NO ONE EVER HEARS DEAD PRESIDENTS

I may have posted the lyrics to "Casa Blanca" a couple of years ago, when I first wrote it -- I'm only now going back and adding tags to four-plus years of LJ-ing, and I'm only to late spring 2004 on 'em -- but starmalachite requested the words at OVFF and I rewrote parts of the final verse last weekend anyway. And it's halfway-sorta-if-you-squint topical and such, with a presidential election in the winds. The song isn't all that partisan or particularly political, since I'm neither all that partisan or particularly political -- it's essentially about how the nature of American politics, at least modern American politics (though things likely haven't changed as much as we think) tends to insulate leaders from hearing and heeding the wisdom that should have been gained from their predecessors' successes and failures.

Heavy stuff, but it didn't start out that way. Yup, this is the Behind The Music tale of "Casa Blanca." (Lyrics are behind the cut.)

The embryo of the song came a few years earler, in a Games magazine contest that I didn't enter but considered; the gist was to take the title of a well-known film, book, song, etc., and work up a completely different plot synopsis (or maybe just concept/premise) that has nothing to do with the actual work. I remember mentally retooling Red Dragon (from the Hannibal Lecter continuum) as the story of a fearsome dragon that gets sucked through some time/dimensional portal into the Cold War-era Soviet Union and becomes the linchpin of Soviet strategic superiority, until the Red Dragon meets up with our protagonist, Yank pilot Arthur St. George ... and then I thought of Dead Presidents (a 1990s crime/caper/gangsta film, if I remember correctly) and thinking it could be about actual dead presidents haunting Washington, but I didn't develop it any further. Like I said, I never entered the contest.

Fast forward a couple years later to a meeting of a writers' group organized by Marcy (who very occasionally pops up on LJ as hazmatplaytime. We usually ended the meetings with the rotating facilitator giving an exercise to be done by the following meeting; and Marcy (I think) paired us into duos to switch on and off writing a story -- one starts it, the other picks it up with no prompts from the original writer other than the text itself, and so forth. I was paired with snakelegs and, as a trifle, remembered my dead presidents concept. My take was more or less comedic, with the take of about 35 presidential ghosts who didn't much get along with one another -- I recall having Andrew Jackson refer to Lincoln as a "morbid fruitcake" and saying he was getting tired of "all this genteel drawin'-room ghostifyin'" -- yet who saw an apocalyptic-in-scope error the current White House occupant was going to make. Things got weirder when snakelegs left me with an allusion to a mysterious "box" -- which I decided contained the sum total of the life essence of the passed-on presidents or some such silliness -- and when she mistook my references to "Franklin" (meaning FDR) for Benjamin Franklin (which was fun, because it meant I could work up a back story for why he would be there among the presidential ghosts). Anyway, like I said, it was played mostly for comedy, and I didn't really think of it much afterward ...

... until either at a convention or coming home from one, I was mentally assaulted by an opening couplet: Abe lies in his bedroom like a titan in repose/Seven score have gone and he's grown only more morose.

That did it. The song demanded to be written.

I lifted some elements from the comedy story fragment -- the generals sitting together sharing war stories; Nixon keeping to himself, etc. I have no clue as to when, how or why I arrived at the idea of William McKinley as the point-of-view character, but it worked. And, as it was being written, I knew that this was going to be nowhere near as light as the trifle from which it came. What would it be like to be a presidential ghost, unable to influence the current administration, knowing you were just as blind and deaf when you were in charge, longing for a final rest and reward but knowing that can only happen if the country you love is dust?

And so was born perhaps my most-realized filk song (if anyone who's only written half a dozen can say something like that): "Casa Blanca," first performed at FKO in 2006 after the final few lines were written, heh, in the filk circle about 15 minutes earlier. (The title is, of course, Spanish for "White House." Just me being pretentious.) One of these days, when/if I get the tech to do so, I'll upload it to Filk Archive, to give an idea of the melody. Of course, I'm not married to its current melody, so anybody who likes it is free to give it their own arrangement.

( So, after all that build-up, here be the lyrics. )