Mitch McConnell has become Schroedinger’s senator: He will be both alive and dead until somebody checks on him. All we know is that EMTs found him unconscious after suffering an apparent cardiac event on June14. He’s been hospitalized since then. He might be dead, he might be alive and functioning, or he might be comatose, or being kept on life support – there’s no way to know until an unbiased observer opens the box.
And it seems that won’t happen until August, because holding out that long eliminates the need for a special election, which Republicans are afraid Trump opponent Thomas Massie would enter. As one wag noted, having his death suspended on a technicality is a fitting way for McConnell to go out. I think what’s fitting is that he leaves despised by almost everyone – Democrats for obvious reasons, and MAGAts because he disagreed with Trump that one time.
Most people would call McConnell something stronger than “you rascal you,” but that’s about as strong an epithet singer/comedian Sam Theard could record back in 1929. Given the subject matter, a man raging at the friend who betrayed hospitality by running off with the singer’s wife, I’m sure he used much stronger in his nightclub act. He makes no bones about being the one who’ll ensure the seducer is dead, either, vowing “I’ll cut your arms off too, and something else that’s attached to you.”
Within a few years the tune had been covered by more than a dozen others, most of whom modified the lyrics. Cab Calloway, for instance, promised to employ a Gatling gun on the interloper. Red Nichols never mentions violence and obfuscates the allegations, demonstrating that the tradition of white musicians bowdlerizing black music into PG form didn’t start with Pat Boone. Louis Armstrong’s 1931 version not only toned down the violence, it played up the situation’s comedic aspect.
Armstrong’s version was the one that influenced later artists. By the time Louis Prima recorded it in 1956, in his typically jumped-up style, the rascal’s transgression had been downgraded to stealing Louie’s meatballs.
