In Praise Of Mickey Dolenz: Anti-War Hero

Water cooler conversations in our office usually involve the girls moaning and bitching about each other in various cliquey combinations.
Water cooler conversations with Chris B, however, can take a left turn from reality and head off in all sorts of interesting directions.
You remember CB; egg-spattered bow tie and tweeds, a master of the incomprehensible spuffle, an accomplished morris dancer and expert in the arcane ways of the shawm and the serpent.

There we were this morning at the water cooler, discussing the finer points of John Browne's beautiful, mystical "O Maria salvatoris" (written in the 1490s … CB is nothing if not bang up to date) and the relative merits of the Tallis Scholars v. The Academy of Ancient Music when we happened to wander back to my cubicle with the intention of bringing them up on iTunes to illustrate our points.

Chris is a "mouse" man and has never quite got the hang of using my Wacom tablet but he is enthusiastic in his cack-handedness and so instead of the Tallis Scholars glorious eight part harmony he managed to dial up The Monkees playing "Randy Scouse Git" (my iTunes is nothing if not comprehensive).

I managed to hit the pause button as Chris was going into his patented "semaphore signaller being surprised by a sudden enema" act and then found myself in the position of having to defend my reputation as a highbrow snob in the face of the quite alarming number of Monkees songs displayed for all to see on my monitor.

Then something struck me about that particular song that had never occurred to me before and Chris had to grudgingly acknowledge its rightful place among the great and important works of musical and cultural history.

As any fule no, The Monkees were a manufactured band put together for a kids' TV series in the mid 1960s. All the music on their first album was played by session guys but the band rebelled and insisted on writing and playing their own material on later recordings.

Randy Scouse Git was a phrase Mickey Dolenz picked up on a visit to England; it being the phrase used by Alf Garnett in the BBC sitcom "'til Death Us Do Part" to describe his son-in-law, played by Tony Booth (Tony Blair's real-life father-in-law … I hope you're following this).

Dolenz had no idea what "randy scouse git" meant but thought it would make a great song title.
And so was born something that earns The Monkees serious respect: the world's first ever, incongruously titled, three minute singalong fluffy pop chart anti-war protest song.

Previously, anti-war and anti-establishment protest had been the preserve of the folk singer: Pete Seeger with "This Land Is Your Land", Woodie Guthrie with just about everything and Dylan with "Masters Of War" and "The Times They Are A'Changing".
Pop was too lightweight and unimportant to take seriously.
Sure, there had been pouty tantrum pop songs like The Stones' "Satisfaction" and The Who's "My Generation", but those were hardly protest songs; yet suddenly, here were the dumbest of dumb pop bands grasping the protest baton with a vengeance.

Mickey Dolenz can rightly stand beside Dylan and Lennon, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie at last. A hero of the anti-war protest movement.
Yay!

History's first pop protest song starts out by lulling the listener into a false sense of security.
Yadda, yadda; it's another hippy-dippy, throwaway Monkees tune with silly lyrics.

And then suddenly … Fucking Hell!
Crowbarred in between trippy little verses and the silly "doo-bi-doo" scat singing, the chorus is a demented scream of rage; it has no tune, just a single note battered into submission as Dolenz assumes the character of "The Establishment" and rails against the hippies, yelling:
"Why don't you cut your hair?"

And suddenly, out of tinny wireless sets across the world - and most particularly in the USA and Vietnam - Mickey the Monkee screams the greatest lines he ever wrote:
"Why don't you be like me?
Why don't you stop and see?
Why don't you hate who I hate,
Kill who I kill,
To be free?"

Holy crap!
The Monkees?
"Why don't you hate who I hate,
Kill who I kill,
To be free?"

Little gurning, silly-haired kiddie-pop actor Mickey Dolenz sums up the insanity of US foreign policy and the whole 1960s counter-culture clash in fourteen single-syllable words.
Fucking awesome! I still get chills listening to it.
Because it was a Monkees hit we kids sang it out loud in the playgrounds and the streets.

And, like Dylan's "Masters Of War" from Wednesday's post, those lines are even more tragically relevant today after eight years of the Bush regime screaming them in our ears like murderous lunatics to justify their insane warmongering.

It is the same imbecile chant that has been shrieked by our leaders for the whole of recorded history.
The late, great historian Barbara Tuchman explored the theme in her masterful book "The March of Folly", taking examples from Troy through to Vietnam.
The inability of leaders to learn that single most basic lesson of civilisation: "that it is sheer folly to pursue a policy contrary to the interests of their people by waging unjust war".

Unjust war …
And today we have an even more sickening twist of that folly: unjust war "in the name of freedom and democracy".
Neither Vietnam nor Bush's insane war in Iraq had a damned thing to do with freedom or democracy but everything to do with political self-interest.

Stir up fear and hatred and then kill!
Fear and hatred of communism to justify destroying Vietnam and Cambodia.
Fear and hatred of Islam to justify Bush's personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein and his cronies' lust for that country's oil reserves (the so-called "war on terror" had fuck-all to do with alQaeda and 9/11).
Unjust war …
A lesson that after thousands of years of repeating the same mistake over and over again we seem never to learn.

Thank God the US has at last elected its first intelligent President since FDR.
We have yet to see the result of that decision but he's started promisingly enough, halting the illegal military tribunals, ordering the closure of the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and "rendition" and renewing the US commitment to international law and the Geneva Convention.
President Obama just doesn't cut it as a "hater".
I somehow cannot picture him joining Nixon and Kissinger, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, urging Joe SixPack to hate and kill in his name by screaming along with that devastating chorus:
"Why don't you hate who I hate,
Kill who I kill,
To be free?"

So here's to Mickey Dolenz: bona fide hero of the anti-war movement; wrapping a mailed fist of a message in candy floss and serving it up to the children of the 1960s as the very first pop protest song.
Little wonder I turned out like I did.
Thanks, Mickey!

Sing along, people: