Enter the Nightmare-Fueled World of "Josie and the Pussycats"

               Once upon a time, in a world of soda fountains and family-safe shenanigans, there was a boy named Archie. Archie is and was the star of “Archie Comics,” a deeply mismanaged funny-book targeting (it seemed) the same demographic as Bazooka Joe. Over the years, Archie has had countless spinoffs, including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Afterlife with Archie, and the inexplicably amazing Archie Vs. Predator. Today we’re going to talk about the least-known of the spinoffs, the 2001 Universal Studios blunder, Josie and the Pussycats.

               “Hold it, pal,” you say, lowering your croissant, “ain’t this a literary blog? Where the hell’s the literature?”

               Well, yeah it is. But your Loyal Writer is finishing up the second draft of a novel and he’s a bit tired, so a reaction-post about a pre-teen pop parody is about all he can do right now. Okay?

               “Fine, but... Aren’t you worried you might alienate readers who come here for high-quality, intellectual stimulation—”

               Hey, relax. I know what I’m doing here. Besides, this movie has Alan Cumming in it. And the Illuminati. Everyone loves those two things specifically, right?

               “Actually…”

               Ah, shut up and eat your hypothetical croissant.

You can feel the obscurity seeping out of every pixel, can’t you?

               So, Josie and the Pussycats. This movie was based on a comic of the same name published by Archie Comics. Josie and crew were pretty popular back in your parents’ day, and even had their own cartoon. Which is weird, given that her gang… doesn’t really have much personality. Don’t blame Josie, though: they’re not allowed to. They needed to be inoffensive in the way 60’s cartoons had to be: vacant-eyed, eternally cheerful, and ready for family-friendly adventures every Saturday morning.

               Also, they went everywhere dressed in leotards and cat ears. That’s not weird. Why would that be weird at all?

              

               … Okay, I lied. It’s super weird.

               Josie and her pals were mostly forgotten by society, until in 2001 Universal Studios decided to resurrect them for a quick cash-grab. What they expected was a paint-by-the-numbers, predictable teenage adventure with photogenic stars, which might net them some profit. What they got was a huge financial flop with embedded warnings of corporate greed, world-spanning conspiracies, and subliminal messaging. Understandably, there were no sequels.

               Which is kind of a shame, because it’s a good movie in a vapid, early-00’s kind of way. Josie came out in April 2001, so I’m not surprised it’s been forgotten—a year later we were pushing Freedom Fries and watching George W. waddle into a quagmire. But Josie deserves to be remembered for its surprising, inexplicable, and wholesale rejection of consumerism.

               Josie opens with an N-SYNC style group playing to a crowd of cheering teenagers. We see already this is a rough world to live in: without a Nick Carter or a Timberlake to crush on, the teens of this universe must settle for Seth Green, Breckin Mayer and… Donald Faison? What the hell are you doing here?

Run, Turk, run! You have an amazing sitcom career ahead of you! Don’t get affiliated with this movie!

               The movie proceeds to mock its own boy-band relentlessly. This is a tongue-in-cheek nod at stupid fads which Disney has also done, and it’s all fun and games until Alan Cumming figures out the boys are getting wise to subliminal tracks in their music. And he proceeds to kill them. Yep, he parachutes out of the plane and it crashes. We aren’t treated to a gruesome explosion, but presumably it happens off-screen. Damn!

               Having crashed this plane with no survivors, we are then introduced to Josie and her bandmates Melody and Valerie. Josie is heart-sick over the “cutest boy” in Riverdale, a knockoff Cobain type who’s apparently allergic to shoes. Shouldn't Josie’s unrequited love be someone with a job? Who doesn’t sing about truck engines? Whatever, la vie boheime, I guess. We’re also introduced to Josie’s shitty manager and his sister, who are only characters because the movie needed more SUPER ZANY and MAD GRODY behavior, because that’s what brings kids to theaters.

Damn you, focus groups!

               After the weird 90’s nostalgia-bomb that is Josie’s house, we snap back to Alan Cumming as Wyatt, who--we feel obliged to remind you--is still a murderer. Our murderer is looking for a band, and wanders into a mall. Things get terrifying real fast.

Wyatt tells the mall DJ (because it’s 2001, and they have those) to play a new track from the band he turned into jerky. The DJ does, and the mindless consumers around them are re-wired to want new stuff. Yeah, seems legit! He also gives some random Biff-looking teen spontaneous alcoholism. Hooray for capitalism! (Not pictured in this clip: An edgy goth girl rejects his subliminal message and is dragged into an unmarked van, faster than a Saudi professor acknowledging the existence of Yoda.) By this time it’s clear: Alan Cumming is an actual supervillain. All hail our snarky new overlord?

