The Occupy with Art blog provides updates on projects in progress, opinion articles about art-related issues and OWS, useful tools built by artists for the movement, new features on the website, and requests for assistance. To submit a post, contact us at occupationalartschool(at)gmail(dot)com .
How did Barack Obama win re-election? The philosopher Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed the notion of the "stabilising class": not the old ruling class, but all who are committed to the stability and continuity of the existing social, economic and political order – the class of those who, even when they call for a change, do so to ensure that nothing really will change. The key to electoral success in today's developed states is winning over this class. - Slavoj Žižek, “Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face”
Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. – Chris Hedges, “The Presidential Election Exposed, Again, the Death of the Liberal Class”
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
- Wilfred Owens, “Strange Meeting”
Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain - if history has taught us anything - it's that you can kill anyone. – Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part II
War - Nations do have to go to war sometimes, but that Iraq thing was pretty bad, to put it mildly. Somebody should have been, I dunno – FIRED for bad performance. Aren’t you the party of good corporate managers or something? This topic could get 10,000 words on its own. Let’s just leave it at: You guys suck at running wars. - Eric Garland, “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people”
In the 2012 election, we have a winner. Management won.
Slavoj Žižek is almost right to cite Milner in his analysis. He would have been more correct to point to Peter Drucker, whom George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Drucker wrote the book on Management, literally. The culture of management won the culture war this time. No one seems to have noticed management was a combatant. So, no one seems able to figure out the margin of victory, or explain the results, and consequences.
Chris Hedges is right, too, about what the election was not about, but should have been. Hedges, too, is almost right to slam the liberal class for its passivity with respect to Obama’s “betrayal” of liberal “core values” in his first term. He would have been more correct to consider the values (or lack thereof) of the management class, because that is the key to electoral victory in the United States currently, not the performance of the “Other” voter classes that the professional political punditry claim pushed Obama’s campaign over the electoral finish line ahead of Romney.
Really, the non-drama of 2012 is how boring, banal and mediocre political realities are in the United States. From a management perspective, the Obama victory is the safer bet.
My theory is that the outcome of the election is in fact a story about behavior and demography, but not the story we’re being told via corporate monopoly media, or by the “alternative” media. Voters who swung the election to Obama chose him, because they realized the Republican candidate was a corporate raider whose fortune derived from purging middle-management and labor, outsourcing jobs or destroying them, wiping out pensions, “streamlining” benefits and the social safety net, increasing cost burdens on all but management and owner classes, and prioritizing the owner’s or corporation’s or organization’s bottom line over all else.
Romney is dedicated to making everything from the Olympics to America run more like a business. The problem the voters discovered by reading between the lines or watching Obama’s attack ads is that Romney’s business was Bain Capital.
Plus, Romney is a 1%-loving, 47%-hating superrich asshole.
Wall Street was never occupied, except by itself. From its origins in the slave trade to its present slave business, it is itself, and not even that much. When did a street wield such power over men? Never. Not High Street or Main Street. A street is only the substrate for the mass movement of man. By what motivation would the men and women of Wall Street enjoin us of the mass to action? The short answer is they would not. They would and do encourage us to acquiesce to our being consumed, at a profit (for them).
It is a sickness of man that he would lord it over his fellows, doom the other to misery and impoverishment, when all the necessities of life are in plenitude. We, the collective All of Everything live in a moment of disgrace, as intervention by the 1% so-called. If only the elegance of the few were worth all this mess, but no. It’s untrue. The great and powerful among us are mediocre. They are managers, for the most part, which never anything special and the contrivance of these management types is to assign everything the value of currency, of dollars or pounds or euros or whatever. How boring. How tragic. How commonplace. Why be occupied with the patently mediocre, even it is super-rich and powerful? Sure, that’s a guise, a ruse and a trick, but let’s run with it, for the sake of conjecture, as play.
It’s actually not correct to say Wall Street was unoccupied by Occupy Wall Street. Our occupation of Wall Street, as such, was dimensional. The convergence of people, and with us our ideas, dreams, outrage, love and hope, switched the focus or at least blurred it for a time. For the “Time Is Money” sub-humans, we attached to that protocol a small measure of discomfort, which they perceived generally as disease. This actuality ought to indicate the fragility of the psychosis that envelops the financial sector, which is now the political sector and the social. Wall Street’s view of itself is tenuous, at best. Most in the know claim it, “Wall Street” per se, meaning the “stock market,” doesn’t even exist at Wall Street, anymore. This is in a number of aspects a verifiable statement. Wall Street isn’t a street anymore, anyway. It is a global managed cycle of consumption. Of Everything. 24/7/365. Timeless, which is to say, “All the time.”
