In which we do not offer a track from Fred Astaire

Do you not wonder, in our age of soi-disant Tea Party-ers, that Fred Astaire has not already been banned in cities? There is nothing more conducive to prodigal riot in such notoriously paved concentrations of persons, than the example of his music. At the same time, the most pathetic case of assimilated blackmail in office in our history, is hamstrung. Mr Obama, unctuous to a fault to portray himself as Punctilius Maximus, does all he can to squander the hottest mandate ever to trod the upper floors of his house since Ms Mercer buttered Roosevelt's toast. He is our third John Adams.

Never mind us, of course. You'll see. The mongrels will adduce the correlation between the spendthrift dancer and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen and Con Conrad soon enough. It's like the slots, for this pack: stand enough of them up with a gavel, and eventually, they'll get around to smashing everything. They'll also write their immolation. You've all read your Euripides; Saturday evening's no time to cite The Bacchae.


This is the kind of fact history refuses to repudiate: when they begin the béguine, these worthies will be toast points, if not glistening little sturgeon berries, incarnate. I doubt very much that we've seen anything like the crest of their ascendancy, which means an excruciating endurance of Dark Ages. Yet such is the force of the béguine, that it is content to practice in the open, before our eyes. Even if that generation has no idea who its antecedents are, who can believe that music forgets?


I love the doom I anticipate from the young.