White Guilt is a very serious affliction in this country. Its symptoms include cultural appropriation, political correctness, and obsessive NPR consumption. Fall is peak White Guilt season, wedged between our country's most cherished celebrations of genocide, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A common misconception is that White Guilt is a mental illness. While it can cause delusions in more severe cases, White Guilt is actually a completely natural response to conspicuous consumption, particularly when this addiction to material garbage is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Lets face it people, like it or not, this country's grotesque surplus of wealth would be scientifically impossible without a veritable banquet of holocausts spanning three continents and the entire Western Hemisphere. Scores of tribes in North and South America and Africa were reduced to cinder to create a level of concentrated wealth in Western Europe and its bastard breakaway states that is downright unnatural and white people on both sides of the Atlantic continue to enjoy the luxuries that this legacy of brutality provides us. Luxuries like slowly murdering ourselves with trans fats while others starve and declaring it a holiday. So if you're white, you probably should feel a little bit guilty. Our ancestors did some dicked up shit, even mine. Though they may have came to this country as white niggers escaping their own holocaust on potato boats, my Irish Catholic kin still earned their right to whiteness by whooping on school buses full of black kids as good as any Catholic bashing WASP could.
So we've zeroed in on the cause of white guilt, now how about the cure if there even is one? The prescription currently preferred by most milquetoast, limp-wristed, liberal, sweater vest jockies is some form of charity. Whether this means cutting checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center or voting for extravagant welfare state packages, honkies seem convinced that they can buy their way out of rape like Kobe fucking Bryant. This doesn't work. However well intentioned, forking over fists full of cash to poor people does nothing but make them dependent on the same kind of hierarchy that imprisoned them in the first place. Africa doesn't need food, they need farms that aren't owned by Monsanto and more than anything they need the bloodsucking monkey of Western Imperialism off their fucking back. So unless you can give them debt forgiveness save your money.
Welfare strings people along and gives them just enough money to exist while keeping them reliant on and thus subservient to the state. I know this from personal experience. My agoraphobia makes me ill-equipped to function in conventional society, the fact that I'm permanently stuck between genders doesn't exactly help either. But rather than adjusting society to meet the needs of people like me and encouraging our strengths, the state prefers to give me a stiffened that affords me just enough money to cover my meds while preventing me from seeking the part time work that might be enough to get me started but not enough to cover my expenses. The result is being trapped in a kind of limbo of economic dependency. This snare serves a whole other purpose when we're talking about even more heavily marginalized communities. What sane black person living under the yoke of a police state wouldn't want to strap on a Ruger and hit the nearest Howard Johnson's? Well, one that needs that same racist state to feed their family. It's no coincidence that LBJ's Great Society came amidst some of the biggest black insurrections since the Restoration. It was payola in the form of high rise slave quarters called projects. The welfare state seeks to cripple not empower.
The more radical white leftist solution to White Guilt usually comes in the form of some kind of #pandering. You can keep your gentrified town house and hit up the ATM for your trust funds in your cherry new Tesla as long as you sip fair trade lattes and support Black Lives Matter and queer rights on Facebook. Not only is this brand of plush armchair activism offensively counterproductive but it's also downright counterrevolutionary. It's easy to support someone else's struggle from the comfort of the suburbs. And marching off to someone else's barrio thinking your going to save the peasants with your menthol E-cigs and your Che Guevara iPhone is just a petite bourgeois version of humanitarian imperialism. So congrats Sandernistas, you're Clintonians after all.
So what is the cure? Your probably begging your browser by now. The harsh reality is that there really isn't one. The damage has been done. Contrition is a lifelong sentence, not a solution. But that doesn't mean things can't be done to help equal the playing field and live a long fulfilling life with WG. How do we do that? I think founding Black Panther, Huey Newton came up with the best answer to that question when he was asked what white kids could do to support his cause. His response? Start a White Panther Party. There are poor white folks from the Ozarks to the Rust Belt that are just as thirsty for revolution as any person of color and for many of the same damn reasons. Sadly, too many of their kids have turned their backs on them and left their righteous fury to be poached by race baiting twats like Donald Trump. These kids go on and on about intersectionality without realizing that the best way to show their solidarity with oppressed minorities is to organize their own communities against the state that threatens them both. They could use a brief history lesson.
