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Brookings Fight Song: The Winners

By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2001, at 6:06 PM ET

Last week Chatterbox broke the story (since reported, without attribution, in the Washington Post) that the Heritage Foundation had acquired a new fight song. Chatterbox urged readers to compose lyrics for a fight song that could be adopted by the Brookings Institution. In response, Chatterbox was inundated with fight songs not only for Brookings (including this one from an anonymous Brookings staffer), but for RAND, the Independent Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI song, submitted anonymously, was frankly disrespectful:

Old McDonnell-Douglas pledged
AEI I owe
To give a right-wing hack a job
AEI I owe
With a Bork Bork here and a Newt Newt there
Here a Bork, there a Bork, everywhere a Bork Bork
Welfare's bad except for us
AEI I owe

The same bias could be detected in a reworking of the Heritage song by Patrick King. It began this way:

O Heritage, O Heritage
Your foundation's built on sand.
A hollow shell where morons dwell,
A blot upon our fair land.

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute submitted a Brookings song that was a similarly savage but ideologically quite different. Here's a snippet (sung to the tune of "Muskrat Love"):

Brookings Henry, Brookings Bill
Examine congeries in Brookings Land
And they publish!
Their statist rubbish!
Yeah they whirl and they twirl and they tango
An intellectual fandango
Looks like Brookings love. ...

Chatterbox pledged to give special consideration to any entry that included the word "congeries" and the phrase "regression analysis." He wishes he had not done so because the effort to work them in ruined many a submission. Although Chatterbox asked readers to submit only a single stanza, just about everyone submitted a whole song, and Chatterbox decided to go with the flow.

Here are the winners:

Fifth Runner-Up: Rob Latham

(Sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas")

There's a tank near Dupont Circle
With Washington Disease
We call it "Brooks"
'Cuz we've got books
With regression analyses!

If you need to raise taxes
Or grow your U.S. state
Our congeries of monographs
Will, your foes, sedate!

Fourth Runner-Up: Matthew Budman

From slums in Jakarta to schools in the Bronx
Our well-meaning pundits and policy wonks
Offer expertise, hardcovers, studies, and letters
That aim for a world that's just slightly better

The center must hold!
The center must hold!

We moderate lefties with doct'rates of gold
Who sit next to cronies of Nixon and Ford
We fend off accusals of radical 'pinion
By ignorant Armeys who rally their minions

The center must hold!
The center must hold!

On Ave. Massachusetts we pray for a time
In which issues of zoning will win hearts and minds
When incomes and races don't fall into strata
And when scholars have increased the scope of their data!

Gimme a B! Gimme an R! (etc.)

Third Runner-Up: Josh Greenman

O Brookings, careful scholar,
We rally to your cause
Your just-left-of-center leanings
Never do give us pause.

O Brookings, studied wonk,
With rhetoric so dry
Ideas almost bold
and salaries so high.

O Brookings, nerdy fighter
Learned and risk averse
Too coy to show emotion,
Though your op-eds can be terse

O Brookings, sober advocate
Of policies that work
Indulge us in arcana
And never gloat or smirk.

O Brookings, precious intellect
More cultured than fine pearls
Just like a university
Without the pretty girls!

Second Runner-Up: Kim Day

Through congeries of Keynesians
We aid the working poor,
Transcending boundaries' disciplines
With theories tried and sure.

Objectified perceptuals
Be e'er our stock in trade,
And regression analysis
Cut like a vorpal blade.

O Brookings Institution be
Well-praised throughout the land
And never build your models up
On rationales of sand.

And the winner is ...

Kate Wing

Hail to you Old Brookings,
Whose hallowed halls burn bright,
With paradigmatic shiftings,
'Neath compact fluorescent lights!
Our nation's louche paralysis,
Can but be overcome,
by well-regressed analysis,
from Brooking's nimble tongues.

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