SGT PEPÉ’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BUND

A Meditation On Normalcy

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“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

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“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

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“You know, we’re living in a society! We’re supposed to act in a civilized way!”

—George Costanza

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NORMAL (as sung by Martin Mull)

🎶Why’d we have to get so hip?

Why’d we have to take that trip? Honey…

You look dumb in dungarees — and so do I.

Go put on your nicest dress and I’ll put on my tie.

Here’s why…

CHORUS:

I’m tired of rock n’ rollin’

Let’s get married, honey — let’s go bowlin’

Throw away our pot and acid

Spend the weekend at Lake Placid

It’s hard to live in this town if you’re strange

What say you and I get normal for a change?

What say you and I get normal

We don’t have to be that formal

We’ll just sit and watch TV, like others do

We’ll eat meat and mashed potatoes

Cut our hair so folks don’t hate us

Life is nuts enough just livin’ here with you

Let’s see who can be most borin’

You do the dishes, honey — I’ll start snorin’

Get a mower, do some mowin’

Spend all mornin’ gettin’ it goin’

We’ll show everyone in town we’re not deranged

What say you and I get normal for a change?

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“We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back—that we’re being born into a NEW NORMAL: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.”

—Charles Eisenstein

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NORML: National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

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“Normopathy is the pathological pursuit of conformity and societal acceptance at the expense of individuality.”

—Wikipedia

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Normotic (adj.): You figure out the definition. Hint: it’s not a coincidence it rhymes with neurotic and robotic.

—J.St.E., M.O.O. (Master of the Ordinary and the Obvious)

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BARRACKS LIFE RECOLLECTIONS

by Sgt. Pepé

I recall a friend from California when I was just a raw recruit—he once lamented that all his peers in that UR-hip state were just conforming to nonconformity.

I often wonder what happened to John (insert generic Dutch name). He was an interesting, intelligent misfit who turned me on to A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich during his anti-military phase—and Lao Tzu during his more mellow moods. He tried to school me on the Aryan theory of Hindu origins, not knowing I was already familiar. He thought me a bit of a naïve East Coast ethnic. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Nor were his politics, oddly enough.

Being immersed in barracks life with men from wildly divergent regions—back when regional distinctions meant something—was an education in itself.

The Texans were loud, loyal, and branded with their hometowns on their bumpers. The New Mexico Hispanics looked and acted like European Spaniards. They seemed oddly familiar. They took me in. The Boston cryptographers? Smart, smug, nasal—and nearly got us thrown out of a John Denver concert for heckling.

Then there were two quiet guys who shared a room that looked like an art gallery. Impeccable taste, aloof demeanor. They never mingled, and they didn’t need to. They were ahead of their time.

Unluckily for them, their room was next to an old Black staff sergeant who shuffled like he was stoned and hosted a 24/7 party. After the race riots of a few years earlier, the brass gave Black troops wide behavioral leeway. There were still racial slurs faintly visible under shoddy paint jobs outside the barracks—whether out of laziness or Southern spite, who’s to say.

The point is: we were all thrown together. You met people. You learned things. That kind of real diversity doesn’t happen anymore.

Today, the young are funneled into universities stratified by class. American culture has been homogenized by the media-industrial complex. They’re all the same.

Abolish the All-Volunteer Army. Bring back the draft.

—Sgt. Pepé

References:

“Normopathy” — Psychology Today Martin Mull — “Normal” (song)