As I’ve mentioned before, my adoptive father listened almost solely to country music, by preference the old-school “my pickup broke down, my wife left me, and my dog died” kind. And being a very selfish person, he had no problem with making the entire family listen to it during interminably long car trips, while he smoked like a chimney as well, with his window opened a mere crack to let enough of the smoke out that he could still see the road — he didn’t want to miss the music, I suppose.

(As you can probably guess, he was a really cheerful person. As you can probably also guess, we got along famously. And the two preceding sentences were dripping so much sarcasm that I’ll be scrubbing the rug for ages to get it out. Oh well.)

Anyway, I’ve always listened to the lyrics of songs, as much as the tunes, so I did learn a thing or two from the music. Fortunately I managed to forget most of them. But one of those things was brought back to me when I read this article, along with the tune that I learned it from (and haven’t thought of in probably a quarter-century). With a little prompting from the bit I recalled, Google turned up a name and these lyrics:

Jesus was a Capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes

Long hair, beard and sandals
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again

’cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me

Eggheads cussing rednecks cussing
Hippies for their hair
Others laugh at straights who laugh at
Freaks who laugh at squares

Some folks hate the whites
Who hate the blacks who hate the Klan
Most of us hate anything that
We don’t understand

’cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me

(Jesus Was A Capricorn, Kris Kristofferson)

Who needs science, when it’s just rediscovering what country music songwriters knew decades ago?