Consuming in the “global community” and the “free market” cannot, in the management view, be interrupted.* While both quoted terms in the previous sentence are outrageous lies, as we have witnessed perpetually, the mandate they represent for management society, the infinite artificial person syndicate must be fueled by everything. People are fuel. Nature is fuel. Perception and belief are fuels. God is fuel. Everything conceivable by man is fuel. Thus they have manufactured a market that encompasses everything on earth and every imaginary man can conceive of beyond the planet’s bounds. The market includes space, heaven and wonder in its fraudulent balance sheet. The secret of the derivatives market is its enslavement of all we know to its foibles, its notions, its whims, and the whims of those gangsters who manipulate it, many of whom are among the world’s wealthiest individuals today.
The Everything Market is like the cancer that has fully consumed the body of its host. All systems begin to break down. Action to resist the illness becomes impossible, or at least seemingly so. Even self-destructive addiction becomes a secondary consideration, when the cancer reaches its final phase. The Everything Market, which Occupy Wall Street assembled to combat, peacefully for the most part, is the sort of disease that does not relent in its surge to dominate its victim. It does not stop short at the level of sustainable parasitism. It continues to metasticize until the body of the host is killed, continuing its sick growth to the end.
So the Everything Market is mindless, as such, an enemy without conscience or an aim. It is death disguised. The mask of the market is the fat face or beautiful vision of unimaginable wealth, power and reproduction, if not sex or sexiness (although people must tend to project attractiveness or lust upon it). The market is insatiable.
Humans can be incapable of satiation. Society, or societies that are concerned with survival, promote antipathy against mindless excess, except in the odd, highly regulated instances of ceremonial release. Such expressive forms are not uniform, by any means. Still, we as a race have ample proof of the dangers of unchecked anything, or “anything goes.” The social is plentiful in its supply of prohibitions against excess as modus operandi.
To make examples of “successful” evasion of those prohibition the excuse to justify a catastrophe like the Everything Market is to behave as an addict does, who cannot stop his all-directionally destructive progression toward doom. To make such justifications of the wholesale devastation of humanity and our world the mantras of society is a crime against humanity and world, and nothing less.
Which is why the 1% must proclaim God to be on their side. For this purpose, they have re-purposed God, the Creator, to suit their diseased, mad demands. No, this narrative is not a new one. The difference now is the scale of destruction possible through such blasphemies. Whether one God is true or not is no longer the point, in the monetized universe of the Everything Marketeer. It is whether a god can be invented to serve the short-term needs of the market and its propellents.
War and heroism being commoditized, in the artificial imaginary of derivatives, the abstraction of all value, the mobilization of any means necessary to sustain the insane gambit, the only enemy is Loss, and that can be and is hedged. So, that’s that, except for the abominable consequences that such an inhumane program ensures. Casualties and cowardice are rationalized as systemic outcomes. This is the banality of evil. The prime EM players seek to defray and deflect any direct accountability for themselves, in the scheme. They seek to make everyone guilty, or at least not innocent. Is there any sin worse?
How is it possible to not address this chronic problem outside the domain of the moral? Law has been twisted beyond recognition, subverted at every turn by the management society and its Everything Marketeer. The democracies the Everything Market evolved to destroy, because the slaver cannot abide freedom, is now bought and sold by the market, which controls both government and citizen through debt and threat. The threat of the market is enforced by increasingly militarized and “privatized” police.
“Privatized” means “owned and operated by corporate syndicates and their prime beneficiaries, some of whom, like Bloomberg, have purchased the high offices of the land.
It is the moral that can yet apply, because in most every person, except for the most deformed among us, is some conception of it. For the moral is another iteration of love, and almost no person knows no love. So how does the Everything Market attack love? By creating conditions in which the value of human life is systematically abolished. Monetizing human life, and the quality of it, is only one way de-humanization or the demoralizing of humanity is accomplished. Enforced poverty, artificially-induced starvation, endless war, drugs are others, for “others.” It is also an important function of management society to destroy to dissent, which is now nothing more than realistic assessment of the effects of management society and Everything Market on life.
