Steven Tyler appears in drag on "American Idol" and quotes Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues."

He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:

"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.

"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."

I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.

Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about  friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Manaj. Tyler had said in an interview:

“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”

Manaj thereafter tweeted:

“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”

And:

“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.” 

Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?

“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”

To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.

So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.

But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.



IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:

"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.

Dust Bunny Queen links to this TZ clip.

Iran sends a monkey into space.

And — it says — "returning its shipment intact."

In 2010, Iran successfully sent a rat, turtle and worms into space. But an attempt to send a monkey up in a rocket failed in 2011.

Did this new monkey return alive and in good shape? Can't tell from "shipment intact" (which may be a translation).

Quite aside from concerns about the monkey, Iran's space program may be part of developing a delivery system for a nuclear bomb.

"North Korea said Thursday that it plans to carry out a 'high-level nuclear test' and further long-range rocket launches, all of which it said are 'aimed at the U.S.'"

"The statement from the North's National Defense Commission was carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency," says just-in email from CNN Breaking News.

I read it aloud, hear myself laugh, then say, "It's funny 'til it's not funny," and Meade says, "Axis of Evil."

"Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb."

"It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! Aaah! A perfect shot!... It's a very odd cloud... I've never quite seen a cloud like this from atomic detonation... It was just beautiful."

Wyoming prepares for a post-America future.

Just in case!

Frankly, I think all the states should have made plans like this a long time ago. Given the possibility of nuclear war, a large asteroid, or — Wyoming, I'm looking at you — the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, the states ought to be ready to operate independently. I recommend, as part of the plan, ultimate reunion of the states — those that survive with intact state government — under the U.S. Constitution.

"The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty."

Says the UK Telegraph, relying on Wikileaks:

A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START” deal.

Oh, but don't be upset! The START treaty was Obama's chosen post-elections showdown with GOP last fall:

Just two weeks after an election that left him struggling to find his way forward, President Obama has decided to confront Senate Republicans in a make-or-break battle over arms control that could be an early test of his mettle heading into the final two years of his term.

Obama proved his mettle! What's more important? Our relationship with the UK or proof of Obama's mettle after the crushing 2010 elections?

"In the face of a Strangelovian apocalypse, ['Duck and Cover'] might only have produced a slower death..."

"... but for those facing a terrorist bomb such protection is likely to be adequate, and much safer than, say, being stuck in traffic on the Beltway when the fallout begins to settle. Also, people sheltering in place won't tie up roads, making it easier for emergency services to get where they're needed. So the Obama Administration wants to encourage people to shelter in place rather than head for the hills in the event of a nuclear attack. Even sheltering for a few hours, or a couple of days, lets radiation levels fall dramatically and avoids road tie-ups for later evacuation."

Think about it.

"Obama Closes In on Big Wins in Lame-Duck Congress" — says the New York Times.

The home page looks like this:




At the link, the headline tones down the pro-Obama spin:

Could Lame Duck Be a Big Win for Obama Agenda?

Is President Obama on the verge of one of his most productive months in office?...

In the early hours of Friday morning, the president won passage of the $858 billion tax deal he reached with Republicans and he appears close to achieving approval of the landmark nuclear treaty he negotiated with the Russians. Both political parties have grudgingly agreed to do whatever is necessary to keep the federal government operating by approving an extension of the current budget authority into early next year.

And in something of a surprise, it appears there may be enough Republican support to provide Mr. Obama with a victory on a key promise: to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bars gay people from serving opening in the armed forces.

AND: By contrast, Politico:

Democrats concede budget fight to Republicans.

Senate Democrats abruptly abandoned an omnibus budget bill for the coming year, pushing major spending decisions into the next Congress and giving Republicans immense new leverage to confront President Barack Obama priorities.

But see Krauthammer:

Remember the question after Election Day: Can Obama move to the center to win back the independents who had abandoned the party in November? And if so, how long would it take? Answer: Five weeks. An indoor record, although an asterisk should denote that he had help - Republicans clearing his path and sprinkling it with rose petals.

The conservative gloaters were simply fooled again by the flapping and squawking that liberals ritually engage in before folding at Obama's feet....

And Obama pulled this off at his lowest political ebb...

"It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised."

"It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact."

The neutron bomb — so sensible to its inventor — was so intensely reviled.

Samuel T. Cohen, dead of stomach cancer at age 89.

***

Dialogue from the movie "Repo Man":

I had a lobotomy in the end.

Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?

Not at all. A friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people, but leaves buildings standing. It fits in a suitcase. So small. No one knows it's there, until... blammo!

MORE:

Rush Limbaugh thinks Obama is icy cold — like Michael Dukakis... and Buck Turgidson.

Don't let the horrible photo chosen by Media Matters here stop you from listening to the audio. It's an excellent performance by Rush, including his approximation of the George C. Scott performance:



The transcript — along with the Dukakis and "Dr. Strangelove" clips — is here. He's talking about the new Bob Woodward book:

Woodward asks about terrorism, terror attacks, and so forth. Obama says, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, we absorbed it, and we're stronger." That, to me, is the equivalent of Dukakis being asked, "If your wife were raped and murdered, would you favor the death penalty?" So Woodward says, "What about terrorism?" Obama figures, "Ah, we can handle it. We can absorb it. We're even stronger." That's not cool. That is cold, and it reminded me of something. One of my all-time favorite movies is Dr. Strangelove. A Stanley Kubrick movie. And one of the characters in this movie is General Buck Turgidson....

And Buck Turgidson is one of these stereotypical generals. He just wants to nuke the world. He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies. He just wants to nuke everything. And Buck Turgidson said, "Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching the moment of truth, both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always pleasant thing. But it's necessary now to make a choice: To choose between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments, one where you get 20 million people killed, the other where you'd get 150 million people killed." Turgidson was saying, "Let's send more B-52s! Let's just wipe these people out while we're at it, since we can't call this one back. Let's just be rid of them. We'll kill 20 million of them and that's it. They can't kill any of ours. It's a livable situation, Mr. President."

Peter Sellers playing President Merkin Muffley says, "You're talking about mass murder, general, not war," and Turgidson replies, "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed but I do say no more than ten to 20 million killed tops, depending on the breaks." Here's a guy totally cold and unaffected by the possibility of ten to 20 million people being killed in an accident and wants to say, "Let's go wipe 'em out even further." The president can't believe what he's hearing. You have Dukakis, "If your wife was raped and murdered, would you favor the death penalty?" "No, Bernard. As you know, I've long and consistently opposed the death penalty during all my life." Obama is asked, "Mr. President, what is your attitude on terrorism?"

"Well, we could absorb one of those, a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it but even a 9/11, but even the biggest attack ever we absorbed it and we're stronger. We can deal with it." All these examples are of leftists and they are cold, removed, unemotional, unaffected, uninvolved.

Did he just call Turgidson a leftist?

Anyway, you know how it must pain the average-citizen leftist to hear that Obama, like Dukakis, is cold and unemotional. It can't be true! Obama is about empathy.

[Click here for video of George Lakoff explaining Obama's "empathy campaign."]

Remember when Bill Clinton made us — some of us — think he feels our pain? Obama, aloof, observes that we have an excellent capacity to absorb pain. We're pain sponges, apparently, so there's nothing to get too worked up about.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks....

Percentage of Americans who think the U.S. should apologize to Japan for using nuclear bombs in WWII: 20.

Percentage of Americans who think the U.S. did the decision to drop the bombs was good: 59.

***

Meanwhile, in the Middle East....

What is ... likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft....

In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

"During the ceremony, Hiroshima’s mayor welcomed the ambassador, John Roos, and praised President Obama..."

"... as one of the world leaders who 'wielded their powerful influence' to rid the world of nuclear weapons."

This is the first time a U.S. ambassador has attended the ceremony. The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 65 years ago.

The White House and War Department announced today that an atomic bomb, possessing more power than 20,000 tons of TNT, a destructive force equal to the load of 2,000 B-29's and more than 2,000 times the blast power of what previously was the world's most devastating bomb, had been dropped on Japan.

The announcement, first given to the world in utmost solemnity by President Truman, made it plain that one of the scientific landmarks of the century had been passed, and that the "age of atomic energy," which can be a tremendous force for the advancement of civilization as well as for destruction, was at hand....

What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known. The War Department said it "as yet was unable to make an accurate report" because "an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke" masked the target area from reconnaissance planes. The Secretary of War will release the story "as soon as accurate details of the results of the bombing become available."...

Not the slightest spirit of braggadocio is discernible either in the wording of the official announcements or in the mien of the officials who gave out the news. There was an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon for employment against an enemy who started the war and has told us she would rather be destroyed than surrender, but it was grim elation. There was sobering awareness of the tremendous responsibility involved....

