If you’ve read much of the American anarchist press of the 1990s, you’ve probably run across articles or pamphlets published by the Boston-based BAD Brigade. Joe Peacott was one of the primary authors of those BAD pamphlets. Anchorage Anarchy is a little zine published by Peacott that reflects many of the libertarian and anarchist themes he’s written about over the years.

Anchorage Anarchy #10 (August 2007)

Bad Press, PO Box 230332, anchorage, AK 99523-0332

If you’ve read much of the American anarchist press of the 1990s, you’ve probably run across articles or pamphlets published by the Boston-based BAD Brigade. Joe Peacott was one of the primary authors of those BAD pamphlets. Anchorage Anarchy is a little zine published by Peacott that reflects many of the libertarian and anarchist themes he’s written about over the years. In this issue, Peacott asks the important question “What’s the matter with kids today?” He doesn’t find anything wrong with today’s kids, but he has plenty of criticism of the bad parenting that turns the lives of young people into an omnipresent paranoid reality. Parents react to the overhyped fears promoted by societal institutions like the media by controlling and monitoring every minute of their children’s lives. The risks to children are not greater than they where back when these parents were children. Then there is the irony that today’s parents were the generation rebelling against overbearing parental authority in the 1960s and 70s. It gets even worse when irrational controlling parents enlist the government to enact programs and laws that make things worse for everybody and don’t even reduce the risks that these parents fear.

Peacott works a nurse, so he often has anti-authoritarian insights about the current healthcare system. In another article, he criticizes the Medicare system and the ways the government uses the program to screw over people and enrich corporations.

Reviewed by Chuck Munson for Factsheet 5.