For the most part, Huey's sage advice fell on deaf ears but a few radical honkies got the message. John Sinclair's appropriately titled White Panther Party worked to unite Ann Arbor and Detroit's disenfranchised white youth around dope, sex, and Rock&Roll. He managed to galvanize the weapons grade angst of youth culture to create an authentic vanguard against Nixon's fascist state. They joined the Black Panther's revolution from their own neighborhoods, creating the terrifyingly unthinkable; the teenage suburban guerrilla, armed with a blunt and their daddies gauge and ready to fight the pigs that crashed their kegger knowing they were the same pigs that shot Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.
Perhaps even more fascinating was the Young Patriots Organization which later manifested itself into the sadly short lived Patriot Party. These were a loose knit collection of rural white radicals who realized that hillbillies, white trash, and rednecks were the new white niggers and that their hunting skills were put to better use taking aim at city hall than joining the Klan to fuck with other poor people. So they dressed in berets and denim jackets emblazoned with the Stars and Bars and joined Fred Hampton's militant Rainbow Coalition to take down the state. I think this cuts to the heart of the White Guilt conundrum and how to treat it by lending a hand to the people our ancestors fucked rather than belittling their cause with charity and empty calls for solidarity.
You see, dearest motherfuckers, the best thing we can do to make up for the crimes of the white race is to secede from it. The very concept of whiteness was invented to justify one small cartel of pale faced oligarch's theft of three entire continents. We should reject our membership to this jerry-rigged caste by recognizing that all poor people are their playthings and we're done with being played. We need to reinvest into our own maligned cultures and declare independence for our true tribes separate from the inherently classist monstrosity of White Supremacy, be we queers, headcases, delinquents, hillbillies, or trailer trash. Our act of contrition for getting high off the fumes of the white race should be to burn it down.
It's one of the reasons why I'm proud to be a part of a site like Attack the System. It celebrates true tribal diversity as well as the one thing that brings us all together, our thirst for liberty and our hatred of the state that deprives every shade of this radical rainbow its god given right to radical self-determination. It's like the Breakfast Club for renegades. Here we are all the nigger, the faggot, the redneck, the bandit, and the call-girl. So let them call me a token tranny or a NatBol. I share Huey's dream of an America of a thousand flags even if a few of them are emblazoned on the back of pick-up trucks. This is all of our fight. So swallow that guilt and pick up a torch, we've got mansions to burn together.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno
* Serve the People by Handsome Furs
* Great American Hoax by the MC5
* Common People by Pulp
* Sonic Reducer by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Rebels by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
* Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack
* Sit Down by James
* Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds
* Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Monday, November 19, 2018
Support the Houthis
Growing up I was obsessed with the counterculture of the 60's and 70's, so much so that I now instinctively associate a lot of it with my own childhood even though I grew up in the 90's and 00's. Shaved Fish and Let It Bleed play like soundtracks to my teenage years. Some of my first crushes were on righteous babes in arms like Angela Davis and Leila Khaled. And I spent hours pouring over my parents vintage magazines, devouring articles on the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army. What can I say, I was a weird fucking kid. But my fixation with radical chic felt very appropriate during the Orwellian miasma of the Bush years and in some very sad ways, it feels even more appropriate today.
