Sixties "Country Joe"
By Tom DeWeese

I'm a baby boomer and that's a curse. You see I'm stuck with my generation from the sixties till my dying day as they whine and moan about injustice and mentally dwell forever in the days of tie-die shirts, incense, and free love.

The news media, now controlled by baby boomers, keep the myth alive that everyone from that era got high and protested in the streets disgorging their revolution to enforce a "new America." They were revolting all right. The very sight of them turned my stomach.

The truth is that those who perpetrated the anti-war protests didn't really care about the Vietnam War except for how it affected their draft status. They had no compassion for the pro-freedom forces in South Vietnam who were sacrificing everything to try and stop the takeover of their part of that country by a very brutal communist regime. As the protesters carried their Mao signs and chanted "Che, Che," their purpose was to rip apart traditional America and rebuild it on the ideals of Mao and Che. What ideal was that? Communism.

The tragedy of the sixties was that so many young people simply didn't understand that their chants and posters and the promised "new vision" were really in support of a left-wing America. Nor did they understand that their actions were helping the communists to sentence millions in Southeast Asia to the gulag. Worse, those baby boomers had no sense of the brutal reality of life under communism. Most still don't.

Case in point is Country Joe McDonald. He and his group, "The Fish", performed the song that became one of the anthems of the Woodstock Generation. It was called, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag." Usually, Country Joe would start the song by shouting to the crowd, "Give me an F!" The other three letters of the cheer would follow as Country Joe would ask, "What's that spell?" The crowd would respond by shouting the well-known profanity. Country Joe would then begin the catchy rag which asked "One, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." It was all so, well, revolutionary.

Country Joe became a major voice in the "revolution." So what was Joe fighting for? He did help force America to abandon an anticommunist ally; resulting in its becoming an enslaved nation. Is that what he wanted? Is that what he hoped would happen? Is he happy now? Apparently Country Joe doesn't have a clue.

Recently he was invited to Hanoi to receive a World Peace Music Award. However, Country Joe says he won't go because "as a hippie protest songwriter I could not exist in Vietnam." Why on earth not? Isn't Vietnam now exactly the communist paradise he and his buddy protesters wanted it to be? Apparently Joe misunderstood back in the sixties.

"Communism tends to be totalitarian, and I am not for that," says the self-proclaimed revolutionary. Even worse, his complete ignorance of communism's principles is shocking. "My parents were American Communists for some time, but they left the Party because of a lack of democratic positions by the Party," he naïvely admitted.

Like a lot of the baby boomer generation, it seems that Country Joe McDonald just got a thrill from protesting. He had no idea what he was against or for. It was just a social event to go down to the local protest, carry a sign, and meet some "groovy chicks."

The consequences of his actions? His nation suffered worldwide disgrace and millions of innocent Vietnamese remain enslaved to this day. Oh well, it was "kool." The whole lot of ‘em make me ill!

Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, an activist, grassroots think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA.