‘Laughter in a Police State’ is one of my favorite songs. Was there anything in particular that inspired this song?
I was working out by the river at a huge estate as a gardener and tending retired thoroughbred horses (sweet, sad, and some barely able to trot) when the owner asked me to help him shovel a ton of gravel into the foundation of his mansion. This entailed placing me, and a shovel in a cave of the foundation under the giant stairs. It was dark, dusty, and about a thousand degrees in the summer in Richmond, Virginia. I was coughing and sunblind when I finally got out, my boss handed me a soda, then he ran inside to his air conditioning and I passed out on the driveway for about five minutes. When this day ended, like many others back then, I rode my bike back downtown to drink on friends’ porches and eventually end up by the James River in the morning. A colorful horde of half sleeping, half drunken punk folks, men and women, would finally litter the long river rocks, falling out between conversations, skinny dipping, and absorbing the night sounds and cool air of the pre-dawn.
The often painfully desperate quest for beauty and honesty that fleshes out the small, subtle hours between work and sleep is what informed the lyrics to this song. It was my first foray into attempting to describe the spectacle of ‘citizenship’ and ‘a society’ as it truly plays out in our lives. It’s written from the point of view of the working poor of the earth who fight with images and prescribed identities as a part of the psychological trickle down of digital consumer hyperconnectivity fallout. This whole aspect, I feel, just further isolates us from our labors, their products, a collective human vision for the future, and each other.
Whew! That’s some dark stuff. But there is hope in there too. The song gets more prescriptive and in the bridge, as we like for them to do whenever possible!
The ‘House Divided’ is a nod to Lincoln and a retooling of the idea of secession as a (almost reversed from its historical context - don’t fret!) tool for reclaiming consciousness from the illusions of liberty we have, pumping out of every mouthpiece, of almost every media, reinforcing the work-consume-die dialectic until the end of time.... Or until we get angry enough, smart enough, and united enough to stop stepping in this choreography. Any day, any minute now.If such loftiness can be applied to as compressed and referential a piece of art as a hardcore punk song, the above would be the “goal” of ‘Laughter In A Police State’.
‘The Chorus of One’ seems based on a personal story. Is it?
Like many of us, I have been imprisoned and convicted wrongfully of crimes, shot through the system, taxed and vilified. ‘Chorus Of One’ is one of many songs I wrote during long hours of community service. Waiting for the few, smaller hours that were under my own steerage and vision. Seems like with most folks I run into who remain entrenched, attached, inspired and participant in this punk rock thing often cite a moment where they sometimes consciously, often subconsciously, make a pledge to themselves to continue beyond the fashion, the distraction, the temporary youth culture preoccupation with chasing trends and the static power plays of drifting from marketing construct to social clique and back… The song is a prescription to make all this rebellion and critiquing and trespassing and truth seeking stick past the crossroads of young adulthood, a way to move it all forward for the lifers in this, the folks who continue to inspire and transform, communicate and spit back at the world, never giving in or giving up. When we play this song, as we often still do, its crazy fun to see the thirty-something hardcore kids and punk rockers, often now teachers, social workers, parents, business owners, carpenters, dentists, journalists, etc. get into the pit, and pile on to sing with us. It’s touching, really. And sometimes a little scary!
In ‘Hollywood Cemetery’, who were you referring to when you said, “I found out all my heroes are just parasites”?
It would be difficult and dishonest to say this song was directed against one person in my life, or even one historic individual. Sometimes, especially when trying to approach punk songwriting as both a confessional booth and a parallel media for a counterculture, you utilize shared perspectives; other people’s stories that have transformed you for hearing them. This song throws two distinct narratives together in the verses and pulls out a bottom line of action and personal responsibility in the chorus and bridge. There is so much exhausting and dangerously reductive philosophical baggage in our community in regards to ‘selling out’, and sometimes there is a lack of quantifiable distinction between keeping the message and movement safe from usurpers and the superficial processes of mainstream culture, and the petty and precious leisure class radicalism that keeps ideas from getting to the people who need them the most. If I did it right, this song describes the tension between ‘purists’ and the adult crash of the agonized compromise… indicting neither, but telling the story of both.
Another aspect of this song is the shield of nonviolence used in the past by radical white kids in labor-intensive outfits (me, my bandmates, and a lot of our audience and this beloved, embattled punk community also fall into this category). In the late eighties, I had one friend who stood up and confronted neo-nazis while some of the CRASS peace punks refused to fight and left my friend to stand his ground alone against somewhat nightmarish odds. I’ve always wanted to tell this tiny weekend-in-any-punk-scene story, and open up the floor for a discussion on what the significance of nonviolence is in our present worldwide condition. Years after this, friends of mine who were entrenched in the Millenial Anti-Globalization Actions were tossing around ideas of rejecting their first world privilege to nonviolent protest and having these savage, passionate talks about Pacifism As Pathology.
Wow! All that in a 1:42 song! I guess efficiency is our goal these days.
There’s been a lot of resentment of the “American archetype” overseas. Despite the fact that we welcome immigrants and give billions of dollars in aid around the world, our very reputation has been overshadowed by the Bush Administration. Do you think any of the up-and-comers can repair our tainted image?
In some ways, it would be hard for our national image to recover from the past eight years, or from the precedent and quieter foundations built in administrations previous. The heavy handed military and corporate incursions of recent times are gonna still be raging and serving their purpose against the people’s will (ours and our ‘enemies’: those whom our government have occupied in various ways for a half century or more...).
Still, because I have always found that endless cynicism is a self-indulgent, smug, intellectually bankrupt, and emotionally tedious response, I read an article recently that made interesting points about the international P.R. value (that may be measured in human lives) of having a U.S. president (or even candidate) who has a Muslim name, African coloring, features, ancestry. One thing that I think is true, and not often heard about within the media and cultural borders of our country; is the difference in memory of world populations. When we travel outside of the U.S. and further than our Anglo post colonial historical cousins, we find that America has such a religion of forgetting, a collective amnesia so pervasive and entrenched, while other countries and cultures cannot separate themselves from the pasts of their mothers, grandmothers, and prophets. Europe always seems somewhere in the middle of this eternal adolescence vs. immortal racial memory, but each time we go over there we find more of the viral qualities of our own country affecting the intellectual and material spaces of the Old World…
GOP candidate Ron Paul has mentioned getting rid of all the following: the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the CIA (any function other than intelligence gathering); which 3 systems do you feel need a major overhaul?