One of the big moments that had a permanent impact on my socio-political outlook were the riots of the '68 Chicago Democratic National Convention, when, unlike today, the radical left took on their own supposed party for refusing to get serious about ending their growing bloodbath in Vietnam. Irate kids filled the streets chanting expletives, the Yippies threatened to contaminate the city's water supply with LSD, and the MC5 crashed the caucus on a flatbed truck with an eight our marathon performance that helped give birth to the Yippies mutant offspring later known as punk rock. The moment that stuck with me most, however, was the one that sent the club swinging pigs in the Chicago PD into a skull cracking frenzy that even the state agreed was a police riot, the moment on night three of the Convention when ten thousand kids raided Grant Park and took down an American flag before replacing it with a red one in an act of solidarity with the Vietcong. To many meat and potatoes Americans, this was the step too far, when protesters went from simply opposing an illegal war to supporting the "enemy".
But from an anti-imperialist perspective, this was the only moral option. The Vietcong were peasants defending their country from an American invasion of genocidal proportions. They were the one force standing between the American war machine and a million My Lai's. To appose the war without supporting this resistance would be an act of absurd hypocrisy. It wasn't about politics. Though their were plenty of communists in the antiwar movement, they didn't make make up the majority any more than fascists made up the majority of the America First Committee. The leading figures in Grant Park included queer anarchist bard Allen Ginsberg, who was later thrown out of Cuba for calling Che Guevara "cute", and foul mouthed libertarian socialist prankster Abbie Hoffman, who owed at least as much to classic liberal populists like Thomas Paine and Henry George as he did the Frankfurt School. They didn't support "Charlie" because they were commies, they supported them because they were the real heroes fighting for their freedom.
Flash forward fifty years, an Arab coalition backed by US Dollars and armed to the fangs with American weapons has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and starved countless more in the tiny nation of Yemen, one of the poorest on earth. Their latest victim's crime? An old one, Supporting another rag-tag militia of rural freedom fighters known as the Houthis and, regardless of the latest UN ceasefire, with the last rebel held port of Hodeidah surrounded by a death squad of 30,000 mercenaries, our imperial superstate is a cunts hair away from shutting down the source of 70% of the already impoverished countries imports making the deaths of millions an inevitability. Chicken-hawks like Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis have called for a tentative peace deal sometime in December. But their grim track record speaks for itself. These were the same little Kissingers who sabotaged the last ceasefire in June. Meanwhile, the weapons just keep flowing to the front lines while the Saudis launch new fronts in the north west and the Trump administration openly toys with making such a peace deal null and void by declaring the embattled Houthis terrorists.
In other words, the fabled ceasefire is a rouse to calm down Europe while the Saudis prepare to land the death blow in Hodeidah. However, against all perceivable odds, the Houthis continue to make the bastards bleed for every last inch of their country while remaining open to peace. They stand alone against the greatest forces for tyranny the world has ever seen. Contrary to state appropriated myth, there are no Iranian sugar daddies supplying them with arms. The only guns in their hands are the ones they pried from the bodies of the tyrants we sent to subjugate them. These are not terrorists. They aren't even extremists. Though their humble beginnings rest in the Shia stronghold of their nations mountainous north, they are a non-sectarian, non-denominational militia that has earned the hard won support of their nations working-class majority.
But where are the Houthi flags flying here in the land of the free, the sacred belly of the beast? Where have all the Yippies gone? Where is our generations Grant Park moment? well I for one am willing to forgo political correctness to make that stand. So I am calling on you, my dearest motherfuckers, to take this November, National Veterans Month, to pledge your solidarity to the brave men who are truly dying for their freedom. Stand with the Houthis as they make what could very well be their final stand. Tear down the American flag and raise the one that calls for the death of this wretched empire. Support peace. Support justice. Support the Houthis.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* Power to the People by John Lennon
* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies
* Flowers in December by Mazzy Star
One of the big moments that had a permanent impact on my socio-political outlook were the riots of the '68 Chicago Democratic National Convention, when, unlike today, the radical left took on their own supposed party for refusing to get serious about ending their growing bloodbath in Vietnam. Irate kids filled the streets chanting expletives, the Yippies threatened to contaminate the city's water supply with LSD, and the MC5 crashed the caucus on a flatbed truck with an eight our marathon performance that helped give birth to the Yippies mutant offspring later known as punk rock. The moment that stuck with me most, however, was the one that sent the club swinging pigs in the Chicago PD into a skull cracking frenzy that even the state agreed was a police riot, the moment on night three of the Convention when ten thousand kids raided Grant Park and took down an American flag before replacing it with a red one in an act of solidarity with the Vietcong. To many meat and potatoes Americans, this was the step too far, when protesters went from simply opposing an illegal war to supporting the "enemy".
