Bring On The Dancing Horses (or, Never Mind The Wazzocks Here’s The Romneys)
The rich are not just like you and me. When they put on their pants, they get dressage down when trying to get one leg up.
I’ve curated for you an audiovisual collage of what it might all mean that Ann and Mitt Romney mark their debut on the world stage in London and during the Olympics, no less, where Ann has a horse competing in the sport of dressage and where Mitt thought he could capitalize on his own experience running the Salt Lake Olympics as an icebreaker for his diplomatic inexperience.
Everything was only slightly less embarrassing than 4 years ago when Sarah Palin speed dated her way through the United Nations to shore up the international credentials she built seeing Russia from her back yard. I wrote about that here at the time. Read it, it’s quite funny: The Sarah Palin School of Resume Building.
The only thing Mitt omitted yesterday was to throw up on the Prime Minister’s lap, but he may be saving all his lapping once he gets to Israel, where he hopes to explain to Netanyahu why Mormons love baptizing dead Jews for shits and giggles but are more trustworthy that Obama.
The 1985 Echo and The Bunnymen video (with the lyrics) appeared on the “Pretty In Pink” soundtrack. Oh, and I threw in a pretty convincing explanation of the video and the lyrics, which might be relevant for our merrymaking here. The article by Alex Altman form Time.com perfectly captures why the #RomneyShambles hashtag is trending on Twitter. (You can read the piece with the links intact by clicking on the title.)
I hope you take the time to give it all a look. And as that new saying goes, you can lead a horse across the pond to dance but you cannot make it’s owner think.
Romney Stumbles in London
By Alex AltmanMitt Romney’s foreign trip is not going well. Since arriving in London, Romney has been tripped up by a series of niggling skirmishes. Taken together, they have sidetracked media coverage of a sojourn intended to showcase Romney’s statesmanship.
The trouble began before Romney’s arrival, with an anonymous quote in the conservative Daily Telegraph. The White House, a Romney “adviser” suggested, didn’t appreciate the shared “Anglo-Saxon heritage” of the U.S. and U.K. It is unfair to hold Romney accountable for a blind quote uttered by someone who could be far outside his orbit, and his campaign disavowed the sentiment. Still, not a strong start.
The former Massachusetts governor, whose stint at the helm of the Salt Lake City Olympics is a central part of his case for the presidency, compounded the problem by suggesting on the eve of the London Games that the city’s preparation may not have met his standards. There were “disconcerting” signs, Romney said during an interview with NBC, before questioning the capital’s ability to “come together and celebrate the Olympic moment.” The jab, which was splattered across the A1 page of London dailies on Thursday, left British officials “speechless,” according to the Guardian.
“Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” huffed British Prime Minister David Cameron. London mayor Boris Johnson used Romney’s comment, which the presumptive Republican nominee later walked back, as a rallying cry at a massive public event in Hyde Park on Thursday. “Can this get any worse for Romney?” tweeted the political editor of the conservative Daily Mail. Both Cameron and Johnson are Conservatives, a sign that the U.S. pol’s blunders had transcended ideology. Meanwhile, Romney referred to British Labour leader Ed Miliband as “Mr. Leader,” an appellation some British outlets took as a sign that he had blanked on Miliband’s name.
Those weren’t Romney’s only goofs. The candidate divulged to reporters a confab he had held with the chief of the British intelligence service MI6 — information the agency apparently would have preferred to keep quiet. And while he said too much to the press, Romney also drew criticism for saying too little. His refusal to take questions from the domestic pool that trailed him to London prompted an angry missive from NBC.
Romney has tried to distance himself from the dressage competition that Democrats have sought to make a symbol of his wealth. But his dodge on the topic — “I have to tell you. This is Ann’s sport. I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on” — prompted one influential blogger, Andrew Sullivan, to argue that Romney’s comment was “either a fib, designed to insulate him from whatever minimal fallout there is from owning a dressage horse; or it’s true and he’s just unlike other human beings.”
The pounding continued on Thursday when reporters excavated a passage from his book No Apology that includes some unflattering remarks about the U.S.’s chief European ally. “England is just a small island,” he wrote. “Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that the rest of the world wants to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions.” (The context of the quote is a rumination on why nations rise and fall.)
At home, these flaps would quickly disappear into the maw of the news cycle. The standard is different on foreign soil. Romney’s blunders have undercut the entire purpose of the trip, which was to prove he could adequately represent U.S. interests with international leaders despite his scant foreign policy experience. He hasn’t met that standard so far. Even Drudge has turned against him.
Jimmy Brown
Made of stone
Charlie Clown
No way home
Bring on the dancing horses
Headless and all alone
Shiver and say the words
Of every lie you’ve heard
First I’m gonna make it
Then I’m gonna break it
Till it falls apart
Hating all the faking
And shaking while I’m breaking
Your brittle heart
Billy stands
All alone
Sinking sand
Skin and bone
Bring on the dancing horses
Wherever they may roam
Shiver and say the words
Of every lie you’ve heard
First I’m gonna make it
Then I’m gonna break it
Till it falls apart
Hating all the faking
And shaking while I’m breaking
Your brittle heart
Brittle heart
Brittle heart
Brittle heart
And my little heart
Goes
Jimmy Brown
Made of stone
Charlie Clown
No way home
Bring on the headless horses
Wherever they may roam
Shiver and say the words
Of every lie you’ve heard
First I’m gonna make it
Then I’m gonna break it
Till it falls apart
Hating all the faking
And shaking while you’re breaking
My brittle heart
Brittle heart
Brittle heart
And our little heart
Goes
Bring on the new messiah
Wherever he may roam
Bring on the new messiah
Wherever he may roam
Bring on the new messiah
Wherever he may roam
Bring on the new messiah
Wherever he may roam
“Compare this to the song Jimmy Brown, an earlier incarnation and you can see how they play with lyricism and meaning. Like other E&TB songs it’s more impressionistic imagery (old timey stage works and passion plays) than straightforward narrative (though they shared the same era as the new romantics, they had more literary pretensions than the dance floor hit of the day, hence the doors influence: descant out with your cock out). If you watch the video, it kind of feels like a dumb show–the last refrain (bring on the new messiah…) the band stops lip syncing, staring mutely at the camera. So the song maybe is a sweepingly agnostic take on the dubious power and salvation of love, an anti-pop song, an un-love song: the stoic and the clown as poor players, and the bearers of passion, the dancing horses, are headless, have no free will of their own beyond what they’ve been trained, like the legions singing the same sentimentalists’ lies, the tired aphorisms, the sleepy sonnets. And all is ephemeral skin and bone, even Jimmy Brown the stoic, our abject and makeshift constructions, our grandiose plays at love but poor gestures on an empty stage, who can save us from ourselves, bring on the new messiah, wherever he is, if he is. But then ironically or as if in counterpoint the music seems to deny such an existentialist limbo.”
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