INTERNET — Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon played Phil Och’s satiric song, “Love me, I’m a Liberal” at a fundraiser for Paul Williams, who requires expensive care after injuring his brain in a bike accident.
The lyrics of the classic and funny lampoon were updated, seemingly so that the audience could grasp the dated jokes of Phil Ochs. Names of typical liberal politicians and publications were changed, but a line condemning the racism of liberals with the satiric use of the word ‘Negro’ was removed.
Ochs lines, “I love Puerto Ricans and negros / As long as they don’t move next door” became “I love blacks and gays and latinos / As long as they don’t move next door.”
This despicable effacement of Phil Ochs’ and his mild satire was perpetrated by the man whose songs once proudly proclaimed, along the same lines as Ochs, only with more punk rock snarl:
Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin’ that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul
Has Jello Biafra been abducted and replaced? Has he grown too old for the shocking, confrontational satire of the Dead Kennedys? Perhaps.
I can read the tweets, already, saying things like, “Phil Ochs is only funny for people with white privilege,” or “Ochs — typical white ally,” or maybe “To people of color this just represents a violent system.” And then, when the Butthurt Black Panthers bust into Phil Ochs’ house and gun him down, these same people will be tweeting #JeSuisPanther.
Satire isn’t always funny, and oftentimes it is downright offensive, and a song like Phil Ochs’ “Love me, I’m a Liberal” would surely be viewed as an incontrovertible act of violence in the contemporary liberal atmosphere, where terrorists who murdered the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are sympathetic victims of systemic racism. Tolerance and sensitivity have been so emphasized by moderate liberals to the point where it’s a racist superiority trip. Right below the thin veneer of this new brand of “radical” liberalism is something pathetic and moderate, a liberal who wants to be loved, and desperately — the niggers and the towel heads are babies who can’t read big boy jokes.