According to this Washington Post article [via Boing Boing], Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is Sadaam Hussein’s campaign theme song for today’s presidential referendum. Before it became a the most popular Valentine song in England, it was the love theme for The Bodyguard. I imagine somewhere in the Pentagon, a psyops playlist is being revised; Whitney’ll have to find some other way of contributing to the (Bush, not Husseini) war effort.
With Houston off the (turn)table, I wondered what does Operation MC Hammer play? Most accounts of the 1989 US invasion of Panama universally mention just generic “rock music” or “hard rock music”; in Iraq I, it was “grunge and death rock”, but actual bands and titles are hard to come by. But not impossible. And the throwaway labels, “rock” and “grunge” turn out to obscure more than illuminate the actual operations.
Piecing together the US Military and FBI Psychological Warfare Compilation Tape, it seems that they’re programming more for themselves, not for their opponents. Like Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, who clearly relishes the Wagner he blasts out of his chopper, when the ATF plays “These boots were made for walkin'” in Waco, it’s just a morale booster for their own guys. (Did it drive Koresh mad? Wasn’t he already there? And how many people actually put on those boots and walked out?) When it comes to psyops, you have to wonder whose heads are really being messed with.
The playlist so far:
[Correction: Two readers–neither of them Sandy Gallin–wrote to demand credit be given to Dolly Parton for that Whitney song. They were more worked up than the Klingons who corrected my (only other) previous error (ever). With fans like that…]