The revolution will be televised 

Fast-forwarding through a VHS tape from 1987, I came across an accidentally taped episode of the syndicated Top 40 show Solid Gold, featuring the soft-rock dream team of Amy Grant and Peter Cetera. Amy Grant was crossing over from Contemporary Christian music (as Billboard calls it) and Peter Cetera was staking a claim as a solo artist after fronting the rock band Chicago since the early 70s. We’re not talking Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell here. The song is a drippy ballad, Cetera’s hair blow-dried to tousled perfection as he looks into Grant’s eyes selling the lyrics. 

Among many, Cetera’s band Chicago was a sellout from the start. Underground bands weren’t supposed to hit the top 10 with the depressing regularity that Chicago did – it’s something that undid the Doors’ reputation for some – and it was particularly loathsome for Chicago after it included this note on its second album: “We dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. And the revolution in all of its forms." A paper revolutionary at best, it’s no surprise that Cetera wound up a preening pop star. Who knows where Jim Morrison might have landed if he’d lived, someone who once allowed himself to be profiled by 16 Magazine? 

Cetera and Grant’s performance on Solid Gold was followed by this commercial for Jordache Basics:

If you’re half-asleep on a Saturday afternoon with Solid Gold droning on in the background, you’re now awake, aware that scenes of rioting, with plumes of tear gas and a burning American flag have just flashed before you, framed between scenes of whiny adolescents. The girl wearing the t-shirt with the peace symbol only confuses things further as if to say, “Yes, we’ve just commoditized the past and trivialized the opposition to an immoral war and a military draft. But hey, that revolution thing was cool, right?” 

One other symbol of the counterculture that seems to have not so much lost its profile as misplaced it, is the raised fist. Used in leftist social movements for more than 150 years as an anti-fascist gesture, America took notice when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during their medal ceremony at the 1986 Olympics. 

Although for Smith and Carlos, the fists were a “human rights salute,” it got adopted by the Black Panthers as its logo, representing black power. Later, in blaxploitation movies, you’d see Bernie Casey walking through the ‘hood casually greeting other black men with a raised clenched fist. You saw it often following George Floyd’s murder. Unity, strength, resistance. 

Then, on Jan. 6 news cameras caught the despicable Josh Hawley awkwardly flashing a raised fist to the horde gathering in front of the Capitol, an image that he quickly turned into a fundraiser, putting it on coffee mugs that sold on his website. Someone on Hawley’s staff surely used the word “iconic” in selling him the idea. 

It commemorates when a politician with a $200 haircut urged on a bloodthirsty mob dressed for a tailgate party outside the Ninth Circle of Hell, the one Dante reserved for Treachery, to fight the power. Maybe he would have seemed more believable if he ditched the expensive suit and wore Jordache Basics.