Today’s Christmas post is Simon & Garfunkel’s version of ‘Silent Night’ known as ‘Silent Night -7 O’Clock news’ as interspersed with their rendition of the carol is the evening news. And boy is this sad.

According to the Wiki entry, this is a simulated bulletin of August 3, 1966.

“This is the early evening edition of the news.
The recent fight in the House of Representatives was over the open housing
section of the Civil Rights Bill.
Brought traditional enemies together but it left the defenders of the
measure without the votes of their strongest supporters.
President Johnson originally proposed an outright ban covering discrimination
by everyone for every type of housing but it had no chance from the start
and everyone in Congress knew it.
A compromise was painfully worked out in the House Judiciary Committee.
In Los Angeles today comedian Lenny Bruce died of what was believed to be an
overdoes of narcotics.
Bruce was 42 years old.
Dr. Martin Luther King says he does not intend to cancel plans for an open
housing march Sunday into the Chicago suburb of Cicero.
Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogleby asked King to call off the march and the
police in Cicero said they would ask the National Guard to be called out
if it is held.
King, now in Atlanta, Georgia, plans to return to Chicago Tuesday.
In Chicago Richard Speck, accused murderer of nine student nurses, was brought
before a grand jury today for indictment.
The nurses were found stabbed an strangled in their Chicago apartment.
In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the
House Committee on Un-American activities continued it’s probe into anti-
Viet nam war protests.
Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting
anti-war slogans.
Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial
increase in the present war effort in Viet nam, the U.S. should look forward
to five more years of war.
In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York,
Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single
weapon working against the U.S.
That’s the 7 o’clock edition of the news,
Goodnight.”

And then Paul and Art give us a final verse of what is the saddest and greatest Christmas carol ever written:

Silent night
Holy night
All is calm
All is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

This has not lost its power in the nearly fifty years since it was recorded. We of course have the benefit of history, and somehow it makes the song even more heartbreaking. Martin Luther King will die a mere two years later, shot as a victim of the terrible prejudices he fought so hard to overcome. The Vietnam War will drag on and on, and eventually the US will have to concede defeat. Former Vice-President Nixon will end up being remembered as the only US President to have to resign.

And yet…

You can find this on Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme.