July 28, 2006
(Fifteen Anti-Primitivist Theses)
1. Biology's constructs and dichotomies are not useful.
2. The biosphere is not inherently good or superior, just very dynamic.
3. Humans can choose their dynamics.
4. Role-filling is moral nihilism.
5. Individuals flourish with increase of dynamic connections.
6. Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience.
7. Physical limitation inspires social oppression.
8. Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy.
9. Freedom of information is necessary for free societies.
10. It's impossible to speak of regional liberty.
11. Any society that embraces death will embrace oppression.
12. Technology can be applied dynamically.
13. We do not live in a closed system.
14. Hard though the struggle may be, the ease of partial victories will always cost us more.
15. The new is possible.
Twenty years ago a group of Detroit anarchists began work on a new synthesis of environmental and anti-authoritarian thought. Differencing themselves from other burgeoning ecological movements in the Eighties anarcho-punk scene they sought to draw inspiration directly from the primitive roots of Humanity. Anarchy, they declared, was not an abstract state to be politically won, but a living experience and extensive historical reality. Reevaluating the ideologies and dogma of the classic Anarchist movement, they turned attention to the archaeological record and existing indigenous societies. By building on post-left critiques they passionately and fluidly deconstructed mental, social and physical expressions of totalitarianism.
And finally, having recognized the mythological Fall in Humanity's embrace of Civilization, the movement chose to target the complete technological infrastructure and mental hierarchies originally launched by the onset of agrarianism.
The radical core of a vast Green Anarchist reawakening, Anarcho-Primitivism blossomed across the North American anti-authoritarian community and then beyond. Concurrent and intermingled with the birth of organizations like Earth First and the Earth Liberation Front, it kept up a hard-line intellectual argument while actively inspiring a more fervent exploration into personal and relational power issues than had ever been accomplished under the old European Anarchist ideologies.
High-profile operations such as Earth First's creation of the Cascadia Free State to block old-growth logging built an international momentum around Green Anarchy and indigenous movements like that of the infamous Zapatistas buffered their status. At the same time intellectuals like John Zerzan gained public exposure in defense and support of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's anti-civilization politics. In the Seattle riots against the WTO a sizable Anarcho-Primitivist group from Eugene stole the spotlight with their widespread participation in property destruction. Today the various shapes of Green Anarchy have become diffuse and deeply integral in the broader Anarchist movement and Anarcho-Primitivism enjoys a vast influence.
Naturally this has come with sizable criticism.
Within the traditionally socialist and unabashedly Leftist veins writers such as Michael Albert and Murray Bookchin have been repulsed at the movement's radical rejection of everyday basic technology and universally accepted constructs like Language itself. Socialists deride a lack of engagement with the class conflict and colonial realities. Autonomists occasionally take issue with the mainly-first world adherents' disengagement from solidarity. Furthermore, identity issues and accusations of irrelevancy have plagued the mainly economically-privileged white Anglophone movement.
As the dialogue has seeped out into general platform and as the Anarchist community continues its exponential growth, there have also been some noticeable effects on attitude. Predictions of an inevitable and permanent crash of civilization have sapped the perceived need for revolutionary action and, with the popularity of nature skills, small doses of survivalist elitism have taken root.
But, as with any political philosophy or revolutionary paradigm, the demographics and particular social consequences are far less important than what Anarcho-Primitivism actually has to say. Radicalism alone is never reason for rejection and, whatever tactics might be concluded from an assertion, if the underlying idea is inviolate, the consequence of it should not blind us to that reality.
The actual argument behind Anarcho-Primitivism is fierce. It is intelligent and complex, yet beautifully simple at root... And it is ultimately wrong.
Precisely one year ago, through his tribe Anthropik, Jason Godesky launched a series of essays in a kind of master attempt at detailing their Primitivist argument. Invoking Martin Luther's theological rebellion, Godesky named them The Thirty Theses.
Though I mean this similarly named project in response, I do so not to his specific prose or logic but in engagement with the broader movement.
While it is true my father long positioned himself within and introduced me to a more classic Anarchism, it was the unquenchable reason I found in Anarcho-Primitivism that first rooted my personal politics. Its sensibility, unflinching radicalism in analysis and passionate focus on abolishing power from our interpersonal relationships have given heart to my life for over a decade. Though I maintain significant differences with some elements of the radical environmentalist diaspora, I am an Anarchist who believes in living Anarchy as the perpetual resurgence of the human spirit and I think the words "Green Anarchy" are self-evidently redundant. At the same time I also see a future beyond the physical restraints of the frail bodies chance dealt us, a society of infinite freedom. But in body as well as mind and love. Spread across the unlimited heavens and pressed up against the fabric of reality. ...A self-banishment back behind the walls of our lovely garden is not reconcilable with that.
In giving memetic flesh to these fifteen theses I seek not to call out the eco movement wholesale. Nor do I mean to limit myself to some official orthodoxy of Anarcho-Primitivism proper. Rather I mean to address what I consider the core "Primitivist" strand in Anarchism today and the deep failings that have come to define it.
Hopefully I won't fuck this up too horribly.
[Afterword]
[Why & How Jason Godesky Is So Wrong His Ancestors Are Wrong]
1. Biology's constructs and dichotomies are not useful.
2. The biosphere is not inherently good or superior, just very dynamic.
3. Humans can choose their dynamics.
4. Role-filling is moral nihilism.
5. Individuals flourish with increase of dynamic connections.
6. Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience.
7. Physical limitation inspires social oppression.
8. Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy.
9. Freedom of information is necessary for free societies.
10. It's impossible to speak of regional liberty.
11. Any society that embraces death will embrace oppression.
12. Technology can be applied dynamically.
13. We do not live in a closed system.
14. Hard though the struggle may be, the ease of partial victories will always cost us more.
15. The new is possible.
Twenty years ago a group of Detroit anarchists began work on a new synthesis of environmental and anti-authoritarian thought. Differencing themselves from other burgeoning ecological movements in the Eighties anarcho-punk scene they sought to draw inspiration directly from the primitive roots of Humanity. Anarchy, they declared, was not an abstract state to be politically won, but a living experience and extensive historical reality. Reevaluating the ideologies and dogma of the classic Anarchist movement, they turned attention to the archaeological record and existing indigenous societies. By building on post-left critiques they passionately and fluidly deconstructed mental, social and physical expressions of totalitarianism.
And finally, having recognized the mythological Fall in Humanity's embrace of Civilization, the movement chose to target the complete technological infrastructure and mental hierarchies originally launched by the onset of agrarianism.
The radical core of a vast Green Anarchist reawakening, Anarcho-Primitivism blossomed across the North American anti-authoritarian community and then beyond. Concurrent and intermingled with the birth of organizations like Earth First and the Earth Liberation Front, it kept up a hard-line intellectual argument while actively inspiring a more fervent exploration into personal and relational power issues than had ever been accomplished under the old European Anarchist ideologies.
High-profile operations such as Earth First's creation of the Cascadia Free State to block old-growth logging built an international momentum around Green Anarchy and indigenous movements like that of the infamous Zapatistas buffered their status. At the same time intellectuals like John Zerzan gained public exposure in defense and support of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's anti-civilization politics. In the Seattle riots against the WTO a sizable Anarcho-Primitivist group from Eugene stole the spotlight with their widespread participation in property destruction. Today the various shapes of Green Anarchy have become diffuse and deeply integral in the broader Anarchist movement and Anarcho-Primitivism enjoys a vast influence.
Naturally this has come with sizable criticism.
Within the traditionally socialist and unabashedly Leftist veins writers such as Michael Albert and Murray Bookchin have been repulsed at the movement's radical rejection of everyday basic technology and universally accepted constructs like Language itself. Socialists deride a lack of engagement with the class conflict and colonial realities. Autonomists occasionally take issue with the mainly-first world adherents' disengagement from solidarity. Furthermore, identity issues and accusations of irrelevancy have plagued the mainly economically-privileged white Anglophone movement.
As the dialogue has seeped out into general platform and as the Anarchist community continues its exponential growth, there have also been some noticeable effects on attitude. Predictions of an inevitable and permanent crash of civilization have sapped the perceived need for revolutionary action and, with the popularity of nature skills, small doses of survivalist elitism have taken root.
But, as with any political philosophy or revolutionary paradigm, the demographics and particular social consequences are far less important than what Anarcho-Primitivism actually has to say. Radicalism alone is never reason for rejection and, whatever tactics might be concluded from an assertion, if the underlying idea is inviolate, the consequence of it should not blind us to that reality.
The actual argument behind Anarcho-Primitivism is fierce. It is intelligent and complex, yet beautifully simple at root... And it is ultimately wrong.
Precisely one year ago, through his tribe Anthropik, Jason Godesky launched a series of essays in a kind of master attempt at detailing their Primitivist argument. Invoking Martin Luther's theological rebellion, Godesky named them The Thirty Theses.
Though I mean this similarly named project in response, I do so not to his specific prose or logic but in engagement with the broader movement.
While it is true my father long positioned himself within and introduced me to a more classic Anarchism, it was the unquenchable reason I found in Anarcho-Primitivism that first rooted my personal politics. Its sensibility, unflinching radicalism in analysis and passionate focus on abolishing power from our interpersonal relationships have given heart to my life for over a decade. Though I maintain significant differences with some elements of the radical environmentalist diaspora, I am an Anarchist who believes in living Anarchy as the perpetual resurgence of the human spirit and I think the words "Green Anarchy" are self-evidently redundant. At the same time I also see a future beyond the physical restraints of the frail bodies chance dealt us, a society of infinite freedom. But in body as well as mind and love. Spread across the unlimited heavens and pressed up against the fabric of reality. ...A self-banishment back behind the walls of our lovely garden is not reconcilable with that.
