Politics & Power Quote by Jello Biafra

Home, in Jello Biafra's mouth, isn't a warm hearth; it's an infection site you learn to navigate because leaving would mean losing the symptoms you write about. "Home is where the disease is" flips the comfort-food cliche into diagnosis, and it lands because punk has always treated patriotism as a marketing slogan for rot. He's not confessing despair so much as staking out a workflow: America as an endlessly renewable supply chain of hypocrisy, violence, and spectacle.

The bite comes from the double allegiance embedded in the line. He claims America as "my home" while calling it sick, refusing the easy moral high ground of exile. That's a distinctly Biafra move: staying close enough to smell the garbage, then amplifying the stench into satire and protest. The promise that he'll "never run out of subjects" reads like gallows humor, but it also implicates the audience. If the artist's material is infinite, the culture isn't healing; it's producing fresh scandals on schedule.

Context matters: Biafra emerged with Dead Kennedys in the late '70s and '80s, when Reagan-era nationalism, moral panics, and police crackdowns made dissent feel both urgent and criminalized. Punk wasn't merely aesthetic rebellion; it was an alternative newsroom. The line treats songwriting as civic reporting-by-other-means, with the bleak punchline that the beat is permanent. The "disease" isn't just politicians; it's the systems that keep generating them, and the public appetite that keeps buying the story.