Rambozo The Clown

IMO, jello commenting on how america makes war and fighting look like fun and games to kids.

also quixotic: chivalrous and unselfish to an extravagant or impractical extent. i presume don quixote is where the meaning came from, maybe he was very chivalrous? dunno bout the winmill blades thing tho.

Bottom line: Sylvester Stallone is a bad role model.

"Bullshitter in the Indochina shop" is one of the most brilliant lyrics ever written.

"hey rocky, watch me pull a massacre out of my hat" "again??"

That's wierd how Jello talks about violent video games because Bedtime for Democracy was released in 1986, and the only video games then were games like Frogger and Pong. It's like he's talking about today's video games cause those are the ones where you shoot people.

But war movies did come out before '86, Rambo part 1 and 2 came out before 1985 and there are plenty more, but this song does relate to modern games too, very violent, very gory. Westerns were popular too, also violent, those too were watched by children.

He dosen't talk about them being violent, I think he means they're bright, fun, happy and far from reality.

there were war oriented games for the ATARI game console. games such as "River Raid" and "Combat". although they were crude compared to games produced in the 90's. these games undoubtedly made war seem like a light- hearted enjoyable pastime.

Once again, the Dead Kennedys remain as relevant as they did when they wrote this song. They managed to pinpoint a disturbing aspect of our culture that still runs strong today, and sarcastically tear it to pieces.

The most commonly portrayed image of a "hero" is the man who is tough and rugged- physically enough to kill anybody, and mentally enough to have no qualms with killing anybody or watching his friends be killed.

Violent war movies and video games, designed for young adults who are just the right age to join the army, then fail to show some of the more horrific aspects of war, and because they are impersonal and "fake," people begin to disassociate killing with the feelings of disgust and terror that they should feel. And with video games in their infancy when this song was released, Jello really did show incredible insight by mentioning them- I'm not saying he predicted the future or anything, but realizing then the implications of their illusoriness really was brilliant.

In Don Quixote, one of the most well-known scenes is when Don Quixote attacks a field of windmills, thinking they are giants (throughout the story he performs dozens of brave and heroic acts against mundane objects, thinking they are "enemies.") What is probably meant in the song is that wars and enemy combatants don't exist in the way that people think they do- they enter war with an idea that they are fighting inept, nameless, evil henchmen, when those enemies exist only as much as Quixote's giants did.

And of course, we habituate children to the "normality" of war by bombarding them with toys and images glorifying it.

In the end, the people who lose are the people who buy into it and become cannon fodder- a tool used to push militaristic strategy. Actually, we all lose...

And yes, "bullshitter in an Indochina shop" is one of the most ingenious play on words I've ever heard.

Am I missing something about "bullshitter in an Indochina shop?" I guess all I take away from it is the idea of an American solider fighting in the Vietnam war (for the purported purpose of improving the social and political climate) without any true understanding of what's really going on in that culture.

But is there more to it than that? If not, well, I guess it is still a pretty good line.