Audio By Carbonatix
With 2 days left in our spring campaign, we have a new $10,000 goal!
New Times members have already contributed more than $7,500 - can you help us hit our new goal and keep New Times free and in print every week? If New Times matters to you, please take action and contribute today.
The Buzz reports that Larry Cretul, the Republican speaker of the state house, will apparently now be humming the Beatles’ “Come Together” all day. He found it on the Internet radio app Pandora.
“It’s a Beatles song and it’s called ‘Come Together.’ If you hear me humming it from the podium up there today, it’s because I’m trying to get it out of my head and into a message,” Cretul said.
It sounds good in a “Hey, guys, let’s all come together and finish this damn legislative session” way.
Unfortunately for Cretul, the noted socialist John Lennon originally wrote the song as a campaign song for Dr. Timothy Leary in his ill-fated attempt to run against Ronald Reagan for governor of California. Yes, Timothy Leary, the father of LSD and drug activist. Lennon liked Leary’s campaign slogan — “Come Together, Join the Party” — and decided to write a song. Leary was later thrown in jail for possession of marijuana, and his candidacy ended.
“‘Come Together’ was an expression that Tim Leary had come up with [perhaps for the governorship of California against Reagan], and he asked me to write a campaign song,” Lennon attested in a 1980 interview with Playboy.
So after Leary dropped out (in the political sense), Lennon added some nonsensical lyrics, and now almost 40 years later, the song is being used as the new mantra of some Republican politician in Florida.
