Home » Bow, bow, to the President-elect

Comments

Bow, bow, to the President-elect — 18 Comments

  1. The President ELECT seems to be quite the fan of logos and banners. I won’t go down the list of unsavory characters in the past that have loved special symbols and podium accessories, but it does point to either an enlarged ego or insecurity or both.

  2. Those pictures of Obama with his various seals always look photoshopped to me, like jokes from the Onion.

    Am I being unfair to Obama? Has any other President-Elect done this?

  3. Those lyrics yours? Fantastic! You could launch a second career … if you didn’t live in a country where even Gilbert and Sullivan are too high-brow for TV.

  4. Neo – from a songwriter – good job. If you put your mind to it I think you could give Weird Al a run for his money in the song parody business.

    And to Huxley – no other president elect has done anything like this. There is not any such official title or office as “President elect”.

    The arrogance of this whole show amazes me.

  5. I do hope there is a heaven with saved souls, who finally having recognized ‘truth,’ are now looking down and listening. One would be an old lunch friend, dead at 84 in the mid-nineties, who could and did declaim, indeed sing, if a bit reedy, the exactly appropriate Gilbert & Sullivan song for the political/intellectual argument of the moment.

    He was the only self-identified Republican in my local, very progressive ‘church’ group that I had been indoctrinated into as a child; I was long, long past childhood in the nineties, and about to become an apostate *********/Democrat, gratis Bill’s child-lawyer definition of sex, the final, inappropriate straw. The sex was stupid; his crapping out on ROTC much earlier, finally defined him and the progressive crew for me.

    This old friend and G&S fan was a Dartmouth graduate, who never missed a chance to so note (i.e., a real Ivy-League Easterner), and had been an Army communications Sgt. aboard the Navy cruiser that carried FDR to Yalta; that story we heard several times; but he hardly remembered Korea had happened by the mid-nineties.

    He so humorously used G&S to note the political inanities of those days, that I’m sure he’s smiling down at you, neo.

  6. I love this guy! Now it’s The Office of the President Elect? Fantastic!Do you suppose he hangs that sign on the bathroom door while he’s in there? If he uses condoms do you suppose there are little titles printed on them? Does Michelle, do you imagine, have to dress up like the Statue of Liberty?

  7. Good job, neo. It’s just a shame that you had to settle for the embedded version. Have you by chance seen the movie “Topsy Turvy,” which is (probably loosely) based on G&S’s inspiration for and staging of The Mikado?

  8. OlderandWheezier: I did see the movie “Topsy Turvy, ” and I have to register a dissenting opinion. I did not like it. I tend to prefer fairly freeform versions of the Mikado—I like them to take a lot of liberties. The version I posted takes too many liberties, though—it is just strange. But I found “Topsy Turvy” to be too staid. I find that local productions are often the best—the actors usually have good voices, but they know how to have fun.

  9. We have some controversy going on between black, gay marriage, and Obama supporters, Neo.

    Link

    Obama will have his work cut out for him herding these cats around. But he will do so better than Bush did, at least.

  10. Gilbert was a solicitor, and had an appreciation of human weakness based on a lawyer’s view of the seamier side of Victorian society. There is another song in The Mikado that I have always liked, for its insight into human nature. The song is a duet between the Mikado and Katisha. It goes something like this (I’m going by imperfect memory here).

    See how fortune the Fates alot
    For A is happy, but B is not.
    Yet B is deserving, I dare say,
    of far more happiness than A.

    Is B derserving? I should say
    he’s worth a great deal more than A.

    But A is happy, oh so happy,
    laughing, haha, chaffing, haha, quaffing haha haha ha.
    Ever joyous ever gay,
    happy undeserving A.

    If I were Fortune, which I’m not,
    B would enjoy A’s happy lot.
    A should perish miserably,
    always assuming that I am B.

    Then B would be happy, oh so happy.
    Laughing, haha, chaffing, haha, quaffing haha haha ha.
    But condemned to die is he,
    wretched meritorious B.

  11. I love it, but (1) “The Mikado” as a “pretentious” figure? When you’re an absolute ruler, why do you have to pretend? (2) Remember, “Topsy Turvy” is about the *creation* of “The Mikado,” which limits the liberties Mike Leigh could have taken; and (3) Michael Lonie, I believe Gilbert was a failed barrister, not a failed solicitor _ in his time, and for a long time afterward, barristers were considered gentlemen, solicitors were not. (Sir Joseph Porter made his career as a solicitor.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>