The Emperor’s New Skin
“My name is Obama, and I’m quite the charmer.”
NOTE. The reader will find some irregular spellings in the lyrics to this song, so I’d best explain them. They’re occasioned by certain particularities of the political scene in the USA. This decadent but still ferociously predatory imperial power, not unlike other core states of the capitalist world-system, is ruled by a single party, the Party of Capital, which maintains a façade of electoral choice by partitioning itself into two ostensibly warring camps. Their rivalry, however clamorous, does not extend to issues that might affect the fortunes of billionaires or the supremacy of the global North over the global South. One camp calls itself Democratic, although it is anti-democratic, and the other Republican, although it is anti-republican. In an effort to counter such flagrant hypocrisy, I substitute a k for the c in each name. Moreover, given that the Republikans are notoriously prone to nepotism, I here further substitute an i for the a, yielding “Republikin” (a spelling that, by a happy coincidence, has the added virtue of being better suited to the song’s rhyme scheme).
Chord Chart & Lead Sheet