They’re Rioting in Africa

As my hip English-Lit teacher used to put it, it’s story-time, kidlets! Now, down-settle yourselves while I tell you all a bedtime story before you get tucked in for the Long Night of Darkness that accompanies progressive cultural oblivion!

Yesterday, while riffling through some of the stacks of paper that are an inexhaustible feature of my desk (‘organised disorganisation’, I like to call it), I came across a copy of my annual Winter Solstice letter, dated 2003. That’s almost but not quite 20 years ago.

Given that my near-obsessive dedication to preserving written communications, letters, articles and such things constitutes a sort of ersatz time-capsule compilation of information about the changing quality of life lived and experienced through this particular set of eyes and senses, it actually constitutes a sort of truncated daily diary. And so, I briefly gazed at this two-page written missive to reapprise myself as to what had happened back in 2003.

Without wasting any further gouts of your time, I can tell you that none of what I read was uplifting, encouraging, inspiring and/or particularly heartening. Still, it does serve as a sort of social issues Rosetta Stone and is thereby worth a cursory review. A short, salient paragraph from it appears below:

“The ancient Chinese curse of “May you live in interesting times” certainly seems to have applied to the year of 2003. American is now firmly embroiled in a completely needless war in Iraq while the real radical Islamic terrorist menace continues virtually unchecked, Israel continues to treat its indigenous Palestinian population with predacious disregard. On Wall Street, American corporate CEOs continue to be exposed as corrupt, greedy, predacious and immoral profiteers, and in California the uninformed, knee-jerk masses have elected a popular action matinee idol as governor (of the world’s 5th largest economy) who hasn’t even play-acted the part of a politician in the movies. If I weren’t a heathen, godless unbeliever, I’d almost think that these events are palpable evidence of the fact that the world is indeed sliding off into that biblical Armageddon that presages the ‘second coming’… At any rate, and despite the progressive unraveling of the world…”

It goes on at some length, along similar lines, and reading this all over nearly two decades later I am struck by the awful fact that far from things having gotten better, what we now presently face in 2022 is exponentially more dire, more awfully angst-filled and more portent-saturated that ever before.

Last night at zero-dark-hours in the early AM, I awoke from my nightly FITBIT-monitored sleep-phase to brood on odd matters, as is my usual (involuntary) wont. There, in the utter, silent darkness, unpunctuated except by the snarling roar of over-horsepowered, unmuffled street rods (drive by the usual three braincell morons from the barrio, who, probably high on either drugs of excessive ETOH, have nothing better to do at night than race around peacefully slumbering neighborhoods, creating horrific noise and chaotic cacophony for the sheer hell of it) on the nearby interstate, the insane monkey that is my mind at such moments gibbered on interminably about a wide range of sanity-blithering worries and anxieties.

Amidst all this fretting about the present grave-yard spiral America seems to be in the midst of, faced as our nation is with both internal and external forces that threaten to rip what remains of it apart at any moment, I spontaneously recollected that back in 1957, a new folk singing group named the Kingston Trio had performed a song at the famed San Francisco ‘Hungry-i’ nightclub, titled ‘The Merry Little Minuet’.

The song itself was originally written by composer Sheldon Harnick in 1948 (or ’49), a then well-known (back then, at least) Broadway lyricist with credits ranging from Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway) to many other productions, both on and off Broadway, and it was intended merely as an inconsequentially amusing commentary on the turbulent post-war era, with its impending theme of nuclear doom permeating every aspects of 50s life. [For more on The Merry Little Minuet and its creator, see Jim Moran’s excellent blog entry, here .]

How ironic, then, that 74 years after Harnick composed this delightful bit of musical doggerel (and 65 years after the Kingston Trio popularized it), The Merry Little Minuet still has as much (if not more) impact and relevance today as ever before.

The full lyrics of the original Harnick composition appear below for your elucidation:

There are days in my life

when everything is dreary

I grow pessimistic,

sad and world weary

But when I am fearful

and tearfully upset

I always sing

this MERRY LITTLE MINUET

They're rioting in Africa
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
They're starving in Spain
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
There're hurricanes in Florida
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
And Texas needs rain
La, la-la, la-la, la-la

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls

The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles

Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.