But from an anti-imperialist perspective, this was the only moral option. The Vietcong were peasants defending their country from an American invasion of genocidal proportions. They were the one force standing between the American war machine and a million My Lai's. To appose the war without supporting this resistance would be an act of absurd hypocrisy. It wasn't about politics. Though their were plenty of communists in the antiwar movement, they didn't make make up the majority any more than fascists made up the majority of the America First Committee. The leading figures in Grant Park included queer anarchist bard Allen Ginsberg, who was later thrown out of Cuba for calling Che Guevara "cute", and foul mouthed libertarian socialist prankster Abbie Hoffman, who owed at least as much to classic liberal populists like Thomas Paine and Henry George as he did the Frankfurt School. They didn't support "Charlie" because they were commies, they supported them because they were the real heroes fighting for their freedom.
Flash forward fifty years, an Arab coalition backed by US Dollars and armed to the fangs with American weapons has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and starved countless more in the tiny nation of Yemen, one of the poorest on earth. Their latest victim's crime? An old one, Supporting another rag-tag militia of rural freedom fighters known as the Houthis and, regardless of the latest UN ceasefire, with the last rebel held port of Hodeidah surrounded by a death squad of 30,000 mercenaries, our imperial superstate is a cunts hair away from shutting down the source of 70% of the already impoverished countries imports making the deaths of millions an inevitability. Chicken-hawks like Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary, James "Mad Dog" Mattis have called for a tentative peace deal sometime in December. But their grim track record speaks for itself. These were the same little Kissingers who sabotaged the last ceasefire in June. Meanwhile, the weapons just keep flowing to the front lines while the Saudis launch new fronts in the north west and the Trump administration openly toys with making such a peace deal null and void by declaring the embattled Houthis terrorists.
In other words, the fabled ceasefire is a rouse to calm down Europe while the Saudis prepare to land the death blow in Hodeidah. However, against all perceivable odds, the Houthis continue to make the bastards bleed for every last inch of their country while remaining open to peace. They stand alone against the greatest forces for tyranny the world has ever seen. Contrary to state appropriated myth, there are no Iranian sugar daddies supplying them with arms. The only guns in their hands are the ones they pried from the bodies of the tyrants we sent to subjugate them. These are not terrorists. They aren't even extremists. Though their humble beginnings rest in the Shia stronghold of their nations mountainous north, they are a non-sectarian, non-denominational militia that has earned the hard won support of their nations working-class majority.
But where are the Houthi flags flying here in the land of the free, the sacred belly of the beast? Where have all the Yippies gone? Where is our generations Grant Park moment? well I for one am willing to forgo political correctness to make that stand. So I am calling on you, my dearest motherfuckers, to take this November, National Veterans Month, to pledge your solidarity to the brave men who are truly dying for their freedom. Stand with the Houthis as they make what could very well be their final stand. Tear down the American flag and raise the one that calls for the death of this wretched empire. Support peace. Support justice. Support the Houthis.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* Power to the People by John Lennon
* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies
* Flowers in December by Mazzy Star
Monday, November 12, 2018
Has the Government Declared War on Trans People?
Has the government declared war on trans people? That's the million dollar question and its one I still don't have a clear answer to. As some of you may already know, several weeks ago a memo being circulated by the Department of Health and Human Services was leaked exposing a plan by the Trump administration in league with their supposed enemies in the Deep State to officially establish gender as being defined exclusively by ones genitalia at birth. This would essentially erase people like me and leave us at the mercy of a bevy of bureaucratic tyrants from the prison industrial complex to its child abusing cousins in the tenured snake pits of the public school system.
