You kinda had to be aware of the first Denis Leary song in the mid-nineties to appreciate the beauty of what happened on CBS the other night.
For those of you who weren’t, or maybe those of you who weren’t old enough to remember the nineties, it was, in essence, a simpler time. We were a world fresh off the cusp of the cold war, where George Herbert Walker Bush was as big and bad as they came, and we didn’t think the Gulf War would last longer than the Peloponnesian one (technically, we keep changing the name and bad guys, but really, who are we kidding anymore?). We didn’t at all understand the concept of LGBT rights, but then Friends explained it to us and Disney let Ellen come out on her show. Dennis Miller wasn’t quite as crazy and none of us gave a good goddamn what he thought about football.
And Denis Leary released “I’m an asshole” and it was funny because life was sufficiently good enough (for those of us not fighting a war in the Gulf) that we had time to get annoyed by the little things he mentions. It’s a song, he tells us, about the American Dream. In reality, it’s a song about how the American Dream has made us assholes.
Fast forward to, well, now. I watched it again after he reprised it on CBS — more on that in a moment — and maybe it’s my “I’ve only had one cup of coffee” state, but the more I watch the video of the 1993 version the more I realize he was singing about Trump both times.
He just didn’t realize it the first time, and neither did we.