But wait: the conspiracy goes deeper. Wyatt picks up Josie and co., since he needs new musicians to replace the ones he burned alive, and Josie is skeptical. But her band-mates are totally down! so they fly to the big city! With Josie’s beau! What could go wrong?

Sweet Jesus.

So… THAT’S a thing, I guess. The movie has neglected to mention until now that NYC, Riverdale, and possibly all of America are slowly becoming Mega-City One. Corporations own the city skyline, the local decor, and quite possibly the air. How edgy! It’s almost like the movie is trying to tell us something, about reckless consumerism.

I wonder what they’re getting at?

Our heroine and her crew are deluged with luxury, but all is not well. A stalker keeps leaving them warnings not to trust the record label, Wyatt’s auto-tune machine turns their vegetarian into a Big Mac lover, and we’re given a back-stage pass to the inner workings of a pop-music conspiracy. It’s led by Wyatt’s boss, villainess-slash-fashion-abomination Fiona (Parker Posey.)

“Could you at least TRY to look menacing for this scene?”

In true teen-movie fashion, the antagonists are more bumbling than terrifying, but they’re also selling mind-control headphones to the U.S. government. And they’re doing all this in the name of “stimulating the economy.” Don’t worry, they’re job creators, it’s fine.

By now we’re in maximum anti-Wall Street territory, smuggling as many Marxist undertones as our humble Universal kids’ movie can abscond with. The characters are constantly surrounded by branding, which has double-duty both advertising to the audience and reminding us how annoying it is to be advertised to—and this was back in 2001. I can only imagine the horrors a modern Josie reboot might bring us. Mind-reading Pandora ads? McDonalds-sponsored extra stomachs? Man, I’m glad I don’t live in their universe. Or do I? Maybe I’m being mind-controlled right now! Maybe we all are! My third eye is opening, I can see Hypercubes! Must… build… tinfoil hats! 

Speaking of mind control, the use of the band’s cat ears (as a subliminal messaging vector) is a clever little commentary. “The Man” has taken Josie’s endearing gimmick, and turned it into a soulless money-making machine. Her music itself is then remixed and used to turn her into… well, kind of an asshole. She drives her friends away by acting like a diva, because the psychologicalfallout of wealth and fame is hard to unpack inside one hour and thirty-eight minutes. It’s easier to just say “Josie’s an asshole now, because of magic headphones.”

Schizophrenic personality swaps and BFF-breakups ensue. All standard Disney Channel fare, but it leads us to the best moment in all cinema. Because there is a scene, in this movie, where Carson Daly turns out to be an assassin working for the New World Order.

Did we mention this movie is for kids? The Pussycats provide valuable role model material here, by beating the shit out of their aggressors. Then they run to tell Josie and not the police, for… some reason. Josie, of course, isn’t having it, because she’s a Lizard Person now, and is helping the Masons erect a giant Xenu-pyramid beneath the World Trade Center. (No, none of that actually happens, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch at this point.) 

Everything gets wrapped up in the climax with PG-rated convenience: the villainess turns out to just be looking for love, the mind-control scheme is derailed, and the U.S. government confiscates the cat-ear headsets, probably for use at Guantanamo. The dead band turns out to be alive—horribly maimed, but alive! They even get triumphant background music.

"After getting their skin cooked off, Du Jour's music improved considerably, and they put out a rustic folk album."

Everything is neatly resolved, with no loose ends at all except for… wait. The "Archie" universe is still run by corporations treating people like puppets. That hasn’t changed one bit by the end! This isn’t a resolution at all! But Josie and the girls get to sing a rebellious rock song about love, so... maybe that’ll fix their dystopia somehow. I don't know.

While soaked in post-90’s wholesomeness, this is the rare kind of kids’ movie which serves as a commentary on itself. And despite bad reviews, it's genuinely funny, with absurdist gags throughout, and Alan Cumming doing his best Atlas, carrying the entire movie like a boss. Parker Posey also deserves an honorable mention, for her creepy junk-food-addicted, gender-role-enforcing CEO. Really, the only REAL villain in this movie… is Capitalism. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. Open your eyes, sheeple!

And that wraps up my (hopefully) only interaction with the ridiculous Archie universe. Thank God I’ll never have to interact with this cornball cast again. Wait... What’s that, on the horizon?