In giving memetic flesh to these fifteen theses I seek not to call out the eco movement wholesale. Nor do I mean to limit myself to some official orthodoxy of Anarcho-Primitivism proper. Rather I mean to address what I consider the core "Primitivist" strand in Anarchism today and the deep failings that have come to define it.
Hopefully I won't fuck this up too horribly.
[Afterword]
[Why & How Jason Godesky Is So Wrong His Ancestors Are Wrong]
(#1: Biology's constructs and dichotomies are not useful.)
An Anti-Primitivist Essay
With the onset of the Industrial Revolution came a serious blossoming of cosmology-through-taxonomy. In many ways the new engines of society eradicated the quasi-shamanic, more personally intuitive behaviors of old medicine so that in its place it could forge yet another hierarchical monopoly. The traditional myth of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral founded new sub-Parthenons. Phyla, Compound, Infraclass and a host of other cognitive divisions were canonized. It was a profound and expansive campaign of centralization and itemization and, like all others, it was about control.
Just as has been true since the very first person mucked around with Language. Naming is power.
It was not enough to build a massive technological infrastructure by which to ingrain social-hierarchies. Humanity itself had to be broken down and controlled. The greatest tool of coercion and control that had ever been available, the needs and frailty of our bodies, was to be so thoroughly itemized as give charge to the second greatest tool of coercion and control: a religion.
Biology mediated the legitimacy of science into the social realm. Even as forests were clearcut and species exterminated, Europe's expanding ecosystem of social hierarchy launched a barrage of taxonomy to convince the people that it best understood their interactions, place and role within the world. We may not understand the processes killing you, but we can pick its name off a chart.
Though it gave no strength, such taxonomic knowledge provided a numbing security. A sense of personal control over the world through the ingestion of structure.
The fundamental synchrony of this pursuit of taxonomy with the valuation of position and power can of course be seen in the vigorous construction applied to Race and Sex. Yet it was about more than just bringing the classifications of material world into the social plane with elaborate internal taxonomies of humanity. Social Darwinians justified social stratification by adopting strict biological identity in the place of more common metaphysical assumptions. Rather than discrete individuals, they argued, we were, in fact nothing more than the product of our categorizations. Throughout history this thinking has set off all kinds of horror and, with the increasing popularity of Biological constructs, such horrors flourished mightily. But such strands of Social Darwinism also built from a fine-tuned sense of continuity within the greater biological ecosystem.
That's not to say that they sought out ecologically harmonious hippie lifestyles, but rather that they saw themselves as fulfilling their role within the ecosystem. And the fulfillment of one's participation in the game of life was asserted as the primary good. Thus homosexuality, for example gets attacked for being “unnatural” just as often as it hears the “unholy” crowd or plain faced cultural distaste. The root of this biological imperative stuff grew out from the reductionist empiricist movement, but it quickly adopted a mystical spirit of its own.
The religion of biology and biological life excelled in layered complex arcana, rituals and miracles. What it needed was a touch of divinity, something that could be personally mystified until it swallowed up all existential questions. And then it would be possible to draw lines and slice up whatever was left on the metaphysical level. “Life” begins at conception. Because that was the taxonomic simple.
The churches bought in real fast.
Even through the imperialist explorers' clumsily demarcation of “species” from “species,” Biology, at root, was built rife with arbitrary constructs. It's divisions and interpretations of structure were deeply influenced by the surrounding memetic environment and power myths. And most fundamental of all, the popularly mystified presumption of a cosmological division between 'biological life' and 'inert matter' doesn't exist. The layered constructs of Biology are very much a social and cultural creation.
If self-replication is somehow an entropy-breaking signature of a divinely separate force, what of the stars? They grow, collapse and, in doing so, seed their own re-growth among the nebulae. Every piece of matter around us is part of that cycle. Likewise, a mystification of the information patterns of DNA breaks down in the form of RNA and quasi-nucleaicacid carriers on the frayed edge of what's a complex molecule and what was declared easily recognizable by a lab technician.
It can seem an inane difficulty, but the reality behind it is sharp.
The informational constructs Biology declares around the vast agglomerations of particles are arbitrary.
There is no such thing as self-replication, for example, because the new creature is a completely different set of molecules with completely different relationships to the rest of the universe. The connection we see between the original creature and second creature is just a matter of symbolism. It's us creating structural simplifications and taxonomic declarations in our minds and then imposing them over our actual experience.
Significant abstraction based in such taxonomy is useless. There can be just as much, say, fundamental "diversity" between a given spotted owl & lemur as between two lemurs. Narrowly focused in such directions as informational similarities between patterns of DNA or macroscopic physical trends in physiology, our concept of "diversity" might even be applicable in the way we want it to be. But it won't give us anything other than another pile of information inconducive to meaning. And it won't get us beyond the mental and social hierarchies that taxonomic approach is couched in.
Abstractions of any moral, cosmological, ontological or existential significance that are built out of Biology's constructs will be deeply fucked up.
An Anti-Primitivist Essay
With the onset of the Industrial Revolution came a serious blossoming of cosmology-through-taxonomy. In many ways the new engines of society eradicated the quasi-shamanic, more personally intuitive behaviors of old medicine so that in its place it could forge yet another hierarchical monopoly. The traditional myth of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral founded new sub-Parthenons. Phyla, Compound, Infraclass and a host of other cognitive divisions were canonized. It was a profound and expansive campaign of centralization and itemization and, like all others, it was about control.
Just as has been true since the very first person mucked around with Language. Naming is power.
It was not enough to build a massive technological infrastructure by which to ingrain social-hierarchies. Humanity itself had to be broken down and controlled. The greatest tool of coercion and control that had ever been available, the needs and frailty of our bodies, was to be so thoroughly itemized as give charge to the second greatest tool of coercion and control: a religion.
Biology mediated the legitimacy of science into the social realm. Even as forests were clearcut and species exterminated, Europe's expanding ecosystem of social hierarchy launched a barrage of taxonomy to convince the people that it best understood their interactions, place and role within the world. We may not understand the processes killing you, but we can pick its name off a chart.
Though it gave no strength, such taxonomic knowledge provided a numbing security. A sense of personal control over the world through the ingestion of structure.
The fundamental synchrony of this pursuit of taxonomy with the valuation of position and power can of course be seen in the vigorous construction applied to Race and Sex. Yet it was about more than just bringing the classifications of material world into the social plane with elaborate internal taxonomies of humanity. Social Darwinians justified social stratification by adopting strict biological identity in the place of more common metaphysical assumptions. Rather than discrete individuals, they argued, we were, in fact nothing more than the product of our categorizations. Throughout history this thinking has set off all kinds of horror and, with the increasing popularity of Biological constructs, such horrors flourished mightily. But such strands of Social Darwinism also built from a fine-tuned sense of continuity within the greater biological ecosystem.
That's not to say that they sought out ecologically harmonious hippie lifestyles, but rather that they saw themselves as fulfilling their role within the ecosystem. And the fulfillment of one's participation in the game of life was asserted as the primary good. Thus homosexuality, for example gets attacked for being “unnatural” just as often as it hears the “unholy” crowd or plain faced cultural distaste. The root of this biological imperative stuff grew out from the reductionist empiricist movement, but it quickly adopted a mystical spirit of its own.
The religion of biology and biological life excelled in layered complex arcana, rituals and miracles. What it needed was a touch of divinity, something that could be personally mystified until it swallowed up all existential questions. And then it would be possible to draw lines and slice up whatever was left on the metaphysical level. “Life” begins at conception. Because that was the taxonomic simple.
The churches bought in real fast.
Even through the imperialist explorers' clumsily demarcation of “species” from “species,” Biology, at root, was built rife with arbitrary constructs. It's divisions and interpretations of structure were deeply influenced by the surrounding memetic environment and power myths. And most fundamental of all, the popularly mystified presumption of a cosmological division between 'biological life' and 'inert matter' doesn't exist. The layered constructs of Biology are very much a social and cultural creation.
If self-replication is somehow an entropy-breaking signature of a divinely separate force, what of the stars? They grow, collapse and, in doing so, seed their own re-growth among the nebulae. Every piece of matter around us is part of that cycle. Likewise, a mystification of the information patterns of DNA breaks down in the form of RNA and quasi-nucleaicacid carriers on the frayed edge of what's a complex molecule and what was declared easily recognizable by a lab technician.
It can seem an inane difficulty, but the reality behind it is sharp.
The informational constructs Biology declares around the vast agglomerations of particles are arbitrary.
There is no such thing as self-replication, for example, because the new creature is a completely different set of molecules with completely different relationships to the rest of the universe. The connection we see between the original creature and second creature is just a matter of symbolism. It's us creating structural simplifications and taxonomic declarations in our minds and then imposing them over our actual experience.
Significant abstraction based in such taxonomy is useless. There can be just as much, say, fundamental "diversity" between a given spotted owl & lemur as between two lemurs. Narrowly focused in such directions as informational similarities between patterns of DNA or macroscopic physical trends in physiology, our concept of "diversity" might even be applicable in the way we want it to be. But it won't give us anything other than another pile of information inconducive to meaning. And it won't get us beyond the mental and social hierarchies that taxonomic approach is couched in.
Abstractions of any moral, cosmological, ontological or existential significance that are built out of Biology's constructs will be deeply fucked up.
July 27, 2006
(Biomimetics Technologies)
"The company came out of research work done at Carnegie Mellon from 1997 to 2003, attempting to mimic natural processes. The idea was to create technologies based on biological processes like tissue growth. [...] They have, among other things, developed a microchip that mimics the insect melanophila acumainata's ability to detect fires from 50km. Interestingly, they're organized as a cooperative and their work unit is affiliated with the I.W.W."
-Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
"The company came out of research work done at Carnegie Mellon from 1997 to 2003, attempting to mimic natural processes. The idea was to create technologies based on biological processes like tissue growth. [...] They have, among other things, developed a microchip that mimics the insect melanophila acumainata's ability to detect fires from 50km. Interestingly, they're organized as a cooperative and their work unit is affiliated with the I.W.W."
-Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
(It's Ad Hominem Time)
The Left is dumb on Geopolitics.
So fucking stupid it boggles the mind. So self-absorbed, self-deluding, pretentious, naive, petulant, irrational, close-minded, gutless, ignorant, hypocritical, strategy-less, and petty it can only survive through leech-like populist parasitism.
Can't tie its own shoes unsupervised or get within reach of plastic bags because the doctor says if it idiotically asphyxiates itself any further its whining, wheedling, wheezing voice will finally warble into completely unintelligible sonic pollution, splattering acidic drool down its pressed polo shirt.
...What I'm trying to say is that Stephen F. Cohen is certifiably retarded, has only a cocktail-party understanding of Russian politics and his article in The Nation is a load of shit.
I am split as to whether the Russian FSB is still keeping up the old KGB's payments to him to write such criminally imbecilic propaganda or whether his "Useful Idiot" status was independently arrived at through somesort of social evolution out of the festering primordial slime of upper east-coast leftist elitism, supercilious post-modern echo-chamber academic bullshitting, and willfully negligent Wilsonian nation-state idealism.
One almost feels obliged to pat Cohen on the head for being able to keep up with the basic news out of Russia, but the man seems utterly incapable of believing in any causal sequence with an origin in the Kremlin. The only exception, his situation-ignoring and history re-writing Gorbachev fetishism, should come as no surprise, as a position long canonically accepted in the twenty-first century's new Noble Savage mythos. Wherein all other cultures or societies are naturally and emergently simple and peaceminded in the absence of our touch. The same old leftist cliquism and moral relativism/nihilism that timelessly emerges to passionately and awkwardly assert that 'The enemy of my government is not only my ally, but also a really nice guy at heart, whose crimes or geopolitical maneuvers could not possibly be intelligently self-originating but instead entirely respondent and dependent upon the singular Great Evil of our own government.'
In this mindset, any significant intelligence or complexity is entirely a product of our own society's singular evil. Because the idea that any one else could be more intelligent than us is as absolutely ridiculous as the idea of them having the independently emergent capacity or desire to hurt us. Our role is to be the aloof self-aware intelligent enlightened accepting relativists (much as we like to think is our role at parties) while their role is to be diverse, supply us with a variety of cuisines we can be knowledgeable about and wear funny hats. (Which we have the utmost of respect for, by the way.)
They get funny hats and we get intelligence.
That's why no funny-hat person could ever be involved in something against us that wasn't our justly deserved fault.
To Cohen and his ilk, the real battle in this world is between those who would use their intelligence to accomplish something in the external world and those who understand the foolishness of doing anything at all or having goals based in some -horrors!- absolutist conception of morality or reality.
Don't they know the path towards a better world lies in sitting around with our friends talking about how stupid those people are who try to do things with their lives are?! You can't make the world a better place!! Such hubris!! If only everyone smart, educated and white like us just withdrew and let the funny-hat people get back to how they'd naturally be without us getting involved!! Besides, if everyone had free will, we'd have to deal with the fact that we've done jackshit with our lives!!
Better to invent an elitist, deterministic, rootless, goal-less analytical framework that denies the free will of individuals and justifies our comfy self-satisfied slothery.
Everyone is warped and controlled by the forces of history, but the worst people of all are those of us intelligent people (ie white, first world...) stupid enough to get involved. The more they get involved the worse. Obviously.
We don't have to think through intentions of players, strategic complications and full relationships. People who take action against our government/white first world society = good. But, of course, such actions are only equal and opposite reactions to someone within our society's original and despicable hard action (ie anything non-talk).
Cohen's Russia can do no wrong that isn't a natural, choice-less response to stupid action on the part of the US.
It takes serious balls to pull off that much self-delusion. I'll give him that. Putin as a fucking martyr somehow not as deep in this shit as the Bush administration. Jesus fucking Christ.
Fisking this particular piece of comprehensive bullshit would be a waste of time. But it reminds me just how magnificently inept the Left (particularly America's) is in matters of geopolitics.
To the contrary of Cohen's structured delusion, The Russian Empire (2.0 Now with trace amounts of Communism!) didn't enlightenedly give up shit . They just had to face some of the shit they'd done to buy time against us. Russia today is stronger and more self-secured than it was in the 90s, 80s, or even the 60s. Yes, the US seized the opportunity presented by Yeltsin to roll back the nation's power. But the fall of the USSR was geopolitically hella GOOD for Russia. It made Russia stronger. Today's Russian Empire may be poor and suffering population decline, but it's not held up by mud and sticks anymore.
Viewed from the old USSR boundaries, it's definitely hemorrhaging land and the US is working hard to make sure of that, but a suck-ass economy and brittle government never really compensated for huge ass boundaries. Russia has shed bad investments, been stoically defeated on a couple of its most impossibly brash hostile take-overs (Ukraine) and insanely capitalized off of/permanently acquired a lot of really valuable investments (Belarus, Kazakhstan), and stolen advantages from the US (Lower Earth Orbit, regions of Georgia, various pipeline stuff). Granted, several of Russia's relationships (China, Iran) have developed through intimate engagement against the US, but could you accept perhaps that Russia might have their own, separately motivated imperialist interests there? Plus, I mean come on, Putin has insane internal control, being the most loved and in-control Czar since Stalin (a man still popular).
Don't fucking tell me we're responsible for Russia having a leader that's not as useless a waste of flesh as Yeltsin or even Gorbachev -who at least tried to work his way to superior power. Don't try to write off Putin as the result of American imperialism. Don't fucking pretend this is a one-way Cold War with Russia being some oppressed funny-hat looking to live in peace and harmony just because you want to get high off your own simplistic hipster, chomskite soundbytes and common social elitism without actually having to do any thinking or analysis or accept the existence of anyone else.
Those Bolsheviks, you know... I guess they were wrong about a couple things. Like actually trying to do anything. But what really ruined them was the USA. Otherwise it would have been a funny-hat paradise. Why can't we just leave the world alone? Just sit around with universal healthcare or whatever our statist ideal government is, offer advice, 'friendly relations' and feel good when they ask for tangible help. All the nation states will behave funky-dory with universal friendship and humanist diplomacy will solve every potential problem without the US giving folks guns. Because social systems built on hierarchy and the acquisition of power aren't fundamentally destined to act paranoid and pursue vicious relative self-interest. Naw, it's only our culture that does that. Their power structures are just the neutral result of cultural self-determination. Which is everyone's god and the only moral good.
Go arrogantly sip some fucking wine coolers you fucking idiot. But if I have to hear you flap your mouth again I will break your jaw.
Goddamn fucking Left. Utterly useless. Except maybe to the all the tyrants that aren't our own.
The Left is dumb on Geopolitics.
So fucking stupid it boggles the mind. So self-absorbed, self-deluding, pretentious, naive, petulant, irrational, close-minded, gutless, ignorant, hypocritical, strategy-less, and petty it can only survive through leech-like populist parasitism.
Can't tie its own shoes unsupervised or get within reach of plastic bags because the doctor says if it idiotically asphyxiates itself any further its whining, wheedling, wheezing voice will finally warble into completely unintelligible sonic pollution, splattering acidic drool down its pressed polo shirt.
...What I'm trying to say is that Stephen F. Cohen is certifiably retarded, has only a cocktail-party understanding of Russian politics and his article in The Nation is a load of shit.
I am split as to whether the Russian FSB is still keeping up the old KGB's payments to him to write such criminally imbecilic propaganda or whether his "Useful Idiot" status was independently arrived at through somesort of social evolution out of the festering primordial slime of upper east-coast leftist elitism, supercilious post-modern echo-chamber academic bullshitting, and willfully negligent Wilsonian nation-state idealism.
One almost feels obliged to pat Cohen on the head for being able to keep up with the basic news out of Russia, but the man seems utterly incapable of believing in any causal sequence with an origin in the Kremlin. The only exception, his situation-ignoring and history re-writing Gorbachev fetishism, should come as no surprise, as a position long canonically accepted in the twenty-first century's new Noble Savage mythos. Wherein all other cultures or societies are naturally and emergently simple and peaceminded in the absence of our touch. The same old leftist cliquism and moral relativism/nihilism that timelessly emerges to passionately and awkwardly assert that 'The enemy of my government is not only my ally, but also a really nice guy at heart, whose crimes or geopolitical maneuvers could not possibly be intelligently self-originating but instead entirely respondent and dependent upon the singular Great Evil of our own government.'
In this mindset, any significant intelligence or complexity is entirely a product of our own society's singular evil. Because the idea that any one else could be more intelligent than us is as absolutely ridiculous as the idea of them having the independently emergent capacity or desire to hurt us. Our role is to be the aloof self-aware intelligent enlightened accepting relativists (much as we like to think is our role at parties) while their role is to be diverse, supply us with a variety of cuisines we can be knowledgeable about and wear funny hats. (Which we have the utmost of respect for, by the way.)
They get funny hats and we get intelligence.
That's why no funny-hat person could ever be involved in something against us that wasn't our justly deserved fault.
To Cohen and his ilk, the real battle in this world is between those who would use their intelligence to accomplish something in the external world and those who understand the foolishness of doing anything at all or having goals based in some -horrors!- absolutist conception of morality or reality.
