Because of changes to the terms on Draft2Digital, which acquired Smashwords, my e-books are no longer available there. I’m looking for alternatives and will let you know when they’re available again. Amazon should be unaffected.
Many years ago, I put up a page called “The Key of P. D. Q.” It’s still there, though I haven’t updated it in decades. It lists musical parodies by Peter Schickele under the name P. D. Q. Bach and names pieces of classical and popular music they quote. This gave way to the P. D. Q. Bach Wiki on fandom.com, or “WikiPDQ,” as I like to call it. I contributed to it for a while. It’s probably the best online source for details about the music, but wikis are fragile things, and not all the information on them is verified.
So I’m starting a new project, where so far I’m reusing the name “The Key of P. D. Q.” It will be an e-book, most likely for free, since I doubt that there’s a market for it. It will be a PDF document, which is good for preservation. I’ll probably make it available for free in several places, such as one of my websites and Scribd.
I’ve been a P. D. Q. Bach fan for over half a century. I love spotting the hidden jokes in the music. The book will have an entry on each piece I can get information about, taking a light tone while digging into the technical tricks Schickele used. That’s a tricky balance, and I’m working on how to do it best. These pieces can give people a fun introduction to classical music, and I’ll work on explaining the connections between the satires and their models.
An early target will be a public or semi-public alpha version. It will have articles on just some of the music, so readers can comment on the approach I’m taking and suggest tweaks.
For many years and through many address changes, Hillsdale College has regularly sent me its print newsletter, Imprimis, for free. I sometimes look at it. It’s been known to have good articles. The lead piece in the March/April 2026 issue, though, has me inclined to put each one straight into recycling.
The piece in question, by Edward J. Erler, is titled “Are We Subjects or Citizens? Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution.” It says, “Many believe that this policy is an explicit command of the Constitution, consistent with the British common law system. But this is simply not true.”
Already the presentation is suspicious. The birthright citizenship clause is a declaration of who is a citizen, not a command. It isn’t about British common law.
A little further, he claims that “the idea of birthright citizenship … is derived from feudal law. It is the relation of master and servant…” That’s complete nonsense. The main goal of the Constitutional clause in question was to affirm that former slaves born in the United States have the rights of citizenship. In other words, to destroy the involuntary relation of master and servant.
The article tries to portray citizenship as an obligation bound on people, a form of serfdom. It does come with obligations, but on balance, it’s a benefit which people want to keep. It lets a person vote (subject to other requirements, such as age). It gives stronger protection under the law. It’s supposed to make a person immune from deportation, though lately this hasn’t always been observed.
Erler goes through various dodges, citing irrelevant history. He argues that jurisdiction “connoted ‘complete jurisdiction’ — in other words, not owing allegiance to anyone else.” If someone born in the US claims citizenship in another country on the basis of their parents, it seems reasonable at least to question their US citizenship. But in most cases, we’re talking about people who have lived in the US since their birth and don’t think of themselves as citizens of any other country. Foreign diplomats are an often-mentioned exception; they aren’t subject to US jurisdiction, and their children normally aren’t considered citizens. He’s not talking about dual citizenship or diplomatic immunity, though, but setting up a spurious claim about allegiance.
He declares that “‘subject to the jurisdiction’ does not simply mean, as is commonly thought, subject to American laws or American courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S.” If it’s “commonly thought” that jurisdiction means the sphere in which laws may be enforced and courts may act, that’s because because it does.
The implications of Erler’s doctrine are frightening. Citizenship would no longer be guaranteed by the Constitution to any American; it would depend on our attitudes as perceived by the government. If “allegiance” is a precondition of citizenship, then even people descended from the Pilgrims could have it revoked if the government calls their allegiance in doubt. For all I can tell, refusing to recite the Pledge to the Flag might be deemed enough to establish lack of allegiance. The title’s significance now becomes clear; Erler is saying we’re subjects, required to give fealty to the government.
It’s the same game as “creation science” or Holocaust denial. The aim is to create the impression of a two-sided question where there isn’t one, to make people think there’s a controversy over whether “jurisdiction” means jurisdiction or something else.
Not all arguments against birthright citizenship are dishonest on their face, even though I don’t think they’re valid. For instance, someone could argue that many countries have citizenship by parentage rather than place of birth and their claim takes precedence. My understanding is that if people born in the US don’t go to their parents’ homeland and don’t ask for citizenship, they’re US citizens and not subject to the rule of their parents’ country. The US took this position in the War of 1812.
Any publication will have articles I disagree with and even some I consider stupid. Pretending that denying people citizenship is saving them from serfdom, though, is absurd. A publication that claims to have editorial principles but features dishonest articles on its front page doesn’t get my respect.
The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.
(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)
I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.
It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.
When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.
This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.
The words “liberal” and “liberty” look similar, and they come from a common root. At one time, the word referred to the advocacy of liberty. In the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the USA, it took on a different meaning, advocacy of government as the solution to everything. The pendulum is swinging, back, though. As I noted in my earlier post on “reclaiming liberalism,” advocates of liberty and justice under law are being attacked as “liberals.” Meanwhile, the government-solves-everything bunch now prefers to call itself “progressive.” They’re vague on what they’re progressing toward.
I’m bringing this up again because the Institute for Humane Studies has launched an exciting new website, Liberalism.org. Many of the names on it will be familiar to advocates of liberty: Jason Kuznicki, Aaron Ross Powell, Radley Balko, Ilya Somin, Sarah Skwire, and others. And they pay for articles! I need to look into that. Their choosing to label the site liberal rather than libertarian is significant. While there are still overtly libertarian individuals and organizations fighting a good fight, the Libertarian Party has damaged the name by accommodating populists. It’s time to say that we, not the Democratic Party, are the real liberals.