A YELLOW SUBMARINE RERUN

One of my favorite animated films is The Yellow Submarine. It’s rich in color, texture, and little themes that always seem to pop back into my head every so often. The part that always comes back to me is the arrival of the Blue Meanies—a bunch of goblin-like creatures who hate music and color so they invade Pepperland. Their whole mission is to silence music and drain the world of its color. (Spoiler: they fail, and that’s thanks to the Beatles and their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.)

Anyway I’ve Lately been thinking about how the Blue Meanies aren’t just a psychedelic cartoon villain. They’re kind of a perfect stand-in for what’s happening right now. Except this time, they aren’t blue—they’re red. Since the Trump years, politics has been less about governing and more about this bizarre culture war: making headlines over Sydney Sweeney, Cracker Barrel logos, renaming landmarks, turning the Rose Garden into a strip mall common area. It’s not about policy, it’s about control. It’s about flattening a culture until it feels bland and empty.

The “red meanies” aren’t banning music, but their fingerprints are all over the places that shape culture. When you pressure institutions, when you pave over spaces that had meaning and history, you strip away color. You erase texture — truth too.

While I don’t buy into the idea of American Exceptionalism, if there’s anything that actually makes this country uniquely special, it’s the culture—the creativity, the mix of voices, and the harmless weird shit that we just tolerate and accept. That’s exactly what’s being chipped away. And like in Yellow Submarine, I have to believe the music—the art, the culture—will hopefully be what outlasts the meanies.