for every voice you ever heard

It was a blue letter
She wrote to me
Its silver words she told
Want to be -- 
On the road to paradise
I want a lover who don't get old

Do I read a message in your eyes
You want love to stay another night
Baby, when your day goes down
I won't be --
Waitin' around for you


For every voice you ever heard
There's a thousand without a word
Redbird, don't say you told me so,
Just give me one more song to go

Do I read a message in your eyes
You want a love to stay another night
Baby when your day goes down, I won't be --
Waitin' around for you...

__________________________

Type in on Google:

blue letter, fleetwood mac

and experience this song via You Tube

{"Blue Letter" -- written by Michael Curtis, Richard Curtis.  Fleetwood Mac White Album.}

_______________________
___________________________

----------------- [excerpt, Frank Rich 2015 article] -------------- Trump also sounds like Hal Phillip Walker, the unseen candidate of the "Replacement Party" whose campaign aphorisms percolate throughout Robert Altman's post-Watergate state-of-the-union comic epic, Nashville (1975).  His platform includes eliminating farm subsidies, taxing churches, banning lawyers from government, and jettisoning the national anthem because "nobody knows the words, nobody can sing it, nobody understands it."  (Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.)  

In résumé and beliefs, Trump is even closer to the insurgent candidate played by Tim Robbins and reviled as "a crypto-fascist clown" in the mockumentary Bob Roberts (1992) -- a self-congratulatory right-wing Wall Street success story, beauty-pageant aficionado, and folksinging star whose emblematic song is titled "Retake America."  Give Trump time, and we may yet find him quoting the accidental president played by Chris Rock in Head of State (2003)....

     Thanks to Trump, this character has leaped off the screen into real life, like the Hollywood leading man in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo.  As a human torpedo blasting through the 2016 campaign, Trump can inflict more damage, satirical and otherwise, than any fictional prototype ever could.  In his great comic novel of 1959, The Magic Christian, Terry Southern anticipated just the kind of ruckus a Trump could make.  Southern's protagonist is a billionaire named Guy Grand who spends his fortune on elaborate pranks to disrupt almost every sector of American life -- law enforcement, advertising, newspapers, movies, television, sports, the space program.  

Like Trump, he operates on the premise that everyone can be bought.  In one typical venture, he pays the actor playing "an amiable old physician" on a live network medical drama a million bucks to stop in mid-surgery and tell the audience that if he speaks "one more line of this drivel," he'll [do something disgusting].  The network, FCC, and press go into a tizzy until viewers, hoping to see more such outrages, start rewarding the show with record ratings.


     There have already been some modest precedents for Trump's real-life prank -- most recently, Stephen Colbert, 

who staged a brief stunt run for president in 2007.  The comic Pat Paulsen...

ran for president intermittently from 1968 into the '90s, aiming to call attention to the absurdity of politics.  His first run was under the banner of the STAG (Straight Talking American Government) Party; later, he ran consecutively as a Republican and a Democrat.  

("I like to mix it up," he explained.)  

Paulsen came in a (very) distant second to Bill Clinton in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, one of four primaries where he qualified for the ballot that year.  But a judge threw him off the ballot in California, declaring, "I do not want to reduce the campaign for an important office like president of the United States to some kind of farce."

     Some kind of farce, nonetheless, is just what the modern presidential campaign has devolved into.  By calling attention to that sorry state of affairs 24/7, Trump's impersonation of a crypto-fascist clown is delivering the most persuasively bipartisan message of 2016.


     Trump lacks the comic chops of a Colbert or Paulsen, and, unlike the screenwriters of movies like Bulworth and Nashville, he is witless.  His instrument of humor is the bitch-slap, blunt and cruel -- Don Rickles 

dumbed down to the schoolyard.  But when he hits a worthy target and exerts himself beyond his usual repertoire of lazy epithets (Loser!  Dope!  Slob!), he is funny, in part because his one-liners have the ring of truth.  When Eric Cantor endorsed Jeb Bush, Trump asked, "Who wants the endorsement of a guy who lost in perhaps the greatest upset in the history of Congress?"  

When Trump's presidential rivals attended a David and Charles Koch retreat, he tweeted:  "I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch brothers.  Puppets?"


     Twitter inspires his best material, as does Bush.  Among Trump's many Bush put-downs is this classic:  "Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers -- which, when it folded, almost took the world with it?"

     The exclamation point in Bush's sad campaign logo, JEB!, has effectively been downsized to a semicolon by Trump's insistence on affixing the modifier "low-energy" to his name every chance he gets.

     The most significant Trump insult thus far is the one that heralded his hostile takeover of the GOP.  The target was Reince Priebus, the overmatched Republican National Committee chairman.  Following the debacle of 2012, Priebus had vowed that his party would reach out to minorities and curb the xenophobic and misogynist invective that drives away the voters without whom it cannot win national elections.  

When Trump lampooned John McCain's sacred record as a POW as gleefully as Republicans had Swift Boated John Kerry, the chairman saw his best-laid plans for a "big tent" GOP imperiled by an unauthorized sideshow.  

"Party donors," no doubt with his blessing, let it be known to the Washington Post that, in a lengthy phone conversation, he had persuaded Trump to "tone it down."  

Hardly had the story surfaced when Trump shot it down:  He said Priebus's call had been brief and flattering, and that he hadn't agreed to change a thing.  

As Priebus beat a hasty retreat, Trump joked that manipulating him wasn't exactly like "dealing with a five-star Army general."  Soon the chastened chairman was proclaiming Trump a "net positive" for his party.  When Trump deigned to sign a faux legal document pledging not to run as a third-party candidate, Priebus 

had to show up at Trump Tower to bear witness, like a lackey summoned to an audience with the boss.  That "pledge" served Trump's immediate goal of securing his spot on primary ballots, but come next year it will carry no more weight than a certificate from the now-defunct Trump University.
-------------------------------- [end, excerpt] --------------

{"Donald Trump Is Saving Our Democracy"
written by Frank Rich
New York Magazine
September 20, 2015}

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