Could it be? It is!

Another weird Archie-themed reboot, that NOBODY asked for!

               Oh, I gotta check this one out. See you guys in a few weeks.

UUUUUH-LAAAA! Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds: The Amazing Prog-Rock Acid-Trip That No One’s Ever Heard Of

Still busy on the novel editing this month, so instead of short or flash fiction, it’s more reviews! Because who doesn’t love the 70’s?

 

In the last years of the twentieth century, a time we look back on with fondness and nostalgia and just a slight confusion over how it went horribly wrong (is that just me?) there was a man called Jeff Wayne. Wayne and his buddies were a bunch of dreamers and thinkers in pre-Thatcher England who were riding the purple-haze wave of 70’s rock. And somehow, somewhere, one of them asked:
 

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we did a psychedelic concept album, based on H.G. Wells?”

In any other decade, the answer would have been “give me the bong, you’ve had enough, Jeff.” (The idea was actually suggested by Jeff’s dad, but I imagine the response would’ve been the same.) And in any other decade a silly, fun idea like this would have met with crushing failure. But this was 1978, and the world was inundated with tie-die extravagance, bell bottoms and the wishful artistic idealism of the sixties, which hadn’t completely congealed. So, like a bunch of absolute madmen, Jeff and his buddies went and actually made the album.

Let me give you a taste of its pure, flawless camp.

 How crazy is this? It’s literally just a guy (the excellent Richard Burton, who offered his services after a personal letter from Wayne) grimly reciting lines from the original “alien invasion” book itself. Just when you think maybe you accidentally popped in a book-on-tape rather than a masterpiece of alt-pop, WHAM, they whack you over the head with orchestral silliness! And then there’s the absurdly fun sound effect that goes “P’TCHOOoooo!” as the Martians fire their canisters towards Earth. It's beautiful.

Also hilarious. Are you laughing yet? Good. Laugh now, Earthlings… Laugh while you still can. Because the worst is yet to come. Oh, yes, Earth will have its reckoning. Soon...

In a concept-album tradition, the story jumps directly to the next phase of the story: the Martian arrival, on idyllic Horsell Common. The first track wraps with an Elysian vision of rumbling trains, quiet evening bustle, and general British well-to-do-ness. One of my favorite things about this album is how perfectly it skewers the comfortable homeland atmosphere of Britain: shows like Downton Abbey would have us believe old-timey Victorian Britain was a garden paradise, filled with mincing earls and fancy hats. The reality, of course, was a massively xenophobic empire that ruled the seas with an iron grip for over a century. The insidious attack of the Martians is a sort of “karmic rebound” that Wayne plays with masterfully. Let’s get our first glimpse of these squamous invaders:

Damn! Things are getting real. From the Darth Vader-esque sound effects to the startling, unnerving bleeps and bloops of the synthesizer, we immediately get the sense that Something Wicked has arrived. The Martians don’t speak, or try to communicate: they follow the grim pattern of Wells’ original vision, mercilessly exterminating a band of peacemakers who try to welcome them. These guys don’t come in peace. It’s funny to note how this idea of the merciless invader played with Britain’s fears at the time: for a nation so secure, so comfortably on top of the world, they were awfully paranoid about getting invaded. Wells’ book was immensely popular and to this day carries weird, xenophobic undercurrents: the Bad Other Species is coming! They’re going to ruin your way of life! Watch out! “Hide your kids, hide yo’ wives!” If this sounds a bit Trumpy to you, it’s because it is—Wells was focused on the possibility that the new discoveries of the 20^th century would be grim and horrifying, but his book’s popularity is due to that cow-like fear of the Outsider. The same unreasoning fear which spawned Brexit, and caused the same countries that survived WW2 to reject immigrants fleeing murderous regimes. There are layers to this, and we won’t get into them here… because the Tripods have arrived, and nothing can save you now anyway. 

AHHH! Holy fucking shit, dudes!

The musical cues are so on-point here you can practically see the gleaming metal monsters stomping over Britain’s countryside, demolishing buildings, melting people to ash with their heat-rays and generally acting Big, Scary and Alien. This is the money shot, the moment that establishes how England gets outstripped by alien technology. The military makes a stand against the Martians, and naturally gets their shit slapped. “Bows and arrows against the lightning,” as our Artillery-Man says. It’s a madhouse out there! Run for your lives!!!

