View from the Precipice

​

 

You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet

 

by Roman Sympos

 

 

January 21, 2026

 

I was getting close to sleeping through the night as New Year’s Day approached. The pace and magnitude of governmental outrages since Donald Trump’s inauguration had, after nearly a year, reached the point of saturation. They’d become a kind of white noise of moral insults, ratcheted up to 140 decibels—loud enough to rupture eardrums. By December I was deaf to the meaning of events, unable to make sense of any particular absurdity or indignity or criminal action in the cacophony of nonsense vying for my attention.  

 

White noise? No. A blizzard, an avalanche of noise. Buried alive.

 

I clawed down into the darkness like a hibernating animal. Why not?  Winter was here. After Christmas I stopped following the news cycle except for a few headlines of personal interest (“Is the new high school cost effective?”) and the outcome of Drake Maye’s latest game. I wrote. I did chess puzzles. I looked for new recipes to try.

 

I slept like a baby.

 

In a week or two I recovered my hearing, and the first thing I heard was what the prophet Elijah heard thousands of years ago, when the children of Israel betrayed their covenant and Elijah fled to a cave on Mt. Horeb. That’s where “the word of the Lord came unto him,” not as a whirlwind, not as an earthquake, not as a wildfire, but as “a still small voice” (Kings 19, 10-12).

 

Elijah left his cave. January arrived and I emerged to greet the new year.

 

And lo, whirlwinds and earthquakes! And a new whisper, unmistakable.

 

“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

 

Venezuela.

 

Renee Nicole Good.

 

Greenland. (Greenland!)

 

Absurd? Impossible?

 

“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

 

The year was less than a week old and I was already hoping for an invasion. By Denmark. Maybe an amphibious landing near the Lincoln Memorial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C’mon, Danes! Where’s your Viking spirit?

 

That whisper.

 

Where had I heard it before?

 

No, not Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who made “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” the stuttering catchphrase of ‘70s rock and roll. Like its auditory counterpart, however, Randy Bachman’s variation entered pop culture long before he was born, in the early, innocent years of mass entertainment known as vaudeville. Jimmy Durante, for instance, the radio and TV comedian who started out as a jazz pianist in New York nightclubs, used it as part of his stage act decades ahead of BTO.

 

Vaudeville is also where “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” got its start, in 1919, when Al Jolson, the Tin Pan Alley vocalist who went on to headline the first talkie in motion picture history, The Jazz Singer, recorded a song by that name for the Columbia Graphophone Company.

 

Some of my younger readers, I suspect, don’t know what I’m talking about. So gather ‘round, kids. Before Netflix, before podcasts, before cable TV and Sirius, long before broadcast TV or radio—in fact, before Marconi invented the radio—there was vaudeville.

 

Roughly coeval with early 19th century melodrama, vaudeville was the modern world’s first form of popular mass entertainment. It originated in France, where two traditional genres of satirical song—the rural Vau de Vire, named for its birthplace in the Vire Valley of Normandy, and the voix de ville, or “voice of the town,” which arose in France’s urban centers—merged in the 16th and 17th centuries to become the variety show or “revue” of the 1800s, first in France, later in the US. The vaudeville show that evolved from them comprised songs interspersed with jokes, patter, dances (often risqué), and stunts.

 

Those of us old enough to remember when TVs were ponderous cyclopses of varnished wood squatting in our living rooms spent our childhoods bathed in the flickering cathode rays of vaudeville’s dying sun: the variety show. Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, The Red Skelton Show, The Gary Moore Show, The Ed Sullivan Show—Durante himself hosted a variety show—these dominated the broadcast networks of the ‘50s, along with horse operas like Gunsmoke and Cheyanne and situation comedies like I Love Lucy. They were populated by dancers, singers, acrobats, and standup comics who’d cut their teeth in vaudeville.

 

The main target of satire for vaudeville’s earliest French progenitors was the nobility—the “one percent,” the wealthy, governing classes. By the time Jolson was packing the movie theaters, however, vaudeville had lost its satirical edge, which, with a few exceptions like Will Rogers, it wouldn’t regain until the arrival of a distant descendent, Saturday Night Live. Vaudeville continued to thrive, however, on the American Dream of ethnic assimilation. Jimmy Cagney’s Academy Award winning star turn in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), which tells the rags-to-riches story of the Irish American Broadway showman George M. Cohan, pretty much sums it up.

