“Down to the Ark” reimagines the 2008 American election as having even grander consequences.

Track: “Down to the Ark”
Album: Unreleased (recorded for Weekend America, a public radio show for American Public Media)

“That’s just not sort of what I do.” – John Darnielle, on writing political satire without being partisan.

“Down to the Ark” exists solely as a one-off recording for Weekend America, a now-defunct radio show from Minnesota. You can still read the comments on the original post here, and the fact that so much of this still exists on the web for a radio program that hasn’t aired in almost fifteen years is both remarkable and a testament to public radio in some sort of way. The song was written for “Super Tuesday,” the day in American elections where, typically, the primary candidates for political parties are decided given the number of states that vote on that same day. It certainly felt like the end of days for American politics in 2008, which, in turn, feels quaint now as I write this in 2023. I’m sure if you’re reading this later than that, you’ll laugh at even what we thought was the end of days in 2023. I hope that’s not true, but, well, you’d know better than me, right?

The “sticker for our shirts” is the “I Voted!” sticker you’ll get if you vote in an American election, because we need a treat to entice us to vote. In Darnielle’s tale, we’re voting for literal monsters and thus have “just one way to go.” John Darnielle has talked before about people reading too much into some non-political songs but in the years since 2008 he’s had a whole new generation of fascists to write about. There’s a lot to unpack about any political song — Darnielle is a staunch liberal, so the “just one way to go” only works if these are actual monsters — but especially so for one frozen in 2008.