Welcome Back to the Land of Confusion
a memoir
I was five the first time I saw the music video for “Land of Confusion” by Genesis. My dad had passed out on the couch, still in his courthouse suit, one sock dangling from his foot like a white flag. The other sock was balled up next to his Crown Royal glass on the coffee table, the ice melted. I crept out of bed dragging my Care Bears blanket behind me like a security clearance I hadn’t earned, and parked myself on the beige carpet just in time to see a rubbery, bloated head explode onto the screen.
At first I thought I was dreaming. Not a fun dream. Not even a nightmare in the Freddy Krueger sense. More like a fever-dream reality, the kind you get when you're five years old and you’ve just started realizing the world’s run by people who probably shouldn't be trusted with scissors, let alone missiles. That video didn’t invent the fear. It just packaged it with puppets and synthesizers.
The whole thing was straight-up-fucked. Cartoon versions of world leaders with faces like melted candles. There was a president (supposedly Reagan)sweating through his sheets, eyes bulging like he was lost in a dream he couldn’t control. He fumbled with the nuclear button like it was a TV remote. He smiled and waved as the world caught fire behind him. Even the trees looked terrified. It fucked me up.
However, there was something about how fake it all looked that made it feel more real than anything else I’d ever seen. Like it was telling a truth nobody wanted to say out loud. That the people in charge were out of their depth. That they weren’t wise, or noble or even decent. They were soulless puppets, rubber-skinned caricatures being manipulated by hands we weren’t allowed to see.
When I asked my mom why the puppet-president was sweating, she said, “Because he’s the one in charge.” And then she went back to folding laundry, like that answered anything.
Years later, I saw the same puppet again…
Only this time he had a different face and an orange hue. Same bloated ego. Same sweaty panic behind the bravado. Different show, same clown. The scenery changed from the Cold War bunkers to gold elevators. But the feeling stayed the same. That weird, rubbery sense that nobody was actually steering the ship. That the people yelling about greatness were really just panicking under the table.
Watching “Land of Confusion” again as an adult didn’t scare me anymore. It made me nostalgic. Not for the era, but for the honesty of it. How it didn’t sugarcoat the chaos or polish the panic. It exposed the whole act. The power posturing, the greed masquerading as leadership, the hollow slogans (you know them all) that always seemed to come just before the nightmare.
The 80s pretended everything was fine. So does now. Different haircuts. Same lie. Pretend hard enough and you can almost forget that the whole system is a stage set. However, “Land of Confusion” didn’t forget. It sneered. It sweated. It showed us the puppet show and dared us to see the strings.Go watch the video. Just don’t be surprised if it looks a little too familiar.
Link here:
I scared super easy as a kid but someone (probably my dad) recorded an episode of Spitting Image off the TV and I watched it constantly as a child. Those puppets were awesome!
This was the single most terrifying video of my childhood.