A Fisking

Can a song be fisked? I'm not sure; maybe that word only applies to dismantling news reports and opinion pieces and such. Well, if fisking isn't the right word for songs, then pretend I used the right one.

Green Day writes some great hooks. So what if their politics demonstrate their fundamental ignorance, and demonstrate Alice Cooper's observation that rock stars are not to be taken seriously? They have a song on the radio now called "Holiday," which sounds mildly antagonistic to the current administration.

"Hear the sound of the falling rain
Coming down like an Armageddon flame (Hey!)
The shame
The ones who died without a name"

Hey, maybe I was wrong about them - they seem to be genuinely concerned about fetuses getting chopped to little bits ... oh, wait, I don't think "the ones who died without a name" refers to abortion, here. Oh, well, I guess it's only a shame if you've exited the womb. Whatever.

"Hear the dogs howling out of key
To a hymn called "Faith and Misery" (Hey!)
And bleed, the company lost the war today"

Heh. Green Day is unhappy about someone being out of key? That's rich. I also like the bit about a company losing a war. The last time America lost a war, it was in Somalia. I wonder if Billy Joe knows where Somalia is. I wonder if he knows anything about why we lost that war, and who was the Commander in Chief at the time. I suspect not.

A riddle: what's the difference between right-wing war-mongers and left-wing war-mongers? The right-wingers win their wars.

"I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives
On holiday"

You know what's great about America? You don't have to beg to differ, you can just differ. Apparently "difference," in the eyes of Green Day, means coloring your hair and blaming the deaths of innocents on Halliburton. Exactly like all the "different" people at Democratic Underground. But Green Day will take issue with my views on American freedoms in just a second, so stay tuned.

"Hear the drum pounding out of time
Another protestor has crossed the line (Hey!)
To find, the money's on the other side"

I wonder if Billy Joe knows how much money John Kerry (or, more properly, his wife) has. I wonder if he's ever heard of George Soros, and the inordinate amount of spectacularly wasted money he spent in an unsuccesful attempt to defeat GWB. I wonder if Billy Joe knows how many millions of dollars the Democratic Party spent on trying to get Kerry Elected, or how much it spends on re-electing Robert KKK Byrd and Ted "Chapaquiddick" Kennedy.

And on a separate note, I wonder how many albums Green Day has sold, and what percentage of those sales end up in Billy Joe's bank account.

"Can I get another Amen? (Amen!)
There's a flag wrapped around a score of men (Hey!)
A gag, A plastic bag on a monument"

So, Green Day opposes defacing monuments, now? Like the granite ten commandments monument, or the cross that the ACLU is trying to get removed from a mountaintop in California? Glad to know you're on board, Billy Joe.

"The representative from California has the floor"

Oh, this is going to be good. The scary thing is that Green Day could feasibly be elected to public office in that state. I mean, they can't be any dumber than their two Senators, right?

"Zieg Heil to the president gasman"

Let's see, which world leader, recently deposed, was well known for gassing his own people to death? Think Billy Joe knows the answer?

"Bombs away is your punishment"

Maybe Green Day prefers UN punishments, which involve the biggest theft in human history, and hundreds of thousands of starving Iraqis, and France, Germany and Russia illegally selling arms to a mass murderer. Wait, how exactly is any of that "punishment"?

"Pulverize the Eiffel towers"

War-mongering neocons like myself certainly can't deny that we'd like to see the Eiffel Tower pulverized. But, um, do you really not know where the Eiffel Tower is, compared to Iraq? I guess that's par for the course for a band that is unaware that flag burning is constitutionally protected.

Also, for the record, there's only one Eiffel Tower. Unless you count the cheap metal trinket replicas you can buy from street vendors in Paris, but I sort of doubt even Chimpy McSmirky-burton would drop a MOAB on one of those.

"Who criticize your government"

Huh? The Eiffel towers criticize our government?

Still, it makes more sense than anything I've heard from Barbara Boxer.

"Bang bang goes the broken glass and
Kill all the fags that don't agree"

Uh huh. Because conservatives don't want judges to impose a radically new definition of "marriage" on a society that overwhelmingly opposes such a thing, we must want to murder homosexuals. Makes perfect sense, right?

"Trials by fire, setting fire
Is not a way that's meant for me"

I hope for your sake you're not a Democrat. They can get pretty violent.

"Just cause, just cause, because we're outlaws yeah!"

No, you're not outlaws. Did you notice that? You just wrote an entire song making our President out to be a fascist killer, and you're not in jail. You're not being pursued by the FBI or CIA. You're not being tortured to executed or deported. You're allowed to be as "different" as you want to be, say virtually anything you want to say, go where you want to go, believe what you want to believe. You are free to have no clue about the First Amendment laws, to think there's more than one Eiffel Tower and that at least one of them is in the Middle East. All of that, and you aren't in jail. Is the significance really lost on you? If so, I recommend laying off on the hair dye - it seems to be seeping into your brains.

One more line from Green Day:

"Don't want to be an American idiot"

It's a little late for that, pal. But I guess you could move to Manitoba and be a Canadian idiot, if that's what you prefer.