Through it all, excellent synthesizer music warbles and trills, swoops and undulates. I’m not much of a music snob, but I know synth music hasn’t been popular since Wayne’s heyday—the only exception being ‘arthouse’ movie soundtracks like Drive or ‘retro’ appeal in Stranger Things. But here, it’s hard to imagine any sound that would so effectively capture both the cheesy tone of the album itself, and the giddy mad terror of a real extraterrestrial attack. This sheer attention to detail calls to mind the famous radio play, where Orson Welles (no relation) successfully convinced most of urban America that the Martians were here to kill them. You can laugh, and shrug off the bleeping and blooping and the zany laser-blasts, but at its heart this scene is serious: people are dying, roasted to death or crushed by the Martians, who stride over it all in their god-like machines with all the callous disinterest of a farmer spraying crops. It’s chilling.

I’m tempted to compare it to drone warfare—the Young Artilleryman, who teams up with Burton’s narrator, has a bad dose of PTSD going on. But there are plenty of analyses of Wells’ work in the context of modern warfare. You can Google ‘em. Instead of soapboxing, I have just one thing to say:

Straight from the track, this is our first exposure to the deeply unsettling, yet comically over-the-top Martian war cry, a noise that makes your eyes bug out and makes you ask “Are these guys serious?” Yes. Yes, they are. And the line gets callbacks throughout the album, so get used to it. Wayne’s interpretation of “UUUH-LAAA” is not up for scholarly debate, but it seems like the Martian equivalent of an Inception-blare, to frighten humans and scatter them for slaughter. It’s much more silly in the book, as the tepid “Ulla-Ulla!” war cry. Wayne and Spielberg rightly thought it could be much creepier, if done properly.

But enough of that—the war for Earth has begun. Let’s move our needle over to the next dose of eargasm.

Yeah, uh… What?

There’s a shift in tone here. “Forever Autumn” derails the earlier action, but it also showcases the variety of music Wayne and his pals have mastered. We go from blaring, stomping, murdering Fighting-Machines to the depiction of mankind fleeing the Martians, accompanied by voiceovers and painfully 70’s vocals and strings. It’s like “Simon and Garfunkel Does the Apocalypse.”

To sum up: The Narrator is riding to the rescue of his bride, the distant and unfortunately song-less Carrie. Carrie is one of several characters who don’t exist in the original novel, and in the album she seems to be added just to give the Narrator motivation to run around like a moron looking for her. Thankfully the songwriters didn’t “fridge” her for the sake of drama, but she only gets one scene and that’s it—poof. She’s out of the story. Kind of a bummer when she’s the Narrator’s ENTIRE motivation for going to London, but whatever.

Anyway, I feel like this track is underrated. Rumor has it that the refrain is actually a Lego advertisement jingle, which Wayne put into the album because Lego rejected it. If that’s true, it does explain the tonal shift, and the “purple” lyrics. “Like the sun through the trees, you came to love me”? Really? How exactly does the sun come through trees to ‘love’ anyone? I’m pretty sure it comes through the trees to cook us with cosmic UV rays, but sure, fine. Every track can’t be a winner—and I challenge you not to start humming “Forever Autumn” weeks after listening to it. It’s an ear-worm, just as insidious as a Martian tentacle.

Moving on, we come to the gangbuster track, the one that will make you pump your fist despite the absolute balls-to-the-wall silliness. Welcome, my shell-shocked friends, to “Thunderchild.”

Below is an accurate depiction of my face, the first time I heard this song:

"FUCK MARS!!"

Excuse me while I set this as my desktop wallpaper, phone screen and screensaver, and lip-sync "FAREWELL, THUNDER-CHIIIILD!" on repeat.

Unfortunately, "Thunder-Child" is the last really intense track the album has to offer. After this point, we are treated to the creepy but very slow-paced onslaught of the Martian terraforming plant, a real thing from the novel. It’s very trippy and surreal, but not exactly a masterpiece—and it gets a “part 2,” likely because Wayne ran out of material while making the album. Truth be told, there is not a lot of narrative substance to “War of the Worlds.” It’s a very straightforward story, told in crisp journalistic fashion. The aliens come, they conquer, they are defeated. Which is where we get tracks like this:

Woof. That’s a rough listen, my friends. Not just for the repetitive lyrics, the over-acting from our Parson (the excellent Phil Lynott, given nothing much to do here, 'cept bitch about Satan) and the lack of ANYTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENING in this track’s narrative. Let me break down the song's theological debate for you:

• The Parson, a character established in the album, is wounded by Martians but alive. His wife comes to say hi. The Parson tells her to bugger off, because she’s a Martian possessed by the Devil… or something.
•  Beth, the parson’s wife, tells him to stop being an idiot—these are Martians, not demons.
•  The Parson is all like “Bro! These be demons, bro. I’m telling you bro. There’s nothing left to live for, we’re done. Game over, man. Game over!”
• Beth disagrees. Rinse and repeat until a cylinder falls on the cast, conveniently killing her so the argument can end. (Sorry, Beth!) 

