Song 375: This week on the playlist you’ll hear Political Science (Let's Drop the Big One Now) by Randy Newman, who also wrote the song. In the early 1970s, Rolling Stone carried a number of articles talking about what an essential songwriter Randy Newman was, and how people needed to pay attention to him. Back then, still catching up on the music I already knew and wanted to add to my collection, I let Sail Away (which included this cut) slide by when it came along in 1972. When Good Old Boys started making some noise 2 years later, though, I did get a copy of that, and it sounded so good that I soon picked up on Randy's other works as well. During that stretch, this track provided an amusing commentary on the small-minded jingoistic rhetoric that might occasionally pop out of the mouths of quirky strangers in random public settings, but I did not expect that 4 decades later, a major TV news host would make this same kind of stupid and short-sighted suggestion. I sincerely hope, for the sake of our species, and all other higher life forms on this planet, that these fools never have even half a chance to Drop the Big One. From my earliest years, the nuclear nightmare has at times disturbed my dreams, and I have my own recording about that, called Dream Revelations.
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