Don't they know the path towards a better world lies in sitting around with our friends talking about how stupid those people are who try to do things with their lives are?! You can't make the world a better place!! Such hubris!! If only everyone smart, educated and white like us just withdrew and let the funny-hat people get back to how they'd naturally be without us getting involved!! Besides, if everyone had free will, we'd have to deal with the fact that we've done jackshit with our lives!!
Better to invent an elitist, deterministic, rootless, goal-less analytical framework that denies the free will of individuals and justifies our comfy self-satisfied slothery.
Everyone is warped and controlled by the forces of history, but the worst people of all are those of us intelligent people (ie white, first world...) stupid enough to get involved. The more they get involved the worse. Obviously.
We don't have to think through intentions of players, strategic complications and full relationships. People who take action against our government/white first world society = good. But, of course, such actions are only equal and opposite reactions to someone within our society's original and despicable hard action (ie anything non-talk).
Cohen's Russia can do no wrong that isn't a natural, choice-less response to stupid action on the part of the US.
It takes serious balls to pull off that much self-delusion. I'll give him that. Putin as a fucking martyr somehow not as deep in this shit as the Bush administration. Jesus fucking Christ.
Fisking this particular piece of comprehensive bullshit would be a waste of time. But it reminds me just how magnificently inept the Left (particularly America's) is in matters of geopolitics.
To the contrary of Cohen's structured delusion, The Russian Empire (2.0 Now with trace amounts of Communism!) didn't enlightenedly give up shit . They just had to face some of the shit they'd done to buy time against us. Russia today is stronger and more self-secured than it was in the 90s, 80s, or even the 60s. Yes, the US seized the opportunity presented by Yeltsin to roll back the nation's power. But the fall of the USSR was geopolitically hella GOOD for Russia. It made Russia stronger. Today's Russian Empire may be poor and suffering population decline, but it's not held up by mud and sticks anymore.
Viewed from the old USSR boundaries, it's definitely hemorrhaging land and the US is working hard to make sure of that, but a suck-ass economy and brittle government never really compensated for huge ass boundaries. Russia has shed bad investments, been stoically defeated on a couple of its most impossibly brash hostile take-overs (Ukraine) and insanely capitalized off of/permanently acquired a lot of really valuable investments (Belarus, Kazakhstan), and stolen advantages from the US (Lower Earth Orbit, regions of Georgia, various pipeline stuff). Granted, several of Russia's relationships (China, Iran) have developed through intimate engagement against the US, but could you accept perhaps that Russia might have their own, separately motivated imperialist interests there? Plus, I mean come on, Putin has insane internal control, being the most loved and in-control Czar since Stalin (a man still popular).
Don't fucking tell me we're responsible for Russia having a leader that's not as useless a waste of flesh as Yeltsin or even Gorbachev -who at least tried to work his way to superior power. Don't try to write off Putin as the result of American imperialism. Don't fucking pretend this is a one-way Cold War with Russia being some oppressed funny-hat looking to live in peace and harmony just because you want to get high off your own simplistic hipster, chomskite soundbytes and common social elitism without actually having to do any thinking or analysis or accept the existence of anyone else.
Those Bolsheviks, you know... I guess they were wrong about a couple things. Like actually trying to do anything. But what really ruined them was the USA. Otherwise it would have been a funny-hat paradise. Why can't we just leave the world alone? Just sit around with universal healthcare or whatever our statist ideal government is, offer advice, 'friendly relations' and feel good when they ask for tangible help. All the nation states will behave funky-dory with universal friendship and humanist diplomacy will solve every potential problem without the US giving folks guns. Because social systems built on hierarchy and the acquisition of power aren't fundamentally destined to act paranoid and pursue vicious relative self-interest. Naw, it's only our culture that does that. Their power structures are just the neutral result of cultural self-determination. Which is everyone's god and the only moral good.
Go arrogantly sip some fucking wine coolers you fucking idiot. But if I have to hear you flap your mouth again I will break your jaw.
Goddamn fucking Left. Utterly useless. Except maybe to the all the tyrants that aren't our own.
July 26, 2006
(And I Have Heard Very Solid Things About Darren Aronofsky)
At the risk of propping something random that might turn out utterly innane...
The Fountain looks exceptionally awesome.
At the risk of propping something random that might turn out utterly innane...
The Fountain looks exceptionally awesome.
July 25, 2006
(Some Unfortunately Necessary Words)
Israel demonstrates a remarkable talent for pissing me off. Profoundly, irrationally and emotionally. It's like the country was deliberately invented to irritate all my sensibilities. Every horrific aspect of social identity extrapolated to its inevitable and despicable extreme. And given nukes.
It's like a little seed crystal of self-reinforcing power and oppression. If war's the health of the State, Israel's the health of every fucked up social order in the Middle East.
But I'm really sick of the Hezbollah-as-freedom-fighters myth trending itself through the Left. Seriously. That shit aint sane and it aint cool. In history it would be like idolizing the German Nazi resistance to Stalin's red army.
Stalin was a dick. Killed way more folks than Hitler. And no German school kid deserves getting used as a human shield. That shit's fucked up.
Nobody deserves jackshit in terms of retributive "justice." What a fucking lie.
But not every resistance movement is capable of reconciliation with anti-authoritarianism. (No matter how stylish their guerrilla fatigues.) Pity the poor burning hearts whose righteous fury is stolen and spent out under the iron grip of Hezbollah. Don't fucking cheer for them. God damn it.
Israel demonstrates a remarkable talent for pissing me off. Profoundly, irrationally and emotionally. It's like the country was deliberately invented to irritate all my sensibilities. Every horrific aspect of social identity extrapolated to its inevitable and despicable extreme. And given nukes.
It's like a little seed crystal of self-reinforcing power and oppression. If war's the health of the State, Israel's the health of every fucked up social order in the Middle East.
But I'm really sick of the Hezbollah-as-freedom-fighters myth trending itself through the Left. Seriously. That shit aint sane and it aint cool. In history it would be like idolizing the German Nazi resistance to Stalin's red army.
Stalin was a dick. Killed way more folks than Hitler. And no German school kid deserves getting used as a human shield. That shit's fucked up.
Nobody deserves jackshit in terms of retributive "justice." What a fucking lie.
But not every resistance movement is capable of reconciliation with anti-authoritarianism. (No matter how stylish their guerrilla fatigues.) Pity the poor burning hearts whose righteous fury is stolen and spent out under the iron grip of Hezbollah. Don't fucking cheer for them. God damn it.
July 24, 2006
(Does Solidarity Mean Holding Hands With You?)
A couple days ago a good friend of mine relayed how he was busted out of a Spanish jail thanks to a communist town mayor with the CNT. Though they violently disagreed on almost every issue and just about openly glared at each other, they both felt obliged to act as comrades. "Things are very complex over there," he understated with a sad smile and a shrug.
The indomitable Bombs & Shields' latest report from Greece reminded me of that cheerful grimace:
"The anarchist group Revolutionary Liberation Action has claimed responsibility for the homemade explosive device that was detonated Saturday outside the office of a Socialist deputy Costas Gitonas. [...] Revolutionary Liberation Action dedicated their assault to the memory of Christoforos Marino, a prominent anarchist who was found dead under mysterious circumstances in July 1996 during Gitonas' term as public order minister."
A couple days ago a good friend of mine relayed how he was busted out of a Spanish jail thanks to a communist town mayor with the CNT. Though they violently disagreed on almost every issue and just about openly glared at each other, they both felt obliged to act as comrades. "Things are very complex over there," he understated with a sad smile and a shrug.
The indomitable Bombs & Shields' latest report from Greece reminded me of that cheerful grimace:
"The anarchist group Revolutionary Liberation Action has claimed responsibility for the homemade explosive device that was detonated Saturday outside the office of a Socialist deputy Costas Gitonas. [...] Revolutionary Liberation Action dedicated their assault to the memory of Christoforos Marino, a prominent anarchist who was found dead under mysterious circumstances in July 1996 during Gitonas' term as public order minister."
July 22, 2006
(Granted, No One Can Be All Evil, All The Time)
...But I never thought I'd see Bill Gates forcibly backing open source.
(via Velcro City Tourist Board)
...But I never thought I'd see Bill Gates forcibly backing open source.
(via Velcro City Tourist Board)
July 20, 2006
(A Scanner Darkly)
Hollywood hates Science Fiction with a passion.
To them the only thing more horrifying than a genre defined by its aggressively radical paradigm shifts is the alien concept of art in-pursuit-of-understanding rather than art in-pursuit-of-escapism or art for-its-own-sake. (The latter, of course, being a notorious scam ubiquitous around to the world in its callous intent to print social and cultural currency just as fast as it can be devalued.)
So it's always disconcerting when an actual SF film manages to sneak out.
That's not to do either Phillip K Dick's original novel or Richard Linklater's interpretation the disservice of impressing upon them some grand teleological drive toward awakening. Obviously nothing could be farther off. Rather than some Arthur C Clarkian journey toward gleaming enlightenment, A Scanner Darkly's trade is that of the fall. The runaway singularity of our own escapism.
Catered to or given space, this psychological decent would langor as naught more than base Modern Literature. As substanceless as the escapist delusions chased by any other critical mass of drug-abuse. But, in his address of it, A Scanner Darkly seethes with the indisguisable drive of a Golden Age author.
In his mid-career burnout Phillip K Dick walked the line between the New and Old eras of SF. The old career solidity of Rockets, Robots & Rayguns slowly bending and twisting under the author's weight until at last nothing remained of the Old Guard but its beating radicalism, stripped of all those irrelevant tropes.