"If you are trapped under wreckage..."

"... tap on something hard to attract attention."

Just an image I ran across Googling "Conelrad." Who among you remembers Conelrad? I only got to thinking about it because "Talkin' World War III Blues" attracted my attention:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Why did Bob Dylan's record player work when the radio didn't? You'd be more likely to have a battery-operated radio than a battery-operated record player. But you probably don't even have a record player anymore, do you? And I don't think your radio has the Conelrad symbol on it. Do you even remember what the symbol looks like? I don't. Some triangle? That's what I wanted to see when I got distracted by that poor trapped woman, who was not so unfortunate that she didn't have a stiletto shoe to use to tap out her distress.

What took me back to the old Dylan song? I wasn't worrying about World War III. (I have a book in the house — it was given to me — called "World War IV" and one of my sons, puzzled, said "When did we have World War III?") I wasn't worrying about that, I was selecting the ideal pronunciation of the word "paw" (or "pa") to explain how to pronounce the name "Pawlenty" so it didn't confuse me by sounding like "polenta." Now, Tim Pawlenty, like Bob Dylan, is a Minnesotan. We were talking about him, because he's in a bit of a dispute with Mitch Daniels — who, unlike Bob Dylan, is a Hoosier (like my interlocutor in this conversation I'm alluding too). I need to do a separate post on the Pawlenty/Daniels dust-up, though, because in this post, I'm trapped under wreckage.

"It’s a big shitty world, and it gets shittier by the minute."

A nugget from the newly revealed letters of J.D. Salinger. Don't you hanker for more heaping mouthfuls of that?

He had 2 children,Peggy and Matthew.  At restaurants, Peggy had "a double portion of shrimp cocktail, dessert, and milk, with a pickle on the side, if available," while Matthew ate "lamb chops, almost exclusively."

He didn't like us too much: "Murder in my heart, daily, hourly, incessantly, and you ask if I feel as nasty as ever about planetary affairs. … How ready this wretched planet is for the bomb or more Nancy Reagan."

Imagine having such a troubled relationship with other people that you fixated on the idea of a nuclear war that would end it all, not just for you, but for everyone.

IN THE COMMENTS: Seven Machos says:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is what my kids like to eat at restaurants and what my lousy view of the world is like, and how I am occupied with thoughts of murder, and all that John Wayne Gacy kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The leaked Gates memo: We have no plan for dealing with nuclear Iran.

If diplomacy fails...

Why was this leaked now? The memo was written in January but only today are “government officials” finally whispering about it to the Times. Normally I’d assume that it was leaked by the White House itself in yet another naive attempt to pressure allied powers about the severity of the threat, but the story’s simply too embarrassing to Obama. Presumably the leakers are insiders who are worried that, three months later, we’re still not taking the prospect of an Iranian bomb seriously enough.

Sarah Palin makes an analogy.

"That's kind of like getting out there on the playground with a bunch of kids ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, 'Go ahead and punch me in the face, and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to me.'"

More grist for John McWhorter's theory that Sarah Palin is childish.

"Together, we have stopped the drift..."

Obama & Medvedev, ending "the drift."

Obama's announcement about nuclear weapons.

Did he really change anything here?

Search the 137-year Popular Science archive.

But you have to go in by keyword. So what do you search... and what does that say about you?

I searched "bomb shelter" and read an article from January 1962 and scrolled through the rest of the magazine to see what was going on from the PopSci viewpoint when I was 11 and wondering why my parents weren't building us a bomb shelter. The article, "Plain Facts About Fallout Shelters" is written as Frequently Asked Questions, and the first question is exactly the one my parents would have asked — "What's the point of all this effort? Wouldn't an H-bomb attack kill everybody anyway, shelters or no shelters?" — if they were the sort of people who put their thoughts on the subject in question form. They were not.

Why did Joshua Basso — who was only looking for sex — keep calling 911?

According to the police report — he'd run out of minutes on his cell phone, so 911 was the only number that still worked.

ADDED: Poor Joshua! He just wanted to hear a voice of some kind. Got me thinking about "Talkin' World War III Blues," in which Bob Dylan's problem is not that he ran out of minutes but — it's kind of worse — there's been a nuclear holocaust:

I was feelin' kinda lonesome and blue,
I needed somebody to talk to.
So I called up the operator of time
Just to hear a voice of some kind.
"When you hear the beep
It will be three o'clock,"
She said that for over an hour
And I hung it up.