Coming from the background of a high school dropout, punk rocker, and not a political science scholar, I must say that I’ve seen a good deal of common ground between some theoretical anarchists and the ‘Love Revolution’ Ron Paul organizers. And, surprisingly, both of these groups come out to our shows, especially on this last East Coast tour in small venues and spaces with the RIVERBOAT GAMBLERS, and PAINT IT BLACK. And sometimes… these have been the same people....
It’s neat to see this election cycle, for all of its illusions and exploitations, bring so many ideas and distinct communities into contact. Even those in moral opposition to the process (like I often feel, along with some of my bandmates to varying degrees of passion). At the risk of getting some things wrong, I will give you my most pervasive questions and critiques of what I fear could emerge as an old model libertarian society. The compassionate and measured arguments that these libertarian folks have made to back up some of the more, on the surface to my cursory assumptions, er.. ‘tooth and claw’ free market worship, social Darwinisms, and mystifications have impressed me and educated me and my bandmates. Still we are not convinced completely that industrial global capitalism, and a ‘true’ free market has these perfect platonic economic forms, balancing physics, and that the ‘playing field’ as it were has the inherent capacity to defend ecologies, human life and liberty. I still maintain from both theoretical and emotional perspectives that our human invented and orchestrated economies need to work for the people and the planet. Not the other way around as it currently stands and has stood for too long.
Still, the amount of change and thought that local municipality control over federal functions in the wake of the abovementioned cancellations inspires is an exciting prospect in a lot of lights. The call to improvement of our Education system from the State level or ever-smaller, and the localization of Energy and Educational priority has the potential to push our society forward and help build consciousness. Of course, getting rid of the Dept. of Homeland Security, CIA, and the IRS all sound like fine ideas, but the retention of a nation-state, still playing in the world as an economic power, with its attendant military conquests and security protocols in service of resource/labor extraction and global market manipulations seems like a strange half measure, rather like a headless body with wildly flailing arms, kicking legs, and violent genitalia.
If Ron Paul supporters could start/continue building together and synthesize a new prescription with the paragons of ParEcons, L.E.T.S. adventurers, Green Anarchists and Social Ecologists, I [can] see a lot of the problems and dysfunctions of last century’s ideologies disappear. Plus a world-transforming amount of energy in community would be preserved as these folks would no longer be fighting among themselves. You know, that mythical place where the furthest right meets the furthest left. People are living this shit right now, and the potential is intoxicating. So let’s do this people, we’ll write the punk songs and bring the beer!
Having spoken to the homeless and “forgotten about” people that slipped between the cracks of the system, how do you feel the current welfare system, addiction programs, job banks, etc. have failed these people? What reforms could be made?
I have had the privilege of knowing some talented and determined people who have dedicated their lives to working with the chronically poor and homeless. I found my own experiences the most connected and salient, when the social work was itself reaching past the system to meet halfway those who live outside its classifications and comforts. Food Not Bombs in Richmond, Virginia, midwifed 15 years ago by the indomitable Adam Nathanson and Alyssa Murray, supported by the punk scene, Catholic Workers, Civil Rights leaders (civil disobedience in the City Hall!), provides a non hierarchical model where everyone eats, everyone serves, everyone helps everyone. This model also extends to addressing the fissures in the social foundations in our nation, our cultures colliding and exhausting their vision on the bottom lines of private and public institution alike. To me, this is one of the most exciting radical practices - enriching and building a community of mutual aid that transcends class, racial, historical, institutional and legal barriers to the inherent art of pulling each other up through these cracks.
Some long time friends and fans of STRIKE ANYWHERE deep in Brooklyn, had squatted an old warehouse, hooked up power and water, and BUILT A HOMELESS SHELTER where mutual aid, and non hierarchical counseling was practiced. Of course, within a year, the police found it and shut it down, but these two revolutionary street punk homeless advocates kept building their practice, their community, and checking in with us about their accomplishments. Soon, a documentary film of their experience will be finished, some of which even has one of our crazy outdoor benefit shows in the background.
So my answer doesn’t touch on reforms in this case at all. Good friends and family have had whole careers as social workers for various private and public institutions, leaving shredded and bewildered by bureaucratic paralysis and the cynical careering of managers. Instead of despairing within the system though, we can [be] inspired by the urgency, compassion, and creativity of our community - building a network of lay punk social workers who can challenge these structures which foster dependence and corral the city’s chronically poor and homeless populations ‘out of sight, out of mind’ into dangerous quasi-prisons which never remedy and seldom address the foundations of trans-generational poverty, mental health, street drug addiction, and family abuse.
There’s been a monumental change from the 1950s to 2007 in the way most people treat relationships, child rearing and marriage—leading to “the disintegration of the family.” How’d we get here?
I think that families were probably disintegrating, although through the course of a lifetime, silent and miserable, throughout and before, America’s Golden Age. And perhaps, although it’s still a mess of beautiful contradictions, there is an arsenal of choices and powers, at least for the educated first world, that can enhance personal fulfillment, individual safety and potential; to redefine what we mean when we say family. For example, there is a relatively modern cultural precedent for women and children to now escape abuse and domination through divorce. This can’t be a bad thing, although I am sure there are some examples where the fathers were only (or even less than) half the problem. There is also a trudging sense of progress as far as the post-modernization of family where traditional roles can be retooled, or done away with altogether in light of maximizing the most emotionally resilient, creative and harmonious aspects of relationships and child rearing if that road is taken.
