The USA has got a lot of cheese.

This is a headline that makes you sit up and take notice, especially if you're my dog:

America has a record high stockpile of cheese at 1.385 billion pounds

Courtesy of WXYZ in Detroit (hat tip: Instapundit). 

Any way you slice it, 1.385 billion pounds is a lot of cheese. The last time I remember the cheese stockpile (which would sound better as the strategic cheese stockpile) getting out of control was the 1980s, when the government started giving away huge loaves of cheese to get rid of it. In 1986 the Rainmakers released a song inspired by it called "Government Cheese." The Wayan Bros. comedy sketch show In Living Color got a lot of mileage out of it. I knew a family that was not poor but wangled a five-pound loaf anyway -- to be fair, they had a number of teenagers at home, and feeding them and their loser friends (hi!) was difficult. That cheese made a pretty good sandwich.

But when I heard about this new cheese crisis, my thought was not of the Rainmakers or Chris Farley as Matt Foley or any of that, but rather that Frank Sinatra tune of 1946, "The Coffee Song," by Bob Hilliard and Dick Miles. It was inspired by news of a coffee oversupply in Brazil that threatened to cause prices to plummet. So, according to the song, in Brazil everyone was mandated to consume coffee. "You can't get cherry soda / 'Cause they've got to fill that quota / And the way things are I'll bet they never will / They've got a zillion tons of coffee in Brazil." And so on.

Here it is:

I, of course, wanted to get in on this, and do it before any of Harvey and his gang of geniuses at IMAO got there. So I present: "The Cheese Song."

Way up on the plains of Kansas
They don’t know what the demand is
They keep those cattle busier than bees
Oh the USA has got a lot of cheese

You can't get peanut butter
'Cause the cows will start to mutter
And the farmers let 'em do just what they please
Oh the USA has got a lot of cheese

No meat, and no broccoli rabe
You'll eat no wasabi, Bob
'Cause the guys at USDA all say hey, hey, hey

The morning talk show cohost
Was accused of shunning lactose
And it brought the channel halfway to its knees
Oh the USA has got a lot of cheese

You see that Pizza Hut is stuffin’
Crusts with all that cheesy lovin’
Cram it in you till you start to wheeze
Oh the USA is drowning in the cheese

And when you take your car for fillin’
Don’t go frackin’, don’t go drillin’
Aerosols can fill ‘er up with ease
Oh the USA has got just too much cheese

So when you see the CDC all
Freaking on the cho-les-ter-ol
Calling for fat taxes, fines, and fees
You’ll know the USA has too much cheese
You’ll wonder how we’ll eat this goldurn cheese
You’ll know the country’s got a gang of cheese

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Rung-a-dung-dung.

I was listening to Mark Steyn’s podcasts about the songs of the great lyricist Sammy Cahn, who had more American standards than the Home Depot. Whoever you are, you've heard his songs, and you'll hear many again as Christmas approaches. “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” “Come Fly with Me,” “Come Dance with Me,” “High Hopes,” “Written on the Wind,” “My Kind of Town,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” "Let It Snow," “Love and Marriage,” “The Christmas Waltz,” “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” "I've Heard That Song Before," “Call Me Irresponsible,” “It’s Magic,” “All the Way”---four Oscars among those and another 23 Oscar nominations, and those are only the songs used in the movies.

You’ll notice a lot of these were recorded by Sinatra, and Steyn makes the point that Cahn’s easy lyrical style was perfect for Sinatra’s ring-a-ding style, and did so much for what would be considered the Rat Pack lounge style.

One of the things Sinatra liked to do was sling nicknames at people in the Cahn songs of his Capitol Records days, and possibly in real life for all I know. For example, in “Come Blow Your Horn”:

You've got to sound your "A" the day you're born,
I tell ya, chum, it’s time to come blow your horn.

And in “The Boys’ Night Out”:

Hey there, buster, it’s the Injuns after Custer
It's the boys’ night out

And in “Love and Marriage”:

This I tell ya, brother,
You can't have one without the other.

And in “Come Dance with Me”:

Hey there, cutes, put on your dancin’ boots
And come dance with me

Sinatra would do that kind of thing with other songs not written by Cahn, things like taking the devoted “darling” out of Cole Porter and replacing it with the diminutive “baby.” I don’t want to read too much into it, but there’s a definite lack of respect being shown even to the supposed object of one’s affection.

Now, maybe some people like to be called chum or buster or cutes or sweetheart or chuckles, but it’s always struck me that Frankie and his admirers did it as a means of not having to learn your name, a prelude to his peeling a couple of bills from the roll and expecting you to roll over for him. Guys like that kind of thing when they’re the roll-holder, but let’s face it---most of us are the rolled.

It becomes more obvious if you just move the nicknames a little further down the scale of acceptability:

You've got to toot your flute the day you're born,
I tell ya, ho, it’s time to go blow your horn.

Hey there, schmuck, it’s the Injuns run amok
It's the boys’ night out

This I tell ya, stupid,
You can’t go running out on cupid

Hey there, fats, put on your dancin’ spats
And come dance with me

This is why, no matter how much I smoked and drank and wore sharp hats and chased after women, I was never asked to join the Rat Pack. I might have passed the physical but I’d have still washed out of basic.