Did a line from a popular song half a century ago foreshadow the final days of the Trump Presidency? That question sounds like the kind of online click-bait I always fall for. Did Nostradamus really predict the coronavirus? Which 1980s female heartthrob would I not recognize today?
The question also begs other, more pertinent questions from discerning ECA readers. What is the song, and which outrageous Trump administration action did it predict? And what does this have to do with ethical college admissions, this blog’s expressed beat?
There is a connection, and we’ll get there eventually. Until then I beg your pardon as I digress more than usual.
So what 1970-ish pop song might loosely be interpreted to have predicted recent political events? There are multiple candidates, depending on your willingness to take a leap of faith or logic. While the politics are different, the mob violence and attempted insurrection of the U.S. Capitol bring to mind a song written by Stephen Stills during his time in the Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth, with its reference to “a thousand people in the street,” and another song sung by Stills as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, referring to “four dead in Ohio.” The Trump Administration’s attempts to deny the election results and gum up the peaceful transition of power recall Don MacLean’s American Pie with its reference to “the players tried to take the field, the marching band refused to yield.” If we really want to attempt to extend the argument and get cute, we could even include Three Dog Night (“liar, liar”) or Michael Jackson’s second solo hit, Rockin’ Robin (“tweet, tweet”).
The correct answer in this case is, to borrow an SAT phrase, “none of the above.” The song in question is what Casey Kasem might have described as a number one country hit that crossed over to become a top five hit nearly 50 years ago. It is also a song that includes in its very first line the rhyme “pardon” and “rose garden.” It’s Lynn Anderson’s 1971 hit single, Rose Garden.
Rose Garden was composed by singer-songwriter Joe South. I remember that name, but didn’t know much about him until researching this piece. In case you are wondering, Joe South was not his real name, but unlike Bill Murray’s lounge singer character on Saturday Night Live, his last name did not change depending on in what part of the country he was performing.
Joe South was an accomplished studio musician whose credits include playing on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album, Aretha Franklin’s recording of Chain of Fools, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence album. In addition to Rose Garden he wrote songs ranging from Games People Play to Walk a Mile in My Shoes to the Deep Purple song Hush.
But was Joe South prescient, not only a songwriter but also a prophet? To answer that question let us turn to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, named for the 14th century philosopher William of Occam. Occam’s Razor states that when evaluating multiple explanations for the same event, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. William of Occam was clearly neither a conspiracy theorist nor an aficionado of TV murder mysteries.
Applying Occam’s Razor to the song Rose Garden, the simplest answer is that Joe South was not predicting Donald Trump’s “Get Out of Jail Free” pardon-fest. The song does rhyme “pardon” and “rose garden” in its very first line, but the narrator states that he or she (Lynn Anderson chose the song over objections that it was not a song for a female singer) never promised a rose garden, not the Rose Garden.
The obvious explanation for the pairing of “pardon” and “rose garden” is that there are few other rhymes. There is “harden,” and if you are not a purist you could stretch to get “carton” or “Spartan.” The other options are all proper names. There is NBA star James Harden, who wasn’t born when the song was written. There are actresses Eve Arden and Marcia Gay Harden, golfer Harry Varden, and former Virginia Governor Colgate Darden, for whom the business school at the University of Virginia is named. There also used to be a Jarden consumer products company, whose products ranged from Mr. Coffee to Yankee Candle to the Crock-Pot to Rawlings baseball equipment.
That brings us back to the college admissions connection. Two of those pardoned by Trump in the final weeks of his term have previously been in the news for their involvement in admission-related scandals.
One of the 143 pardoned in Trump’s final hours was Miami developer Robert Zangrillo, who was among those arrested in March, 2019 as part of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal. Zangrillo was accused of paying $250,000 to get his daughter admitted to the University of Southern California as a faux crew transfer recruit. He pleaded not guilty and had not yet gone to trial.
Zangrillo, the CEO of private investment firm Dragon Global, denied that he had worked with Rick Singer to bribe officials at USC, instead characterizing the money as a legitimate donation. He and his lawyer subpoenaed USC officials for documents attempting to prove that the university was anything but a victim in the bribery scandal, er, donation solicitation.
A White House statement regarding the Zangrillo pardon described him as a “well-respected business leader and philanthropist” and stated that daughter Amber Zangrillo did not have others take admissions tests for her and that she currently maintains a GPA of 3.9 at USC. That is probably due to the extra study time she has gained from not rowing in college, an activity she claimed in her transfer application took up 44 hours each week over a four-month period.
I don’t know that we ever expected Trump White House statements to contain “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” but there is an important detail left out. Amber Zangrillo may not have had any of Singer’s confederates take the SAT or ACT on her behalf, but she was the only student named in the original FBI investigation who had one of Singer’s employees actually take a class for her, retaking an art history class that Amber Zangrillo had failed.
There is a second individual on Trump’s pardon list with a sketchy college admissions past. Several weeks ago Trump commuted the sentence of another Floridian, Philip Esformes. Esformes was serving a 20-year sentence for orchestrating the largest Medicare fraud in the nation’s history.
Esformes also had a connection with Rick Singer. While not charged in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, forensic accountants sorting through Esformes’ Medicare fraud discovered that he had used $400,000 of the money to make a contribution to Singer’s Key Worldwide Foundation. The Los Angeles Times reported in July of 2019 that Esformes had paid Singer in 2012 to “slip his daughter into USC as a fake soccer recruit” and fix his son’s college entrance exams.
Philip Esformes took a page from Singer’s playbook by paying University of Pennsylvania basketball coach Jerome Allen $300,000 in bribes to facilitate son Morris Esformes’ admission to Penn as a basketball recruit. Allen took the money on his way to becoming an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics. Morris Esformes attended Penn but never made the basketball team. I wrote about that scandal in a column for Inside Higher Ed back in 2018, and was subsequently interviewed for an article that appeared in Sports Illustrated (but not quoted, to my immense disappointment).
Morris Esformes graduated from Penn, and now his father has graduated from the pen.
I beg your pardon (for the expletive I just uttered, but chose not to print).