Well there ain't no time to wonder why

Whoopee we're all gonna die.

And in "Superbird," Joe aims his attack directly at President Johnson:

Look up yonder, way up in the sky

What is that I see

It's a bird, it's a plane

It's a man insane

It's my president, LBJ.

Country Joe and the Fish try to laugh at the horror of the War and of the ugliness of death. They have their own kind of humor--at the same time satirical and sick. "If you get people to laugh at themselves, something happens," Joe said.

In the "Rag," the laughter is meant to combine with tears. "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box," David sings toward the end.

ASPIRITUAL-TYPE piece that the Fish do runs in the same vein. "Please don't drop that H-bomb on me, drop it on yourself," Joe pleads, and then, as if to say that the only way to fight the destruction and evil and hideousness of War is to turn on, the group begins immediately to play the beautiful "Thought Dream":

I walk through the center air of summer's blooming

Into the frozen air of winter's dying.

And as tears inside me fall

The pain of old wounds calls me to mend them.