Like many lifelong music-loving Americans, I don't think I exaggerate when I say I know and can identify many hundreds of, if not several thousand, melodies and themes: folk, pop, rock, symphony, concerto, aria, commercials, jingles, and ringtones — you name it.  My aural memory is pretty good.

So when I saw newly anointed CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky's video a few days ago, something bothered me — something other, that is, than its relentless, dour exhortation that everybody stay immobile, unemployed, isolated, depressed, and shame-face-wrapped and get "the shot."  Because I also heard the background soundtrack "music," which wordlessly admonishes everyone to stay dopey.  Dang if I know how it happened, but I had a near instant shock of auditory recognition.

If you still doubt that the pernicious background forces that have just foisted upon us the first demented president are anything other than the same pernicious background forces that swept ashore in 2008 along with the second first black president (hey, Toni Morrison called Wm. Jeff. Clinton that; I didn't), here are two pieces of auditory evidence that might sway you.

In Dr. Walensky's video, the banjo "music" — I'm using the word with cringing reluctance — is of a piece with the same jangling noise that accompanied the decade-old but still-as-revolting-as-ever video by the troubled Lena Dunham exhorting you to "do it" your "first time" with a "great guy."  And as if the unsavory, heavy-handed, and frankly disgusting appeal to tawdry sex were not bad enough, Ms. Dunham mocks, chides, carps, lectures, sneers, advocates, and pre-emptively shames you if you don't accompany her on her "transition" from girl to woman by choosing to "do it" with Barack Obama.  Dr. Walensky eschews the sex talk — in favor of Harris-style smiley giggles, the muted but apparently still requisite smirky condescension, a wussy, fake "interviewer," gratuitous subtitles, and a Birxian scarf — but she also wants to make sure you do things her way.  No difference there.

The choice of the insipid folksy "music" behind both of these gems of brainwashing could have been coincidental, I guess.  After all, it's possible that two independent producers a decade apart were independently moved to transports of ecstatic, simultaneous, mutual melodygasm — out of all the countless melodies of the world — by the same shapeless, meandering, idiot pickings of this particular banjo.  But maybe not.  And if not, then my antennae tell me that they're working for the same grim bunch of control-your-life leftists who never left.  And that Barack Obama's so-called third term — updated with a little less soft and ever more quickly hardening coercive psychological government pressure — has finally been forced upon us.  Go ahead, give a listen.  Then decide if you plan to pick resolute defiance or war-weary submission. 

Richard Kantro may be reached at rk4at@hotmail.com.

Image: PxHere.