Donny Osmond: The Last Empire’s Accidental Soundtrack—and Why the World Still Hums Along
OSMOND IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA (AND TIKTOK)
From the Diplomatic Lounge of Dave’s Locker, somewhere above the 38th parallel
The name Donny Osmond still triggers Pavlovian flashbacks in three distinct planetary zones. In Manila karaoke bars, “Puppy Love” is the go-to apology ballad for husbands who forgot their anniversaries—nothing says contrition like a falsetto warble that once made Ferdinand Marcos tap his loafers. In the duty-free zone of Dubai International, a looped clip of Donny crooning “Crazy Horses” plays on the perfume screens, presumably to remind travelers that the 1970s were a controlled substance. And in the hermetically sealed karaoke pods of Seoul’s Gangnam district, Gen-Z Koreans Auto-Tune the chorus into something that sounds like a wounded fax machine, thereby completing the circle of geopolitical irony.
How, you ask, did a Mormon crooner from Utah become a piece of floating soft-power driftwood? The short answer is that empires collapse, currencies hyperventilate, but a well-scrubbed chorus lodges itself in the human hippocampus like a popcorn kernel. The long answer involves UNESCO, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a German telecom giant that licensed Osmond ringtones to finance 5G towers in sub-Saharan Africa—proof that every falsetto eventually becomes infrastructure.
Consider the numbers. In 1972, at the height of Osmondmania, the U.S. recorded a balance-of-payments surplus roughly equal to the merchandising revenue from Donny dolls sold in Tokyo alone. Fast-forward five decades and Japan is using those same dolls—now collectors’ items—in a soft-diplomacy exhibit titled “When America Was Harmless.” Visitors receive a commemorative coin featuring Donny’s smile on one side and a QR code on the other that links to a State Department travel advisory. Nothing says “evolution of soft power” like a teen idol turned liability disclaimer.
Meanwhile, the European Union—ever the connoisseur of cultural guilt—has quietly added “Puppy Love” to its list of dual-use technologies. Play it at a border checkpoint and watch hardened migrants tear up, which is apparently more cost-effective than tear gas. Brussels calls the initiative “Emotional Deterrence.” Critics call it weaponized nostalgia. Either way, the royalties still flow to Provo, Utah, where the Osmond family compound now houses a server farm that mines cryptocurrency while blasting a remastered version of “Go Away Little Girl.” The carbon offset? One tree planted for every TikTok dance challenge set to the chorus.
And let us not overlook the Belt & Road initiative’s forgotten soundtrack. In a muddy construction camp outside Nairobi, Chinese engineers unwind by screening grainy VHS tapes of The Donny & Marie Show. The tapes, smuggled in by a Filipino welder, have become an unofficial labor-management tool; when disputes arise, both sides agree to pause and watch Marie attempt to out-diva Donny for three minutes. Productivity rises 11%. The World Bank is studying the phenomenon under the file name “Osmond Arbitration Protocol.” The IMF wants a cut.
Back home, America treats Donny like a national appendix: present, benign, occasionally inflamed by a Vegas residency. Yet abroad he remains a living Rosetta Stone. Decode the Osmond smile and you understand why post-war multilateralism needed unthreatening white teeth. Decode the sequined jumpsuit and you grasp the IMF’s structural-adjustment programs: all sparkle on top, austerity underneath. Even North Korea’s state orchestra has rehearsed a Muzak version of “Soldier of Love,” reportedly because Kim Jong Un finds the key change “emotionally instructive.” Analysts at Langley are still debating whether this counts as sanctions evasion or performance art.
So, as COP delegates argue over carbon budgets and grain futures, remember that a 66-year-old man in Provo is humming a 1971 chorus that now underwrites data centers, border policy, and at least one micro-currency pegged to the Thai baht. Empires fall, treaties expire, but the chorus—that immaculate, indestructible chorus—keeps playing in the elevator of global governance, forever stuck between floors, forever in the key of manufactured innocence. If that isn’t the sound of late capitalism’s pulse oximeter, I don’t know what is.