A Scanner Darkly's greatest bauble of technological futurism is an almost lackadaisical plot device. A full-body suit designed to hide the real-life identities of narcotics officers from one another by warping their facade into a constantly rotating set of faces and identities. ...An inefficient and uneven technological extrapolation, of course. But more than that, it's a bore. The scramble suit is not the point. It's an atmospheric special effect. Part of Phillip K Dick's eerie repainting of Californian suburbia.
A Scanner Darkly is not SF because of any speculative technology that may appear in the background. What makes the story SF is not its setting but its perspective.
In that, Richard Linklater's film is brilliant success. The first legitimate Phillip K Dick movie ever made. And, in the process, a stark and welcome addition to the small number (some would say single digits) of SF films ever produced. It succeeds where others (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report...) failed because Linklater was true not only to the original text but also to the paradigm.
Anaheim. Seven years from now.
Everything is precisely the same.
It's just that some of the details have been washed over. Some of the colors are stronger. And the boundaries are growing harsher. Everything is pulled out to its extreme. The background has been outsourced, lost behind a stable wall of fuzz, but it still flickers beyond one's peripheral vision with hints of a richer reality, now abandoned.
Bob Arctor and Agent Fred walk together through the bleached, open, rundown Californian suburbia, wondering where they lost their identity, why their friend is such a scheming jackass, what their relationship to their girlfriend is, and when they will finally vanish from the drug use that is simultaneously a byproduct of their authoritarian job, a passive escape and the siren whisper of rebellion. When the lone lefty protester is pulled off the street and bundled up into the unmarked black van... it's unreal. Cartoonish. The least tangible and most ignorable aspect of Bob Arctor's world.
In the end, for Bob/Fred/Bruce, the entire world becomes ignorable. But, though we've driven along with the embodiment of his coming demise, Phillip K Dick is still a Science Fiction writer, and he cannot accept such an slippery world. And so the story is really a spattering of resistance, littered around the edge of the growing, whirling hole.
Like all of his works, A Scanner Darkly is poorly named. Less the tale of self-judgment and Descartes' demon than an attempt to grapple with a fading world. Linklater could have cleaned it up for his movie. But he didn't. Despite the watching-oneself psychosis overtones, he lets the whole narcotics officer duel-life slip on by just as fast as the rest of Arctor's life. If anything, Linklater's vast lifting from the original text actually creates a more profound sense of broken reality. The scenes fall together chunky and disjointed, as if edited by a hacksaw-wielding madman.
Blessedly, Robert Downey Jr.'s character Barris fills these unseeable gaps with a sticky sort of spastic personal fire that works brilliantly. Amid the dying embers of Aractor's life, Barris gives us the most powerful whiff of direction and connection. Even if it's to a personal world inclusive of "lizard alienoid motherfuckers." Of course, Downey's character must be eventually stamped out. But while matched alongside Rory Cochrane and Woody Harrelson, their chemistry is illegally wicked.
Though mocking the ridiculous statements of critics regarding A Scanner Darkly could occupy solid months, of particular note has been a popular allegation that said actors' paranoid/druggy humor in the movie is somehow either divergent or disrespectful to Phillip K Dick's original work. Okay, yes, the bright open scenes between Arctor and his friends don't lend themselves to dark-and-serious melodrama. But that's not the point. A Scanner Darkly crafts darkness out of over-bleached, feel-good sunlight. The twitchiness. The snarky infighting. The getting dressed up to commit suicide ODing while clutching The Fountainhead and an angry letter to the power company... only to experience a pan-dimensional many-eyed alien reading your sins for eternity. It was all a vital part of the original novel. And almost all the scenes were lifted word-for-word, tone-for-tone.
You constantly laugh with Fred at how loserly Bob's friends are. But, burnt-out losers though they may be, they've still got more within their grasp than Fred. And you know it.
Barris (Downey Jr.) gets himself arrested in a brightly lit room, while the lead officer makes cracks about him to the scramble-suited Agent Fred. It's an ironic comeuppance for Barris. But as he's led away, outrageously oblivious to the true doom he's assigned himself, his laughable paranoid-freak tics set the stage for a much deeper sensation of desperation.
All this scorching bright light and vibrant color resonates with Phillip K Dick's original light and wry prose. It's a destructive power of densely packed subtleties that Keanu Reeves passive face builds on beautifully. No melodrama, but instead a cheerful mellowness that amplifies the desperate drama until there's nothing left.
Over the course of the entire film the only exception allowed to this theme is Donna, Arctor's girlfriend. Though at first Winona Ryder gives an appearingly lackluster performance, the audience's perspective slowly shifts under Linklater's touch from Fred's vantage point to Donna's. It's an extremely subtle divergence from the original text, yet it has the biggest effect on the film, amplifying Phillip K Dick's original vision as much as the rotoscoping. For in Donna is found most clearly the drop of radical and unreasonable hope that makes A Scanner Darkly more than a drugged out work of modern literature with a "Sci-Fi" plot device.
"To sacrifice someone without their ever knowing it?" She existentially implores in the film's climax, suddenly charged with all the missing life, understanding, and paradigm solidity the film had seen drained away.
Phillip K Dick (and Linklater as his stalwart proxy) won't let us any closer, but for a split second the fractured world lets through a ray. The desperate possibility of maybe, just maybe, being whole. Of reason and empathy.
To take the different, the fantastical or improbable and dare to make sense of it. It's a radical presumption. An alarming declaration of resistance. From a man who knew himself so far gone he listed himself among friends lost in his own afterword (wisely and lovingly appended to the film by Linklater).
It grates against the film's aesthetic potential. Ill packaged for entertainment, it likewise refuses the 'artistic' abandon of chaotic abstraction. As unusual and antithetical a product of Hollywood as only Science Fiction can be.
A definitively Phillip K Dick work. No one else stood at the crux like he.
High school classmate of Ursula K Le Guin and inspiration for The Lathe of Heaven. The burnt-out hippie beatnik to whom stranger and hardened naval officer Robert A Heinlein sent grocery checks out of camaraderie. The sacrificial loser whose body of work fully bridged the gap. A man respected in distance and death. But never in life.
"Christ, Bob! No one held a gun to your head and forced you to get addicted!"
No. But they needed him to.
We all needed him to.
Hollywood hates Science Fiction with a passion.
To them the only thing more horrifying than a genre defined by its aggressively radical paradigm shifts is the alien concept of art in-pursuit-of-understanding rather than art in-pursuit-of-escapism or art for-its-own-sake. (The latter, of course, being a notorious scam ubiquitous around to the world in its callous intent to print social and cultural currency just as fast as it can be devalued.)
So it's always disconcerting when an actual SF film manages to sneak out.
That's not to do either Phillip K Dick's original novel or Richard Linklater's interpretation the disservice of impressing upon them some grand teleological drive toward awakening. Obviously nothing could be farther off. Rather than some Arthur C Clarkian journey toward gleaming enlightenment, A Scanner Darkly's trade is that of the fall. The runaway singularity of our own escapism.
Catered to or given space, this psychological decent would langor as naught more than base Modern Literature. As substanceless as the escapist delusions chased by any other critical mass of drug-abuse. But, in his address of it, A Scanner Darkly seethes with the indisguisable drive of a Golden Age author.
In his mid-career burnout Phillip K Dick walked the line between the New and Old eras of SF. The old career solidity of Rockets, Robots & Rayguns slowly bending and twisting under the author's weight until at last nothing remained of the Old Guard but its beating radicalism, stripped of all those irrelevant tropes.
A Scanner Darkly's greatest bauble of technological futurism is an almost lackadaisical plot device. A full-body suit designed to hide the real-life identities of narcotics officers from one another by warping their facade into a constantly rotating set of faces and identities. ...An inefficient and uneven technological extrapolation, of course. But more than that, it's a bore. The scramble suit is not the point. It's an atmospheric special effect. Part of Phillip K Dick's eerie repainting of Californian suburbia.
A Scanner Darkly is not SF because of any speculative technology that may appear in the background. What makes the story SF is not its setting but its perspective.
In that, Richard Linklater's film is brilliant success. The first legitimate Phillip K Dick movie ever made. And, in the process, a stark and welcome addition to the small number (some would say single digits) of SF films ever produced. It succeeds where others (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report...) failed because Linklater was true not only to the original text but also to the paradigm.
Anaheim. Seven years from now.
Everything is precisely the same.
It's just that some of the details have been washed over. Some of the colors are stronger. And the boundaries are growing harsher. Everything is pulled out to its extreme. The background has been outsourced, lost behind a stable wall of fuzz, but it still flickers beyond one's peripheral vision with hints of a richer reality, now abandoned.
Bob Arctor and Agent Fred walk together through the bleached, open, rundown Californian suburbia, wondering where they lost their identity, why their friend is such a scheming jackass, what their relationship to their girlfriend is, and when they will finally vanish from the drug use that is simultaneously a byproduct of their authoritarian job, a passive escape and the siren whisper of rebellion. When the lone lefty protester is pulled off the street and bundled up into the unmarked black van... it's unreal. Cartoonish. The least tangible and most ignorable aspect of Bob Arctor's world.
In the end, for Bob/Fred/Bruce, the entire world becomes ignorable. But, though we've driven along with the embodiment of his coming demise, Phillip K Dick is still a Science Fiction writer, and he cannot accept such an slippery world. And so the story is really a spattering of resistance, littered around the edge of the growing, whirling hole.
Like all of his works, A Scanner Darkly is poorly named. Less the tale of self-judgment and Descartes' demon than an attempt to grapple with a fading world. Linklater could have cleaned it up for his movie. But he didn't. Despite the watching-oneself psychosis overtones, he lets the whole narcotics officer duel-life slip on by just as fast as the rest of Arctor's life. If anything, Linklater's vast lifting from the original text actually creates a more profound sense of broken reality. The scenes fall together chunky and disjointed, as if edited by a hacksaw-wielding madman.
