The Clash Meet Frank Sinatra, Plus: Today's Cartoons

Like 'Clockwork': Musk and the Orange dictator?

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (see list at bottom of page, please consider purchasing to sustain this free newsletter) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Watch trailer for his acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: both as @gregmitch.

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Couple things before we get to the usual cartoons.

Thanks to my wife for pointing me to a new article at The Atlantic with a fresh and scary angle on the Musk/DOGE takeover. It’s titled: “If DOGE Goes Nuclear: The Risk of Messing With the Wrong Computer System” by staff writer Ross Andersen. It opens: “You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.”

Just received word there’s a book by Peter Silverton coming next month from the venerable Trouser Press with a surprising focus, as they put it: “Frank Sinatra cut ‘New York, New York’ within weeks of the Clash recording ‘London Calling’ in 1979. Yes, you read right. That nearly simultaneous expression of optimistic striving and dystopic modernity is the jumping-off point for ‘London Calling New York New York’, a tale of two cities and two songs that came to exemplify them.”

More from the promo: “Although the book is about two popular songs from two different cultures, it also addresses nostalgia, mythmaking, family, crime, war, art, terrorism, politics, film, fidelity and propaganda. From the Great Fire of London to a White Castle in the Bronx, from the Thames to the Hudson, Joe Strummer to George Gershwin, Noel Coward to Jay-Z, Margaret Thatcher to George Steinbrenner, Silverton marshals connections and coincidences to illuminate the creative process and its enduring cultural impact.” We also learn the full story of the Elvis inspiration for the iconic Clash album cover after a cartoonist traveling with the group in USA purchased the Presley album in a Chicago bargain bin.

So, why not, the two songs, below:

Who Let the DOGE Out?

Barry Blitt inspired by Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” Do we now call his young crew “DOGEeeees” and not “droogies”?

Steve Brodner:

Some of Greg Mitchell’s books, you might order one or more to help sustain this FREE newsletter (links to Amazon but most also available elsewhere), in no particular order.

>The best-selling “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall—and the Historic Films JFK Tried to Kill” (Crown, 2016).

>Award winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (The New Press, 2020).

>Another award winner (and considered a “classic” by many election nerds and others), “The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics” (Random House, 1992, and later editions).

>”So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq” (Union Square Press, 2008), with a preface by Bruce Springsteen, Forword by Joe Galloway).

>”Tricky Dick and The Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Sexual Politics and the Red Scare” (Random House, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book.

“Vonnegut & Me,” an inexpensive (some would say cheap) little ebook recalling my interviews with the author and humorist in the 1970s, including a much-anthologized profile of the author by one Kilgore Trout.

>Best-seller “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Putnam’s, 1995).

>”Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made” (Sinclair Books, several updated editions), inspired my award-winning film of the same name.

>”Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried” (Sinclair Books, 2024), companion to my PBS film on the 1937 police murder of striking steel workers and activists in Chicago.

“Journeys With Beethoven,” a companion to film I co-produced on the political impact of the 9th Symphony and “Ode to Joy” around the world, including interview with Bill Bragg.

”Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment and the American Conscience,” with Robert Jay Lifton (Morrow, 1999).