I’m not gonna Pollyanna this death, though - This sense of options and social liberation also has its downside, and the perpetual material and impatient self-centeredness blasted back at us in the reflections of shop windows, media cultures, celebrity role models has also taken its toll on the development and health of new nuclear and nuclear-free families. If we can work toward evolving beyond enculturated breeding instincts, subordinating alpha-earner plantation models, and retrofitting the shrill, unresearched ‘think of the children’ mid-20th century sentimentality in favor of looking at community ecology, sustainability and self-actualization; we may be able to go the distance in balancing our civilization, changing our thirst for war and castle into a meditation on folding our species back into the world with grace and creative power. Also, I will eventually learn to break up my sentences with punctuation… sometime after the above is accomplished!
Do you feel our history education is a big problem, as Howard Zinn indicates in The People’s History of the United States or James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me? Do you think kids are bored with history and thus bred to be almost apathetic about current events?
I think a lot of American kids are overwhelmed and tend to shut down in the face of the long-range moral and historical questions being asked under the flash of what they read and hear. I know I tried to. I think there is also a more isolated and homogenous sense of place in the suburbs, now, more than ever in most American cities, and, as much as the internet can dazzle with every specializing content and reflections, the real critical thinking that really living in this world in three dimensions demands is an intellectual and spiritual marathon that tests the will and personality in ways that are hard to predict or prepare for. I think the hardest won, but most prescient goal of self-education, is the ability to relate - to feel the dynamic influence of history in the lives of everyone, and your own place in all of it. I guess part of why punk can be as inspiring even as it is dystopian is to bolster us all against the paralysis of knowing just enough to know how little we know.
Bob Marley and THE SEX PISTOLS both caused a certain amount of controversy and inspired people to mobilize against the status quo. Do you feel music holds the same kind of power that it did back then?
I definitely still feel that music, and perhaps music alone, has an energy that transcends the individual’s status, historical position, and the evolving media of its delivery to inspire, uplift, and counteract cultural stagnancy, injustice, and malaise. The emergence of Bob Marley and his music did something to the world that still needs to be fully comprehended. We as a band tend to reference THE WAILERS and a lot of other revolutionary reggae in often, unconscious ways. We also have a Bob Marley tapestry hanging in our box truck touring vehicle/living space. In a completely different, and certainly more specialized and precious way, the working of cultural dissonance, shock value as art, and media spectacle by THE PISTOLS and McLaren was a cool yet strange and probably incomplete, but utterly appropriate (including its appropriations..) midwifing of punk. Since then, the conversation/argument that this subculture has had with the status quo, and within itself has been a testament to it’s strength as a purer product of the power of music. As much as there exists static musical forms within punk, it’s still hard to see how it’s level of popularity, no matter how superficial, as a dead end street. There is as much inspiration and articulation coming out of creative bands in response to mainstream commercialization of the subculture, as there ever was, and now, at least in the U.S. there seems to be a real understanding of who the real enemies are, and how to empower the positive common ground between bands who choose different approaches to getting the same message out there. With this said, I definitely think that the independent and DIY Punk and Hardcore scenes generally have more to offer the world as the bands on the mainstream radio, and there can, should, and will be both a ‘trickle down’ of impact and visibility from the popular groups who bring their roots and rage with them, and a ‘trickle up’ of creative power, activism, and integrity from the Underground bands who have their heads out of their asses, know what time it is and care about liberating people more than defending their status as righteous college town prophets.
Experiences:
How has growing up in the Reagan era shaped you?
The constant threat of Nuclear Armageddon during the entirety of my conscious memory of childhood cannot be overstated. I remember nightmares from prime time television movies events like ‘The Day After’, and hours of rapt household paralysis while Reagan spoke, bellicose and winking, about the necessities of a war most of us didn’t understand we were fighting. Also, there was a cartoonish duality to life while in middle school and early high school which may have just been adolescence, but I also think that the greed and artifice of the Eighties society was perhaps, the least deep of a cultural experience, even in American life, that will ever happen. Also, growing up in the South in the Reagan era was definitely something insane, and will probably fuel my anger and analysis of media manipulation; historical deception; and the oppression and attempted economic obliteration of black Americans by the white Southern Aristocracy in both rural and urban communities, for the rest of my life. So what’s a sensitive Eighties child to do in Richmond, Virginia when faced with such potential psychological and moral decay?
Lose yourself - then find yourself - in Punk Rock!
I remember an art school ghetto in a section of Richmond named Oregon Hill with lots of backyard parties, and crazy fire breathing punks. My first show was a free GWAR event, when I was fifteen, in 1987 when they had no label, no budget, just loincloths, roller skates, foam battle axes, and disturbing home-made masks… A lot of SST Records jazz-punk; UNSEEN FORCE, WHITE CROSS, thrash bands; and rasta-core brought to us by radiation from D.C. and THE HUMAN RIGHTS (H.R.’s more-reggae side project) BAND. I also remember a thriving skinhead scene of nazi’s, traditional’s, and the occasional brave SHARP. Me and some brilliant dropout punk friends fixed up (mostly with graffiti) an old two story Reconstruction Era barn on the western edge of town, and started having shows that were often near-riots, these weird parties with rednecks, non racist skins, punk kids, furtive goths (these would be eighties goths!) trying to get along and build something, just to tear it down. It was really a brave new world as far as D.I.Y. was concerned, and the band that tied it all together was FOUR WALLS FALLING, Jade Tree’s first LP, and a righteous and musically untouchable political hardcore band. This was my ‘dual consciousness’ turning point from exclusively being into underage drinking, trespassing, and running from police and skinheads. It taught me that there was something to engage in, to build and articulate further than just leather jacket paint, and homemade tattoos.
In the Spring of 1988, FUGAZI came to town, playing at the reggae club, New Horizons, with Guy as a roadie and occasional back up singer. This was thrilling and revolutionary to my punk experience, no doubt, but the final hinges came off the doors when… that Summer, I saw the BAD BRAINS with CORROSION OF CONFORMITY in VA Beach…
By the time AVAIL moved to Richmond in 1991, a second generation of positive hardcore bands and creative punk kids were gaining confidence, and the scene was starting to get a new character, changing from the dark, impressionistic Mid-Eighties. On New Year’s Eve 1990, in a house on Cherry Street, I met Beau and Tim Barry, I think they were pissing in random beer cans, and watching gleefully while wasted, pompous frat people would drink. I liked them instantly. They established the first Avail House, and added just the right amount of numbers and intellect to push the scene to its tipping point; we then organized and happily kicked out the remaining Nazi skins, started INQUISITION, and a dozen other bands, all with character and a singular sense of mission, and the third generation of Richmond Punk came into its own.
