ANNALS OF TINFOIL: Joey Scarbury - Visionary or Rovian Provocateur?

[mountebank]

I nearly spit my latte all over my Dell computer when I recalled this album cover from 1981.

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You might remember Joey Scarbury as the sweet voice behind the theme song to the brilliant 80s TV show "The Greatest American Hero." What is plainly obvious from this album cover, though, is that he was also either a political visionary or provocateur of Rovian proportions. Give or take a state or two (or three), Scarbury deftly predicted our current political lay-out when the Reagan Revolution was still in swaddling clothes. Dressed as an effete dandy, he is the archetypal "limousine liberal," and he veritably leans back on the decadent mid-Atlantic states as he would a gilded recamier. The red border can only represent The Silent Majority, those denizens of the breadbasket states (whose existence Scarbury blights out with his foppish presence). The rage of these Real Americans, expatriates in their own country (hence their location on the border of the album cover) who could only mutely watch as the excesses of the 70s redounded in liberal media from coast to coast, would soon boil over into the Backlash.

It's all right there, in red, white, and blue.

Joey Scarbury: Visionary and/or Rovian Provocateur