Where can I turn?

Well, this week we lost a musical giant from my youth. Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson died Wednesday at age 82.

I confess that when I heard the news my brain was awash with “Little Deuce Coup”, and “Fun, Fun, Fun”, and “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls”—me being one. And I saw long board surfboards stuck in the sand at Huntington Beach, and Redondo, and Malibu, with the sun sinking into the Pacific behind them.

Well, that world is long gone. That was when you could drive your Woodie from the Valley to Santa Monica in half an hour, fil it up with gas for a fiver and leave it all day without having to take out a second mortgage to pay for the parking. Things seemed simpler—although, in retrospect, that was probably only if you were White and middle class and could get student deferments to keep you out of Vietnam.

The Beach Boys’ heyday also included the Watts and Newark Riots, growing anti-war protests, Civil Rights marches, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the beginning of the United Farm Workers union, the surge of the feminist movement, the Weathermen and other domestic terrorists—in short, a whole lot of violent upheaval, right here in the White paradise of America.

Huh.

And here we are, in 2025, with a demented degenerate in the White House enabled by a Sonderkommando of White nationalist tools, both appointed and elected, turning back progress to the 60s (although it’s not clear whether their goal is the 1960s, the 1860s or the 1360s). Tomorrow there will be a parade of tanks down Constitution Avenue to amuse the five-time draft dodger, while he sics the National Guard and Marines on peaceful demonstrators protesting his Neronian immigration policy.

(Here’s the thing about dealing with armor columns: if you take out the lead tank, the rest of them can’t move. One Panzerfaust shot into the treads of that first one and there’s rain on the parade. Just sayin’.)

Well, in honor of Brian, the Beach Boys and the dream of this country, our earworm today is from their iconic 1968 album, Pet Sounds: “I Just Wasn’t Made for these Times”.

 

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