What kind of activist projects are you involved with now?
As any good intentioned touring punk band can tell you, there is still a bit of distance between what we do with our time and talent, and the activists with whom we communicate and trade inspiration. In the past, when we could, we would use our shows as platforms for this community, organizing anti war marches in our hometown and DC, and supporting both monetarily and with art, groups who were doing the real courageous work that we are only singing about. The Richmond (Virginia, our hometown) Coalition for a Living Wage, an anti-poverty group growing in the rich soil of the Civil Rights Movement, are people who we give back a bit to. Also, I have been pretty involved with animal rescue and front-line animal rights organizations both locally, and with the PETA stalls at our shows across most of the U.S. Vegan Action, a Richmond based activist non-profit, has also been a part of our community. We are always happy to have folks with good ideas share their time and passion with us at our shows, it helps to flesh out and sustain what we sing about and what we believe beyond the boundaries of a hardcore show. Of course, in the recent and past years, we have played benefit shows (both loud, fast and acoustic) , made connections with and been inspired by: Food Not Bombs, Iraq Veterans Against The War, Jobs Not Jails, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Industrial Workers Of The World, Wetlands Environmental Activist Collective, Syrentha Savio Endowment (A Women’s Cancer Awareness and Research Fund), Positive Force DC/All our Power, The Coalition For A Living Wage, The Virginia Fair Wage Alliance, Stay Vocal, Music For America, and we have contributed songs (and whole recording sessions) for records and compilations benefit various legal defense funds for anti-globalization activists and imprisoned animal liberators, PunkVoter, anti-police brutality organizations, and other groups.
Have you been to any cities that seem to embody a healthy sense of multiculturalism, or do you see segregated diasporas pretty much everywhere?
It’s hard to figure out what real multiculturalism looks like. Many of the places we’ve been blown away speechless by the city-center whirlwind of many languages, cultures, sounds and colors, (Bilbao, Spain; Toronto, Canada; London UK; Sofia, Bulgaria; Wellington, New Zealand ; Paris, etc.) may only be a timed surface illusion, and the moment the shops close, people might very well corral themselves back into homogenous neighborhoods. We have had the good fortune and absurdity to travel to many cities, some famous, many forgotten (except by their residents), and it does seem like, even within our eight year span of touring, that the world is getting smaller, and people are getting more inspired to make connections across ancient barriers. Of course, there is also a scary, isolating social defense mechanism that triggers sometimes when people feel overwhelmed and powerless. And we’ve recently visited places which felt like they were running against this global trend, including a lot of the central Midwest, the inner South, in the States; and some of the more economically challenged eastern European countries where ethnic tensions and historic feuds are being reinvented by the morally deficient and politically ambitious to control people through violence and terror.
What’s one issue you feel more Americans should pay attention to?
The human and historic cost of multinational industrial capitalism as it operates in the real world. It seems that everyday Americans are still romanced (or...date raped...) by this laizzes-fare lottery sense of siding with the ‘cool kids’; the winning team of the 2% who continually take, through corporate tax breaks and a rigged playing field, the resources, wages, and future sustainability from the other 98%. It’s almost like we suspend our reason; our belief in the earth as a common treasury for all and somehow saddle up to whichever corporate/political/religious racehorse we think will carry us out of our miserable, managed existence. The intense penetration of these bankrupt and adolescent versions of the American Dream also fuel the distortions of religion, citizenship, patriotism, and the general reactionary squalor of our national conversation through bewildering and insulting media channels.
It’s not a matter of Left Vs. Right, Asses Vs. Elephants, Coastal Elites Vs. God-fearing Patriots, in fact IT NEVER HAS BEEN. We’ve all been angry but not angry enough at the right processes, under-educated to frustration, blinded by debt and the career traps that our system provides as opportunity, and deaf to the smaller voices of conscience, balance, and progress that speak within each of us. Once we can all grasp this and shake ourselves loose from this paralysis of submission and exploitation disguised as self-interest and democracy, then many, many other social and political pathologies will show themselves as interrelated and very mortal enemies: Justice for the environment, Animal and human liberation from production and industrial slavery, and an end to war and the international system of economy and profiteering from genocide and corruption.
There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with the world today, but not as many proposed solutions. Have you read or come across anything that’s made you feel hopeful or inspired lately?
It’s sometimes hard to get a grip on what many Americans are doing with themselves. There is so much ignorance and exhaustion passing for consensus and activity, but I don’t believe for a second that this is all people expect from their country, or their lives. We get a steady stream of 24 hour news overwhelming us with surface mediocrities and really dumbed-down, infinite hysteria. Couple this with an under resourced education system, and the sense of unsustainable, adolescent entitlement which trickles into all of us as an affect of this cultural deprivation, and I think we can begin to address the solutions.
I believe the intelligence and outrage that flickers underneath all of these disguises and placebos will break though, and many more folks in this country will start waking up from their slumber. Whether this effects electoral politics immediately, or another kind of change in consciousness needs to sustain us first, I am down to see it happen, and, in whatever small way we can as a punk band, increase the pressure and help save lives wherever possible. Local Economic Exchange Systems, Participatory Economics, Social Ecology (Rest in peace Murray Bookchin), hell, even this cool micro-secessionist movement in Northern New England and Maritime Canada called ‘The New Atlantic Republic’ are all newer, inspiring theories and practices that are harnessing human potential in communities right now as I type this. These bad ass theories in action that show that, along with economies, nation-states themselves need to be reclaimed by their inhabitants, shriven of their godhead status and utilized as liquid, flexible fabrics in which to continue our evolution beyond their need. There are a lot of well-researched and efficient ideas out in the world… It’s up to us to use our creativity and collective will to synthesize new movements, new alliances and new hope from the past century’s overflowing toolbox of ‘isms, and ‘ologies.
