Country Joe himself served a 3-year stint in the navy. That’s something I learned from a Wikipedia entry (perhaps I knew it and forgot, a common event these days) along with other tidbits including that his parents, Communist Party members at the time, named him after Joseph Stalin, and that he was Janis Joplin’s boyfriend (which I must have known because I remember the song Janis). It’s a lengthy, interesting article because he lived a long, active, and consequential life.

As it turns out, I was thinking about Country Joe’s most famous song a few days before his passing, because Uncle Sam had once again gotten himself into a terrible jam, this time in an even more senseless war in Iran. Our slow descent into war in Vietnam, associated forever with the word escalation, was nothing like the precipitous and deliberate plunge into hostilities with Iran, recklessly initiated by a regime whose rise to power is associated with a descent on a golden escalator.

Nothing was more instrumental in turning the American public against the Vietnam War than the images of body bags seen daily on TV sets in living rooms across the country, and that’s what Country Joe was rubbing our noses in, while taking a crack at consumerism, in the lines:

Come on fathers don’t hesitate
Send them off before it’s too late
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box

The aerial warfare that our attack on Iran relies on produces fewer body bags filled with American soldiers, so perhaps the things most likely to turn the country against this war are rising gas prices and falling stock market numbers. It is stunning, and a damning indictment of our society that we measure the cost of war in American casualties and monetary loss, and ignore the devastation and destruction wrought for no intelligible reason on a foreign population. As of now 1,300 Iranians have been killed and 10,000-17,000 injured, and even the remarks of many of those critical of the war assume that American lives are of more value than others’. The administration and much of the American public is fixated on one thing—winning. With a war in progress, who has time to worry about whether we unjustly initiated it, or to consider any option other than killing more of “the enemy”? I’m not sure what winning looks like in a conflict that had no clear objective to begin with—something like what Israel has achieved in Gaza, I suppose. As it turns out, the notion that it’s acceptable to destroy other nations to make us feel safe (even when we’re not in danger) was also expressed succinctly in Country Joe’s song:

And you know that peace could only be won
When we’ve blown them all to kingdom come

What started as a tribute to Country Joe McDonald has gone astray as I fume about our current predicament, so let’s return to him now. While he’s associated with psychedelic music and anti-war and protest songs, his range was much wider, and I want to end with another song from the same album which has remained in my mind, Who Am I? It’s a reminder that even in the midst of war and in times when our lives are disrupted by events beyond our control, there are questions that we face as individuals that don’t go away. Listening to it now, even without benefit of hallucinogens, I still find it thought-provoking and wise.

January, 2026