 

Or take Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, in which Jacob (“Jakie” to his friends) Rabinowitz, an immigrant Jewish Cantor’s son, runs away from home when his father threatens to beat him for sneaking out and singing “raggy-time” songs in public. Assuming the stage name “Jack Robin,” little Jakie sets out to become “a jazz singer.” Fame eludes him, however, until, at “Coffee Dan’s” night club (it’s 1927 and Prohibition has yet to be repealed), he gets his big chance. After hamming it up on “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” a father’s love song to his little boy, and eliciting the audience’s frantic cheers and applause, Jolson tells them, in what must count as one of the earliest examples of product placement, “Wait—you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”—the title of his 1919 hit song.

 

The rest of the movie writes itself. Apparently, if you can make it there, at Coffee Dan’s, you can make it anywhere.

 

Vaudeville’s greatest stars were themselves immigrants who “made it” in the USA by sheer talent, brains, and chutzpah. Cohan was the son of Irish immigrants. Durante was born to an Italian immigrant family on New York’s Lower East Side. The Marx Brothers were the sons of Jewish immigrants living hand-to-mouth in Yorkville, the German and East European enclave just north of Durante’s neighborhood.

 

Al Jolson himself was born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, the fifth and youngest child of Moses Rubin Yoelson, a rabbi and cantor who came to New York to make a better life for his family. Jolson didn’t have to run away from home to start his career, but he did live in an orphanage after his mother died and started singing for coins on street corners with his brother at the age of 13. Two years later he landed his first regular gig as a circus performer, and by his mid-twenties he was a star on the vaudeville circuit.

 

Was it irony that had cemented in my mind the connection between Jakie Rabinowitz’s aspirational tag line and the most brutal and inhumane anti-immigration president in our nation’s history? Or was it something more obvious?

 

For until ten years ago, I don’t believe we’d ever elected a vaudeville comedian to the office of President of the United States, let alone re-elected one. And a pretty poor one, at that. Life under Trump is like being forced to watch Yankee Doodle Dandy with Oliver Hardy in the starring role. No, I take that back. More like one of those bad, scary clowns you see in horror flicks. Angry, orange-haired master of mayhem, lame comedian, bumbling acrobat, tone-deaf song-and-dance man, and miles gloriosus all rolled up in one razzle-dazzle ball of confusion. His knee-slapping solecisms and fatuous bloviating have become the stuff of memes and an object of world-wide ridicule, revulsion, and now, fear.

 

And we ain’t heard nothin’ yet!

 

Whether the connection was ironic or as straight as a deadpan one-liner, I couldn’t break it. Like the mythical earwig, which was thought to burrow into your ear and eat your brain, the nagging whisper wouldn’t go away. How could it?  Why would it, when it found so much to nourish it in the damp, dark basement of my mind? No ENT had the tools or training to help me.  This was a malaise of the soul, not the soma.

 

So I went to church.

 

It was Martin Luther King weekend and our senior minister, the Reverend Ann Mason, was preaching. Her sermon, “The Pulsing Heart of Faith,” took its theme from an open invitation written by the Unitarian Universalist inmates of the Newton Correctional Facility in Newton, IA, who had banded together to create a UU Fellowship within their prison walls. The invitation reads, in part, “The heart in your chest pulses with life as does mine,” and ends with the words, “Every soul who seeks our community will be given the opportunity to become the masterpiece that nature intended.”

 

I’ve never put much faith in faith-healing. But I can now say I’ve experienced it.

 

The whisper was gone, and in its place I heard, again, that other still, small voice, the one that drew Elijah from his cave. It was more insistent, and I could hear it more clearly.

 

Elijah heard it say, “Do God’s work.”

 

I heard it say, “Become the masterpiece that nature intended.”

 

Same voice. Call it, for lack of a better name, conscience.

 

Reverend Ann ended by announcing her departure on Wednesday for Minneapolis, where she and her UU colleagues would join thousands of other protesters calling out ICE’s unchecked, unconstitutional, and lethal violence against America’s citizens and immigrants on the streets of that city.

 

People making themselves the masterpieces nature intended.

 

When I finish writing this, I’ll be leaving to join a demonstration outside the ICE field office in Burlington, MA. It’s gathered there weekly for many months without me and not missed a beat, so clearly I need it more than it needs me. If I have any fears left, it’s that I’ll fail not only at becoming the masterpiece that nature intended (whatever that may end up looking like), but at achieving even a decent likeness.

 

No, I don’t feel born again. I’m not even sure the cure will last. If I do fall short, at least it won't be for lack of trying, and whatever the outcome I will have added my voice to the growing chorus of voices with a message for Donald Trump.

 

No need to tell you what it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postscript:

 

January 25, 2026

 

Alex Pretti.