When I first heard about the memo, released by the New York Times, I was skeptical for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with the foul circus of the midterms. Was the memo leaked by Trump's frenemies in the Steady State in an attempt to use identity politics to shore up the youth vote for their allies in the Democratic Party? Or did Trump leak the memo himself to excite those fun-policing tranny-bashers, the Evangelicals, knowing they'd need the Spanish Fly of state sanctioned child abuse to get hard enough to vote for their local philandering whore-mongers in the GOP and, by proxy, our own philandering whore-monger in chief? Was this memo for real or was it just more hot air to fill Trump's leaky balloon?
Infuriated, I dug like Lazarus to get to the bottom of this fucking thing and I still haven't come any closer to the truth. The memo is out there, bouncing around from one grey-flannel federal bully pit to the next, but as to the question of "does it mean anything?", I still don't know, but I've come to the conclusion that ultimately that's beside the point. The point isn't whether or not the government will use their power to crush a maligned but growing minority. The point is that they can and they can use the federal machinery of 'human rights' to do it. Title IX, a law designed so the state could protect the rights of girls and young women, is now being considered as a possible weapon to define gender based on a horde of powerful mens' Victorian notions of a pink and blue binary universe.
The question here shouldn't be, Can gender be defined by the outward nature of our junk? The question should be, what gives the government the fucking right to make that decision? Regardless of your opinions on gender, do you really trust those pencil-pushing cubicle-Nazis in the Federal Government to tell you who you are? If gender then why not race or sexuality or religion? Where does it stop? The civil rights movement was supposed to be about empowerment, but once the government failed to squash it by force, they decided to co-opt it much the way they did the labor movement. The result hasn't been an increase of rights but a buffet of privileges delivered by the same state with the fire hoses and rabid dogs. When this state decides that it wants to control us, it threatens to take back the privileges and release the hounds. Somehow, I don't think this is what Harvey Milk got shot for.
The relationship between queer people and the state has always been an abusive one. By nature, being queer is an affront to the status quo that the state holds dear. They've tried to annihilate us, to make our love and our bodies illegal, to throw us away in padded cells and concrete tombs. When all that failed to correct us, suddenly Uncle Sam came around offering us a pocket full of candy. We were too desperate to realize this gift was poison. When the state can't eliminate a threat, it subjugates it. The state tried to subjugate trans children with segregated safe spaces and other trinkets of bureaucratic largess but our kids refused to be tamed. They refused to fit into those tight little boxes that say male and female and they inspired many lost adults like myself to join them. Together, we've rejected the tired western notion of gender entirely, creating our own identities to mach the complex nature of our spirits. Spirits that couldn't be contained by outdated science and social structures. Spirits called genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, genderflux, trigender, bigender, neutrois, genderless, and some without any name at all. This radical embrace of spiritual freedom and sexual diversity made it impossible for the state to control us. So now it looks like the poison candy may be replaced by the truncheons and bite wounds of yesteryear.
Well fuck them. They can't tell us who we are. They can't tell us what's in our souls. If the government wants to declare war on my people then I say lets return the fucking favor. It is the state that has no right to exist, not us, and all we have to do is refuse to acknowledge its authority. Dress outlandishly. Refuse to answer to any name that's not your own. Use multiple different gendered spaces in one day. Hold a shit-in and occupy the faculties own facilities. Drop out. Run away. Start your own damn families, your own damn schools, your own damn tribal institutions, and your own damn communities. We've already succeeded at rendering gender irrelevant, lets give the state the same treatment. Lets genderfuck Uncle Sam and give him a taste of his own poison candy.
Our movement was built around the wild flames of the counter-cultural bonfires of the Sixties and Seventies. We were wild, naked, and free. We rejected the false gods of the straight world. But somewhere between Reagan's plagues and Obama's platitudes we lost our way. The latest generation of our tribe has reignited the flame and reminded us who we are. The time is now, dearest motherfuckers. Come back to the fire. With any luck we can make it spread. Lets burn this motherfucker down.
