War & Peace Quote by Mark Mothersbaugh

Mothersbaugh’s line lands like a confession from the draft-era backstage: college not as a dream, but as a dodge. “Basically to avoid going to Vietnam” strips away the patriotic script and replaces it with survival math. Kent State isn’t framed as an intellectual refuge; it’s a bureaucratic shield, a place you go because the alternative is a jungle and a body count.

The emotional engine is the blunt self-indictment: “I had no idea what I was doing.” That’s not charming indecision; it’s disorientation as a generational condition. A lot of Vietnam-era rhetoric splits people into heroes and villains, hawks and doves. Mothersbaugh refuses the neat categories. He’s not claiming moral clarity, just panic, confusion, and the everyday violence humming under American life: “trying not to get into a fight every day.” The war is overseas, but the combat mindset has already colonized the domestic sphere.

Kent State carries its own thunderclap of context, too. Four students killed by the National Guard in 1970 turned the campus into a symbol of state power and youth vulnerability. Mothersbaugh’s quote reads differently with that knowledge: the “safe” place you flee to can still become a frontline. Coming from a musician who’d help define the anxious, deconstructed energy of post-60s art (Devo’s nervy satire, the sense that society is malfunctioning), the subtext is origin-story material: not ideology first, but fear first. Out of that fear comes the need to make something that sounds like a system breaking down.