Worst song ever made . . . part 1

This may sound like a joke, but it's not.  

Chicago has released an album called Chicago XXXVI.  

That's 36 for the young crowd who never learned Roman numerals.

Not only that, this record includes the worst song ever made.  Don't believe me, go read the lyrics:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/america-lyrics-chicago.html

Better yet, you can listen to it and hear for yourself:

I guess it would be too much to expect them to re-imagine some of their earlier political fare like "Dialogue" or "Someday" (or "A song for Richard and his friends," calling on Nixon to quite in 1972), but these guys are rich and old and shouldn't be so afraid to "call a spade a spade" as they once reminded us Harry Truman would do . . .  but their political statement for 2014 is a bunch of empty, and often contradictory, platitudes that I won't even let my second grader get away with.

Instead of blindly slamming our "leaders" for treating us like "fools . . .  who don't have a clue what to do," acknowledge that at least one political party has a vested interest in Government doing as little as possible . . . except repealing Obamacare for the 87th time or threatening to shut down the government to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Hey Chicago: write a song about this.  Meanwhile . . .


Meanwhile, what conclusion am I to draw from the truisms they repeat in the song, like "Everyone's free" . . "we're all free and equal" . . . "everyone comes first" "hurray for everything"?  They talk about Congress passing laws that will "help us all" which doesn't sound very Republican, as the current GOP Congress seems intent only on eliminating laws and policies they dislike (see Obamacare).  But the generic complaints about "leaders," the call for liberty as an abstract value ("America is free" not America should be free, or should be just, or some other variant), and the color blindness connected to the value of freedom ("no religion, no color, just people; No one better, no one worse") suggests Chicago buying into a now longstanding thread of conservative framing on social rights. I just got done reading Ari Berman's excellent Give Us The Ballot, in which the Nation's political correspondent lays out how Reagan staffers and their brethren appropriate Martin Luther King, Jr's arguments about color blindness and use it to launch a whole new line of attacks on the Voting Rights Act.  I doubt Chicago is getting behind this kind of reasoning, but I can see young Red-Staters drawing the obvious inference ("oh yeah, we're all free, we're all equal. No color, people, we're all the same. We don't need no affirmative action; we don't need no oversight of voting laws in former slave states. Right on Chicago: America is you and me.  Let's make it great again . . ").