A salute to Tom Lehrer
‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.
The songs of Tom Lehrer presented me, in my early teens, with my first exposure to the art of modern satire. He was some kind of genius, a Randy Newman with sharper teeth, achieving popularity in the 1950s and ’60s and then giving it all up to pursue his career as a teacher of mathematics at Harvard, MIT and elsewhere. In 2020 he announced that all his work was henceforward free from copyright considerations; anybody could do whatever they wanted with it.
He died the other day, aged 97, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve read some good obituaries, particularly one in the Guardian by Francis Beckett, whose play Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You will be performed at the OSO Arts Centre in Barnes, south-west London, in November. But none of those I’ve seen mentioned the couplet at the top of this piece. It comes from his song “Wernher von Braun”, about the German scientist who helped create the V2 for Hitler before working on ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA. These lines have stayed with me all my life, helping in a small but not insignificant way to form a view of the world.
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