Lyrics The Mysterious "J" - Laurie Anderson

The Mysterious "J"

But I think I can picture this 'J' scribbling away and laughing…
Although the first time I saw the Bible re-enacted was sometime in the 70s,
and there was a cable TV show in the Midwest and Bible study groups would act
out parts of the Bible, but these were pretty low budget productions,
and shot in a church basement or somebody’s rec room, and all the prophets had
towels wrapped around their heads for turbans, but you could see the tags,
the ones with the washing instructions, sort of sticking out in back
There were very few women on these tapes.
They tended to be the odd shepherdess
or dancing girl bit part
Then last year I was invited to perform in Israel, and I was very excited
because I wanted to see Jerusalem, where this mysterious 'J' had spent her life
writing and working, and the Gulf War had made me even more curious.
So I did some asking around, some informal research, and I talked to an
Israeli woman who was living in New York, and she was really having a hard time
living there
And she was always complaining about American men, and she’d say: «You know,
American men are such wimps, I mean, they’re always talking about their
feelings»
And I said:"They are?"
And she said she really liked Israeli men because they were so tough and
because they all had guns
And I said: «Guns?
you like guys with guns?»
And she said she did and went on about how terrible it was that Clinton wanted
to reduce the army, and she was so adamant about this that I started to get
kind of worried.
Yeah, I thought, yeah that’s true, what are all these military
people going to do when they lose their jobs?
And then I thought: Well, hang on, we’ve got all these service industries now,
things like psychotherapy, and the military approach to psychotherapy would
really be kind of perfect, really efficient and fast, you know:
«Listen, you are nothing, you are a worm!
And if you don’t get that mother
complex solved by 0400 hours you are dead meat!»