The suffering often wonder how their tormenters can do their evil business day in and day out, consistently striving to generate their product, which is obliteration of Everything (although obviously this is not how the players prefer to identify themselves). Well, they develop sophisticated entertainments. Peering through the lens of the created abject is an entertainment for those most responsible for the massive man-made suffering present in the world. Their warped vision has displaced the created object, or art. Instead we have Everything Art and a market to consume it, and legions of consumers, critics, marketeers, dealers, manufacturers, workers, and so on to tend that market. No longer is does the artist strive to make a thing timeless, for all. Art is contemporary and immaterial, except in its progressive costs.
A key feature of such Everything Art, as in the Everything Market, is its indecipherable quality. Only the Great Practitioners can comprehend Everthing(s), either markets or art, or any everything else. The Common Man, Woman or Child is not qualified even to enter such markets, without expert advisors. Of course, we have discovered the Everything Game (see LIBOR) is rigged, and learned that the expert advisors are frauds (see Sothebys). It is therefore no surprise that many view Everything with such cynicism.
We mustn’t however listen to the cynics. They often, wittingly or not, serve the interests of the Everything Market and Management Society. How? By debilitating the confrontational. It is not enough to critique and spread cynicism, when confronting evil. Evil must be met with force, and completely eradicated. This is ancient wisdom. It holds today.
It is not markets that are evil. Who hasn’t been to a local market and found the experience life-affirming? It is today a rhetorical question, because many people have no concept of any but the Everything Market and its base and debasing derivatives. The same is true of art. Art is not evil, nor is it sorcery or a con. It is so difficult to remember this, when the perceptual and transactional fields are so thoroughly corrupted.
But try.
On the anniversary of the occupation of Liberty Square, try to remember that exchange can be a gift. Try to remember that art is real, it exists, and humans still can make it, for us, for all time, the only object, as a form of sacred play [+].
Also, its good to recall that the Everything Market will pass. The infinite artificial person will die. Really. The Everything Market will crash again, even worse than before, because nothing significant has been done to prevent that happening. The infinite artificial person will “die,” or something like that, which is to say, it never really was alive to begin with. We will all just agree to the demise of infinite artificial personhood. Or else, there will be no more “we,” only “it.”
Maybe you can push the passing of these evil manifestations of our minds a bit, and help kill the artificial person that’s killing, maiming or diseasing your dreams. Whatever. You will or you won’t. Maybe you have other more important things to do, more pressing matters.
At any rate, something will change, because nothing lasts forever, right? Hopefully, things will be okay for you and the ones and the things you really care about. If they aren’t okay, who is there to blame?
Well, one can always blame the Economy, if you must blame something (not yourself). Too bad, though: the Economy won’t care about either you or your blame.
#
*That chimera, the Economy must feed, like a shark swimming in the oceans of want and ownership; this is another essay.
I’ve been thinking about Harold Jarboe, about a line Harold tossed around all the time. Harold is a Nashville-based filmmaker. I “crawled” him just now, and his website linked a video he’d recently made for former Miss West Virginia Julia Burton, titled, “What a Woman Wants.” By the way, if you look up Burton’s video on the Google, dear wired Rail reader, you shouldn’t miss Burton’s post-video comments on the Y’all Wire version, the one Harold linked. Classic Nashville. Heart.
Harold and I worked together on one art project, but mostly our friendship was a series of exchanges. When I lived in Nashville, our circles overlapped at the gym, coffee shop, art openings, and post-production shops. When our trajectories crossed – and this went on for years – Harold would get a kind of wild-eyed fierce look on his face and intone (I think this is right): “To be an artist & awake & aware is to be in a constant state of rage.” I seem to recall Harold telling me the source of the quote a few times. I don’t remember what it was now, though.
I used to laugh off Harold’s pantomime. I don’t anymore.
∞
To get rightly situated for the composition of this essay, I listened to Allen Ginsberg read Howl on YouTube. So New Media, man. If I’m not mistaken the reading was taped at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. The audio recording wasn’t properly cited, but it played with a nice photo of Ginsberg in a snazzy suit. Imagine that!
Google has an archive of news clippings, now. That’s how I double-checked the quote. Who knew? We’ve come a long way, since the days of microfilm at the public library, baby!
Since Allen’s gone to the great poetry reading in the sky, we can only speculate as to what the poet might say about the American police/surveillance/prison state, as it is now, about the corporate media monopolies, about the United States’ endless war program, about the evil that is the SCOTUS ruling on Citizens United.
∞
Finally, to get in the proper state of mind to write this essay, I watched and listened to Joseph Nechvatal’s “pour finir avec le jugement de dieu (complete)” on YouTube, and then I scanned Donnie Brasco on Netflix. I’ve seen Donnie Brasco before, but it seems more real, now that I live in Brooklyn. Art and God’s judgment. Cops and criminals.