What advice would you give to some of your fans who are disgruntled and frustrated with current politics?
As my answers above may reveal, I feel that the solutions are way beyond elections.... It’s about changing consciousness, or building ways of life around the numbness, isolation, and false competitions that are sold to us in pretty packages. But! It’s also still about voting, too - a process so maligned by radicals for it’s imminently corruptible dependency and ‘confessional booth’ moral compartmentalization. No doubt, the modern attitude, the ‘fantasy sports league’ approach held by large populations on voting proves radical theory on point with its critique, but there is still a community moment, a third theater of connection and public potential even as elections get stolen, primary votes (like mine here in Los Angeles) get mysteriously lost and uncounted, private corporations monopolize voting technologies.... It’s still important I think to look at and participate in this fucked up and dehumanizing system, if only to repeatedly educate the individual on their own powerlessness. The sense of ‘is this all we get?’ from the process of choosing who will run the world; the absurdity of a two party system; the losses to our humanity and the future we endure if we ONLY vote for presidents.
As far as getting inspired and engaged with your life at the community level (this is what I would recommend to inoculate against the National Election Blues, and the ‘fuck politics’ flu) - - - Follow your curiosity, research the rebel histories of your hometown, and stay open to the radical community in its many forms… A quick search of your hometown’s Indymedia.org will start this fire in most cases. Hell, I found out about a protest against the Minutemen happening in Richmond on a day after a tour when I as just visiting friends and family, waiting for a flight. It was great to roll down to the Capital and represent for Immigrant Rights and Human Rights in the face of the ridiculous theater of misguided nationalism and their dangerous reading of (and mind blowing costumes regarding) Colonial America. The Minutemen are so whack.
Strike Anywhere
by: Crawdaddy
Posted on Jun 07, 2008 - 4:46 pm | Comments (0)
‘Laughter in a Police State’ is one of my favorite songs. Was there anything in particular that inspired this song?
I was working out by the river at a huge estate as a gardener and tending retired thoroughbred horses (sweet, sad, and some barely able to trot) when the owner asked me to help him shovel a ton of gravel into the foundation of his mansion. This entailed placing me, and a shovel in a cave of the foundation under the giant stairs. It was dark, dusty, and about a thousand degrees in the summer in Richmond, Virginia. I was coughing and sunblind when I finally got out, my boss handed me a soda, then he ran inside to his air conditioning and I passed out on the driveway for about five minutes. When this day ended, like many others back then, I rode my bike back downtown to drink on friends’ porches and eventually end up by the James River in the morning. A colorful horde of half sleeping, half drunken punk folks, men and women, would finally litter the long river rocks, falling out between conversations, skinny dipping, and absorbing the night sounds and cool air of the pre-dawn.
The often painfully desperate quest for beauty and honesty that fleshes out the small, subtle hours between work and sleep is what informed the lyrics to this song. It was my first foray into attempting to describe the spectacle of ‘citizenship’ and ‘a society’ as it truly plays out in our lives. It’s written from the point of view of the working poor of the earth who fight with images and prescribed identities as a part of the psychological trickle down of digital consumer hyperconnectivity fallout. This whole aspect, I feel, just further isolates us from our labors, their products, a collective human vision for the future, and each other.
Whew! That’s some dark stuff. But there is hope in there too. The song gets more prescriptive and in the bridge, as we like for them to do whenever possible!
The ‘House Divided’ is a nod to Lincoln and a retooling of the idea of secession as a (almost reversed from its historical context - don’t fret!) tool for reclaiming consciousness from the illusions of liberty we have, pumping out of every mouthpiece, of almost every media, reinforcing the work-consume-die dialectic until the end of time.... Or until we get angry enough, smart enough, and united enough to stop stepping in this choreography. Any day, any minute now.If such loftiness can be applied to as compressed and referential a piece of art as a hardcore punk song, the above would be the “goal” of ‘Laughter In A Police State’.
‘The Chorus of One’ seems based on a personal story. Is it?
Like many of us, I have been imprisoned and convicted wrongfully of crimes, shot through the system, taxed and vilified. ‘Chorus Of One’ is one of many songs I wrote during long hours of community service. Waiting for the few, smaller hours that were under my own steerage and vision. Seems like with most folks I run into who remain entrenched, attached, inspired and participant in this punk rock thing often cite a moment where they sometimes consciously, often subconsciously, make a pledge to themselves to continue beyond the fashion, the distraction, the temporary youth culture preoccupation with chasing trends and the static power plays of drifting from marketing construct to social clique and back… The song is a prescription to make all this rebellion and critiquing and trespassing and truth seeking stick past the crossroads of young adulthood, a way to move it all forward for the lifers in this, the folks who continue to inspire and transform, communicate and spit back at the world, never giving in or giving up. When we play this song, as we often still do, its crazy fun to see the thirty-something hardcore kids and punk rockers, often now teachers, social workers, parents, business owners, carpenters, dentists, journalists, etc. get into the pit, and pile on to sing with us. It’s touching, really. And sometimes a little scary!
In ‘Hollywood Cemetery’, who were you referring to when you said, “I found out all my heroes are just parasites”?
It would be difficult and dishonest to say this song was directed against one person in my life, or even one historic individual. Sometimes, especially when trying to approach punk songwriting as both a confessional booth and a parallel media for a counterculture, you utilize shared perspectives; other people’s stories that have transformed you for hearing them. This song throws two distinct narratives together in the verses and pulls out a bottom line of action and personal responsibility in the chorus and bridge. There is so much exhausting and dangerously reductive philosophical baggage in our community in regards to ‘selling out’, and sometimes there is a lack of quantifiable distinction between keeping the message and movement safe from usurpers and the superficial processes of mainstream culture, and the petty and precious leisure class radicalism that keeps ideas from getting to the people who need them the most. If I did it right, this song describes the tension between ‘purists’ and the adult crash of the agonized compromise… indicting neither, but telling the story of both.
