Opinion

I’d left the hot, dirty city in order to find peace and inspiration in the remote woods of northern Minnesota. A record number of young black men (97 and still counting) had been killed on the streets of Oakland during the past few months. There were drive-by shootings, drug deals gone askew, heavy gang activities. -more-

Tom Lehrer, the ideological mentor of my teenage years in the fifties, said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He himself stopped performing in 1967, a long time ago now, and yet he is still regarded as a fountainhead of political wisdom by young people of a certain type who were raised in homes with old Tom Lehrer songbooks on the piano. The Onion, one of his spiritual descendants, interviewed him in May on the occasion of the release of his boxed CD set, which has been selling well. -more-