not the guy to sing it.”  It was for Frank, no one else.

Sinatra recorded the song in one take.  “My Way” sold well in the U.S., but it was an even bigger hit in the UK, where it remained in the top forty for 75 weeks.

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It turns out that Paul Anka was full of sh*t, too.  Despite staying that he wasn’t the guy to sing it, Anka ended up recording “My Way” no fewer than five times.  

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Three of the people who were asked to nominate songs for the CBS Sunday Morning show’s “Essential American Songbook” named “My Way.”  

One of those three was the very brown-eyed William Shatner, who sang “My Way” to George Lucas at a 2005 American Film Institute ceremony honoring the Star Wars director.

Click here to watch Shatner’s performance.

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Click here to listen to Frank Sinatra’s recording of “My Way.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Steve Miller Band – "Living in the U.S.A." (1968)

Somebody gimme a cheeseburger!

I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the cheeseburger not only was the quintessential American food when Steve Miller wrote “Living in the U.S.A.” in 1968, but also that the cheeseburger is now, and ever shall be, world without end, the quintessential American food.

If the cheeseburger has a serious rival for that honor, it’s probably the double cheeseburger.  Because while the legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said “Less is more” when it comes to building design, Americans are too smart to believe that.  To the contrary, Americans know that more is more – especially when it comes to cheeseburgers.

The shoutout to the cheeseburger is reason enough to include “Living in the U.S.A.” in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.

 

But wait – there’s more!

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Consider these lines from the second verse of “Living in the U.S.A.”:

I see a yellow man, a brown man

A white man, a red man

Lookin’ for Uncle Sam

To give you a helpin’ hand

It’s commonly believed that it’s liberals who want the government should do more to help people, while conservatives believe that we’d be better off if the government did less.

But Professor Ronnie Janoff-Bulman believes that both liberals and conservatives want the government to help them achieve their goals – the difference is the nature of each group’s favored goals.  

“Reflecting a fundamental distinction in psychology,” she wrote in her 2023 book The Two Moralities, “liberals’ Social Justice morality involves approach, which moves us towards desirable ends, whereas conservatives’ Social Order morality involves avoidance, which moves us away from undesirable ends.”  

In other words, liberals would use the power of the government to push us in the direction of what they believe is a better world, while conservatives want the government to focus on preventing us from behaving badly.  But both groups want the government to do their dirty work.

“Living in the U.S.A.” not only points out that pretty much everyone wants Uncle Sam’s help, but also recognizes that identity politics – which promotes division and “us vs. them” thinking when we need to be focused on finding common ground – has come to dominate the political process.  

In order to get the government to do our bidding, we organize ourselves into tribes – there’s the yellow tribe, and the brown tribe, and the white tribe, and the red tribe (among others) –  and try to persuade Uncle Sam that our tribe is more worthy of his help than the other tribes.

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One final note about cheeseburgers.

According to Wikipedia, “it is reasonably common, but by no means automatic” for the number of beef patties and slices of cheese on a cheeseburger “to increase at the same rate with cheese and meat interleaved.”  For example, while the McDonald’s “Double Cheeseburger” comes with two beef patties and two slices of American cheese, the McDonald’s “McDouble” – which costs considerably less – also comes with two beef patties but has only one slice of American cheese. 

Click here to listen to “Living in the U.S.A.”

Click here to buy “Living in the U.S.A.” from Amazon.

  

Grateful Dead – "U. S. Blues" (1974)

Wave that flag

Wave it wide and high!

Samuel Johnson, the distinguished 18th-century English man of letters, famously said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  

Of course, he was speaking of false patriotism – not true patriotism.  So we Americans shouldn’t be apologetic about being arguably the most patriotic country in the world.

Dr. Johnson (who was blind in one eye,
deaf in one ear, and suffered from
depression and Tourette’s syndrome)

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When YouGov – which is an international market research and data analytics firm headquartered in the UK – surveyed people from 18 countries to find out what percentage of each country’s citizens believed they lived in the best country in the world, the U.S. was the clear winner.

According to that survey, 41% of Americans said their country was the best.  (It would be interesting to know which countries the other 59% who got it wrong think are better than the U.S.)

The country that had the second-highest percentage of citizens who believed that their country was numero uno was India (36%), followed by Australia (34%), Thailand (25%), and Saudi Arabia (25%).

(I’m guessing that none of the people who picked those countries had ever been to the United States or they would have known better.)

Bringing up the rear in that survey were Germany and France.  Only 5% of Germans and 5% of the French said that their countries were the best in the world.  (Give the Germans and the French credit – they see things pretty clearly.)

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The U. S. didn’t do so well in another survey that sought to measure the relative patriotism of different countries.  That survey asked citizens of several dozen countries if they were willing to fight and possibly die for their country.

The United States finished in the bottom half of the rankings – only 44% of the Americans who were surveyed said they would fight for the good ol’ U. S. of A.  

Not surprisingly, most European countries had even fewer patriotic citizens – France, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands scored only 29%, 27%, 18%, and 15%, respectively.  Canada (30%), Australia (29%), and especially Japan performed poorly as well – only 11% of the Japanese said they would fight for their country.  (I guess getting hit with the atomic bomb takes away a country’s appetite for going to war.)

The countries that had more citizens who were willing to fight for their country than the United States included Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%), Bangladesh (86%), India (75%), China (71%), and Mexico (56%).

You’ll never guess who was at the top of the rankings – a whopping 94% of the citizens of both Morocco and Fiji said they would fight and, if necessary, die for their countries.  

I’m not too worried about Morocco and Fiji.  But that China number worries me a little.

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Let’s review the bidding.

So 41% of Americans think their country is the best in the world.  

But only 44% of Americans are willing to fight to defend their country – which is well below average.

Those numbers illustrate a couple of important truths about Americans.  We have a pretty high opinion of ourselves – for good reason, of course – but we’re not always willing to put our money where our mouths are.  

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In other words, we’re kinda full of sh*t – sort of like the singer of the Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues,” one of the 13 songs I’ve chosen to include in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.  

Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia worked on the lyrics for “U.S. Blues” for the better part of a year.  The Dead performed an earlier version of the song titled “Wave That Flag” throughout 1973 before revising it and changing its name to “U.S. Blues” early the following year.

The zippy music of “U.S. Blues” is a perfect setting for its sardonic lyrics, which depict Uncle Sam as a shuckin’-and-jivin’ con man who’s happy to “drink your health, share your health, run your life, [and/or] steal your wife” – all the while waving the Stars and Stripes wide and high.

It “ain’t no luck” that he’s “learned to duck,” or that his “pulse don’t change . . .come shine or rain.”  (He’s got it, he was born with it, and he washes it twice a day!)        

  

Shake his hand and you’ll be shaking the hand that shook the hand of P. T. Barnum – the greatest of all American showmen, and the man who gets credit for coming up with “There’s a sucker born every minute” even though there’s no evidence that he ever spoke those words.

Click here to hear “U.S. Blues.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.