Stukas Over Disneyland

Stukas Over Disneyland

During the Great War, Dadaists lobbed art at the raging war machines all around them to no avail. The luckiest Dadaists holed up in Switzerland and goofed around until the global conflict took a little break in 1918. Artists of all stripes tend to have very little direct impact on politics or war -- these things are too big, yet also too constraining. Still, a little satire never hurt, and might even cheer some people out of their gloom. Rockets and missiles are raining down on civilians in the Middle East yesterday, today and tomorrow, IEDs are going off in Iraq, and all we get here so far are higher gas prices and TV footage. But I do remember, a la Dada, The Dickies -- and Tom Lehrer!

Dawn of the Dickies

The Dickies, if you've never heard them, are a California punk band formed originally in 1977 as The Imbeciles. Imagine The Ramones plus Devo mixed with Shonen Knife on speed. Fast, campy, quirky, nutty punkers renouned for their hyper-short renditions of "Eve of Destruction" (1978), "Paranoid" (1979) and "Nights in White Satin" (1979), among other things. The song and album titles and rat-tat-tat machine gun ditties are catchy, a Dada-like antidote to certain ponderous artists. Take their first three albums, for instance: The Incredible Shrinking Dickies (1979), Dawn of the Dickies (1979), and Stukas Over Disneyland (1983). Or some of their song titles: "Poodle Party," "You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)," "Walk Like An Egg," "Rondo (The Midget's Revenge)," and the unforgettable "Where Did His Eye Go?" These guys made it big in the UK, and despite casualties along the way, they're still touring. For more of everything Dickies, you can check out their official website

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

Tom Lehrer (1928-) is a guy who used to write and sing parody and satire back in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was big. His album That Was The Year That Was (1965) had a huge following, mostly for its topical lyrics and ribald, no-holds-barred and un-PC attitude. The album is mostly a live collection of songs originally created for the 1964-1965 NBC TV show of the same name, which in turn was derived from a BBC show of that name. In the American version, Tom Lehrer rubbed shoulders with Woody Allen and Gloria Steinem, which must have been a blast.

Lehrer's albums and full lyrics can easily be found elsewhere on the internet, so I'll just give two snippets. The first is from "National Brotherhood Week:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

Obviously, since 1965 the world's peoples have better discovered how to live in peace and harmony, eh?The second snippet is from "Wehrner Von Braun," inspired by the ex-Nazi rocket scientist who came over to the USA after Hitler's demise (think V-1 and V-2 rockets and the London Blitz; or better yet, turn on a TV to see his handiwork and legacy, improved upon, in action today):

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

So the question is, why did Lehrer stop his entertainment career in mid-stream? From what I can gather, simple boredom and the realization that he couldn't stop anything, let alone things like war and passionate hatred. In a 2003 interview he stated, with obvious contempt for the political world: "I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."

Artists may delve into politics from time to time, but for the most part are better off keeping at least some critical distance. Unless one wants to create propaganda, straight-out political art rarely works as well aesthetically as unconstrained art, or so it seems to me. There are always exceptions, no doubt. Political activism is fine and dandy, of course, just not as a work of art. The best anti-war art has a bigger aim, not a specific partisan agenda: Picasso's Guernica, Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," Euripides' The Women of Troy / The Trojan Women, Voltaire's Candide, Goya's Disasters of War, to name a handful. That kind of subtler approach seems to aim for a more universal audience.

Ciao!