Another aspect of this song is the shield of nonviolence used in the past by radical white kids in labor-intensive outfits (me, my bandmates, and a lot of our audience and this beloved, embattled punk community also fall into this category). In the late eighties, I had one friend who stood up and confronted neo-nazis while some of the CRASS peace punks refused to fight and left my friend to stand his ground alone against somewhat nightmarish odds. I’ve always wanted to tell this tiny weekend-in-any-punk-scene story, and open up the floor for a discussion on what the significance of nonviolence is in our present worldwide condition. Years after this, friends of mine who were entrenched in the Millenial Anti-Globalization Actions were tossing around ideas of rejecting their first world privilege to nonviolent protest and having these savage, passionate talks about Pacifism As Pathology.
Wow! All that in a 1:42 song! I guess efficiency is our goal these days.
There’s been a lot of resentment of the “American archetype” overseas. Despite the fact that we welcome immigrants and give billions of dollars in aid around the world, our very reputation has been overshadowed by the Bush Administration. Do you think any of the up-and-comers can repair our tainted image?
In some ways, it would be hard for our national image to recover from the past eight years, or from the precedent and quieter foundations built in administrations previous. The heavy handed military and corporate incursions of recent times are gonna still be raging and serving their purpose against the people’s will (ours and our ‘enemies’: those whom our government have occupied in various ways for a half century or more...).
Still, because I have always found that endless cynicism is a self-indulgent, smug, intellectually bankrupt, and emotionally tedious response, I read an article recently that made interesting points about the international P.R. value (that may be measured in human lives) of having a U.S. president (or even candidate) who has a Muslim name, African coloring, features, ancestry. One thing that I think is true, and not often heard about within the media and cultural borders of our country; is the difference in memory of world populations. When we travel outside of the U.S. and further than our Anglo post colonial historical cousins, we find that America has such a religion of forgetting, a collective amnesia so pervasive and entrenched, while other countries and cultures cannot separate themselves from the pasts of their mothers, grandmothers, and prophets. Europe always seems somewhere in the middle of this eternal adolescence vs. immortal racial memory, but each time we go over there we find more of the viral qualities of our own country affecting the intellectual and material spaces of the Old World…
GOP candidate Ron Paul has mentioned getting rid of all the following: the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the CIA (any function other than intelligence gathering); which 3 systems do you feel need a major overhaul?
Coming from the background of a high school dropout, punk rocker, and not a political science scholar, I must say that I’ve seen a good deal of common ground between some theoretical anarchists and the ‘Love Revolution’ Ron Paul organizers. And, surprisingly, both of these groups come out to our shows, especially on this last East Coast tour in small venues and spaces with the RIVERBOAT GAMBLERS, and PAINT IT BLACK. And sometimes… these have been the same people....
It’s neat to see this election cycle, for all of its illusions and exploitations, bring so many ideas and distinct communities into contact. Even those in moral opposition to the process (like I often feel, along with some of my bandmates to varying degrees of passion). At the risk of getting some things wrong, I will give you my most pervasive questions and critiques of what I fear could emerge as an old model libertarian society. The compassionate and measured arguments that these libertarian folks have made to back up some of the more, on the surface to my cursory assumptions, er.. ‘tooth and claw’ free market worship, social Darwinisms, and mystifications have impressed me and educated me and my bandmates. Still we are not convinced completely that industrial global capitalism, and a ‘true’ free market has these perfect platonic economic forms, balancing physics, and that the ‘playing field’ as it were has the inherent capacity to defend ecologies, human life and liberty. I still maintain from both theoretical and emotional perspectives that our human invented and orchestrated economies need to work for the people and the planet. Not the other way around as it currently stands and has stood for too long.
Still, the amount of change and thought that local municipality control over federal functions in the wake of the abovementioned cancellations inspires is an exciting prospect in a lot of lights. The call to improvement of our Education system from the State level or ever-smaller, and the localization of Energy and Educational priority has the potential to push our society forward and help build consciousness. Of course, getting rid of the Dept. of Homeland Security, CIA, and the IRS all sound like fine ideas, but the retention of a nation-state, still playing in the world as an economic power, with its attendant military conquests and security protocols in service of resource/labor extraction and global market manipulations seems like a strange half measure, rather like a headless body with wildly flailing arms, kicking legs, and violent genitalia.
If Ron Paul supporters could start/continue building together and synthesize a new prescription with the paragons of ParEcons, L.E.T.S. adventurers, Green Anarchists and Social Ecologists, I [can] see a lot of the problems and dysfunctions of last century’s ideologies disappear. Plus a world-transforming amount of energy in community would be preserved as these folks would no longer be fighting among themselves. You know, that mythical place where the furthest right meets the furthest left. People are living this shit right now, and the potential is intoxicating. So let’s do this people, we’ll write the punk songs and bring the beer!
Having spoken to the homeless and “forgotten about” people that slipped between the cracks of the system, how do you feel the current welfare system, addiction programs, job banks, etc. have failed these people? What reforms could be made?
I have had the privilege of knowing some talented and determined people who have dedicated their lives to working with the chronically poor and homeless. I found my own experiences the most connected and salient, when the social work was itself reaching past the system to meet halfway those who live outside its classifications and comforts. Food Not Bombs in Richmond, Virginia, midwifed 15 years ago by the indomitable Adam Nathanson and Alyssa Murray, supported by the punk scene, Catholic Workers, Civil Rights leaders (civil disobedience in the City Hall!), provides a non hierarchical model where everyone eats, everyone serves, everyone helps everyone. This model also extends to addressing the fissures in the social foundations in our nation, our cultures colliding and exhausting their vision on the bottom lines of private and public institution alike. To me, this is one of the most exciting radical practices - enriching and building a community of mutual aid that transcends class, racial, historical, institutional and legal barriers to the inherent art of pulling each other up through these cracks.
Some long time friends and fans of STRIKE ANYWHERE deep in Brooklyn, had squatted an old warehouse, hooked up power and water, and BUILT A HOMELESS SHELTER where mutual aid, and non hierarchical counseling was practiced. Of course, within a year, the police found it and shut it down, but these two revolutionary street punk homeless advocates kept building their practice, their community, and checking in with us about their accomplishments. Soon, a documentary film of their experience will be finished, some of which even has one of our crazy outdoor benefit shows in the background.
