Strap in, kids--it's soapbox time. This week I go deep into why I hate the smiley-face, the "peace" sign and why the Beatles' legacy bugs the shit out of me.
Stop me
if you’ve heard this one. A crazy foreign dictator waggles nukes at the U.S. as
he threatens to wipe every country who doesn’t agree with him from the face of
the earth. If anyone so much as LOOKS at him wrong, he’ll do it! Swear to God,
he’ll do it!
Sound familiar? Yeah. The Kim
family’s been a boogeyman for the U.S. literally since I was a child, taking on
Saturday-morning supervillain status. Most of us still see them as
toothless—compared to the United States. The odds of us, even of Californians,
getting nuked by a bunch of nuts with homemade rockets are pretty slim. While a
full-scale nuclear attack would be a tricky thing to fend off (can we stop it?
We don’t really know! How exciting!) supposedly a hit from Pyongyang would be like throwing pebbles at a giant. At
least, that’s what we’re all trained to think. Despite all the shit the DOD
gets for its Godzilla-sized budget and wasteful allocation of resources, we are
all conditioned to assume the U.S. is best and smarterest at fending off nuclear attacks, because instead of education we put all our federal dollary-doos into
stuff like this. Surely our doom lasers, which can’t shoot through fog or dense cloud, will save
us from Kim and his endless armies of starving, brainwashed stormtroopers.
But
that’s a bit of a dark topic, ennit? Let’s talk about peace.
Specifically,
let’s talk about how we look at peace in this country. The 60’s has always
fascinated me, and not in a nostalgic way, because I wasn’t there.
It’s been immortalized in pop culture ever since the decade itself out. It was,
supposedly, the first time a counterculture movement made real dents in the
superstructure of America.
But did
it, really? When the lofty-minded flower-children of that era ran smack into
the 70’s—into the Manson family, Jonestown, designer drugs and Iran—all of that
idealism was lost, and we traded a newer, brighter vision of the world for the
Home Shopping Network and Ronald Reagan. No one has ever gotten up since and
demanded a complete social revolution. (Well, except for Occupy, but the police infiltrators took care of that pretty efficiently.)
When I
was a kid, I went to a Charter school. And not just any Charter school—a Montessori charter school. Those who
know Maria Montessori’s history usually conclude she was a cool person: she was
ahead of her time, predicting kids didn’t always learn in a linear, A-to-B
fashion. Sometimes to get important info into a child’s fuzzy head, you had to
think outside the box. You had to get weird
with it.
They certainly
got weird with it, in my school. From
elementary all the way through middle school, we were drilled in such exotic
policies as the Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated,
etc.) and sitting in a forum-style circle during daily meetings. To this day I
still wonder if any of that stuff remained in the hearts and minds of students,
or if they just brushed it off when they walked out the doors and returned to
cable TV, boomer-parents and the Iraq War’s deepening miasma. It was hard to absorb
peace and tranquility when your country was bombing a bunch of people into dust
on the other side of the planet.
The
Charter school I went to was like a secret hideout, a citadel for hippies and
boomer free-thinkers trying out different ways of teaching than smooshing us
all into desks and shouting at us. I’ll always be grateful they tried this, though I did get quite a
dose of culture shock when I went to high-school after and got my ass kicked
for trying to “treat others as I’d like to be treated.” Turns out those
policies are pretty hard to apply in the quote-unquote Real World, and people
have a tendency to call you a pussy and a fag when you practice non-violence.
Anyway,
peace. Peace is tricky and nebulous, especially in a country that hasn’t been
out of international conflict since the years after WW2, and that was just
before we said “hey Korea, how’s it going, we got bored not shooting stuff so
GIRD YOUR LOINS, HERE COMES ‘MERICA.”
We all want peace in the USA, right? We’d
all love to see a world where the news isn’t filled with suicide bombings We’d
love to see a world where dictators are quietly shuffled off the world stage
and replaced with democracies of some stripe or another.
Of
course, it doesn’t really happen like that. We tried that in Iraq, in Libya, and even Syria for a few hours until
our “president” got bored with it. We can’t just strong-arm the world into
accepting our form of government. That attitude has gotten us in more trouble
than ten generations of Americans can fix. And the reason we keep fucking this
up is not just because the people in charge of foreign policy are idiots, or
because our Congress is beholden to oil and gun lobbies. (Anyone feel weird
that we just sold a bunch of arms to Taiwan? Isn’t it kind of weird that our country
is selling guns like some creep in an alley wearing an American flag
trench-coat? Is it just me, or is that super weird?) This attitude has gotten
us in trouble because we have a fundamental flaw perceiving what peace is.
Consider
the hippies. These guys were the real deal, the authentic
item: doing LSD and toking up and generally just being a bunch of groovy
revolutionaries. Except, with very few exceptions, there was nothing
revolutionary about them. You don’t overthrow a government or a set of ideas by
sitting on your ass and going “everything is astral, maaan.” And I think they
knew it. Outside the few exceptions (Black Panthers, or Marxist hippies who
burned books on college campuses) there was nothing particularly earth-shattering
about the counterculture of the time. It may have seemed that way to the Greatest Generation (“Young Billy is smoking
the pot and having the sex! Disown him!”) but in actuality they weren’t
committing to any of the logistical or long-term requirements a revolution needed: real political change, starting
new parties or successfully running for office, using new platforms like TV and
talk radio to spread and refine their ideas of peace. Take a look at what happens when someone dares to walk outside the typical boundaries of the two-party system today:
It's fucking impossible. The decks are stacked. Hell, turning a party against itself by playing center against left is so effective, even Russia got in on the action. Just saying.
