McCain's musical taste: A cry for help?

LG&M's Paul Campos studies the contours of John McCain's favorite songs and finds a gay man trapped inside the gruff, Most Patriotic Man's Man in America facade...

"Dancing Queen" was released in the United States on Nov. 12 1976, and five months later became Abba's only #1 American hit (the sugary pop confections of the Swedish quartet were always far more popular on the international scene, and they remain one of the top-selling musical acts of all time).

The narrative structure of the song is a model of classical economy: as one critic has noted, "[I]t's about a seventeen-year-old girl having a good time on a Friday night. Not fazed by the social pressures in her daily life as a teenager, all she wants to do is go out and look for a 'king' to dance with."

What, we might -- and will -- ask, was it about this story that a 40-year-old married father of three children found so compelling about this particular story in that long-ago spring of 1977, as he roamed the dance floors of discotheques in southern Florida? McCain himself has tried to answer that question, but his response merely confuses the issue, with its highly anachronistic reference to being shot down over North Vietnam a full decade earlier, thus (according to him) permanently disabling his musical taste, while at the same time granting him the gift of Patriotism.

...Not that there's anything wrong with that.