And I don't like anybody very much

In faraway Siberia
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
They freeze by the score
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
An avalanche in Switzerland
La, la-la,-la la, la-la
Just got fifteen more
La, la-la, la-la, la-la

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud

For man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud

And we know for certain that some lovely day

Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away!

They're rioting in Africa
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
There's strife in Iran
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
What nature doesn't do to us
La, la-la, la-la, la-la
Will be done by our fellow man
La, la-la, la-la, la-la

When they sang their version, in 1957 at the Hungry-i, only a few changes had been made to the original and we ended up with what appears below to be an almost identically congruent piece to Harnick’s original composition:

[Verse 1] They're rioting in Africa; they're starving in Spain

There's hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain

[Verse 2] The whole world is festering with unhappy souls

The French hate the Germans; the Germans hate the Poles

[Verse 3] Italians hate Yugoslavs; South Africans hate the Dutch

And I don't like anybody very much!

[Verse 4] But we can be tranquil, and thankful and proud

For man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud

[Verse 5] And we know for certain that some lovely day

Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away

[Verse 6] They're rioting in Africa; there's strife in Iran

What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man!

The ‘la-la-las’ have been replaced in the Kingston Trio rendition by oral whistling and at least a few versions I heard in Ireland had a tin-flute filling in for the whistling and la-la-las. Either way, the song was brilliant both for its timely and its stinging wit and is as relevant now as it was back then, as crisis-after-crisis and natural-disaster-after-natural-disaster (wildfires, hurricanes, mega-storms, droughts and what have you, as experienced in recent years, most either directly or indirectly linked to global warming) continue to beset humanity around the world.

With Russia’s Vladimir Ras-Putin now threatening to re-establish a rump-end (but vastly important) vestige of the former Soviet Empire (with Belarus an eager band-wagon-jumper-onner), China’s Xi Jinping aggressively promoting his ambitions for Chinese world hegemony, more religious instability in the Southwest Asian nations, the world’s growing environmental catastrophe, the COVID-19 Pandemic and all of the growing wave of temperature-related world-wide climatic threats we face…not EVEN to mention the progressive (no pun intended) liberal political devolutions that presently have America in a dumbed-down death grip…this wonderful song that arose out of Harnick’s brilliant mind is more prescient than ever.

Reflect upon it when Ras-Putin marches into Ukraine, thereby igniting potential death and devastation the likes of which Europe hasn’t seen since brutal Communist murderer Joseph Stalin threatened a similar assault immediately after WW2. Or when Xi Jinping, emboldened both by his ‘mutual friendship’ with Ras-Putin and by Joe Biden’s criminally inept foreign policy bungling, finally moves in on the Republic of China (Taiwan) to reclaim it as part of his already vast empire. You might even try singing a few stanzas of it, if the unique massaging of your vagal nerve that the song provides helps calm the jitters all VERY bad news portends.

At any rate, having written that 2003 Winter Solstice letter I mentioned at the beginning, and thinking at that time that NOTHING experienced then could be conceivably worse in the future, I realise now that I should have known that the only future course available to humanity is more and more of the same human-created and compounded catastrophe, given the ‘failed’ evolutionary experiment that we human beings represent. All considered, we (humanity) have done more damage, environmentally speaking, and in the comically short tenure of our ‘rise to civilization from savages’, than all the previous many millennia of natural development have done to this poor, long suffering planet since it became habitable. And that’s NOTHING to be proud of, I assure you!

Nor is it conducive to our species’ continued survival, regrettably! Famed Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his epic novel The Brothers Karamazov, had a great deal to say about such common vagaries of humanity, much of which underscores and substantiates my own pessimistic bias against the frequent and serial wretched excesses of my fellow beings.

