Firsts
Mad Kane has come out with her first ever poll, and it’s on impeachment. Go and vote. If you’re in New York, Chicago, or Miami, vote often as is the custom.
I note it’s a WordPress plug-in so I could run polls, were I so inclined. Don’t worry, I’m not.
Blame it on Vitter, but I’m including my first, and probably only, song parody in honor of Ms. Kane’s first:
The G-O-P [to the traditional tune associated with The House of the Rising Sun]
There is a group in Washington
They’re called the G-O-P
And it’s been the ruin of many a rich boy
But you know that isn’t me.Their mothers were all debutants
Living on a family trust
Their fathers were in business
Either thriving or gone bust.Now the only thing an investor needs
Are rules that are quite lax
And the only time he’s satisfied
Is when he pays no taxOh mothers tell your children
Not to do what they have done
Spend their lives in amorality
In the town called WashingtonThey are standing on the platform
A Blackberry in their hand
They’re goin’ back to Washington
To corrupt a CongressmanThere is a group in Washington
They’re called the G-O-P
And it’s been the ruin of many a rich boy
But that damn sure isn’t me.
Now, you realize why I won’t do it again.
6 comments
“Senator,” you’re no Mad Kane… 🙂
But I do hope you’ll do it again. An excellent first effort!
It happened, it will probably never happen again. Sometimes things write themselves, other times all the work in the world won’t make it happen.
“Sometimes things write themselves, other times all the work in the world won’t make it happen.” – Bryan
That’s how it is, with both parody and doggerel: some of them do, indeed, practically write themselves.
It does help to write verse frequently and throw out the stuff you don’t like. If you wait for perfect moments of inspiration, you could wait a long time, and the skills themselves get rusty while you wait.
Your first published parody is better than 90 percent of what I run across on the web (and needless to say I seek out such things), so I really do hope you’ll do more. If you don’t want to post them on your political blog, you could always set up a separate blog for them… but if you decide to do that, you absolutely must tell me where to find that blog.
Rusty indeed, as I have read a good deal more Russian than English poetry and rhyme is not as important as alliteration. In an endings-based language, where the function of words is identified by the ending and sentence position is not extremely important, rhyme is child’s play. Alliteration in meter is altogether another problem and that is generally considered a higher accomplishment.
You will see the effect of writing in Russian for so many years in some of the odd constructs that I use. My written “voice” is very different from my spoken voice.
Understood, Bryan. Poetry differs from one language to another. And yes, spending a lot of time using a language other than English irreversibly affects one’s English style. In high school, I really concentrated on German, and it changed my English prose forever. Now I have trouble reading a typical German newspaper. (Sigh!)
But as you point out, English rhyme is easy, especially if you’re willing to employ slant-rhymes, multiple-word rhymes, etc. in the manner of G&S, Ogden Nash, etc. And the expected level of political verse on the web is not terribly high, which is why I do not hang up my pen, so to speak. Again, I do hope you produce and publish more. This one was a lot of fun.
i was sorely tempted in an earlier comment to say that people should take prudent precautions to protect their property, but that was more alliteration than i could allow myself to utter.
your parody…