We never had a real revolution because the boomers didn't want to. It was more comfortable to whip up trouble for a few
years, and then fade away. In the end, hippies just wanted to sit on
their asses and have a good time. They talked a big game and got to play counter-conformist, but the type of peace espoused by hippies in this is deeply flawed because it didn't do anything. Let’s talk about their music, for a minute. Let’s talk about
Bob.
Bob is
a name I’m going to give a dude who worked as music instructor at my Charter
school. Bob was generally a chill guy: he had dreadlocks, which were
surprisingly lice-free for a white guy, and he was genuinely a virtuoso at
music: he knew like fifteen instruments and could play them all masterfully. I
don’t think the parents liked him much, and because of that, we kids loved him.
The trouble was, we didn’t understand
him.
Bob
taught us a lot of cool songs in elementary. We sang “Octopus’ Garden” and wow,
wasn’t that cool? An octopus with a garden, radical. We also sang “Revolution.”
My problems with the Beatles are a little too big to put into one blog post, so
let’s do the cliff-notes version: the Beatles were a very skilled, very
influential group of musicians who did absolutely nothing with their cultural legacy.
They became immortal and, like all boomers, used their newfound generational power
to cash in immediately. I’m not saying their music wasn’t genuine, or that they
were bad people. But they had all this amazing cultural energy, and what did
they use it for? To sell albums.
They
did manage to become “the music of peace.” But what does that mean, exactly?
When Bob taught us “Revolution” we absolutely dug it, because wow, revolution
sounded exciting! Plus the beat was nice and you gotta love that guitar riffing
in the background. But the lyrics didn't exactly work for me, long-term.
“You
say you’ll change the constitution,
Well, you know / We’d all love to change
your head.
You tell me it’s the institution, / Well, you know,
You better
free your mind instead.
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow!”
Okay,
unpacking this. First of all, this song is fantastic as an anti-radicalism
jibe, a tongue-in-cheek mockery of faux-Marxists and deluded rioters who
weren’t really looking for progress,
just to break stuff. Lennon and co. knew a band-wagon when they saw one: hell,
they WERE the ultimate band-wagon. The song is an anthem for moderates, for
middle-roaders, for people who saw the flag-burning and stuff going on and said
“whoa, dude, you gotta chill.” But
they were also defending their comfortable position on top of the pile. The
Beatles, before they were even finished rising to the top, had already become
the status quo. They embodied what you might call the moderate 60’s—that’s why
we still play them, rather than leftist thrash metal. They’re comforting,
they’re familiar. And hey’re the endemic problem with the 60’s: a watered-down
legacy that left us kids with no actual goals
and objectives for counter-cultural activism.
We sang
the words, but we had no idea what the 60’s actually were about. We had no understanding why anyone would want to change the
Constitution, or why revolution felt necessary to people at that time, or why
“freeing your mind” was important or indeed how to do that (spoiler, it’s just drugs.)
We had no idea who the hell Chairman Mao was. And when Bob tried to explain all
this, we did our own “tune in and drop out” and didn’t get it. We hadn’t lived
it, so we didn’t really care. We couldn’t
understand that political involvement was important and crucial to stop your
government from being a bunch of dicks all the time. Vietnam had happened
thirty years before most of us were born.
Let’s
go back to that refrain: “Don’t you know, it’s gonna be alright.” Nice! Very
reaffirming. But in the years since the 60’s it’s become very clear that
everything, in fact, is not gonna be alright. Kind of the opposite. We have
relative peace and quiet here in the U.S. (despite news stations telling us
ISIS is hiding under our beds) and our cities are slowly becoming less violent,
year by year. But the toxic undercurrent of cheap, fake “peace” as a currency
of tranquility is something the 60’s never left behind. Because after the 60’s
quieted down, “give peace a chance” no longer meant world peace. It meant “convenient
peace for us.” Lennon’s anthem of
“just sit back and everything’s gonna be alright” was a great way to tell radicals
to calm the fuck down and try to have dialogue. But it hasn’t worked. We’ve only
gotten more isolated, more polarized.
So
what’s missing? What’s the solution? I am going to do the straw-man thing a
little harder and point at the baby boomers for a minute. The boomers kicked
off the original counterculture, and then happily let it fade, turning it into
flower-shirts and retro VW paint-jobs. (Don’t get me started on the smiley-face.)
They never followed through on their promise to “give peace a chance.” Mostly
because once they sobered up and saw “HELTER SKELTER” in every headline, the 9
to 5 job seemed a much better option than activism. The recessions of the 70s
and 80s also kicked revolution in the ass. It’s really tough to jump-start
society when you’re struggling to pay for half a tank of gas.
But
with the exception of guys like Bob who struggled to teach the meaning of what
they’d learned to the new generation, people stopped caring about making change. Easier to be complacent, to salute the
flag and never question it. People wonder why Trump won; one of the reasons is,
the counterculture lost the few teeth it had, and the “left” ended up going for
Hillary, a middle-of-the-road glass of water whose idea of “going high” never
worked against an enemy who went low, appealing to the lowest level of human
instinct. That's how we got... well, basically this.
In spite of the continual wars we make, the comforting culture of “peace, man” remains
seductive: I see it on Jamaica Plain bumper stickers all the time. But what
that sentiment means is “a peace that is convenient for the middle class person
driving this car.” It doesn’t mean “I am going to campaign to stop my country
bombing the shit out of the Middle East, again.” It doesn’t mean “I am going to
work to find solutions to the toxic and broken two-party system.” It means “I
am going to get high, do some crystal chakra cleansing, and tell myself everything is fine. Because that
makes me feel better than working with reality.”
Peace,
real peace, takes work—maybe even a lifetime of work. And that’s assuming we
really want it, and not just a comfortable set of blinkers. Until we’re ready
to do that work, maybe we should ditch the bumper stickers, and stop pretending
like everything’s gonna be great—no matter how groovy that makes us feel.
