If you want to raise politically correct children, you now don’t have to wait until they’re toddlers and you can snatch the toy truck from your little boy’s hand and replace it with a doll. You can start them off right at birth by playing a few tunes from Lullabies From the Axis of Evil, a new CD featuring baby-treats from, oh, Syria, Iran, Iraq, “Palestine,” and North Korea.
No, I’m not making this up. Click here to view the CD’s cover featuring a mug of baby Kim Jong Il (or at least one of Kim’s infant subjects who hasn’t starved to death yet). And click here to read the gusher of a story about “Lullabies” by Washington Post staff writer Joe Heim.
According to Heim, the Li’l Kim album was the brainchild of Erik Hillestad, a Norwegian (wouldn’t you know?) music producer who happened to hear President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech. Writes Heim:
“‘I got quite angry when I heard him say “axis of evil,” because this is not the speech of a responsible politician, and it is very dangerous,’ Hillestad said in a phone interview from Oslo last week.
“‘What I really wanted to do was try to speak to these people behind this curtain, this enemy line, and learn more about people in these countries,’ he said. ‘I chose to use lullabies because they are the most opposite kind of rhetoric to the words of power that Mr. Bush and his colleagues use.'”
Hillestad apparently wasn’t fazed by the fact that some 3,000 Americans, including babies, had been blown to smithereens just a few months before Bush gave his speech, and that residents of some of the “Lullabies” lands danced in the streets to celebrate the mass murder. No, apparently not, for Rim Banna, Palestinian mother of twins, sings two of the 15 lullabies on the CD. Heim writes:
“‘For me it is an answer to Mr. President Bush,’ she says. ‘It is an opportunity to say, “Listen to these voices, these women.” The lullabies are a mirror of the cultures and they can be a bridge between cultures.'”
And here is one of the lullabies–just the thing to croon to your tiny future suicide bomber while the cradle rocks:
“Don’t you worry my child,
My little darling.
Leave the world far behind
When you are sleeping.
Don’t be afraid of the night.
I’ll be watching.
Lying right by your side
Until morning.”
Hillestad wanted his album to feature U.S. singers as well–but according to Heim, he had trouble finding lullaby singalong mates for the Syrian and North Korean moms. Finally, he did find one, Rickie Lee Jones. Here’s what she told Heim:
“‘George Bush and Dick Cheney and [John] Ashcroft are the axis of evil,’ Jones said in a phone interview from her home last week. ‘They are a triad of evil, and so of course they would think in those terms. To go down in history as the president who called the Middle East people evil is a terrible legacy. In political times to try to evoke religion and the ideas of goodness and evil, when you’re fighting about oil — to try to get the American people to think of these people as evil because you want their oil — this is what he’s trying to do.'”
Rickie Lee, shut up and sing.