The whole loan and interest game is rigged the world over, we discover. Then, the corporate media does its best to blackout the story, you know, the one about THE BIGGEST FRAUD CASE IN HISTORY.
JP Morgan Chase. MF Global. Standard Chartered. HSBC. Goldman Sachs. Terrorist-funding, drug cartel money-laundering, investor-swindling banksters-gone-wild. Who’s in jail? Bradley Manning. Who’s on the run from authorities? Julian Assange.
Disneyland. Anaheim. Cops gunning down and unleashing dogs on unarmed citizens, then responding to protests with cops geared-up like soldiers in Iraq. WTF.
THE BIGGEST PROTESTS IN HISTORY, all over the world, all summer long. Others, it seems like a new one every day, springing up like wack-a-moles, everywhere. Mexico. Spain. Canada. Italy. Syria. Greece. Russia. South Africa. Nepal… If you relied on the New York Times for your one-stop news, how would you know?
How about the Republican Presidential ticket? Romney apparently is a tax evader, and accidentally remained CEO of Bain Capital for years after he wasn’t CEO anymore. Ryan is accused of using his office for insider trading during the Crash. Those stories? Meh.
Painting by Alex Schaefer News Corp executives on trial for bribing cops, for wiretaps – and no Department of Justice prosecution. Wal*Mart, paying bribes in Mexico. The Facebook/Wall Street fiasco. Revelations of surveillance networks in Manhattan, the new Jim Crow laws, Stop and Frisk. Chalking artists, like heroic burning banks painter Alex Schaefer, tossed in the slammer. Same deal. WTF.
And on and on.
Who even wants to get into the complete failure and irresponsibility of Congress? It’s a disgrace. The cruelty of politicians preaching proven-failed Austerity, while they protect corporate profits and 1% tax boondoggles, is astonishing. To make matters worse, we have drought, the likes of which has not occurred since the Dust Bowl. The statistics on American “quality of life” standards, labor conditions, student prospects, medical care and such, are depressing. The Olympics, sponsored by McDonalds, BP and other destructive enterprises, barely put a dent in the malaise. WTF.
∞ I was talking to my friend Don - a Vietnam combat veteran, a retired doorman, a grandfather, a widower – what he thinks about America, right now. His answer was surprising. Don thoughtfully asserted that America is going to be alright. He went on to say that he didn’t think we need a President anymore. He voted for Obama, believed him to be a good man. Don had reached the conclusion, having studied the lives of many US Presidents, that the job might be too big now for one guy, and anyway, that we as a people could get along without a President and Vice-President. He wasn’t impressed, to say the least, with Romney and Ryan.
Myself, I’m going to cast a ballot for Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson.
∞
Occupy with Art is morphing into the Occupational Art School. We concluded the spring’s programs like “Wall Street to Main Street” and “Low Lives: Occupy!” and are moving on to “CO-OP/Occufest” and the Occupational Art School. For a variety of reasons, tactical and ideological, our efforts have been marginalized. With a few exceptions, the art world, as such, is busy folding Occupy Art into its 1%-oriented status quo. No surprise there.
OWS focused its waning organizational juice and its budget on May Day, 2012. The protest was a humdinger, and the posters were great, as was Guitarmy. Since that largely peaceful party, Tax Dodgers got into the Baseball Hall of Fame with their hilarious and poignant antics. Some terrific videos have emerged, and a healthy, robust theoretical discourse, which percolates into mainstream threads and vehicles periodically, especially in the Guardian. The Soul of Occupy has been examined and great thinkers, including Zizec, Graeber and Chomsky, have proffered prognoses. I’ve thrown in my two cents.
People approach me to ask, “What’s going on with OWS?” It happens a lot. I’m supposed to have an inside story, and sometimes I do. What I tell them, though, is “You are Occupy. This is not a spectator sport. Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Scanning galleries of photos and archives of videos from the occupation regularly, I come across reminders of the directness of the Occupy message, which was plentiful and dimensional. One of the Grannies who protested in the park early on wore a sandwich-board sign with the “spectator sport” message. WTF, America, you still don’t get it.
Occupy wasn’t Jesus come to rescue you from the sins and sinners of Capitalism. It doesn’t work that way. OWS was never something you could get by following on Facebook. The occupation wasn’t and isn’t a struggle, mission and task your fractional proxy could accomplish by volunteering in your stead. Most importantly, the problems OWS erupted to confront have not improved. They’ve gotten worse, and for almost anyone who might be reading this text, much worse.
