I first saw Calvin Trillin on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart reading excerpts from Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme, and immediately knew that I wanted to try setting some of those poems to music. His sense of humor was very endearing, and I appreciated the way his poems criticized without being unnecessarily nasty or shrill. A few years, later, this piece was archived because I felt it was somehow “dated.” I realized in 2019 that we’re still facing most of these challenges, and that sadly this piece is likely to be “timely” for longer than I would have liked.