Blessedly, Robert Downey Jr.'s character Barris fills these unseeable gaps with a sticky sort of spastic personal fire that works brilliantly. Amid the dying embers of Aractor's life, Barris gives us the most powerful whiff of direction and connection. Even if it's to a personal world inclusive of "lizard alienoid motherfuckers." Of course, Downey's character must be eventually stamped out. But while matched alongside Rory Cochrane and Woody Harrelson, their chemistry is illegally wicked.
Though mocking the ridiculous statements of critics regarding A Scanner Darkly could occupy solid months, of particular note has been a popular allegation that said actors' paranoid/druggy humor in the movie is somehow either divergent or disrespectful to Phillip K Dick's original work. Okay, yes, the bright open scenes between Arctor and his friends don't lend themselves to dark-and-serious melodrama. But that's not the point. A Scanner Darkly crafts darkness out of over-bleached, feel-good sunlight. The twitchiness. The snarky infighting. The getting dressed up to commit suicide ODing while clutching The Fountainhead and an angry letter to the power company... only to experience a pan-dimensional many-eyed alien reading your sins for eternity. It was all a vital part of the original novel. And almost all the scenes were lifted word-for-word, tone-for-tone.
You constantly laugh with Fred at how loserly Bob's friends are. But, burnt-out losers though they may be, they've still got more within their grasp than Fred. And you know it.
Barris (Downey Jr.) gets himself arrested in a brightly lit room, while the lead officer makes cracks about him to the scramble-suited Agent Fred. It's an ironic comeuppance for Barris. But as he's led away, outrageously oblivious to the true doom he's assigned himself, his laughable paranoid-freak tics set the stage for a much deeper sensation of desperation.
All this scorching bright light and vibrant color resonates with Phillip K Dick's original light and wry prose. It's a destructive power of densely packed subtleties that Keanu Reeves passive face builds on beautifully. No melodrama, but instead a cheerful mellowness that amplifies the desperate drama until there's nothing left.
Over the course of the entire film the only exception allowed to this theme is Donna, Arctor's girlfriend. Though at first Winona Ryder gives an appearingly lackluster performance, the audience's perspective slowly shifts under Linklater's touch from Fred's vantage point to Donna's. It's an extremely subtle divergence from the original text, yet it has the biggest effect on the film, amplifying Phillip K Dick's original vision as much as the rotoscoping. For in Donna is found most clearly the drop of radical and unreasonable hope that makes A Scanner Darkly more than a drugged out work of modern literature with a "Sci-Fi" plot device.
"To sacrifice someone without their ever knowing it?" She existentially implores in the film's climax, suddenly charged with all the missing life, understanding, and paradigm solidity the film had seen drained away.
Phillip K Dick (and Linklater as his stalwart proxy) won't let us any closer, but for a split second the fractured world lets through a ray. The desperate possibility of maybe, just maybe, being whole. Of reason and empathy.
To take the different, the fantastical or improbable and dare to make sense of it. It's a radical presumption. An alarming declaration of resistance. From a man who knew himself so far gone he listed himself among friends lost in his own afterword (wisely and lovingly appended to the film by Linklater).
It grates against the film's aesthetic potential. Ill packaged for entertainment, it likewise refuses the 'artistic' abandon of chaotic abstraction. As unusual and antithetical a product of Hollywood as only Science Fiction can be.
A definitively Phillip K Dick work. No one else stood at the crux like he.
High school classmate of Ursula K Le Guin and inspiration for The Lathe of Heaven. The burnt-out hippie beatnik to whom stranger and hardened naval officer Robert A Heinlein sent grocery checks out of camaraderie. The sacrificial loser whose body of work fully bridged the gap. A man respected in distance and death. But never in life.
"Christ, Bob! No one held a gun to your head and forced you to get addicted!"
No. But they needed him to.
We all needed him to.
July 17, 2006
July 16, 2006
(...Or They're In The Crutch Business)
"I don't get too bent out of shape about the statism of the minimum wage or overtime laws--in my list of statist evils, the guys who are breaking legs rank considerably higher than the ones handing out government crutches. All too many libertarians could care less about the statism that causes the problems of income disparity, but go ballistic over the statism intended to alleviate it. It's another example of the general rule that statism that helps the rich is kinda sorta bad, maybe, I guess, but statism that helps the poor is flaming red ruin on wheels."
-Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
"I don't get too bent out of shape about the statism of the minimum wage or overtime laws--in my list of statist evils, the guys who are breaking legs rank considerably higher than the ones handing out government crutches. All too many libertarians could care less about the statism that causes the problems of income disparity, but go ballistic over the statism intended to alleviate it. It's another example of the general rule that statism that helps the rich is kinda sorta bad, maybe, I guess, but statism that helps the poor is flaming red ruin on wheels."
-Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
July 15, 2006
(...But Mainly I Support The Lebanese Because They've Got The Hottest Activist Chicks)
Fellow Portlander, one time drinking buddy, professional blogger, honorable Middle East reporter, and formerly extreme conservative, Michael J Totten:
"Israel has a right - nay, a moral obligation - to defend itself and rescue the kidnapped. But what kind of down-the-rabbit-hole war is this, where the guilty parties - the Baath regime in Syria and the Jihad regime in Iran - sleep warm in their beds while Beirut, a libertine city they hate, takes the punishment for them?"
Sometimes it all just makes me want to weep.
Fellow Portlander, one time drinking buddy, professional blogger, honorable Middle East reporter, and formerly extreme conservative, Michael J Totten:
"Israel has a right - nay, a moral obligation - to defend itself and rescue the kidnapped. But what kind of down-the-rabbit-hole war is this, where the guilty parties - the Baath regime in Syria and the Jihad regime in Iran - sleep warm in their beds while Beirut, a libertine city they hate, takes the punishment for them?"
Sometimes it all just makes me want to weep.
July 14, 2006
(100 Word Review Of Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Second)
I've never understood people who bitch about long running times. Look I'm willing to sit through whatever's necessary to get engaged. At heart, all I ask for is vague empathic connection and something approaching a satisfying climax. If it means setting aside three hours, fine. So much the better, in fact, if it allows for packing in tighter action and more witty banter. Effeminate pirates afflicted with ataxia are always good for a laugh, Knightley's acceptably hot and I'm pro "Will"/"Elizabeth" romance on general principle... But Pirates takes far too long to deliver its scant fifteen minutes of movie.
I've never understood people who bitch about long running times. Look I'm willing to sit through whatever's necessary to get engaged. At heart, all I ask for is vague empathic connection and something approaching a satisfying climax. If it means setting aside three hours, fine. So much the better, in fact, if it allows for packing in tighter action and more witty banter. Effeminate pirates afflicted with ataxia are always good for a laugh, Knightley's acceptably hot and I'm pro "Will"/"Elizabeth" romance on general principle... But Pirates takes far too long to deliver its scant fifteen minutes of movie.
(That Desperate Feeling Of Intractability Against An Impositionally Irrational World)
Sanity is not a geopolitical sacrifice. Nor is morality tactically infeasible.
Nothing that is built from reaction, rather than the piercing reality of compassion, will ever stand the test of time.
But even in the absence of de-escalation, please. A little fucking proportionality.
Sanity is not a geopolitical sacrifice. Nor is morality tactically infeasible.
Nothing that is built from reaction, rather than the piercing reality of compassion, will ever stand the test of time.
But even in the absence of de-escalation, please. A little fucking proportionality.
July 13, 2006
(Eric Burns Is A Better Writer Than I)
Far better. I'm not one to up and admit such things, but let's just get that out there. Anyway, Jim Baen sure as hell could have done a lot worse in terms of obituary writers.
Far better. I'm not one to up and admit such things, but let's just get that out there. Anyway, Jim Baen sure as hell could have done a lot worse in terms of obituary writers.
(The Obvious Becomes Vogue)
"As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism."
Repeating everything I've ever said about the state of American party politics (complete with lots of fancy numbers) here's Ryan Sager.
"As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism."
Repeating everything I've ever said about the state of American party politics (complete with lots of fancy numbers) here's Ryan Sager.
July 12, 2006
(Partyarchs In A Socialist Utopia)
So how'd that Libertarian convention in Portland fare?
Is that right?
...Well, um, glad to be of service.
[PS: Knapp's a fighter.]
So how'd that Libertarian convention in Portland fare?
Is that right?
...Well, um, glad to be of service.
[PS: Knapp's a fighter.]
July 06, 2006
(Wait)
So is Trudeau really setting up one of his characters to become an agent provocateur? Doonesbury covering the Green Scare would be... interesting to say the least.
So is Trudeau really setting up one of his characters to become an agent provocateur? Doonesbury covering the Green Scare would be... interesting to say the least.
July 04, 2006
(Happy Independence)
(Anarchism & American Traditions)
by guest blogger Voltairine de Cleyre
American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions, and hard pioneer life, grew during the colonization period of one hundred and seventy years from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the Revolution. This was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is well described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for Pennsylvania: "I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors, to do mischief."
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
To the average American of today, the Revolution means the series of battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to "Remember Paoli," to repeat "Molly Stark's a widow," to call General Wayne "Mad Anthony Wayne," and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have learned the Revolution--blessed be George Washington! They have no idea why it should have been called a "revolution" instead of the "English War," or any similar title: it's the name of it, that's all. And name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them, that the name "American Revolution" is held sacred, though it means to them nothing more than successful force, while the name "Revolution" applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. In neither case have they any idea of the content of the word, save that of armed force. That has already happened, and long happened, which Jefferson foresaw when he wrote:
To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the Revolution; they were the incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game they were playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during, and after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such business as was the common concern and to set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man's liberty would encroach upon another's.
