Johnson: A President for all Americans


An old campaign flyer I found at a garage sale yesterday. Particularly amusing in light of the current immigration debate and the stupidity over that Spanish recording of the Star Spangled Banner. (BTW, here’s a nice collection of political cartoons related to this most idiotic of issues.)


This flyer found in the same folder is in Polish and also contains several interior pages I didn’t bother to scan. The only English on the entire thing is the name of the organization, visible on the bottom of the back page.

ALL AMERICANS COUNCIL

9 thoughts on “Johnson: A President for all Americans”

  1. i know it’s probably not the point here. still can’t help pointing out the Chinese seems wrong for Johnson. it reads more like “sonjohn” in the flyer 😛
    Good thinking on the campaign strategy though.

  2. FWIW, on the Spanish recording of the Star Spangled Banner, it’s not a translation of the words into Spanish. That’s been done before, and recorded with less fanfare. Here some different lyrics were used, e.g., “My people fight on,”
    “The time has come to break the chains,” etc.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5369145

    So it’s not exactly the Star Spangled Banner, though it is to the same tune as far as I can tell. Of course, it is closer to it than “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)” is to “God Save the Queen,” speaking of using different words for the same melody.

  3. A closer analogy may well be “O Canada,” where the French lyrics were written originally, and the English lyrics written separately and are not a translation. (Indeed, contests were held to determine the English lyrics.)

  4. Wow, thanks John. I actually had no idea that the lyrics were different. It doesn’t make the controversy any less idiotic, but it does add to the pile of examples showing how craptacular our media can be.

    Oh, and I believe that cc is correct. It appears that they were trying to write the Chinese for Lyndon (not Johnson for some reason), but wrote 森(shen) instead of 林(lin). Since both characters are composed of multiple copies of the very same tree radical you can understand the mistake, if written by someone not very familiar with Chinese.

    I also found it rather interesting that they had access to a Japanese katakana typeface but had to handwrite Chinese. Also notice the lack of Korean, which now easily dwarfs Japanese in usage in this country. When did Koreans start to emigrate heavily? On the other hand, I can understand the lack of Vietnamese…

  5. Isn’t it also funny that Chinese and Japanese were the only two not to get a romanized pronounciation guide?

  6. I think that all U.S. movies that contain any Spanish dialogue in them should be banned. This is utterly un-american and the slime who stoop to such a level are not fit to be considered Real Americans. Let’s start with John Wayne. I know, he tried to hide it, but in the 1939 movie “Stagecoach”, there is a scene where the Ringo Kid is looking for the Mexican-American relay station manager, and asks” “Donde esta Senor Enrique”, or words to that effect. Worse, in the final scenes of the movie, even though the town is obviously divided between a “Mexican” side and an “American” side, it becomes quite obvious that lots of them Mexican vaqueros are sitting in the saloon with their real American counterparts. What the hell was John Ford and Louis Lamour trying to pass off to the American people? That 1880s cowboys in New Mexico territory spoke Spanish and hung around with their fellow vaqueros? Hell, next they’ll be telling us that we stole the guitar from Mexican cowboys, and that western music has it roots in some of the music that came from the border. We need to shut that border air tight right damn now. Or next, we’ll all be eating tacos, drinking dos XX and tequila, and going to movies starring people with names like Banderas, Hayek, and Cruz, and I don’t mean the Tom variety.

    Like we used to say back in Texas. Salva la madrepatria! Fuera los mejicanos! ooops, slight slip, there. As a (serious) footnote, an old friend with roots going way back in New Mexico swore that his grandmother had known Billy the Kid as a little girl, and that he spoke Spanish, and used to hide out in the Mexican-American settlements where he had made friends. And that no one ever ratted on him in those settlements.

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