This is the second post in my blog series about the song We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. I am writing about the significance of each item mentioned in the song. That is, what significance I THINK they have. I am not doing any research or looking anything up, so I could be totally wrong.
More information about his blog series can be found in the series' first post.
Joe McCarthy - McCarthy was a senator from Minnesota who went on a witch hunt for communists in the mid 1960s. This was during a time when countries were falling to communism like dominoes and McCarthy wanted to make sure there weren't any communists in American leadership roles.
Richard Nixon - Nixon won the presidency in 1968, then won reelection in 1972. Shortly thereafter he "resigned the presidency" in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
Studebaker - Studebakers were cars built in South Bend, Indiana. Like most other smaller companies that made automobiles, Studebaker couldn't compete with the big three and went out of business in the 1960s.
Television - Television gained widespread household infiltration in the early 1960s. Half the TV sets in the country would be tuned to the same station during popular shows.
North Korea - No longer just Korea, North Korea became communist and a separate nation the South. The leader of the communist uprising was Pol Pot. He tried to make all of Korea communist, but settled on just the North under heavy resistance from the South.
South Korea - Separated from the North and maintained its status as a free county by holding off Pol Pot's Northern military.
Marilyn Monroe - A blond bombshell, Marilyn was a wildly popular singer and actress who frequently made the tabloids for her tawdriness. She was even rumored to have had an affair with JFK.
2 comments:
Interestingly, not only did Studebaker fail, it did so spectacularly, stiffing its workers out of their (sizeable) pensions along the way. That failure was a major impetus for Congress passing the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which regulates the provision of retirement and other benefits.
Law geek. :-)
Thanks for the additional information Jamie. I'm counting on you to deliver some extra info like that and perhaps even point out some items I'm clearly just guessing about.
As for this posts other stuff. I thought I did pretty well. I already noticed that I do much better with U.S. history than world history. I even almost nailed the state McCarthy was from. Pol Pot was not a Korean leader, however.
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