‘We Are The Champions’ and other morally backward lyrics

A letter to the editor of Progress Collective Farm Pravda from a lowly member of the collective.

This morning the one-channel people’s radio on my tractor transmitted a song “We Are The Champions.” I took a sip of my beet vodka ration, observed the weeds flourishing in our Progress Collective Farm, and wondered why this song’s meaning had always escaped me. My co-pilot lay in the ditch, drunk, and I didn’t feel like plowing the field by myself like some wretched bourgeois individualist. Why kill myself working while others are having so much fun?

The radio kept playing: “I need to go on and on, and on, and on… We are the champions, my friends… and we’ll keep on fighting ’til the end…” And then it dawned on me: this song has everything backwards!

Since when do we brag about our achievements? How come success is a worthy goal? Aren’t we supposed to simply enjoy the process and never mind the outcome? Shouldn’t we welcome our share of sand kicked in our faces? Doesn’t “Progress” mean that we go where everybody else is going because we’re told to, and when we arrive, progress ends and we die? That’s the only meaning our lives are permitted to have.

The obnoxious tenor went on: “I’ve done my sentence but committed no crime.” Is that so? News flash: half the inmates in the gulag say that. Another news flash: no one is innocent. If you think you are, that’s a thoughtcrime and a long sentence right there. “…And bad mistakes I’ve made a few…” My point exactly. Everybody is guilty.

You’re guilty if you think you’re good at something. If you’re not bragging about it openly, you’re guilty for thinking it secretly. You’re guilty of laughing when others are suffering. You’re guilty of having fun when someone else is toiling to repay his debt to the Motherland. And that toiler is not innocent either: no man can repay the enormous debt he owes the Motherland that raised him, fed him, schooled him, assigned him to a job and gave him a roof over his head.

You’re even more guilty if you, like that deadbeat singer, “pay your dues, time after time” instead of giving everything, all the time. That’s why we all have nothing. Think about it: if I have something, I wouldn’t want to give it up, and that’ll make me even more guilty. So having nothing gives me a better standing.

But even then we’re all guilty, by default, of non-compliance with government regulations. There are so many of them, you can’t follow one without violating a bunch of others. Not to mention that we’re all guilty of consuming our planet’s limited resources merely by virtue of being alive.

The song went on: “But it’s been no bed of roses.” Oh really? Welcome to the culture club, comrade. “No pleasure cruise.” And what exactly in our workers’ paradise is a pleasure cruise? “I consider it a challenge before the whole human race, and I ain’t gonna lose.” Stop the tape! That shameless antisocial performer of people’s songs has just admitted that he thinks he’s better than others, he’s smarter than others, he’s special, and the whole human race somehow should care about him. Perhaps you don’t think we know a few things about you, citizen Freddie?

Well, we all know the most important thing about you: you’re as much a loser as the rest of us. Who allowed you to write that song? What reviewing artistic committee gave you the right to sing it, and to do so in a high-pitched voice instead of a standard operatic baritone? And what state agency allowed it on the people’s airwaves?

If I were on that committee (and I hope I will be after writing this letter to the editor), I would have mandated that this song be sung thusly, in a metallic bass-baritone:

We are the losers, my friends,
And we’ll keep on losing ’til the end.
We are the losers.
We are the losers.
No time for champions
‘Cause we are the losers of the world.

Just as I finished thinking my thoughts and took another sip of beet vodka, the people’s radio began to play “I did it my way.” I nearly choked. Why would anyone brag about such a thing? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to the society if the lyrics went, “I did it the way everybody else was doing it” – or better yet, “I did it the Party way?”

So many bad lyrics, so little time to correct them. Let’s report them, comrades! What other morally offensive songs have you heard on the people’s radio that need to be turned around?