Wonderful profile of Tom Lehrer...

...is here. At 74, he hasn't released an album since 1965, which is around the time that politics went insane in the US, in my not-so-humble opinion.



Not that it went insane from a Lack of Lehrer--I don't know, maybe it did; maybe he was the linchpin holding our ever-fractious and aggressive country together; don't look to me for this info, I wasn't born yet. But 1965 is around the time that some sort of thinking mainstream gave its last gasp and disappeared. Perhaps the issues of the day began to arouse too much emotion (satire's enemy) instead of thought. On the other hand, maybe the trouble isn't how we view politics now, but the issues themselves. Lehrer talks about the extremely complicated nature of what faces us today--you can't put a "on the other hand" in a satirical song. Anybody who would make light of suicide bombings is, let's be honest, being at least as sociopathic as they are satirical. And so we get jokes about screwing, ad infinitum et nauseam.