WTF, America? What are you going to do? What are we going to do?
∞
This is your historical moment. The problem is, it doesn’t look, taste, smell or feel anything like what you might have expected. It never does. It doesn’t read like a book. It doesn’t look like a program on the History Channel. It’s not the 60s or the Big War, or the Great Depression. It’s different.
The enemy is not going to appear in a uniform that says “ENEMY” on it. Your enemy is a successful CEO, a banker, and a wealthy industrialist or heir. The cops are not what hundreds and thousands of TV shows convinced you he is. You aren’t safer, now that your civil liberties have been dissolved with pen strokes and normalized lawlessness. The goals of the enemy are, however, the same. Evil psychopaths want to rule the world. They want you to acquiesce. They will insist you accept lives enslaved to their will, to their mad visions. They possess the means and desire to destroy your world, your society, your family, in order to create a New Order that situates them at its pinnacle. In that New Order the best you can be is a manager, a collaborator, a guard, a lackey, a technocrat, a shill or an entertainer. In their universal scheme, they are the stars, and you are nothing more than dark matter, expendable, a human resource.
∞
The “diversity of tactics” discussion in Occupy is a good start. Eventually, it will have to evolve into “by any means necessary.” This is because the enemy, who is dimensional in nature and practice, has settled on that course. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, World War 3 has begun. The enemy is a now-global, syndicated plutocracy, which in one form and scale or another, has been a bane on humanity for thousands of years. Compared to these guys, the Taliban are the Three Stooges. They have the long view. They are willing to do, say, pay for anything to attain, maintain and sustain power, prestige, and a dominant position. They don’t care about you, your dreams, art, truth, beauty, your soul, your kids, your water, your church, your love, your humanity. Their greatest achievement, creatively, is the modern multinational corporation, an artificial infinite personhood, focused solely on the bottom line, equipped with armies (literally, now), the best lawyers, accountants, politicians money can buy, and millions of indentured servants, even straight-up slaves! You don’t even want to know what they do for pleasure (or maybe you do).
The iteration of the corporation they fashioned is Caesar. Its name is on the Coliseum. Everything in Heaven & Earth has been monetized under its rule. Birth, death, food, weather, sex, youth, sickness, conflict, breath… It foments its own art and political movements. It educates the people. It secures them in their (ha!) property and possessions (ROTFL). It explains why, how and who is necessary for good life, all life, to function effectively. What it doesn’t know, it will, eventually. It owns the demos, the democracy. It has the power of life and death, of silence. It is bigger than Nature. Bigger than God. It has destroyed demons and supplanted them with itself. It is its own cosmology. It will send itself into space. It will solve the mysteries of everything, and it will do so because it is the great owner of TIME.
And it is a LIE.
∞
WTF, America. How long are you going to be willing to put up with this? You’ve been robbed blind, swindled, hoodwinked. The goon who took you didn’t look like a cinema wise guy. Who cares! Your kids are being wasted in the deserts, of the Mideast, of the Midwest, of their own addictions, in a land increasingly devoid of meaningful opportunity, in the prisons of America, corporatized prisons, for profit. Your people, the real ones – their loss is the enemy’s gain!
What’s keeping you in your cave? Is it that there has been no resounding call to arms? Forget about it. It’s not coming. The enemy figured out you might be waiting for that and has made sure it won’t be happening. Are you waiting for your neighborhood to mobilize? Have you walked in your neighborhood recently? Are you expecting it to form teams and get on the job? I had that thought for a minute a few months ago, before I woke up.
Are you waiting to get ahead on your debts? Hah! Are holding out for a good job, with benefits, a pension? Just look at Wisconsin, and think of the men, women and children gunned down by cops with machine guns in Marikana. Remember that battle has been raging for 500 years (see Cerro Rico) in every “New World” the extractors and exploiters discover and see an opportunity to “order.”
∞
WTF. America, if you could beat the Nazis, the Japs, the Fascists of Italy in four years, don’t you think you can defeat these scumbags? Are you smart enough? Strong enough? Tough enough? Do you have the endurance? Do you have the will? Is God - whatever your conception of God is, because THAT’S America - on your side, or theirs? By the way, they don’t care about God. The enemy believes they are gods, more or less.
America, if you could turn the tide of Russian and Chinese Communism and/or Socialism, and set it upon itself, don’t you think you can do the same for the Pimps of Davos? Like Jesus cleaning the money lenders out of the Temple, right? Boom goes the Dynamite! Get the bums out of Washington! Don’t quit until the job is done! Rally under the flag of your fathers!
