How Trump Has Already Trumped Reagan

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." –Mark Twain

Among the many bizarre details of Donald Trump's announcement that he's decided to run for president again was his choice in music. There's a well-established tradition in American politics of Republican candidates attempting to co-opt the "cool factor" of well-known musicians by using (or claiming to admire) their music. Paul Ryan has said that Rage Against the Machine is one of his favorite bands. Somehow, Mr. Ryan totally missed the fact that he is the very machine they're raging against.

I thought the low point in juke-box idiocy was set by the Reagan campaign in 1984, when they used Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" at a campaign even in New Jersey. The song (the working title of which was "Vietnam") tells the tragic tale of lives ruined by pointless foreign wars that pull working-class people into situations far beyond their control:

Got in a little hometown jam so they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man.

When our hero finally gets home from the war, there are no jobs for him and guys like him—or even assistance from the Veterans Administration.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "son don't you understand now"

You've got to be pretty oblivious (or cynical) to choose that as the song you're going to use to get people fired up for America. But the nascent Trump campaign has exceeded even my incredibly low expectations by choosing a song that's offers an even harsher picture of American society than Springsteen's darkest visions.

The song Trump & Company used is called "Keep on Rocking in the Free World." The title is meant about as ironically as is humanly possible, but Trump and his people don't get irony, apparently.

Young—a Canadian—begins the song with a nod to homelessness in the world's richest nation:

People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes

It continues with a warning about coming conflict, a gesture toward fundamentalist Christian lunacy in which people think "we'd be better off dead" -- which I read as a reference to those fine folks who welcome Armageddon (the "Left Behind" series and all that).

But then things get really serious.

Young sings about seeing a woman with a baby under an old street light. She puts the kid in the garbage can and goes to buy some drugs. "She hates her life and what she's done to it." I'll bet she does. As for the baby in the garbage can:

There's one more kid
that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.

This is a song, in other words, about a country plagued by homelessness, infanticide, hopelessness, and addiction. Trump 2016!

I don't know what this proves, but it seems impossible that one (or more) of these isn't the case:

• Many of the people in positions of leadership in the US (economic and/or political) are not just of below average intelligence. They're imbeciles.
• People in positions of leadership in the US are so disdainful of the public that they've calculated that they can utterly ignore the meaning of songs, use a few lines from the chorus (without the artist's permission) and not enough people will notice to matter. Or they know people will protest, which will simply give them coverage for another news cycle. So this sort of thing is intentional.
• We live in a computer simulation and the beings controlling the simulation are messing with us.

Update: Neil Young has responded to the situation on Facebook.