Dead Kennedys – "Holiday in Cambodia" (1980)

It’s a holiday in Cambodia

Where you’ll do what you’re told

Better Things is a TV series that aired on FX a few years ago.  It stars Pamela Adlon (who co-created the show with Louis C.K.) as Sam Fox, a divorced actress raising three daughters in Los Angeles.

There’s a scene in one episode of the show where the daughters are all talking over one another as Sam is driving down a busy L.A. street after picking them up at their different schools.  Each of the girls – a high-schooler, a middle-schooler, and a grade-schooler – is demanding that her mother do what she wants to do RIGHT NOW!

The Better Things cast

After putting up with the yelling for a minute or so, Sam loses it.  She pulls her minivan over and tells her daughters to get out and walk home.  When the girls protest that they are miles from their house, she points to a nearby bus stop and tells them they can get home that way.

Sam’s daughters are stunned into silence by her pronouncement – perhaps the only time in the entire series that none of the three are complaining about something trivial or otherwise being annoying.

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A couple of days ago, my daughter Caroline suggested that I take my seven-year-old grandson Sully and five-year-old granddaughter Eliza to see The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants at a local movie theater.  It was only the first day of their Christmas break, and I thought it might be wiser to save that movie for a rainy day.  But I try to mind my own business when it comes to how my kids are raising my grandkids.

Sully and Eliza, looking guilty

We saw the movie in the middle of the afternoon at one of those theaters with fully reclining seats.  I figured if it wasn’t any good, I could at least catch 40 winks.

But the movie was incredibly loud from beginning to end – I can’t imagine how anyone could have fallen asleep while watching it.

The highlight of the movie for me was a scene that was accompanied by a karaoke track of the Dead Kennedys’ fabulous 1980 single, “Holiday in Cambodia.”

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As I was driving home after the SpongeBob movie, the two kids began to bicker.  It seemed that Sully had placed his water bottle over the imaginary yet very important dividing line that demarcated Eliza’s half of the back seat of my car from his half – an unforgivable sin on his part.

A few minutes after I settled that dispute by quoting my favorite Ring Lardner line – “’Shut up,’ he explained” – my two little angels were at it again.”

“My real name is Elizabeth,” Eliza announced.

“No it’s not,” Sully demurred.  “It’s Eliza.”

“Yes it is!”

“No it’s not!”

And so on and so forth, world without end, amen. 

I thought about how the Sam character handled her daughters when they annoyed her while she was driving them home in the Better Things episode, and decided to see if her tactic worked on my grandkids.

“That’s enough,” I said.  “If you two don’t stop arguing right now, I’m going to make you get out of the car and walk home!”

We were in Frederick, Maryland – which is a far cry from Los Angeles – and much closer to my daughter’s house than Sam and her girls were when she threatened them with involuntary debarkation.

On the other hand, we were driving in total darkness, and my grandkids are much younger than Sam’s daughters – so I think my threat may have been even more frightening.

“Granddad, we don’t know how to get home!” they protested.

“Then I’d say you’d better be quiet,” I replied.

It worked like a charm.  Sully and Eliza didn’t say a word for the duration of our drive home.

I figured my grandkids would rat me out when they saw their mother – perhaps causing her to seriously reconsider the wisdom of ever letting them go anywhere with me again – so I came clean and told her exactly what I had said to them . . . but made the whole thing sound like a big joke. 

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When I shared this story with my therapist, she said that my tactic worked because my grandchildren trusted me.

I found her use of “trust” in this context interesting.  By saying that my grandkids trusted me, she meant that they believed I would do what I said I would do  – not that they had confidence that I would take good care of them.

Before I said goodbye to Sully and Eliza that night, I tried to make it clear to them that I would have never put them out of the car and left them alone in the dark – that I just said that so they would stop arguing.

I think that was the right thing to do.  Plus I figured that they wouldn’t fall for the same trick again.

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Here’s the picture sleeve of “Holiday in Cambodia,” which depicts a crowd member using a folding chair to beat the hanged corpse of a dead student during the 1976 Thammasat University protests in Bangkok:

Click here to listen to “Holiday in Cambodia.”

Click here to buy “Holiday in Cambodia” from Amazon.