It's April Fool's Day. So it was hard to tell if Danger Room was pulling my leg, posting the hilarious vid for The Minutemen's "This Ain't No Picnic" as part of their continuing soundtrack. Cali punk corndogs to the core, The Minutemen were decidely antiwar and antiweaponry -- favorite tune: "Little Man With a Gun in his Hand" -- and they spent the majority of that "Picnic" video ducking a remixed Ronald Reagan trying to blow them away from the air. They despised that postmodern president and his real-time policies, and still do now that we're living in the rerun.
Then again, April Fool's Day is D. Boon's birthday, an irony driven home by the fact that he was one of the most normal dudes to ever pick up a guitar and rule it. His loudmouth activism and his bullet-time satires -- some smartass Minutemen tunes topped out at a minute! -- would come in handy these days, but Boon passed in 1985. He was no fool, that's for sure, even though his birthday is named for it. And though his band mercilessly lampooned the milita mindset, they came from military families as well.
But yeah, Danger Room, I'm with you. But it's still weird as hell to see the first name in national security news pimp punkers who hated weaponry with a passion. Happy Birthday, Boon. Our military-industrial clusterf**k and its still-ironic mission misses you.