They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development of the States and United States governments has strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.
Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home localities, endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a State-Church, of a class-divided people, even the institution of African slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we do retain, and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who in the fall of '76 declined a re-election to Congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local assembly, in arranging there for public education which he justly considered a matter of "common concern," said his advocacy of public schools was not with any "view to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns to which it is equal"; and in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he likewise said:
This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise manages better all that to which it IS equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances, Education and Commerce, which the governments of the States and of the United States have undertaken to manage and regulate, as the very two which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause, save the unforeseen developments of Manufacture.
It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government protected by the label "home-made," but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action - this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in endeavoring to provide for common education.
"Confidence," said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky Resolutions, "is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the Alien laws by the monarchist party during John Adams' administration, and were an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of the general government to assume undelegated powers, for said they, to accept these laws would be "to be bound by laws made, not with our. consent, but by others against our consent--that is, to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority." Resolutions identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia, the following month; in those days the States still considered themselves supreme, the general government subordinate.
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up today any common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of rest, security, confidence--the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong, a Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union, power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our All-Seeing Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he knows about Shays' rebellion, and he will answer, "Oh, some of the farmers couldn't pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught 'em a good lesson"-"And what was the result of it?" "The result? Why--why--the result was--Oh yes, I remember--the result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts." Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer "No." Ask him if he ever read Jefferson"s letter to Madison about it, in which he says:
Or to another correspondent:
Ask any school child if he was ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote, "Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one," and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer, "Oh well, he [Tom Paine] was an infidel!" Catechize him about the merits of the Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you will find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld from Congress, but of the powers granted.
Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of the governments of Europe, so say we of this government also after a century and a quarter of independence: "The blood of the people has become its inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish it easily."
Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding the course of a nation; but commerce, dealing as it does with material things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction, and shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.
Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else fail. In this Anarchists agree with the traditional enemies of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists, strong government believers, the Roosevelts of today, the Jays, Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then--that Hamilton, who, as Secretary of the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky heritors, and whose objects were twofold: To puzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a machine for corrupting the legislatures; "for he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by two motives only, force or interest"; force being then out of the question, he laid hold of interest, the greed of the legislators, to set going an association of persons having an entirely separate welfare from the welfare of their electors, bound together by mutual corruption and mutual desire for plunder. The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the difference is, that while strong govermnentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, No Government Whatsoever.
As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere money-getting." The desire for material east long ago vanquished the spirit of '76. What was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they refused to import goods from England; when they preferred (and stood by it) to wear coarse, homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry. Even within the lifetime of the revolutionists, the spirit decayed. The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety nine women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the independence of their sex; nine hundred and ninety nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a new dress? That it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society; that it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people; this it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the corruption of government easy.
As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it is this: to establish bonds between every corner of the earths surface and every other corner, to multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material possession and enjoyment.
The American tradition was the isolation of the States as far as possible. Said they: We have won our liberties by hard sacrifice and struggle unto death. We wish now to be let alone and to let others alone, that our principles may have time for trial; that we may become accustomed to the exercise of our rights; that we may be kept free from the contaminating influence of European gauds, pageants, distinctions. So richly did they esteem the absence of these that they could in all fervor write: "We shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming to America, but no man living will ever seen an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe, and continuing there." Alas! In less than a hundred years the highest aim of a "Daughter of the Revolution" was, and is, to buy a castle, a title, and rotten lord, with the money wrung from American servitude! And the commercial interests of America are seeking a world empire!
In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence, it appeared that the "manifest destiny" of America was to be an agricultural people, exchanging food stuffs and raw materials for manufactured articles. And in those days it was written: "We shall be virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there." Which we are doing, because of the inevitable development of Commerce and Manufacture, and the concomitant development of strong government. And the parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled: "If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface." There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.
And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. It was made when the Constitution was made; and the Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of Commerce. Thus it was at the outset a merchant's machine, which the other interests of the country, the land and labor interests, even then foreboded would destroy their liberties. In vain their jealousy of its central power made enact the first twelve amendments. In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which the federal power dare not trench. In vain they enacted into general law the freedom of speech, of the press, of assemblage and petition. All of these things we see ridden roughshod upon every day, and have so seen with more or less intermission since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At this day, every police lieutenant considers himself, and rightly so, as more powerful than the General Law of the Union; and that one who told Robert Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger than the Constitution, was perfectly correct. The right of assemblage is an American tradition which has gone out of fashion; the police club is now the mode. And it is so in virtue of the people's indifference to liberty, and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation towards the substance of imperial government.
It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.
It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business; viz., that debt is a bad thing, and a man's first surplus earning should be applied to his debts; that offices and office holders should be few. It is American practice that the general government should always have millions [of dollars] of debt, even if a panic or a war has to be forced to prevent its being paid off; and as to the application of its income office holders come first. And within the last administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been created at an annual expense of 1,663,000,000. Shades of Jefferson! "How are vacancies to be obtained? Those by deaths are few; by resignation none." [Theodore] Roosevelt cuts the knot by making 99,000 new ones! And few will die - and none resign. They will beget sons and daughters, and Taft will have to create 99,000 more! Verily a simple and a serviceable thing is our general government.
It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act as a check upon the impetuosity of Legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the Judiciary justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people and nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the people seek to regain some measure of their freedom. Again, in the words of Jefferson: "The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape in any form they please." Truly, if the men who fought the good fight for the triumph of simple, honest, free life in that day, were now to look upon the scene of their labors, they would cry out together with him who said:
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
The problem then becomes, Is it possible to stir men from their indifference? We have said that the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life; that the elements of colonial life were the desire for sectarian independence, and the jealous watchfulness incident thereto; the isolation of pioneer communities which threw each individual strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all-around men, yet at the same time made very strong such social bonds as did exist; and, lastly, the comparative simplicity of small communities.
All this has disappeared. As to sectarianism, it is only by dint of an occasional idiotic persecution that a sect becomes interesting; in the absence of this, outlandish sects play the fool's role, are anything but heroic, and have little to do with either the name or the substance of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have gradually become the "pillars of society," their animosities have died out, their offensive peculiarities have been effaced, they are as like one another as beans in a pod, they build churches - and sleep in them.
As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously diminishing proportion engaged in all around farming; and even these are slaves to mortgages. For our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned to last a week, and certainly there is none which would not be bankrupt with despair at the proposition that it produce its own food. In response to this condition and its correlative political tyranny, Anarchism affirms the economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of the great communities, the use of the earth.
I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this will take place; but I see clearly that this must take place if ever again men are to be free. I am so well satisfied that the mass of mankind prefer material possessions to liberty, that I have no hope that they will ever, by means of intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke of oppression fastened on them by the present economic system, to institute free societies. My only hope is in the blind development of the economic system and political oppression itself. The great characteristic looming factor in this gigantic power is Manufacture. The tendency of each nation is to become more and more a manufacturing one, an exporter of fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency follows its own logic, it must eventually circle round to each community producing for itself. What then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer shall have no foreign market? Why, then mankind must face the dilemma of sitting down and dying'inthe midst of it, or confiscating the goods.
Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now; and-so far we are sitting down and dying. I opine, however, that men will not do it forever, and when once by an act of general expropriation they have overcome the reverence and fear of property, and their awe of government, they may waken to the consciousness that things are to be used, and therefore men are greater than things. This may rouse the spirit of liberty.
If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent. For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals--those may be free who are able to make their own living.
In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of tyranny, the standing army and navy, it is clear that so long as men desire to fight, they will have armed force in one form or another. Our fathers thought they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the voluntary militia. In our day we have lived to see this militia declared part of the regular military force of the United States, and subject to the same demands as the regulars. Within another generation we shall probably see its members in the regular pay of the general government. Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization, inevitably follows the same line of centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up voluntarily, like the minute men of Massachusetts, and disbands as soon as the occasion which called it into existence is past: that the really desirable thing is that all men--not Americans only--should be at peace; and that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who make war shall do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade.
As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result.
And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world--if it ever shall be, as I hope it will--then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to, be an American was greater than to be a king.
In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans - only Men ; over the whole earth, Men.
by guest blogger Voltairine de Cleyre
American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions, and hard pioneer life, grew during the colonization period of one hundred and seventy years from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the Revolution. This was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is well described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for Pennsylvania: "I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors, to do mischief."
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
To the average American of today, the Revolution means the series of battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to "Remember Paoli," to repeat "Molly Stark's a widow," to call General Wayne "Mad Anthony Wayne," and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have learned the Revolution--blessed be George Washington! They have no idea why it should have been called a "revolution" instead of the "English War," or any similar title: it's the name of it, that's all. And name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them, that the name "American Revolution" is held sacred, though it means to them nothing more than successful force, while the name "Revolution" applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. In neither case have they any idea of the content of the word, save that of armed force. That has already happened, and long happened, which Jefferson foresaw when he wrote:
"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right, on a legal basis, is while our rulers are honest, ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the Revolution; they were the incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game they were playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during, and after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such business as was the common concern and to set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man's liberty would encroach upon another's.
They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development of the States and United States governments has strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.
Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home localities, endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a State-Church, of a class-divided people, even the institution of African slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we do retain, and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who in the fall of '76 declined a re-election to Congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local assembly, in arranging there for public education which he justly considered a matter of "common concern," said his advocacy of public schools was not with any "view to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns to which it is equal"; and in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he likewise said:
"Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage for themselves, and the general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."
