FOLLOWING Donald Trump’s maniacal Easter Sunday outburst about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, the generally measured Bernie Sanders described it as “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual”, and urged the US Congress to immediately end the war.

Fat chance. The response was reminiscent, though, of certain lyrics from long ago: “In the swamp of their bureaucracy/ They’re always bogging down/ And criminals are posing/ As advisers to the crown/ And they hope that no one sees the sights/ And no one hears the sounds/ And the speeches of the president/ Are the ravings of a clown.”

Phil Ochs, the author of these lines, mig­ht still have been alive had he not taken his own life 50 years ago tomorrow. The above diatribe was directed against the Richard Nixon administration, whose corruption and criminality was widely viewed in the 1970s as an exemplar of the worst that the American political establishment could cough up. Those were innocent times, relatively speaking. There were excellent reasons to despise and resist the depredations of the Nixon era at home and abroad, but there was little inkling of what lay ahead.

Ochs did not live to witness the extent to which his scathingly witty body of work would........

© Dawn