Monday, November 06, 2006

DANIEL

Elton John's song Daniel is a lovely, pensive, sentimental tune about two simpatico friends. How fitting, then, that Benedict Rod should pen his own lyrics to the same tune, in a fitting tribute to crunchy arch-defender Daniel Larison:

DANIEL as sung by by Benedict Rod

DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HOPE THAT HE'LL ADDRESS THE CONTRAS, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL, WILL MAKE ME LOOK GOOD
GOD IT SEEMS LIKE DANIEL, KNOWS LOTS AND LOTS OF WORDS

DANIEL MY BROTHER, YOU ARE CRUNCHY LIKE ME
DO YOU STILL FEEL THE PAIN, OF THE SOULLESS MAINSTREAM
THEIR SPIRITS DIED, YOU SEE THEM LIKE I
DANIEL YOU'RE A STAR ON THE VIRTUOUS SIDE

DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HE CAN SEE THEM CLEAR LIKE I DO, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL WILL MAKE ME LOOK GREAT
OH GOD BUT HERE COMES DANIEL, AN INTELLECTUAL HEAVYWEIGHT

finis

13 Comments:

Blogger Art Deco said...

Bad fit.

You're welcome to Elton John's entire oevre.

A tribute to Mr. Larison should carry with it some of the sensible experience of reading Mr. Larison's writing, so songs with a slow tempo and minor key are inappropriate.

Suggest whatever you do select must be played at 78 rpm...

2:55 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

art deco, can't say i agree. my "sensible experience" of larison's entire writing is definitely not at 78rpm. It's more like listening to eeyore singing brahm's lullaby.

3:19 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

Actually, upon rereading Larison's blog, my sentiments regarding larison's writing have changed somewhat. I now admit he shows remarkable economy in expression -- why say in 4 sentences what you can say in 1 sentence? for example:

EXAMPLE 1
"If the original formulation about these conservatives was overstated (as pretty much all of us on the crunchy/traditionalist side were willing to grant on reflection), the basic critique that too many conservatives now found themselves living as if they were on the wrong side of Voegelin’s divide between those who accepted the enduring moral order and the materialists was basically sound and was revealed in the course of the debate."

EXAMPLE 2
"There were much more solid criticisms coming from the paleo right, since most of the themes and ideas enunciated in Crunchy Cons had made their appearance in the pages of Chronicles, for example, years and decades before and had reached a depth and intensity that the crunchy con argument, which had also been expressed in much more popular, layman’s terms, never did reach."

EXAMPLE 3
"As I saw it, it was clearly they who derived from a much more recent lineage, it was they who seemed to frequently confuse human freedom with choice and the good life with satisfaction of desires, and it was they who found CCism alien to a large extent because they were unfamiliar with or hostile to the legacy of the agrarianism, localism and traditionalism of the Agrarians (up through and including Weaver and Bradford) and the New Conservatives."

an EDITOR from a known newspaper links to this claptrap? i guess run-on sentences are somehow crunchy.

4:02 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

I like this from example 3: "[the] agrarianism ... of the Agrarians." yeah baby!

4:11 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

sorry, it's the "legacy of the agrarianism ... of the Agrarians." hee hee. OK i'll shut up now.

4:15 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

the bryan garner book i referred to in the other thread really is worthwhile. i attended one of his seminars and felt like i was at the feet of the maharishi mahesh yogi.

5:05 PM  
Blogger Pauli said...

That guy was great in the Rockford Files, too.

6:05 AM  
Blogger Pauli said...

Regarding "Daniel": Kathleen, you're going to make me enjoy Elton John the same way you did with Rupert Holmes. Of course, Homer Simpson's accidental "pina colonics" almost trumps that. (But that was a mondegreen, if you know what I mean.

Maybe you could try the "Crunchy-phile Rock" (Crocodile Rock) next.

6:14 AM  
Blogger Cubeland Mystic said...

In the very same day you get:

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon/2006/11/life-unworthy-of-life-watch.html

and then this

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon/2006/11/day-after.html


What about the judiciary? Whose likely to give us Euro-Supremes?

8:39 PM  
Blogger Cubeland Mystic said...

Whoever is in charge of writing posts here, you ought to write a post that this election now just about guarantees that all those little kindergarten males you see today will now certainly be fighting in wars twenty years from now.

Their rationale for voting against Bush today was to save their baby's from endless war. Good luck now.

8:53 PM  
Blogger kathleen said...

Cube, but the republican congress, such as it was, did deserve to lose. what a bunch of duds. they did nothing they set out to do domestically while they had a golden opportunity.

american voters obviously have their heads in the sand regarding foreign policy, they just want iraq and the bad bad terrorists to go away (our friend Benedict Rod is a great example of that, i guess he'll be buying a couple of tickets to canada for his sons in a dozen years or so. blog entry "i've always really liked canada and canadians, so julie and i bought a cabin..."). most of the americans who voted "against iraq" have no freaking idea where iraq is on the map (uh, between iran and syria and above saudi arabia. maybe not such a bad idea for america to have a badass military presence there, ya know? there's a reason terrorists don't like it, and it's not coca cola) the republicans were losers in every sense of the word. the media would never let them sell iraq so it was asinine of the republicans to shy away from social security form, tax code reform. they didn't fight. Hastert was an embarrassment. they played it safe and they lost. maybe a good, necessary lesson in the long run.

6:21 AM  
Blogger Pauli said...

"Hastert was an embarrassment."

Amen to that. I never understood why that guy was chosen. Rumor is he will resign and that will be a good thing, IMHO.

8:43 AM  
Blogger Pauli said...

Colin, LOL re: Larison. But he's really smart. I guess he's working on some kind of PhD thingy in-between blog posts. Plus he is the king of the exclamation point.

7:28 PM  

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