Peace, Love, Anarchy, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Be a Body by Grimes
* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex
* Losing My Religion by REM
* Monkeywrench by Foo Fighters
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras
* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie
* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen
When I first heard about the memo, released by the New York Times, I was skeptical for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with the foul circus of the midterms. Was the memo leaked by Trump's frenemies in the Steady State in an attempt to use identity politics to shore up the youth vote for their allies in the Democratic Party? Or did Trump leak the memo himself to excite those fun-policing tranny-bashers, the Evangelicals, knowing they'd need the Spanish Fly of state sanctioned child abuse to get hard enough to vote for their local philandering whore-mongers in the GOP and, by proxy, our own philandering whore-monger in chief? Was this memo for real or was it just more hot air to fill Trump's leaky balloon?
Infuriated, I dug like Lazarus to get to the bottom of this fucking thing and I still haven't come any closer to the truth. The memo is out there, bouncing around from one grey-flannel federal bully pit to the next, but as to the question of "does it mean anything?", I still don't know, but I've come to the conclusion that ultimately that's beside the point. The point isn't whether or not the government will use their power to crush a maligned but growing minority. The point is that they can and they can use the federal machinery of 'human rights' to do it. Title IX, a law designed so the state could protect the rights of girls and young women, is now being considered as a possible weapon to define gender based on a horde of powerful mens' Victorian notions of a pink and blue binary universe.
The question here shouldn't be, Can gender be defined by the outward nature of our junk? The question should be, what gives the government the fucking right to make that decision? Regardless of your opinions on gender, do you really trust those pencil-pushing cubicle-Nazis in the Federal Government to tell you who you are? If gender then why not race or sexuality or religion? Where does it stop? The civil rights movement was supposed to be about empowerment, but once the government failed to squash it by force, they decided to co-opt it much the way they did the labor movement. The result hasn't been an increase of rights but a buffet of privileges delivered by the same state with the fire hoses and rabid dogs. When this state decides that it wants to control us, it threatens to take back the privileges and release the hounds. Somehow, I don't think this is what Harvey Milk got shot for.
The relationship between queer people and the state has always been an abusive one. By nature, being queer is an affront to the status quo that the state holds dear. They've tried to annihilate us, to make our love and our bodies illegal, to throw us away in padded cells and concrete tombs. When all that failed to correct us, suddenly Uncle Sam came around offering us a pocket full of candy. We were too desperate to realize this gift was poison. When the state can't eliminate a threat, it subjugates it. The state tried to subjugate trans children with segregated safe spaces and other trinkets of bureaucratic largess but our kids refused to be tamed. They refused to fit into those tight little boxes that say male and female and they inspired many lost adults like myself to join them. Together, we've rejected the tired western notion of gender entirely, creating our own identities to mach the complex nature of our spirits. Spirits that couldn't be contained by outdated science and social structures. Spirits called genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, genderflux, trigender, bigender, neutrois, genderless, and some without any name at all. This radical embrace of spiritual freedom and sexual diversity made it impossible for the state to control us. So now it looks like the poison candy may be replaced by the truncheons and bite wounds of yesteryear.
Well fuck them. They can't tell us who we are. They can't tell us what's in our souls. If the government wants to declare war on my people then I say lets return the fucking favor. It is the state that has no right to exist, not us, and all we have to do is refuse to acknowledge its authority. Dress outlandishly. Refuse to answer to any name that's not your own. Use multiple different gendered spaces in one day. Hold a shit-in and occupy the faculties own facilities. Drop out. Run away. Start your own damn families, your own damn schools, your own damn tribal institutions, and your own damn communities. We've already succeeded at rendering gender irrelevant, lets give the state the same treatment. Lets genderfuck Uncle Sam and give him a taste of his own poison candy.
