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We have before commented on expressions of dubious creativity on The New York Times Op-Ed Page, and today we have another entry to that pantheon, Roger Cohen’s cringe-worthy rewrite of the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which he says is “tribute to a president, Barack Hussein Obama, representing a new post-cold-war generation of 21st-century Americans.”
We Didn’t Start the Fire (2)
Bill Clinton, Tina Fey, capitalist China, O.J.,
Asia rising, Facebook, Kareem Abdul-JabbarDick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ugg boots, Seinfeld
West Bank, Gaza City, Tupac Amaru ShakurMohamed Atta, W.M.D., Harry Potter, Reality TV
Tom Cruise, American Beauty, MP3, Oprah WinfreySchwarzenegger, YouTube, America’s got organic food
Armstrong, blogosphere, Monica LewinskyWe didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
…
My colleague Liz points out that Cohen is not the first to use this gimmick; philosophy professors (“Russell’s denotation scheme, Godel crushes Frege’s dream”), radio jocks, web nerds, and finance humorists (“We didn’t kill the market; when the prices bend, you can find the trends!”) have been in on the joke, too, but that didn’t stop Cohen.
Since The New York Times declined to make comments available on their site, we invite readers to dust off their inner Paula Abduls and Simon Cowells and give Mr. Cohen some feedback. I’ll go first.
“Mr. Cohen, what were you thinking?!”
P.S. Here is Joel’s original masterpiece, which is, ironically his own takeoff of R.E.M. “End of the World as We Know It”—how meta:
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