The Informative American Presents: Buddy Holly, Destroyer of Morals (Originally published January, 1959)

“Rock music and tight-fitting sweaters, nothing is more terrifying to me than these two evils.”

~Old white people in the 1950’s

Hindsight is the greatest.  If you fire enough people and admit something like, “oh I guess natural gas is highly flammable” or “in retrospect, maybe Gays should be allowed to serve in the military,” you can pretty much come off smelling like roses, while appearing “progressive” and “innovative.”  And we at AFFotD are no different.  We’re the first one’s telling you about the glory that is beef jerky potato chips, and as soon as the ghost of Charlton Heston shows up to tell us that the secret ingredient is people, we’ll be the first to tell you that people are fucking delicious.

What we’re trying to say is that we’re not always right about things, and the best way to make everyone totally forget about the terrible, terrible mistakes you’ve made in the past is to make very efficient cars  acknowledge your flaws and put them behind you.

What brings this up, as you no doubt suspected, has to do with our 1950s bi-weekly pamphlets we used to distribute, called “The Informative American.”  We like to go through them from time to time, laughing at the antiquated way most social situations were handled at the time, while cringing at some of the more blatant racism.  It was while going through these that we found a little gem from early 1959 about Buddy Holly.

Now don’t get us wrong, Buddy Holly is clearly American, and is the most responsible person for modern Rock and Roll that wasn’t a black group obfuscated by a racist culture.  But back then, he was clashing a bit with our office’s more conservative ideals.  They didn’t like him.

So now, without further adieu, AFFotD presents an…unfortunately timed release (it came out less than a month before Holly’s untimely death)…

The Informative American Presents:  Buddy Holly, Destroyer of Morals (Originally published January, 1959)

Unless you are 15 years old, or a homosexual, it is guaranteed that you, as an American, have a child, and perhaps several.  And many of you were given the thankless task of drinking a beer and smoking a few cigarettes in the hospital’s bar while your wife gave birth to a daughter.  Now, after the rage blackout where you shake the doctor by the collar demanding, “GIVE ME A SON DAMN YOU!  WHERE IS MY SON?  WHAT IS THIS?  I’LL KILL YOU!” you no doubt began the process of protecting your daughter’s morality and virtue.  After all, you can’t imagine a world where a woman would be sexually active before marriage, that’s why God gave mankind Parisian hookers and loose teenage women who have less vigilant, possibly Italian, fathers.

It is for this reason that we at the Informative American have been on the forefront of protecting our daughters from enjoying themselves in the company of the other gender (or, God forbid, enjoying their own company) until they find themselves in a loveless marriage, or as spinsters if you’re lucky.  Did you know: if your daughter becomes a spinster you’re allowed to spend her dowry on a car?  Not just any car, either.  A Cadillac!  So remember fathers, sabotage every date your daughter goes on.  Every damn one.

“Hey Cindy, what did your father mean when he said you were born with a penis?”

It is for this reason that we’ve campaigned to ban the sale of so called “electric toothbrushes” and why we enacted that law that requires every ear piercing be implanted with a small tracking device.  And it is why we are here to rebel against the latest scourge to attempt to pollute American children.

We are of course talking about this “Buddy Holly” who uses an “electrified” guitar to send sex rays straight into the loins of our nation’s impressionable daughters.  And he has stupid fucking glasses.

Upstanding citizens are not allowed to snap.

This young whippersnapper and his motley crew wear sport coats instead of suits, and play music meant to incite “dance” among those that listen to it.  While we won’t go as far as to say that we think Buddy Holly will lead to a downfall of society which somehow sees American currency devalued below that of the lowly Canadian, we will go on record and say that we at The Informative American hope for a fate no less gruesome than for this young “rocking roll” musician to die in a fiery death from the heavens somehow.

Music is best when it involves smooth instrumentals, harmonic a cappellas, or manages to find that balance between “pleasant” and “can be turned up loud enough to mask the constant sadness in your home.”  However, this Buddy Holly fella is trying to bring “rhythm” into it, and if there’s one thing a 1950’s American fears more than a Hispanic neighbor, it would have to be rhythm.  We make it a habit not to trust words that don’t see fit to use any vowels.

Don’t believe that his music is a menace?  Let us tell you about a story we heard from a friend of AFFotD (we’re not afraid to say that he’s a U.S. Senator and a member of an Elk lodge frequented by our illustrator) and how his 17 year old daughter responded to listening to this young man and his insectoid band mates.  When he harrumphed and asked his daughter what she thought of this “noise” she said, “Oh, I think that Buddy Holly is dreamy.”  Dreamy!  Can you imagine?  If one were in too sober a state of mind, they might actually imagine that this woman was attempting to develop a “libido,” which you might recognize as the driving force for all male enterprise.

When the Senator scolded his daughter saying, “dreams are for sleeping, no man will ever look at you if you talk so foolishly,” she rambled off something about “heavy petting” and “make-out bluff” and “Jesus Christ dad I’ve been fucking Daryl for the past year and a half” and a whole lot of gibberish that he couldn’t understand.  He correctly assumed that this “stone and roll” music had short circuited his poor daughter’s brain, and she is thankfully receiving all the help medicine can afford at the St. Josephine’s House for the Mentally Infirmed.

And no one has ever escaped St. Josephine’s House for the Mentally Infirmed.

So we must say it once more, we hope this Buddy Holly feller falls from a high altitude in some sort of man-made device.  Oh, and fuck the Big Bopper too.

He knows what he did.