Our movement was built around the wild flames of the counter-cultural bonfires of the Sixties and Seventies. We were wild, naked, and free. We rejected the false gods of the straight world. But somewhere between Reagan's plagues and Obama's platitudes we lost our way. The latest generation of our tribe has reignited the flame and reminded us who we are. The time is now, dearest motherfuckers. Come back to the fire. With any luck we can make it spread. Lets burn this motherfucker down.
Peace, Love, Anarchy, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Be a Body by Grimes
* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex
* Losing My Religion by REM
* Monkeywrench by Foo Fighters
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras
* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie
* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Vote or Don't (the Brick and the Ballot Box)
Like any twilight empire, America has some strange and perverse rituals that are generally excepted as normal by our unblinking masses. There's the fascist war prayer of the National Anthem, which you can lose your livelihood for betraying with a knee. There's the Kidz Bop chant version known as the Pledge of Allegiance, my own childhood protest of which had my archdiocese contacting the nearest exorcist. Then of coarse there's the incessant soldier worship which mandates us all to repeatedly thank everyone who has ever served in our colossal armed services for preserving our "freedoms", regardless of whether they launched drone strikes from Las Vegas cubicles or shot Cuban gardeners on golf courses in Grenada. But all of that jingle brained jingoism pales in comparison to the peer-pressure-palooza that is the right to vote.
America's most prestigious imperial holiday comes every two to four years during the first week of November, the sacred ballot bacchanalia known as voting day, an absurd celebration of our mock democracy which everyone from grumpy porch-dwelling oldsters to bitch slapping gangsta rappers implores us to take part in upon the threat dismemberment. "Vote or die because, because... people died... for your right to vote... or die..." or some such nonsense. First off, no they didn't. None of the last centuries ghastly geostrategic boogeymen, be they the starving rice farmers of Indochina or the sheep shagging opium lords of the Hindu Kush gave half a flying fuck about our electoral process. They were much more concerned with that of their own nations and our nations strong arm influence over it. Hell, even those "bastard Japs" would have stuck to there end of the Pacific if it wasn't for FDR's goading oil embargo.
And, hypothetically, if our young men and women in green really did die for our right to vote, that would be twice as tragic because they would have died for a total abject mockery of the word democracy. There is absolutely nothing democratic about picking your favorite grabby one-percenter to run your fucking life for the next two to four years. There are S&M contracts that are more democratic, at least there's a fucking safety word. The only democracy that counts or is even deserving of the title is direct democracy, the original democracy. Personally, I'll take Delescluze and Pericles over Jefferson and Hamilton any day of the fucking week. Until we achieve this standard, the standard being fought for as we speak in Rojava and Chiapas, our elections will be about as meaningful as the ones on reality television.
Does this mean that Comrade Hermit is anti-voting? No, sweet baby, Comrade votes but Comrade votes to protest and Comrade loves to protest. But I also believe in a diversity of tactics, a philosophy I call, the Brick and the Ballot Box, a homage to my kin back in the bandit country of Armagh. I generally do the Rothbard thing and vote for whoever the most antiwar candidate is because without war the states legitimacy swiftly falls to shit. Even here though I have a few caveats. I will not vote for any candidate who doesn't call for a bare minimum of a 50% cut in military spending. If this bare minimum isn't met by any candidate then I protest the vote itself by writing in something like "none of the above" or "roll this ballot into a sharp spear and go fuck yourself with it." (Sadly, computers have largely rendered this last suggestion as symbolic as the vote itself.) What all this generally means is that when I do vote, I vote third party.
