The Crow's Eye: Food

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 5, 2011

Food

You want a revolution to succeed, over the long term? Or to at least have a fighting chance?

Worry less about "voluntarism" or the proper moral context for sabotage, obstruction and strikes. Care not one wit about what actions will or will not anger the police, unless and only as a matter of tactics. Eschew the philosophy of the right historical moment. Abandon any hope of salvaging academia, or the liberal vanguard.

Get a hold of food. Good, healthy food. And learn how to store it, to move it, to get it to hungry people.

Strikes, sabotage, obstruction matter. Tactics matter. Surveying the landscape - economic and actual - matters. But it's all shit if you ain't got food you can count on.

And right now, the rest of us don't have any that's ours, that we can really count on. Do we?

7 comments:

Soma said...: That's another thing that I don't get about common society. A man who steals to feed people isn't a thief; he's making a difficult decision for the greater good. In the long run, that loss of goods by the merchant is NOT worth the imprisonment of the man, or the possible starvation of those he would have fed, and when the merchant asks for vengeance from the state, we all lose for it.; November 5, 2011 at 2:31 PM
Jack Crow said...: I think property is like power, Soma. If you don't use it, defend it, teach it and perhaps most of all, prevent others from having it - it loses not only the value determined by exclusivity, but it's ability to grab hold of the minds of those without it.; November 5, 2011 at 3:00 PM
Anonymous said...: I think power is like property, Jack. If you don't use it, defend it, teach it and perhaps most of all, prevent others from having it- it loses not only the value determined by exclusivity, but it's ability to grab hold of the minds of those without it.

Bitchin'!; November 5, 2011 at 6:34 PM
Lori said...: Property is power. As such, it corrupts.; November 5, 2011 at 6:35 PM
zencomix said...: Food not lawns!; November 5, 2011 at 7:15 PM
Lori said...: I'll second that. The curb appeal fascists are trying to shut down my sheet composting operation.; November 5, 2011 at 11:59 PM
Jack Crow said...: Food, not cemeteries. Food, not golf courses, too.; November 6, 2011 at 9:49 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.