Although Charles Schultz, creator of the popular ‘PEANUTS’ cartoon strips, is often credited with the observation “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand”, and despite the fact that it is also attributed to Albert Einstein, it was in fact the great Dostoyevsky who originally formulated that particular prosaic condemnation of humanity, in his immortal Karamazov. The selection containing it appears below, in its entirety:

“I love humanity . . . but I can’t help being surprised at myself: the more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular, I mean, separately, as separate individuals. In my dreams . . . I am very often passionately determined to save humanity, and I might quite likely have sacrificed my life for my fellow-creatures, if for some reason it has been suddenly demanded of me, and yet I’m quite incapable of living with anyone in one room for two days together, and I know that from experience. As soon as anyone comes close to me, his personality begins to oppress my vanity and restrict my freedom. I’m capable of hating the best men in twenty-four hours: one because he sits too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold in the head and keeps blowing his nose. But, on the other hand, it invariably happened that the more I hated men individually, the more ardent became my love for humanity at large.”

Eventually, over time, this was reduced simply to “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand” and credit was (mistakenly) ascribed to Schultz and Einstein (both of whom were Germanic, of course).

Then there’s the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek, who astutely observed “Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” Well spoken, Slavoj, but I myself would go a lot further than that and say “99% of people may be boring idiots, but fully 75% of them are ignorant, reactive, emotionally fragile and totally unthinking bastards, as well”. I suspect in America the percentages actually approach more like 80%, frankly. [For an interesting analysis of this matter in some greater detail, I’d suggest visiting Rozali Telbis’s illuminating commentary on The Brothers Karamazov in her blog, Growing Up Alienated…]

Slovenia (not to be confused with Sovakia, which is the Slavic part of the former Czechslovakia) is another of those unfortunate European border state breadbaskets that has suffered mightily (like the Ukraine) over past centuries. It is also where my maternal (Germanic) ancestors hailed from, since in its past, Slovenia was comprised of roughly two-thirds German and one-third Slavic peoples, and Slovenia is now what used to be (going back at least to 500 AD or so) the very ancient and historic Duchy of Carniola (known as Krain, in German dialect), the capitol of which is modern Slovenia’s Ljubljana.

I am tempted here to blast off on another of my frequent tangential flights of circumlocution, but it could quickly become unavoidably complicated. Suffice it to say that my Slovenian family were originally French Huguenots who fled Roman Catholic persecution to settle in the Marches of Carniola, back when it was still a Duchy (Carniola, or ‘Krain’, a a distinct entity was incorporated into greater Habsburg Austria-Hungary and came to an end at the end of World War I, when the Habsburg Empire was ‘reconstructed’ by the victorious Allies). Slovenia is today ‘officially’ a Slavic nation but large parts of its western-most regions (‘Oberkrain’) are still largely settled by Ethnic Austrian-Germans. To give you a whimsical taste of German Slovenia, I strongly recommend you listen to an Austrian musical group called the Heimatdamisch (an ‘Oberkrainer’ or Upper Carniolan band), doing a unique piece based on the original AC/DC hit, ‘Highway to Hell’. It’s really a hoot and a half!

And now, Her Imperial Grace, Nala, the Grand Duchess of Eastern Siberia (also a Krainer), commands my presence for a walk in the park, for ‘tis time for one of her several-times-daily investigations of all the choice ‘sniff & squirt’ detritus left by other doggos there.

Be well and if you haven’t already done so, get your COVID-19 immunisations (and booster) fer crissakes!…not necessarily for your sake, but for mine! I’m really tired of having to continue distancing socially from other people due to a few million certified populist idiots out there who REALLY think that ‘the jab’ is an insidious, toxic plot by a mysterious ‘World Order’ bent on subjugating the world! Really!... After all, when it comes to pandemics, it’s no longer a matter of individual rights but basic PUBLIC SAFETY. It’s that simple!

And finally, it would serve us all well to never forget that final stanza of Sheldon Harnick’s Merry Little Minuet which goes “…What nature doesn’t do to us, will be done by our fellow man!”

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For a wonderful EARLY Kingston Trio rendition of 'The Merry Little Minuet' as done at the Hungry-i in 1957, listen to this YOUTUBE video.

For a LATE version, done when the Trio had a reunion back in 1981, listen to the last 2.5 minutes of this YOUTUBE variant.