∞
Or sit on your couch and get high. Go to your therapist. Buy a new CD. Rent a movie. Go to church on Sunday. Get in your 60 hours at the office to keep your job. Take the meds for your anxiety and heart condition. Stop at the bar, go on vacation, get some fishing in, head to the mall, take a drive. Jerk off to porn. Hook up with a co-worker. Play with the kids. Sue somebody. Whatever.
This is your moment in history. You idolize the Greatest Generation. Fair enough. You pine for the hippie free love of yore. Fine. You celebrate emancipations, one after another, in our country’s troubled but great history. Compared to the great struggle we’ve faced – I’m sorry to be the bearer of the news – ours today is of the greatest consequence. The fact is, though, I think that’s always the case.
∞
The objective is to reclaim Time. I know, that notion seems awfully abstract, even conceptual. It’s real.
Time, your time, has been stolen from you, or you’ve willingly surrendered it, with or without much of a fight, if any. Maybe you grumble about it. Until you and we realize how precious time is, no one will have an idea of what we’re actually fighting for.
∞
The Bomb in the 50s was the most fearsome weapon on Earth. Today, it is and it isn’t. The greatest threat to civilization, to freedom, today is the derivatives market. If you’re not willing to figure out why that is, you won’t understand the 2007-8 Crash, LIBOR, the London Whale, or much of the international news that is, whether you accept it or not, gravely affecting your past, present and future.
The prime players in the world game called “You Bet Your Ass (or his, or theirs-)” have faces, names, houses, countries of origin, personal histories and dramas. Some of these players you may be familiar with (like Bloomberg) and others you may not. It’s more possible than ever to uncover the invisible hand of greed. Occupy has and continues to do a lot of that work for you, which is why the movement has incurred such brutal repression.
∞
One thing I’ve learned over the past year of occupation is that Revolution isn’t what you expect. It doesn’t always evolve in directions you personally might advocate. Revolution may not ask or want your opinion. It may not respect your gifts, and you can’t own it. Sometimes, it will whip around and bite your ass. Ask the French. They had a lot of good ideas and intentions. They perfected execution by guillotine. Robespierre is a case study in Revolutionary dynamics.
A lot of sane people are very cautious about pushing revolution for that very reason. Many more people will justify apathy or fearful self-removal from conflict for the very same reason. Hitler and Germany – and all their enablers - demonstrated forever why accepting the unacceptable is finally unacceptable. At some point down the line, people usually will have to explain what they were doing, while Evil was growing and then consuming their society.
∞
WTF, America – what have you been up to, while the treasure of your nation, both material and immaterial, was taken from you, by wicked people through subterfuge or direct action? More to the point, what are you going to do about it, now that the cards are on the table, the jig is up, and you’ve been called?
There’s still time to pull yourself together and put down the Hun, but not much. Time will go on, regardless. The same cannot be said for American democracy. America will sustain, as a bottom-up proposition of freedom – not to be conflated with a free market, which has been shown unequivocally to be a lie – only if we individually and collectively commit to protect and preserve it. Obviously, there are millions, even billions of people around the world, who are ready, willing and able to join us in that task, who want essentially the same for themselves. Democracy, like the Granny said, is not a spectator sport. It has to be chosen. Many Americans have bled and died to defend this democracy – not for the Rockefellers, Gates, Broads and Fricks – for themselves, their families, their buddies, their towns, their futures.
∞
If we succeed, we’ll enter a new dimension. If we fail, the future appears Apocalyptic, right? WTF, America. Do it: do it one more time. It won’t be easy, but you’re worth it. Don’t choose slavery.
After that, you can recede into the dusk of history happy, sleeping comfortably in your own bed, cancer-free. The 1% are a cancer. Cut them out, burn them, poison them, like modern medicine prescribes for most cancers. Then, if you survive, try the 99% new agers, with their preventative measures, their homeopathics, whole natural foods, massages and meditation. Choose to be indigenous, a native. Choose to be happy, joyous and 100% free. Sure, that sounds fantastical. But if you finally manage to remove the vampire squid from your face, you might just look upon the world with new eyes, and realize all along you were living on a spaceship called Paradise, and each one of us is a captain, or whatever we want to play today.
Think Rip van Winkle. It may take thousands of years, but people will come around. In the meantime, we can take lots of road trips, make great art and babies.
Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 05:58AM 
