Luv Doc Recommends: George W. Bush Singers

Making fun of George W. is sort of like hunting dairy cows with a deer rifle and a scope. There’s not much sport in it. Anyone who consistently mispronounces words like “nucular” or “subliminabable” is surely more deserving of pity than scorn. However, far from being a doe-eyed, bucolic bovine, Bush is a beady-eyed, highly repressed ball of id: an easy bug to squash, an easy goat to scape. He’s rich, he’s white, he’s male, he’s Ivy League, he’s Republican, he’s the son of a former president, and perhaps most annoyingly, he doesn’t seem to feel too guilty about any of it. We do, however. We feel guilty for letting him be elected. We feel guilty because we should have known. We feel guilty for having allowed the forces of stupidity and mediocrity to triumph over intelligence and competence. We are ashamed of our apathy and complacency, and like all true red-blooded Americans, we’re looking for someone to take the blame. Sure, Bush lied to us, but are we really surprised? Did we think he was going to play fair in the first place? Saying that Gore really won the election or blaming the Supreme Court or brother Jeb is just a cop-out. Sure, the Democrats lost the game on a bad call late in the fourth quarter, but the W. should have been put away at halftime. Now that we’ve been throwing our helmets and bitching about the refs for four years, it’s time to strap on our cleats and march the ball across the goal line for another rich, white, male Ivy Leaguer who we can only hope is not quite as stupid. “But what,” you ask, “can I do to make things right, to unburden myself and my country of all this guilt and shame?” Vote, for starters. It’s a fairly pedestrian way to get your beak wet in politics, but it’s tried and, well, mostly true. The other way to go is to mercilessly ridicule the current president and his administration in the hopes that the dumb folk who voted for him will somehow see the light. Hands down, this is the fun way to go. It may not carry with it the prestige and effect of earnest, sober political activism, but who really wants to go trudging through neighborhoods door-to-door with a clipboard in the hot summer sun? Fortunately, for those of us who want to help effect political change without hosing down with bug spray and sunscreen, there are folks like the George W. Bush Singers, a choral group of sorts dedicated to bringing the words of The W. to the people through song, literally. This Saturday at Antone’s, choir director Steve McAllister will lead the GWB Singers (along with some local celebrities like Guy Forsyth and 101X’s Chuck Loesh) in a rousing and inspirational tribute to our 43rd president. All GWBS songs are composed from the words of actual George W. speeches and sung by a robed choir accompanied by a band. Played along with the music and singing are sound clips of The W. himself mispronouncing, malaproping, and generally mangling the mother tongue. While the GWBS aren’t nearly as incendiary as, say, Fahrenheit 9/11, they should nonetheless be a healthy sized log in the growing funeral pyre of the Bush administration, and a highly entertaining one at that, as long as you remember to vote.