So my answer doesn’t touch on reforms in this case at all. Good friends and family have had whole careers as social workers for various private and public institutions, leaving shredded and bewildered by bureaucratic paralysis and the cynical careering of managers. Instead of despairing within the system though, we can [be] inspired by the urgency, compassion, and creativity of our community - building a network of lay punk social workers who can challenge these structures which foster dependence and corral the city’s chronically poor and homeless populations ‘out of sight, out of mind’ into dangerous quasi-prisons which never remedy and seldom address the foundations of trans-generational poverty, mental health, street drug addiction, and family abuse.
There’s been a monumental change from the 1950s to 2007 in the way most people treat relationships, child rearing and marriage—leading to “the disintegration of the family.” How’d we get here?
I think that families were probably disintegrating, although through the course of a lifetime, silent and miserable, throughout and before, America’s Golden Age. And perhaps, although it’s still a mess of beautiful contradictions, there is an arsenal of choices and powers, at least for the educated first world, that can enhance personal fulfillment, individual safety and potential; to redefine what we mean when we say family. For example, there is a relatively modern cultural precedent for women and children to now escape abuse and domination through divorce. This can’t be a bad thing, although I am sure there are some examples where the fathers were only (or even less than) half the problem. There is also a trudging sense of progress as far as the post-modernization of family where traditional roles can be retooled, or done away with altogether in light of maximizing the most emotionally resilient, creative and harmonious aspects of relationships and child rearing if that road is taken.
I’m not gonna Pollyanna this death, though - This sense of options and social liberation also has its downside, and the perpetual material and impatient self-centeredness blasted back at us in the reflections of shop windows, media cultures, celebrity role models has also taken its toll on the development and health of new nuclear and nuclear-free families. If we can work toward evolving beyond enculturated breeding instincts, subordinating alpha-earner plantation models, and retrofitting the shrill, unresearched ‘think of the children’ mid-20th century sentimentality in favor of looking at community ecology, sustainability and self-actualization; we may be able to go the distance in balancing our civilization, changing our thirst for war and castle into a meditation on folding our species back into the world with grace and creative power. Also, I will eventually learn to break up my sentences with punctuation… sometime after the above is accomplished!
Do you feel our history education is a big problem, as Howard Zinn indicates in The People’s History of the United States or James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me? Do you think kids are bored with history and thus bred to be almost apathetic about current events?
I think a lot of American kids are overwhelmed and tend to shut down in the face of the long-range moral and historical questions being asked under the flash of what they read and hear. I know I tried to. I think there is also a more isolated and homogenous sense of place in the suburbs, now, more than ever in most American cities, and, as much as the internet can dazzle with every specializing content and reflections, the real critical thinking that really living in this world in three dimensions demands is an intellectual and spiritual marathon that tests the will and personality in ways that are hard to predict or prepare for. I think the hardest won, but most prescient goal of self-education, is the ability to relate - to feel the dynamic influence of history in the lives of everyone, and your own place in all of it. I guess part of why punk can be as inspiring even as it is dystopian is to bolster us all against the paralysis of knowing just enough to know how little we know.
Bob Marley and THE SEX PISTOLS both caused a certain amount of controversy and inspired people to mobilize against the status quo. Do you feel music holds the same kind of power that it did back then?
I definitely still feel that music, and perhaps music alone, has an energy that transcends the individual’s status, historical position, and the evolving media of its delivery to inspire, uplift, and counteract cultural stagnancy, injustice, and malaise. The emergence of Bob Marley and his music did something to the world that still needs to be fully comprehended. We as a band tend to reference THE WAILERS and a lot of other revolutionary reggae in often, unconscious ways. We also have a Bob Marley tapestry hanging in our box truck touring vehicle/living space. In a completely different, and certainly more specialized and precious way, the working of cultural dissonance, shock value as art, and media spectacle by THE PISTOLS and McLaren was a cool yet strange and probably incomplete, but utterly appropriate (including its appropriations..) midwifing of punk. Since then, the conversation/argument that this subculture has had with the status quo, and within itself has been a testament to it’s strength as a purer product of the power of music. As much as there exists static musical forms within punk, it’s still hard to see how it’s level of popularity, no matter how superficial, as a dead end street. There is as much inspiration and articulation coming out of creative bands in response to mainstream commercialization of the subculture, as there ever was, and now, at least in the U.S. there seems to be a real understanding of who the real enemies are, and how to empower the positive common ground between bands who choose different approaches to getting the same message out there. With this said, I definitely think that the independent and DIY Punk and Hardcore scenes generally have more to offer the world as the bands on the mainstream radio, and there can, should, and will be both a ‘trickle down’ of impact and visibility from the popular groups who bring their roots and rage with them, and a ‘trickle up’ of creative power, activism, and integrity from the Underground bands who have their heads out of their asses, know what time it is and care about liberating people more than defending their status as righteous college town prophets.
Experiences:
How has growing up in the Reagan era shaped you?
The constant threat of Nuclear Armageddon during the entirety of my conscious memory of childhood cannot be overstated. I remember nightmares from prime time television movies events like ‘The Day After’, and hours of rapt household paralysis while Reagan spoke, bellicose and winking, about the necessities of a war most of us didn’t understand we were fighting. Also, there was a cartoonish duality to life while in middle school and early high school which may have just been adolescence, but I also think that the greed and artifice of the Eighties society was perhaps, the least deep of a cultural experience, even in American life, that will ever happen. Also, growing up in the South in the Reagan era was definitely something insane, and will probably fuel my anger and analysis of media manipulation; historical deception; and the oppression and attempted economic obliteration of black Americans by the white Southern Aristocracy in both rural and urban communities, for the rest of my life. So what’s a sensitive Eighties child to do in Richmond, Virginia when faced with such potential psychological and moral decay?
Lose yourself - then find yourself - in Punk Rock!