This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise manages better all that to which it IS equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances, Education and Commerce, which the governments of the States and of the United States have undertaken to manage and regulate, as the very two which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause, save the unforeseen developments of Manufacture.
It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government protected by the label "home-made," but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action - this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in endeavoring to provide for common education.
"Confidence," said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky Resolutions, "is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the Alien laws by the monarchist party during John Adams' administration, and were an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of the general government to assume undelegated powers, for said they, to accept these laws would be "to be bound by laws made, not with our. consent, but by others against our consent--that is, to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority." Resolutions identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia, the following month; in those days the States still considered themselves supreme, the general government subordinate.
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up today any common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of rest, security, confidence--the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong, a Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union, power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our All-Seeing Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he knows about Shays' rebellion, and he will answer, "Oh, some of the farmers couldn't pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught 'em a good lesson"-"And what was the result of it?" "The result? Why--why--the result was--Oh yes, I remember--the result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts." Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer "No." Ask him if he ever read Jefferson"s letter to Madison about it, in which he says:
"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under government wherein the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under government of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it...It has its evils too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. ...But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing."
Or to another correspondent:
"God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion!...What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Ask any school child if he was ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote, "Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one," and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer, "Oh well, he [Tom Paine] was an infidel!" Catechize him about the merits of the Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you will find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld from Congress, but of the powers granted.
Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of the governments of Europe, so say we of this government also after a century and a quarter of independence: "The blood of the people has become its inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish it easily."
Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding the course of a nation; but commerce, dealing as it does with material things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction, and shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.
Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else fail. In this Anarchists agree with the traditional enemies of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists, strong government believers, the Roosevelts of today, the Jays, Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then--that Hamilton, who, as Secretary of the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky heritors, and whose objects were twofold: To puzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a machine for corrupting the legislatures; "for he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by two motives only, force or interest"; force being then out of the question, he laid hold of interest, the greed of the legislators, to set going an association of persons having an entirely separate welfare from the welfare of their electors, bound together by mutual corruption and mutual desire for plunder. The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the difference is, that while strong govermnentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, No Government Whatsoever.
As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere money-getting." The desire for material east long ago vanquished the spirit of '76. What was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they refused to import goods from England; when they preferred (and stood by it) to wear coarse, homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry. Even within the lifetime of the revolutionists, the spirit decayed. The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety nine women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the independence of their sex; nine hundred and ninety nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a new dress? That it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society; that it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people; this it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the corruption of government easy.
As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it is this: to establish bonds between every corner of the earths surface and every other corner, to multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material possession and enjoyment.
The American tradition was the isolation of the States as far as possible. Said they: We have won our liberties by hard sacrifice and struggle unto death. We wish now to be let alone and to let others alone, that our principles may have time for trial; that we may become accustomed to the exercise of our rights; that we may be kept free from the contaminating influence of European gauds, pageants, distinctions. So richly did they esteem the absence of these that they could in all fervor write: "We shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming to America, but no man living will ever seen an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe, and continuing there." Alas! In less than a hundred years the highest aim of a "Daughter of the Revolution" was, and is, to buy a castle, a title, and rotten lord, with the money wrung from American servitude! And the commercial interests of America are seeking a world empire!
In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence, it appeared that the "manifest destiny" of America was to be an agricultural people, exchanging food stuffs and raw materials for manufactured articles. And in those days it was written: "We shall be virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there." Which we are doing, because of the inevitable development of Commerce and Manufacture, and the concomitant development of strong government. And the parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled: "If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface." There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.
And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. It was made when the Constitution was made; and the Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of Commerce. Thus it was at the outset a merchant's machine, which the other interests of the country, the land and labor interests, even then foreboded would destroy their liberties. In vain their jealousy of its central power made enact the first twelve amendments. In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which the federal power dare not trench. In vain they enacted into general law the freedom of speech, of the press, of assemblage and petition. All of these things we see ridden roughshod upon every day, and have so seen with more or less intermission since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At this day, every police lieutenant considers himself, and rightly so, as more powerful than the General Law of the Union; and that one who told Robert Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger than the Constitution, was perfectly correct. The right of assemblage is an American tradition which has gone out of fashion; the police club is now the mode. And it is so in virtue of the people's indifference to liberty, and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation towards the substance of imperial government.
It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.
It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business; viz., that debt is a bad thing, and a man's first surplus earning should be applied to his debts; that offices and office holders should be few. It is American practice that the general government should always have millions [of dollars] of debt, even if a panic or a war has to be forced to prevent its being paid off; and as to the application of its income office holders come first. And within the last administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been created at an annual expense of 1,663,000,000. Shades of Jefferson! "How are vacancies to be obtained? Those by deaths are few; by resignation none." [Theodore] Roosevelt cuts the knot by making 99,000 new ones! And few will die - and none resign. They will beget sons and daughters, and Taft will have to create 99,000 more! Verily a simple and a serviceable thing is our general government.
It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act as a check upon the impetuosity of Legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the Judiciary justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people and nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the people seek to regain some measure of their freedom. Again, in the words of Jefferson: "The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape in any form they please." Truly, if the men who fought the good fight for the triumph of simple, honest, free life in that day, were now to look upon the scene of their labors, they would cry out together with him who said:
"I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifices of themselves by the generation of '76 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I shall not live to see it."
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
The problem then becomes, Is it possible to stir men from their indifference? We have said that the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life; that the elements of colonial life were the desire for sectarian independence, and the jealous watchfulness incident thereto; the isolation of pioneer communities which threw each individual strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all-around men, yet at the same time made very strong such social bonds as did exist; and, lastly, the comparative simplicity of small communities.
All this has disappeared. As to sectarianism, it is only by dint of an occasional idiotic persecution that a sect becomes interesting; in the absence of this, outlandish sects play the fool's role, are anything but heroic, and have little to do with either the name or the substance of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have gradually become the "pillars of society," their animosities have died out, their offensive peculiarities have been effaced, they are as like one another as beans in a pod, they build churches - and sleep in them.
As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously diminishing proportion engaged in all around farming; and even these are slaves to mortgages. For our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned to last a week, and certainly there is none which would not be bankrupt with despair at the proposition that it produce its own food. In response to this condition and its correlative political tyranny, Anarchism affirms the economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of the great communities, the use of the earth.
I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this will take place; but I see clearly that this must take place if ever again men are to be free. I am so well satisfied that the mass of mankind prefer material possessions to liberty, that I have no hope that they will ever, by means of intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke of oppression fastened on them by the present economic system, to institute free societies. My only hope is in the blind development of the economic system and political oppression itself. The great characteristic looming factor in this gigantic power is Manufacture. The tendency of each nation is to become more and more a manufacturing one, an exporter of fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency follows its own logic, it must eventually circle round to each community producing for itself. What then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer shall have no foreign market? Why, then mankind must face the dilemma of sitting down and dying'inthe midst of it, or confiscating the goods.
Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now; and-so far we are sitting down and dying. I opine, however, that men will not do it forever, and when once by an act of general expropriation they have overcome the reverence and fear of property, and their awe of government, they may waken to the consciousness that things are to be used, and therefore men are greater than things. This may rouse the spirit of liberty.
If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent. For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals--those may be free who are able to make their own living.
In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of tyranny, the standing army and navy, it is clear that so long as men desire to fight, they will have armed force in one form or another. Our fathers thought they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the voluntary militia. In our day we have lived to see this militia declared part of the regular military force of the United States, and subject to the same demands as the regulars. Within another generation we shall probably see its members in the regular pay of the general government. Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization, inevitably follows the same line of centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up voluntarily, like the minute men of Massachusetts, and disbands as soon as the occasion which called it into existence is past: that the really desirable thing is that all men--not Americans only--should be at peace; and that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who make war shall do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade.
As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result.
And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world--if it ever shall be, as I hope it will--then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to, be an American was greater than to be a king.
In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans - only Men ; over the whole earth, Men.
July 03, 2006
(100 Word Review Of Cory Doctorow's "I, Robot")
If the popularity of his first novels was unfairly boosted by his saintly fame as an activist, with "I, Robot" Cory Doctorow has finally earned his place besides Stross and Macleod. Granted, the novelette follows the same ol' Doctorow style, complete with shiny ideas aired out a wee bit too spaciously and his politics openly flailing about where everyone can see them. But it works. He really is improving. And, more importantly, he's putting his fame to good use. Cuz, frankly, anyone with the balls to write a story simultaneously calling out Asimov and Bradbury is good in my book.
If the popularity of his first novels was unfairly boosted by his saintly fame as an activist, with "I, Robot" Cory Doctorow has finally earned his place besides Stross and Macleod. Granted, the novelette follows the same ol' Doctorow style, complete with shiny ideas aired out a wee bit too spaciously and his politics openly flailing about where everyone can see them. But it works. He really is improving. And, more importantly, he's putting his fame to good use. Cuz, frankly, anyone with the balls to write a story simultaneously calling out Asimov and Bradbury is good in my book.
July 02, 2006
(Ruled By The Type Of People Who Desire Rule)
Read this and then explain to me why we should give Congress responsiblity over a potted plant much less allow them to handle sharpened pencils.
Read this and then explain to me why we should give Congress responsiblity over a potted plant much less allow them to handle sharpened pencils.
- The author does not recognize or accept the legitimacy of any law relating to the regulation of information.
Neither is any copyright or pretense to 'intellectual property' assumed by the author in the slightest nor will any degree of capitulation be wrestled from the author in regard to another's presumptions of authority on matters of supposedly illegal speech. 100% anticopyright