With that being said, voting may be a groovy way to tell the state to fornicate itself but real change has always been the product of direct action in the streets aka the Brick. It was the Brick that gave us the forty hour work week and the weekend (thank a fucking Wobbly for your freedom.) It was the Brick that gave us what little civil rights we have. And it will be the Brick that gets the fascist federal government's jackboot off our kid's throats for following the gender in their heart above the gender in their pants. The Ballot Box is fine but, contrary to popular belief, the Ballot Box is largely optional for real progress, the Brick is not. So if you're not gonna vote, I say right on. But lets not let our plutocracy off that easy. You don't have to meet me half-way at the Ballot Box, dearest motherfuckers, to meet me all the way in the streets. You bring the pessimism and I'll bring my brick. The safety word is revolution, dearest motherfuckers. Lets fucking bring it.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* The National Anthem by Radiohead
* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails
* In the Streets by Big Star
* Testify by Rage Against the Machine
* See No Evil by Television
* Public Image by Public Image Ltd
* My Doorbell by the White Stripes
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
America's most prestigious imperial holiday comes every two to four years during the first week of November, the sacred ballot bacchanalia known as voting day, an absurd celebration of our mock democracy which everyone from grumpy porch-dwelling oldsters to bitch slapping gangsta rappers implores us to take part in upon the threat dismemberment. "Vote or die because, because... people died... for your right to vote... or die..." or some such nonsense. First off, no they didn't. None of the last centuries ghastly geostrategic boogeymen, be they the starving rice farmers of Indochina or the sheep shagging opium lords of the Hindu Kush gave half a flying fuck about our electoral process. They were much more concerned with that of their own nations and our nations strong arm influence over it. Hell, even those "bastard Japs" would have stuck to there end of the Pacific if it wasn't for FDR's goading oil embargo.
And, hypothetically, if our young men and women in green really did die for our right to vote, that would be twice as tragic because they would have died for a total abject mockery of the word democracy. There is absolutely nothing democratic about picking your favorite grabby one-percenter to run your fucking life for the next two to four years. There are S&M contracts that are more democratic, at least there's a fucking safety word. The only democracy that counts or is even deserving of the title is direct democracy, the original democracy. Personally, I'll take Delescluze and Pericles over Jefferson and Hamilton any day of the fucking week. Until we achieve this standard, the standard being fought for as we speak in Rojava and Chiapas, our elections will be about as meaningful as the ones on reality television.
Does this mean that Comrade Hermit is anti-voting? No, sweet baby, Comrade votes but Comrade votes to protest and Comrade loves to protest. But I also believe in a diversity of tactics, a philosophy I call, the Brick and the Ballot Box, a homage to my kin back in the bandit country of Armagh. I generally do the Rothbard thing and vote for whoever the most antiwar candidate is because without war the states legitimacy swiftly falls to shit. Even here though I have a few caveats. I will not vote for any candidate who doesn't call for a bare minimum of a 50% cut in military spending. If this bare minimum isn't met by any candidate then I protest the vote itself by writing in something like "none of the above" or "roll this ballot into a sharp spear and go fuck yourself with it." (Sadly, computers have largely rendered this last suggestion as symbolic as the vote itself.) What all this generally means is that when I do vote, I vote third party.
With that being said, voting may be a groovy way to tell the state to fornicate itself but real change has always been the product of direct action in the streets aka the Brick. It was the Brick that gave us the forty hour work week and the weekend (thank a fucking Wobbly for your freedom.) It was the Brick that gave us what little civil rights we have. And it will be the Brick that gets the fascist federal government's jackboot off our kid's throats for following the gender in their heart above the gender in their pants. The Ballot Box is fine but, contrary to popular belief, the Ballot Box is largely optional for real progress, the Brick is not. So if you're not gonna vote, I say right on. But lets not let our plutocracy off that easy. You don't have to meet me half-way at the Ballot Box, dearest motherfuckers, to meet me all the way in the streets. You bring the pessimism and I'll bring my brick. The safety word is revolution, dearest motherfuckers. Lets fucking bring it.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* The National Anthem by Radiohead
* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails
* In the Streets by Big Star
* Testify by Rage Against the Machine
* See No Evil by Television
* Public Image by Public Image Ltd
* My Doorbell by the White Stripes
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones