That Merkel Massage

I have one more thing to say about the Rat Pack video, namely that what’s going on in those few minutes onstage is an example of what was so important about those guys in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Frank and Sammy and Dean were friends. They were the pop edge of something that had been happening for decades in hip jazz circles, I mean black and white musicians getting along, but their camaraderie was real. That mattered a lot before the Civil Rights Bill. Now ad corporations try to promote racial harmony by putting black and white people in the same commercial, but that’s just pallid propaganda by comparison, and everybody knows it. The Rat Pack helped lead the U.S. out of Jim Crow by example. All the racial jokes in that routine sound rough to refined, 21st-century ears, but the horsing around was a way of facing down a real problem, and it’s hard to come up with any musical act that fills the same role in America now.

When Bush freaked out Angela Merkel by giving her a quick shoulder massage at the G-8 summit earlier this month, I think he imagined himself as a joshing, roughhousing Sinatra, goosing his old buddy onstage. I don’t think he was flirting. I doubt he wanted to “demean” her. But obviously Merkel wasn’t in on the act. Bush thought he could be fraternal, deadpan, funny, and he couldn’t. This isn’t Merkel’s fault, any more than it’s the fault of some newfangled international regime of political correctness. It was never OK in diplomatic circles, and it shows the gulf between the mind of President Bush and the rest of Planet Earth.

     posted 28 July 2006 by Michael Scott Moore