Come Together, Right Now, Over John, Paul, George, and Ringo

Is it just me, or does anyone else think everybody today is way too, uh, partisan (for lack of a better word)?

Look at the situation on health care reform. Because of all the bomb throwing from the political extremes, it may go down in flames. There's a lot of talk about bipartisanship, but negotiators in the Senate aren't walking the walk. President Obama has called for a hands-across-the-aisle approach, so far to no avail.

There once was a time when bipartisanship was real. Perhaps not coincidentally, it prevailed in the mid-1960s at a time when nobody didn't love the Beatles. It was then that things like Medicare came to be. It was then that Senator Ted Kennedy first began putting his stamp on America.

You could be a liberal president like Lyndon B. Johnson and work to pass Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills that made life better for African Americans, but you couldn't do it without votes from across the aisle, corralled with the help of then-Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois.

OK, fast forward to now. In four days (on Sept. 9, 2009) the videogame The Beatles: Rock Band arrives. An article that recently showed up in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times, While My Guitar Gently Beeps, says it is going to revolutionize Young America the way the Beatles' appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show did back in 1964.

Good. If Young America is revolutionized, Old America will follow. That's what happened in '64.

I'm serious. The Beatles: Rock Band is going to (as they say today) rule. And it's going to subvert the culture of contention wherein the notion of "who rules" is all-important. Daniel Radosh, the author of the Times article, writes:

... the overt selling point of Guitar Hero [the highly competitive predecessor of Rock Band] was less participatory music experience than rock-god fantasy. It leaned heavily on the over-the-top energy of heavy metal and punk, and came wrapped in a cartoonish aesthetic. Harmonix toned down these elements with the Rock Band series and dipped into less-aggressive musical artists like Beck, Bob Dylan, the Go-Gos and the Replacements, taking some risk of alienating the games’ core audience. Rock Band also switched the emphasis from competition to cooperation, further confounding the expectations of some gamers. The Beatles project is an even greater departure from the elements that initially made music games successful.

If The Beatles: Rock Band lives up to its hype, America my start to come together again over John, Paul, George, and Ringo.