Posted by
Icarus on Sunday, August 10, 2008 6:44:02 PM
A leisurely Sunday afternoon, I'm sitting in the living room watching the third episode, titled "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin (1930 - 1942)", of the PBS documentary, titled "
Broadway: The American Musical".
When they get to Cole Porter, they start playing his song "You're The Top" with th lyrics:
You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.
It is a catchy tune. Almost everyone who knows anything about American popular music knows it. ... But ... as that radio guy says ... do they know the rest of the story?
In 1934 a portion of the song's lyrics were:
You're the top!
You're the Great Houdini!
You're the Top!
You are Mussolini!
These lyrics were later changed to one line:
You're Whistler's Mama!
Reading Slate won't tell you the real story about this change. That
website states, "
Presumably
someone pointed out to Porter that it was morally repugnant to suggest
that any comparison of one's beloved to a fascist dictator might
constitute praise, however lighthearted. Also, the meter doesn't quite
work." This completely ignores, and keeps readers ignorant of, the fact that many so-called Progressives in the 20s and 30s were ardent fascists and supporters of Mussolini, as Jonah Goldberg's great corrective Liberal Fascism makes clear. Goldberg, it should be noted, writes in an endnote that the Mussolini lyric is probably not Porter's but was added by P.G. Wodehouse for the British adaptation of "You're the Top".
It was also a tune many used to sell liberal fascism. The PBS series about Broadway uses this segment to sell idea that this tune was the "civilized embodiment of the Roosevelt recovery". It goes ont to spend many minutes on the show "The Cradle will Rock", which noted film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted in a "socialist opera". The episode goes on to extol the virtues of the WPA and effort to sell Americans National Socialism.
Nothing like PBS to keep the truth from its viewers.