Maoist rebels and comfortable "Maoist" teenagers who would be rebels if only they weren't also the sons and daughters of affluent assholes and therefore more likely to confuse classism for class and identity policing for active struggle, Republican and Democrat party functionaries, neo-Bolshevik academics, department heads, college deans, shop bosses, working group coordinators, Conservative or Labour Party organizers, bank managers, non-coms and brass, station chiefs, cops with guns, priests and prelates, NGO and charity administrators, magazine publishers and editors, producers, shift supervisors, the UN and a new no fly zone, Barack Reagan Obama Dubya Bush Bubba Clinton Poppy Bush Saint Ronnie Jimmy Cardigan Stumbles Ford Tricky Dick and His Allstar Bombers Band...fuckin' aye...electric company executives, prime ministers and presidents, mob bosses, drug lords...
All them fuckers, rooting in the mud for the truffles of control.
Centralized power does not get people to agree, to cooperate. It is organized to force people to follow orders, to give shape to events by allowing some behaviors, while preventing the enactment or attempt at others. We cooperate in spite of it. To spite it, often enough. A lesson there.
Moammar's gonna find that out soon enough, and he's reaped that to his own suffering, and the sad refrain of those who've already suffered enough at his hands, and at the feet of empire.
Again.
And again.
Until the only thing raining down on us are a million million reminders of our subjugation, the degrees of it which divide us, the complicity we eat, sleep, breathe and fuck.
And then...
The poor sods in Fukushima. The brave protesters in Bahrain. The silenced Algerians and Albanians. Egypt betrayed. Tunisia already slipping back into the French orbit.
Enough to give an aging son of the red and the black the blues.
So, John Lee Hooker to sing us into the darkness, while the "one day Irish" ruin another anniversary of womb exit strategy number one:
(That's Tupelo, No Shoes and Serves Me Right to Suffer, in order...)
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
At times like these I am moved to commit vegicide. Get a nice tomato, tennis-ball-sized. Find a good cement wall, brick wall, whatever. Wind up. Pitch. Splat.
ReplyDeleteLast night I watched The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which Paul Auster directed from his own story. There's a pretty interesting story with some sluggishness at times but it's worth watching just for the Screwdriver Darts scene with Michael Imperioli. Rent it if you can.
My wife is an ardent defender of tomatoes. If I dared, Charles...
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks.
The pathology of control is really something. The way it manifests is a sickness.
ReplyDeleteAssuming, for devil's advocacy, that there's a genuine, compelling need for the exercise of control, the surest means of getting there lies in Maoist revolutionary strategy: make yourself invaluable. "Do not take a single needle, piece of thread from the masses." Instead, provide what's needed.
People who don't have a whole lot will do a whole lot for anyone who is truly and consistently on their side. If it doesn't work, and it won't with some people, the withdrawal and redirection of assistance is an effective goad. Comparative well-being is real and keenly felt. Rising expectations get more cooperation than the imposition of misery.
There's an energy drain and a vicious circle in the thuggish exercise of control. It's a race to the bottom. Pissant aspiring thugs are no threat to entrenched thugs. They offer nothing and rely entirely on gaining numbers through desperation and a febrile desire for revenge. It can change the branding of the status quo, but has no effect on the material reality of it.
Al,
ReplyDeleteMaoists are always impressive when they haven't yet seized a state, when they're still organizing in the bush, or in the recent case of Nepal and the present case of India, when they're fighting from a considerable disadvantage.
As for affluent Maoist poseurs and real Maoists once they get control of a centralized authority?
So much worse.
*
Your last paragraph is thought crunching. I tend to agree, and see in the process described a way to make things hard for them as rule us. Call it a sponsorship program for competitors, wherein we ordinary folk continuously offer up demagogue after demagogue, with as many corrupt and organized fuckers as possible, until the whole edifice is weighed down in strife.
The only people we should elect for any office are known felons. Preferably ones with a tendency to go after rival territory.
Al,
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly what I mean by Maoist poseurs:
http://angrymarxists.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/i-need-to-appropriate-your-life-let-me-slit-your-fucking-throat/