Tom Lehrer Satirized the National Security State From the Inside
Almost every American schoolkid has heard the song : "There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium." Set to a tune from The Pirates of Penzance , Tom Lehrer's cheery musical trip through the periodic table is a staple of middle school chemistry class. Along with his Harvard fight song , it's the most famous work by Lehrer, who died on Saturday at age 97.
But fewer people know about Lehrer's dark satires about Cold War national security politics, songs that nervously laughed at the threat of a nuclear holocaust. And fewer still know that Lehrer was drawing on his experience in America's most shadowy spy agency.
Lehrer's comedic career took off in the 1950s, in between his military service and his mathematics studies at Harvard. Then, suddenly, he retreated from the public eye, refusing all publicity —except for an occasional sarcastic take about how pointless everything is. "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," he quipped after Kissinger won the prize in 1973. "I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them," Lehrer declared in 2003.
Yet his fan base continued to thrive. In 2020, Lehrer released all of his work to the public domain , swearing off any royalties forever. His lyrics, always delivered in a campy show-tunes style, touch on sexual fetishes , drugs , religion , death , army life , academia , and the insanity of the Cold War that he had been called up to fight.
