No One Much Liked This

But this is my blog and I can post whatever I want.

It was the heady days of 2006, and the Iraq War was at its fiercest. Casualty rates were climbing, car bombs were a daily event, and all around me ten thousand hipsters got drunk and had sex with each other.

Meanwhile, I have always loved rousing drinking songs, you know, pound your beer on the bar and singalong and There's whiskey in the jar! and the like.

So I wrote a little ditty in response to both of those inputs. Nobody much cared for it and a friend whose brother had recently been deployed threatened to beat me senseless if I ever sang it at the bar again. But perhaps with the renewal of conflict between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, it regains some of its relevance.

Either way, here is A Rousing Drinking Song:

Oh! Look at the beards on the little boys faces
And check out that girl with the choppy black hair;
Somewhere a child wails for her mother
Her mother's intestines are strewn through the air.

But pour me a Pabst and please turn up the jukebox
Cause Morrisey's singing my favorite sad song;
They're gunning down towel-heads in Al Sadr City
"Iran is supplying Moqtada with bombs."

But don't trouble me with these troublesome politics!
Saturday night's here, I want to get laid.
Sing Allahu Akhbar and get in this car
And drive to the playground and hit "detonate."


O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Oh drive to the playground and hit "detonate!"
O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Sing Allahu Akhbar and hey! Detonate.


There's talk of a draft but that doesn't affect me;
I'm a graduate student with lots on my mind.
They'd never send me to go break into houses,
To murder and rape and be murdered in kind.

And if bodies keep piling in Baghdad's black morgues
Without legs or arms or a hand or a head,
Then I'll walk around campus and carry a sign
But it's just not my kind decapitated.


It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
It's just not my ki-ind decapitated;
It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
No, my kind don't get decapitated.


We're all very hip here, we all know our music,
We're all working hard on our novels and plays.
The guns in the distance they just can't concern us
As much as the haircuts of four guys on stage.

But somewhere a soldier is killing a child,
Somewhere someone's bumper says Support Our Troops.
Someday they will learn that even white liberals
Helped steal their oil and smash all their hopes.


And then it's my kind, And then it's my kind!
And then it's my kind decapitated.
And then all of us, And then all of us!
And then me and you get decapitated!