Hailing Tom Lehrer, John Oliver, Mavis Staples

From late-1950s America to Erie and Newport

Go here now for my award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” that started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps last week (you can easily watch it via links here), plus a companion e-book.

Just a quick one today, mainly to mark the passing of Tom Lehrer, but a highlight from this past weekend’s Newport Folk Festival: Jeff Tweedy bringing out the queen, Mavis Staples, for his song she recorded back in 2010, “You’re Not Alone.”

Last night John Oliver covered the opening “re-branding” night of the team he was allowed to take in hand and re-name the “Moon Mammoths” in Erie, PA. I don’t have the clip from that HBO episode but here is how local TV covered him and that night:

To note the passing of one of my growing up (late-50s/early-’60s) heroes, Tom Lehrer, who died over the weekend at the age of 97: He was the master, sardonic, often acid-tongued, satirist of that era, frequently somehow on TV, with songs from “The Vatican Rag,” “Pollution” and “Send the Marines” to “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “National Brotherhood Week.” But after three hit albums he stepped away and back to his day job—as a genius academic. I’ll just post one obit here.

Lehrer often confronted the Bomb and the Bomb fears of that time. Three of his best known songs mocked the former Nazi/currently U.S. missile chief, Wehrner von Braun; another explored the end of the world, in “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”—and then there was the one that opened with, “So long Mom, I’m off the drop The Bomb / So don’t wait up for me.” So from me to you:

von Braun:

“So Long, Mom”

We will all fry together:

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance

Is ruled by expedience.

Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,

"Ha, Nazi, schmazi, " says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say he's hypocritical,

Say rather he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.