Pat Boone? Say It Ain’t So! by Mike Gold Brainiac On Banjo #242

September 26, 2011 Mike Gold 3 Comments

It’s very hard for me to dislike a fundamentalist Christian pop singer who risked the wrath of his peers to record a heavy metal album with Dweezil Zappa.

It’s also very hard for me to consider any born-again Birther as having sufficient intelligence to hold a microphone. Then again, once you reject science because it is at odds with some of your dedicated magic thinking, I guess you can believe in any convenient ideologies that come your way.

If you’re over 55 you might remember a pop singer named Pat Boone. He made his bones by ripping off the music of Little Richard, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino. Ain’t That A Shame, Tutti-Frutti, Rock Around The Clock, Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens… if you’d heard Pat’s career-making finger-popping super-sappy ultra-white versions of these songs and you’re under 55, you probably thought they were from an old SCTV routine – or, perhaps, SNL back when it was funny. If you’re over 55 and you have any class whatsoever, listening to Pat’s sacrilege just makes you feel old and tired.

Boone, to no one’s surprise, is a member of the Beverly Hills Tea Party. Just think about that phrase for a moment. Last week he told the San Francisco Chronicle “I was in Kenya about a year and a half ago and everybody said, ‘You know he was born here.’ And experts have already looked at and been able to verify that this long form document is a fraud … But the media ignores it … a total fraud. A Photoshopped fraud.”

If you think this is a lone opinion held by a pathetic has-been, a recent poll shows 36% of Republicans in South Carolina continue to insist Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born outside of America.

South Carolina scares me.

For that matter, Birthers scare me. Baggers scare me. People who reject evolution, climate change, the round Earth, the Earth’s annual journey around the sun, and/or the immorality of slavery because it contradicts their magic holy book scare me. Dangerous idiots scare me.

And lest you dismiss me as just another deluded Leftie, let me prove to you that I am not in terms you can understand: I deeply believe in the right to bare arms.

Now more than ever.

As for Tony Bennett…

Red Cat Mike Gold also kicks rock’n’blues ass each week on Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind streaming four times a week on www.getthepointradio.com and available at that same venue on demand for those who are clock-challenged. He also joins MDWers Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com and, in response to the American Family Association, is now going to the supermarket to check out Alec Baldwin’s Schweddy Balls.