The “argument” they have is bare-bones, too: it’s made of sweeping statements about Mankind™ and the Spirit of Man™ that don’t really fit in the mouths of the characters. We’ve gone from subtle allegories of xenophobia and broken faith, to LITERAL actual xenophobia and broken faith, and it doesn’t really work. But the performances are passionate, and the music is fairly catchy, which is the best you can ask from a clunky sermon on the evils of humanity. Also, the track gives us badass album art like this:

Tell me you don't want that as a huge poster in your house. I dare you.

This brings us to the lackluster conclusion of the album. Before the second disc wraps up, we are treated to the delusions of the Young Artilleryman, which are… well, a lot of fun, actually.

I love the Young Artilleryman. He’s a great character, and unlike Carrie, the Parson and poor squashed Beth, they actually squeeze a character arc out of him, in this number. He’s gone from a shattered victim of the Martian advance, to a confident (if deluded) one-man rebellion force. This guy makes the cast of Rogue One all look like pansies. “I’m gonna dig a global tunnel network, with ONE shovel! FUCK Martians! Woop woop!”

Good stuff. Aaand then we are sort of rushed to the album’s conclusion by “Dead London,” a spooky but mostly flat track where the Narrator gives up on life after he’s successfully escaped the Martians like, a bajillion times. He hurls himself at the feet of a Fighting Machine, and… Nothing. The Martians are dead, killed in the classic Wells conclusion where they forgot to account for a little something called "bacteria."

(Jesus, Jeff! Do we need to talk about something?)

Which, to me, is like… Okay, maybe they mastered space flight without learning microbiology. Somehow. But it’s still a dud of an ending, redeemed only by the eerie “UUUH-LAAA” refrains, which slowly fade into nothing as the song goes. For the first time, you feel pity for the Martians—they’re dying one by one in their fabulous fighting-machines, victims of the same kind of indiscriminate pain they visited on Earthlings. It’s poetic justice, but it's not exactly a rousing conclusion.

After that, we get a silly epilogue where Wayne tells us NASA’s future adventures to Mars will have a nasty end… Spoilers, they totally find Martians. Science, you have Gone Too Far! Stahp, Science! Cease all progress immediately!! Et cetera.

Well, that’s the album. Incredibly goofy, skillfully made but definitely a relic of its time. Full of galumphing statements about mankind, subtle but eventually over-wrought drama, and lots of cheesy sound effects. And…

It was a hit! It’s almost completely unknown in America, because we can’t have nice things, but in England the goofy bug-eyed tripod from the album cover is a cultural staple. Live shows of the album have been going on for decades. There was a recent techno remix with Liam Neeson. Yes, Liam Neeson, the dad from Taken, calmly narrating Martian attacks. You gotta check it out, it’s hilarious—but not nearly as good as the original. 

The fact that Neeson was even on board should tell you how popular this thing is, in Britain. As recently as 2016, the album was converted to a stage play in London, which I absolutely have to find a cast recording of. It looks great—lots of gears, steam and red lights, and it’s probably just as silly as the album. If you can find it streaming somewhere, let me know. Of course, the play's greasy undertone of xenophobia is present, and noted in the article. The message about scary monsters from another world fleeing their dying planet, to take our resources, has sad parallels in British politics. But hey, it’s got a giant stompy tripod, which walks all over the stage blasting people! That sounds pretty cool. Better than the live-shows put on by Wayne himself, which honestly look like something your uncle who never came down from his high in 1978 might put on, with no understanding of how quickly CGI starts to look 'dated.' Compared to the brief, visionary design of the album, the live-show is pretty tame. At least they have a real orchestra.

But altogether, the album is a crazy, irreverent homage to both Victorian literature and the sheer, creative insanity of the seventies. If I had to salvage a single piece of art from that rotten decade, it would be the music. You wanna know why? I’ll tell you why:

 “UUUH-LAHHH!” That’s why. Any questions? I didn’t think so.

Watch the skies, my friends.

Political Post: Those Damn Hypocritical Hippies

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.