War With or Without Iran

Punk rock was decidedly not my dad’s taste.

One time, I was wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt while I still lived at home. This provoked the most intense negative response I had seen from my dad in my life, with the possible exceptions of times when my life was at risk.

Here, I’m sure it was my soul that was at risk, as he saw it. I clearly saw it differently, but I didn’t really have the words to explain all this to my dad. Young Andrew had written a few hundred thousand words total by then, max.

It was clumsy to try to broach tough subjects where there was a big fundamental misunderstanding, a skill I’m still working on today.

Anyway, I thought then—and still believe—that the lyrics and protest music the DKs made were righteous and powerful. I think they wanted to stand up against an all-powerful structure to fight against what they saw as wrong, something my dad and I very much have in common.

He was Ned Flanders for all of my adolescence. I was Johnny Rotten. Yet, we were the same.

Anyway, here’s a lyric from Dead Kennedys’ song Moral Majority, written and recorded in 1981, that popped into my head this past week for no particular reason:

We’re planning for a war with or without Iran
Building a police state with your Ku Klux Klan
Pissed at your neighbor? Don’t bother to nag
Pick up the phone and turn in a fag

45 years later, and history rhymes. This group was unafraid to call out powerful institutions and to take on great personal risk.

Punching up. That’s what Dad and I have in common, and we’ve both put our own physical safety and livelihood on the line at various times in order to do what we feel is right in the face of overwhelming odds.

For Dad, this meant one thing. For me, it meant standing up to oppression, and standing up for those who couldn’t stand up themselves. It didn’t much matter to me that everyone around me seemed to think we had no choice but to accept our fate.

Often today, I’ll encounter a person who believes they have to do a certain thing because it has always been done that way, or because everyone around them is doing it. Maybe it’s the way people dress—I am often told by those who believe they know better that you can’t possibly own a small business and wear pajama pants every day, but here I am, just as one trivial (but common) example.

One more punk lyric for today that has kept running through my mind all week:

It's better to go crazy and just break into a run
Than to grow old always being told how everything should be done

This is Citizen Fish’s Break Into a Run/Rainbows, easily one of my favorites of theirs. I’ve summed up the similarities between Dad and me, but this is the difference I saw between us as a teenager. I’m not sure our paths have really been all that different in retrospect.

When Dad volunteered to teach at the finally-integrated all-Black school, he was one of three teachers willing to take that leap. He put himself at great personal and political risk in doing so, and this wasn’t the only time he did this.

When Vietnam loomed large in his mind, he tanked his promising university career by confronting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during a chance encounter, while going to visit his state’s senator in DC. This was personal and important for Dad, and it was costly—after a call from Defense, the rest of his time at that particular college (Clemson) was riddled by blacklisting and a general shunning by at least some of his professors.

There’s more about Dad that helps me see how very similar we are, and I hope to write more about that soon. Thanks for coming along with me.