Finding humor in nuclear war, Walker's judgement plunges

[Updated from 12/16] I'm not talking about his tweeting pictures of half-eaten sandwiches or releasing distorted economic data to paper over his failed jobs' promise that has kept the state's economy stalled far behind the national recovery.

I'm talking about Walker making light of the bright flashes that would accompany a nuclear war and missing the message in a song he oddly went out of his way to quote, use and manipulate out-of-context.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Thursday he knows a 1980s rock song he quoted in a speech about the state's economy is about a pending nuclear holocaust.

"That's why I didn't quote the whole song," Walker said, with a laugh, when asked why he made the reference when speaking to hundreds of business, education and government leaders at the Future Wisconsin Economic Summit.

Walker was so committed to quoting the 1986 Timbuk3 song, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades," that he broke out a pair of dark sunglasses at the beginning of his speech…some of you may be young enough you don't remember them, but I remember the '80s...Remember that great song, 'The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades'?"

But does Walker know what he's talking about?

A couple of 12/17 updates: The story quotes Walker making this claim:

Walker briefly intoned some of the lyrics of the Timbuk3 song when asked after his speech if he knew its meaning. "I do. 'As a student I got good grades studying nuclear,'" Walker said.

My questions are:

Walker is the self-declared Ronald Reagan clone. He and spouse Tonette got married on Reagan's birthday so they could celebrate both events on the same, special day.

And he was allowed to hold the Reagan family Bible, an anecdote he wove into speeches to spellbound crowds:

"And they brought over a pair of white gloves to me and they said, 'No one has touched this since President Reagan. It is his mother's Bible that he took the oath of office on. Mrs. Reagan would like you to hold it and take a picture with it'," Walker said in a YouTube video of part of the speech posted by a reporter for the liberal magazine The Progressive.

Audience members can be heard gasping, then applauding as Walker tells the story.

But while Walker says he knows and understands the lyrics to the song he quoted so out-of-context, I wonder if he knows that the song, laden with satire, is both antiwar and anti-Reagan, according to the group which wrote and recorded it?

'A lot of people thought it was some kind of real optimistic song about how Reaganomics is going to save us all,'' admitted Pat MacDonald, who, along with wife Barbara Kooyman and a portable tape player, make up Timbuk 3.

''I was surprised,'' MacDonald, 34, said, ''but then I should've known it would happen that way because I know people listen to lyrics real peripherally.''

From a surface listen to the song, it's easy for a casual listener to be misled -- or, at the very least, confused -- by MacDonald's intent. You can only get the satire behind lines such as ''I study nuclear science/ I love my classes'' and ''I'm doin' all right/ Gettin' good grades/ The future's so bright/ I've gotta wear shades'' if you fixate on his delivery.

He had written a couple of verses that make the song's meaning more obvious. One went: ''Well I'm well aware/ Of the world out there/ Getting blown to bits/ But what do I care?'' Another referred to a Reagan supporter as a ''flamin' fascist.'' Neither of those made the final cut, however.

''You understand, these verses would've helped the song be understood a bit more,'' MacDonald explained, ''but I thought they were too heavy-handed. The idea is already expressed in the song without having to spell it out like that.

Also:

What does Walker's remark "I got good grades studying nuclear" mean?

Nuclear what? Chemistry? Physics? Biology? Warfare?

Who says "I got good grades studying nuclear?"

Maybe we could clear this up and get a more complete picture of Walker the student if he released that Marquette University transcript he refused to disclose. 

A final point:

I was on a journalism fellowship to Japan in 1987, and was in Hiroshima on the 42nd anniversary of that city's destruction by a nuclear weapon.

I also toured the Peace Museum and Park there. 

This I can tell you: No one there 'studying nuclear' finds a way to work it into anything but reverence.

And sunglasses:

About a nuclear explosion:

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Flash Burn

As already stated, a characteristic feature of the atomic bomb, which is quite foreign to ordinary explosives, is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light. For a sufficiently large explosion, the flash burn produced by this radiated energy will become the dominant cause of damage, since the area of burn damage will increase in proportion to the energy released, whereas the area of blast damage increases only with the two-thirds power of the energy....

The duration of the heat radiation from the bomb is so short, just a few thousandths of a second, that there is no time for the energy falling on a surface to be dissipated by thermal defusion; the flash burn is typically a surface effect. In other words the surface of either a person or an object exposed to the flash is raised to a very high temperature while immediately beneath the surface very little rise in temperature occurs. 

The flash burning of the surface of objects, particularly wooden objects, occurred in Hiroshima up to a radius of 9,500 feet from X; at Nagasaki burns were visible up to 11,000 feet from X.

See what I mean, sunglasses, which Walker was so invested in using as a prop that he posted it on his Twitter feed:

Further update: 

Walker feels the need to defend himself on Twitter, omitting, of course, that Wisconsin has more people, period, that ever before, and the state's new-jobs rate which puts us 33rd out of 50 trails the national rate by about 50%: 

Scott Walker ‏@ScottWalker  Dec 15

More evidence that the media has lost it:

And:

The future's so bright in WI: more people are employed in 2016 than ever before, % of people working one of the highest in the country.

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/entertainment/article121056078.html#storylink=cpy