Cartoons Wednesday, Plus: Bernie Raps and Chuck Berry Rocks

And abandon hope, all ye who enter El Salvador.

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OKay, go, let’s start by revving you up with a little ditty recorded 69 years ago this week, in 1956, inspired by (as he says in his intro) a very fine musician named Bay-toe-van. Actually one of rock n roll’s most important songs, a martial call for a cultural revolution by its greatest leader. So, Chuck Berry, “Roll Over Beethoven,” live a few years after its creation, multiple duck walks included. It is said he wrote the song in response to his sister Lucy always using the family piano to play classical music when Berry wanted to play pop music.

The L.A. Philharmonic, led by that dude Dudamel, played Coachella this past weekend but far as I can tell, no Beethoven. But Bernie Sanders also showed up, as you may have heard, and (according to the brief fake excerpt below) did a little rapping:

Now, to bring you down a little, historian/hero Heather Cox Richardson from her Substack yesterday:

On August 12, 2024, in a discussion on billionaire Elon Musk’s X of what Trump insisted were caravans coming across the southern border of the U.S., Trump told Musk that other countries were doing something “brilliant” by sending streams of people out of their country. “You know the caravans are coming in and…who’s doing this are the heads of the countries. And you would be doing it and so would I, and everyone would say ‘oh what a terrible thing to say.’”

He continued: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they're taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “[i]t is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.”

On Saturday, I boosted Record Store Day and listed a few exclusive items but overlooked a new Patsy Cline collection of 48 recently discovered tracks (many live from TV or radio). Here’s some news coverage:

Walkin’ (to Fascism) After Midnight

Steve Brodner:

Jesse Duquette: