dear God, I enjoyed a Bright Eyes song...A LOT

and WOW he did that one on Leno??

"When The President Talks To God"

When the president talks to God
Are the conversations brief or long?
Does he ask to rape our women’s' rights
And send poor farm kids off to die?
Does God suggest an oil hike
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Are the consonants all hard or soft?
Is he resolute all down the line?
Is every issue black or white?
Does what God say ever change his mind
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?
Agree which convicts should be killed?
Where prisons should be built and filled?
Which voter fraud must be concealed
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
I wonder which one plays the better cop
We should find some jobs. the ghetto's broke
No, they're lazy, George, I say we don't
Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke
That's what God recommends

When the president talks to God
Do they drink near beer and go play golf
While they pick which countries to invade
Which Muslim souls still can be saved?
I guess god just calls a spade a spade
When the president talks to God

When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?

I doubt it

I doubt it

My thoughts are two: (a) the faint miasma of unseemliness that hovers around someone who I think is vociferously preaching to the choir, and (b) the sense that overtly political art, when it is not couched in metaphor, almost always fails as art. There are glistening exceptions, of course, which you're welcome to point out if you like--start with Guernica or whatever--doesn't change my opinion of "When the President Talks to God."

But can see why it's a powerful message to sing on a network TV show.

http://www.prefixmag.com/Bright_Eyes_(Leno)(05.02.05)_(high).php

Did people boo at the end?

This is a very good couplet. The rest, eh.

Bush wasn't even a Christian till September 11th according to some of his friends who work at Christian colleges. Watching liberals strawman the God-fearing backwoods conservative is as bad as the tree-hugging liberal caricature.

The Universal Coward anyone?

If true, which I doubt, this makes his claim that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher back in Feb 2000 or whenever in a Republican candidate debate the most breathtakingly cynical claim that whole year!

This is a huge load of crap. He was faking? What?

I give up!

1. This song, in and of itself, is a piece of shit. Really heavy-handed, obvious, kind of wrongheaded, self-righteous, artless, tuneless, and completely void of nuance.

2. And I got a weird thrilling rush watching him play this thing on Leno all the same.

(Footnote for the young'uns: John Glenn was running for the Democratic nomination at the time.)

the "voice" of left protest is constantly in the conservatives' imaginative ear (have you ever trolled thru freep?), there is no noise or cry or truth or whatever penetrating from outside that world, it's all inside already, songs like this just get slotted into their expected category and filed away. i mean jesus fucking christ,
the current war was planned and executed after the largest mass demonstrations in human history against it. how'd those turn out?

conor oberst is a tuneless, talentless disgrace with zero insight, but after all these embarrassments, he hardly rates.

anyway, songs like this remind me how much of a shit-hot guitar player bob dylan was, really. he could handle a rhythm.

All politicians are protestant Christians.

My mother is old, old friends with someone from Pepperdine University in California. He sees Bush a couple times and year and is pretty good friends with him I guess. His exact words to her were "Bush became saved only three years ago". What that means to many conservative Christians is that while Bush may have claimed to have been a Christian, he only established a personal relationship with God recently (thus becoming a "Christian").

Eighty-percent of Americans are Christians, right? The truth is the number is much smaller when you define "Christian" as one that is an evangelical or fundamentalist (I actually remember reading that they are totally separate, with fundamentalists being even more conservative). The actual number of "fundie" types probably range around the 33% area (compared with England's 7%- The More You Know).

Bush probably fell into the latter category fairly recently. For a long time Bush was pro-abortion and wasn't for a lot of conservative Christian policies that seemed to be essential to win the right. I don't know what his personal struggles were in his past but it seems to me that you don't necessarily need to believe in Republican party-lines to be a Christian. Is it not possible for him to be a pretty populist Christian who was also moderately liberal socially or is this all-or-nothing?

You guys probably see through a lot of bullshit that goes on with televangelists, but then when it comes to a politician's sincerity you honestly believe every word he says about his faith is true.

Of course none of this can be proven by anybody and the only person who knows about his religious beliefs is Dubya himself. Whatever, that only leaves me to judge the Bright Eyes song by its musical merit..

This is Conor's role in the world, it's true.

Bed wetting music.

GET ONE TUNE

And yet, Conor himself is strangely compelling. I just feel sorry for him all the time. The guy just doesn't have a clue.

hahaha soooooo OTM

What's heavy-handed about it if not the politics? Musically it's just straight-up "It's All Right Ma" Dylan with a fake Texas twang and easy-to-understand lyrics.

Meanwhile, politically, heavy-handedness in opposition to extremism isn't necessarily a vice. Keep your pristine moderate liberal minds. I wouldn't want to listen to this song every day, but the performance (and the fact that it was on network TV) gave me goosebumps. Yes, the good kind.

Still, I have to agree w/ Geoff re: this song, which (aside from the frisson from seeing it ON NETWORK TV) is a hectoring, unsubtle, belligerent, gawdawful piece of spew that seems to be deadset on polarizing rather than illuminating and/or inspiring. Maybe this heavy-handed self-congratulatory blather ("he's a BAD MAN! let me tell you about it using vagaries!") is the sort of rhetoric that needs to be proffered to counter what's going ahn, but I'd like to think otherwise. At least his heart's in the right place. [INSERT UNFUNNY JOKES FOLLOWING THIS SENTENCE]

I'd love to know how many of those sets were left on by people who had fallen asleep in front of it. ;-)

In any event, given the various political sites and blogs and things I plow through, one of the most interesting things about all this is that *this* thread is the only place where I've seen or heard anything about this performance! This wasn't the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, folks.

so?

Singer Touches Off Outrage Following 'Tonight' Appearance

Jay Leno, who has frequently denied accusations that he favors political conservatives, presented Omaha singer Conor Oberst of the band Bright Eyes Monday night, who offered a scathing satirical song titled "When the President Talks to God." Sample: "When the president talks to God/Are the conversations brief or long?/Does he ask to rape our women's' rights/And send poor farm kids off to die?/Does God suggest an oil hike/When the president talks to God?" The song immediately touched off debate on numerous Internet blogs. One writer commented: "This guy is clearly confused about the majority of, if not all of, the issues. I saw him on Leno and literally laughed my ass off at how idiotic he was." Another writer remarked on a different blog: "I can't recall hearing a more overt and harsh denunciation of the president in song. ... I'm no Jay fan, but I've got to give him full credit for making elements of his audience squirm."

Funny thing is I'm still not sure how big this was considering that imdb.com sometimes will hype news that isn't too popular elsewhere.

Universal Soldier (Jan Berry, 1965 I believe)

He's young, he's old, he's in-between and he's so very much confused
He'll scrounge around and protest all day long
He joins the pickets at Berkeley, and he burns up his draft card
And he's twisted into thinking that fighting is all wrong (Universal Coward)

He's a pacifist, an extremist, a communist or just a Yank
A demonstrator, an agitator, or just a nave
A conscientious objector, a fanatic, a defector
And he doesn't know he's digging his own grave (Universal Coward)

Oh, he just can't get it through his thick skull why the mighty U.S.A.
Has got to be a watchdog of the world
He'll see the USSR, bury us from afar
And he'll never see the missiles being heard (Universal Coward)

He's the universal coward, and he runs from anything
From a giant, to a human, from an elf
He runs from Uncle Same, and he runs from Vietnam
But most of all he's running from himself (Universal Coward)

Depending on your beliefs you may like or hate this song or the Bright Eyes one, but in terms of working as a protest song they pretty much do the same thing. :(

http://homepage.mac.com/onegoodmove/movies/leno050205brighteyes.html

wow...