{"id":20,"date":"2005-04-12T00:01:04","date_gmt":"2005-04-12T07:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegerber.wpengine.com\/?p=20"},"modified":"2005-04-12T00:01:04","modified_gmt":"2005-04-12T07:01:04","slug":"singing-kumbaya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"“Kumbaya”: The New Standard of Political Fatuousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another plosive.<\/p>\n

For the past couple of years, “people sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya'” has been a snide conservative put-down of sensitive, feelgood, hopelessly naive, stuck-in-the-’60s liberals.<\/p>\n

I always hated the damn song, anyway, so the jokes didn’t really bother me.<\/p>\n

Still, “Kumbaya” is essentially a hymn, a prayer entreating the lord to “come by here,” so it did strike me as odd that conservatives would mock it. I failed to consider that the song was sung mostly by folkers, hippies, progressives, and peaceniks. It should’ve been obvious to me that *their* god wouldn’t count. Sort of like their military service.<\/p>\n

American conservatives get away with this all the time. They loved ridiculing Jean Chretien, the former Canadian prime minister who opposed the Iraq war, by calling him “Jean Cretin” — not bothering to notice or care that “Chretien” is French for “Christian.” Nobody called them on it, either, until about one sentence ago.<\/p>\n

Want to see the conservative mockery machine consume itself in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy?<\/p>\n

Get a bunch of folkers, hippies, progressives, and peaceniks to join hands and sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in French.<\/p>\n

On a vaguely related note to lefites:<\/p>\n

Hey hey! Ho ho!
\n‘Hey-hey-ho-ho’ chants have got to go!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I mean, really — if we can’t come up with anything cleverer than “hey hey ho ho” after 40 years, maybe the right wing deserves to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another plosive. For the past couple of years, “people sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya’” has been a snide conservative put-down of sensitive, feelgood, hopelessly naive, stuck-in-the-’60s liberals. I always hated the damn song, anyway, so the jokes didn’t really bother me. Still, “Kumbaya” is essentially a hymn, a prayer entreating the lord to “come by here,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}