Song of the Day 5/5: Leon Russell, “Alcatraz”

Having run out of old fixations to issue executive orders about, low-flow toilets have been conquered, Trump unveiled some new ones yesterday, and they’re even dumber than the old ones.

A 100% tariff on foreign-produced movies is a non-starter, as there’s no way to apply it and movies are explicitly exempted from the law he’s leaning on to issue tariffs in the first place. But movies – ones Trump has seen, not foreign ones – surely played into the other decree, that Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay be used as a prison again.

As this story notes, reopening the prison was already explored by an earlier idiot Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who was looking for a holding pen for Cubans who arrived in the Mariel boatlift. The fact that Alcatraz was three times more expensive to operate than locations not surrounded by water mattered back when Republicans cared about the budget, or pretended to.

The cost won’t matter to Trump, who values Alcatraz as a symbol of the sadistic state he longs for. The people at the bureau of prisons made the requisite sounds of compliance, but my guess is it will never happen. Building a facility that would meet workplace standards for the guards will take longer than Trump will be in office.

The island holds a different meaning for Native Americans, who occupied the prison in a 1969 protest, when Reagan was California’s governor. It was a big enough deal at the time for people to write songs about it. “Alcatraz” closed side 1 of “Leon Russell and the Shelter People,” his second solo LP, released in 1971.

Scottish rockers Nazareth covered the tune in 1973 on their third studio album, “Razamanaz.”