Pat Boone and 'roaches and the need for a good tenting ...

(Above: eek, Pat Boone).

I always loathed Pat Boone. Not personally of course. Never met the man. Just figuratively.

Even at a tender age, I realized his schmaltzy kind of crap was a lie.

If he wasn't infesting television shows with his crooning - Perry Como, Steve Allen, Dick Clark, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams - then worse still he was infesting his eponymous TV show with bland songs that made a Mormon missionary seem like a wild-eyed hipster.

Then it got worse as he started to infest the movies, beginning with Bernadine, ruined the moment he opened his trap to croon Love Letters in the Sand.

That wasn't enough for him. Oh no, he had to go on and ruin April Love, and not just by crooning the title track, but because he was such a hapless git, and then he ruined Mardi Gras and State Fair, and somehow managed to turn up in Journey to the Center of the Earth, and ruin that, and at some point even studio movie producers began to realize that Pat Boone was a caricature of Pat Boone, and he began to turn up in stinkers that any sensible person had the intelligence to avoid (yes, I saw The Greatest Story Ever Told, but when did I claim to be a sensible person with intelligence, residing as I do in loon pond?)

His contribution of lyrics to the Exodus song perhaps constitute a crime against humanity, and certainly constitute a grave stain on the fledgling state of Israel.

In short, there's no way around it. Pat Boone ruined my childhood. Sure he had some tough competition - who could leave Debbie Reynolds out of the mix - but it's a relief these days to mention Pat Boone to a young person, and they look at you with a dull, vacant stare. Pat who?

Oh sure there are some lounge lizards who recall the name and who love to revel in the fifties. But they're so weird, and such a minority, that it's reasonable to hope that the very concept of Pat Boone was just a pop culture fad and delusion, along with brown suits, slicked back hair, clogging crappy looking cardigans, canary yellow jumpers and 'momma's boy' niceness.

Then you go to Needed: A tenting of the White House, and it turns out that Pat Boone is still alive.

Sob, it turns out that there's no form of pest eradication treatment that will rid us of the notion of Pat Boone. What to do? Well Boone himelf explains:

In time, it seems to happen to all older houses, no matter how well tended they may be.

All manner of parasites, vermin, roaches, rats, worms and termites find their way into the building. Long before they're detected, they infiltrate the walls, the floors, the roofs – and then chew their way into the structure, the supporting beams and the very foundation of the house itself. Silently, surreptitiously, whole communities of invaders make places for themselves, hidden but thriving, totally unknown by the homeowner.

Then, in time, telltale signs are seen. Little droppings, discolored trails, proliferating piles of residue appear in corners, on tabletops, little hanging sacs from ceilings – alarming evidence that the grand old dwelling has been invaded. Decidedly unwelcome creatures have made this place their home, and by their very existence will eventually destroy the house and bring it to ruin.

What can be done, when you learn that your house has already been invaded?

Well, the tried and true remedy is tenting.

Experts come in, actually envelope the whole dwelling in a giant tent – and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house. Done thoroughly, every last destructive insect or rodent is sent to varmint hell – and in a day or two, the grand house is habitable again.

I believe – figuratively, but in a very real way – we need to tent the White House!

Well I believe - figuratively, but in a very real way - that we need to tent the world, and rid it of any last vestiges of Boone-ism. It'll be hard - there might be some collateral damage, we might lose Daniel Boone and a few other decent Boones - but it simply has to be done.

Yes the man who haunted my childhood, who was held up as a decent and honorable man, the kind every girl should aspire to marry, has turned into a wing nut of the first water.

Our White House is being eaten away from within. We urgently need to throw a "tent" of public remonstration and outcry over that hallowed abode, to cause them to quake and hunker down inside. And then treat the invaders, the alien rodents, to massive voter gas – the most lethal antidote to would-be tyrants and usurpers.

We must clean house – starting with our own White House.

Voter gas? Now there's a sensitive post-Holocaust friendly image.

If you were a sensitive liberal type, you might find this kind of overheated, overblown, dumb rhetoric offensive - and there's heaps more of Boone's frothing and foaming in what I hesitate to call a column so much as a therapeutic dump of the kind favored by psychiatrists seeking to purge demons from patients' minds - but trust me, you know nothing if you can't remember the days when Pat Boone infested the radio with the likes of this kind of tripe:

On a day like today
We passed the time away
Writing love letters in the sand

How you laughed when I cried
Each time I saw the tide
Take our love letters from the sand

Chorus:

You made a vow that you would ever be true
But somehow that vow meant nothing to you

Now my broken heart aches
With every wave that breaks
Over love letters in the sand

Oh god, even now I feel my world dissolving into a stew of banality and hideousness. Can it get any worse?

You better come home, Speedy Gonzales
Away from tannery row
Stop alla your a-drinkin'
With that floozie named Flo
Come on home to your adobe
And slap some mud on the wall
The roof is leakin' like a strainer
There's loadsa 'roaches in the hall

Speedy Gonzales, why dontcha come home?
Speedy Gonzales, how come ya leave me all alone?

Yes, it can!

The 'roaches. Always with the 'roaches. What is it with the 'roaches? What have they ever done that can compare to the reduction of pop culture to a sickening sweet mixture of fairy floss and marshmallow in the nineteen fifties? By one man! Pat Boone!

I can't go on. There are dozens of songs, dozens of examples of how Pat Boone ruined by life, and perhaps also ruined the world.

People, comrades - do you mind if I call you comrade, does it sound too leftish, too liberal mamby pamby? - we must hire Christo and Jeanne-Claude to tent the world, and then if it was good enough for the Dixie Chicks, surely it's good enough for Pat Boone. All records, LPs and 'best of Pat' (an oxymoron if ever I've heard one) and such like travesties transferred to CD must be piled on to a bonfire and burned.

Yep, it seems that I can be as sensitive as Pat Boone, and who else can I blame than Pat Boone?

It's the only way to make the world safe for the young. Who knows if the long dormant virus might not suddenly return, and next thing you know men about town will have returned to using Brylcreem and wearing brown suits. Try running your fingers through Brylcreemed hair, and you'll know what it's like to plunge into the mugwump swamp.

And just to show how fearful I am, and how deadly serious, down below's my first offering for the pyre, and for the love of the lord, can we also include brown suits and shoes and the makers of Brylcreem in the tenting? Surely once we embark on this heroic journey, any and every brave deed must be considered.

Oh and as a bonus, we won't have to read Pat Boone ranting about politics. Hey, there's an upside beyond the upside.

Oh those weird Pat Boone eyes staring at me, shriveling my soul. Stop it, anything but that. On with the tenting before I go mad ...