I remember an art school ghetto in a section of Richmond named Oregon Hill with lots of backyard parties, and crazy fire breathing punks. My first show was a free GWAR event, when I was fifteen, in 1987 when they had no label, no budget, just loincloths, roller skates, foam battle axes, and disturbing home-made masks… A lot of SST Records jazz-punk; UNSEEN FORCE, WHITE CROSS, thrash bands; and rasta-core brought to us by radiation from D.C. and THE HUMAN RIGHTS (H.R.’s more-reggae side project) BAND. I also remember a thriving skinhead scene of nazi’s, traditional’s, and the occasional brave SHARP. Me and some brilliant dropout punk friends fixed up (mostly with graffiti) an old two story Reconstruction Era barn on the western edge of town, and started having shows that were often near-riots, these weird parties with rednecks, non racist skins, punk kids, furtive goths (these would be eighties goths!) trying to get along and build something, just to tear it down. It was really a brave new world as far as D.I.Y. was concerned, and the band that tied it all together was FOUR WALLS FALLING, Jade Tree’s first LP, and a righteous and musically untouchable political hardcore band. This was my ‘dual consciousness’ turning point from exclusively being into underage drinking, trespassing, and running from police and skinheads. It taught me that there was something to engage in, to build and articulate further than just leather jacket paint, and homemade tattoos.
In the Spring of 1988, FUGAZI came to town, playing at the reggae club, New Horizons, with Guy as a roadie and occasional back up singer. This was thrilling and revolutionary to my punk experience, no doubt, but the final hinges came off the doors when… that Summer, I saw the BAD BRAINS with CORROSION OF CONFORMITY in VA Beach…
By the time AVAIL moved to Richmond in 1991, a second generation of positive hardcore bands and creative punk kids were gaining confidence, and the scene was starting to get a new character, changing from the dark, impressionistic Mid-Eighties. On New Year’s Eve 1990, in a house on Cherry Street, I met Beau and Tim Barry, I think they were pissing in random beer cans, and watching gleefully while wasted, pompous frat people would drink. I liked them instantly. They established the first Avail House, and added just the right amount of numbers and intellect to push the scene to its tipping point; we then organized and happily kicked out the remaining Nazi skins, started INQUISITION, and a dozen other bands, all with character and a singular sense of mission, and the third generation of Richmond Punk came into its own.
What kind of activist projects are you involved with now?
As any good intentioned touring punk band can tell you, there is still a bit of distance between what we do with our time and talent, and the activists with whom we communicate and trade inspiration. In the past, when we could, we would use our shows as platforms for this community, organizing anti war marches in our hometown and DC, and supporting both monetarily and with art, groups who were doing the real courageous work that we are only singing about. The Richmond (Virginia, our hometown) Coalition for a Living Wage, an anti-poverty group growing in the rich soil of the Civil Rights Movement, are people who we give back a bit to. Also, I have been pretty involved with animal rescue and front-line animal rights organizations both locally, and with the PETA stalls at our shows across most of the U.S. Vegan Action, a Richmond based activist non-profit, has also been a part of our community. We are always happy to have folks with good ideas share their time and passion with us at our shows, it helps to flesh out and sustain what we sing about and what we believe beyond the boundaries of a hardcore show. Of course, in the recent and past years, we have played benefit shows (both loud, fast and acoustic) , made connections with and been inspired by: Food Not Bombs, Iraq Veterans Against The War, Jobs Not Jails, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Industrial Workers Of The World, Wetlands Environmental Activist Collective, Syrentha Savio Endowment (A Women’s Cancer Awareness and Research Fund), Positive Force DC/All our Power, The Coalition For A Living Wage, The Virginia Fair Wage Alliance, Stay Vocal, Music For America, and we have contributed songs (and whole recording sessions) for records and compilations benefit various legal defense funds for anti-globalization activists and imprisoned animal liberators, PunkVoter, anti-police brutality organizations, and other groups.
Have you been to any cities that seem to embody a healthy sense of multiculturalism, or do you see segregated diasporas pretty much everywhere?
It’s hard to figure out what real multiculturalism looks like. Many of the places we’ve been blown away speechless by the city-center whirlwind of many languages, cultures, sounds and colors, (Bilbao, Spain; Toronto, Canada; London UK; Sofia, Bulgaria; Wellington, New Zealand ; Paris, etc.) may only be a timed surface illusion, and the moment the shops close, people might very well corral themselves back into homogenous neighborhoods. We have had the good fortune and absurdity to travel to many cities, some famous, many forgotten (except by their residents), and it does seem like, even within our eight year span of touring, that the world is getting smaller, and people are getting more inspired to make connections across ancient barriers. Of course, there is also a scary, isolating social defense mechanism that triggers sometimes when people feel overwhelmed and powerless. And we’ve recently visited places which felt like they were running against this global trend, including a lot of the central Midwest, the inner South, in the States; and some of the more economically challenged eastern European countries where ethnic tensions and historic feuds are being reinvented by the morally deficient and politically ambitious to control people through violence and terror.
What’s one issue you feel more Americans should pay attention to?
The human and historic cost of multinational industrial capitalism as it operates in the real world. It seems that everyday Americans are still romanced (or...date raped...) by this laizzes-fare lottery sense of siding with the ‘cool kids’; the winning team of the 2% who continually take, through corporate tax breaks and a rigged playing field, the resources, wages, and future sustainability from the other 98%. It’s almost like we suspend our reason; our belief in the earth as a common treasury for all and somehow saddle up to whichever corporate/political/religious racehorse we think will carry us out of our miserable, managed existence. The intense penetration of these bankrupt and adolescent versions of the American Dream also fuel the distortions of religion, citizenship, patriotism, and the general reactionary squalor of our national conversation through bewildering and insulting media channels.
It’s not a matter of Left Vs. Right, Asses Vs. Elephants, Coastal Elites Vs. God-fearing Patriots, in fact IT NEVER HAS BEEN. We’ve all been angry but not angry enough at the right processes, under-educated to frustration, blinded by debt and the career traps that our system provides as opportunity, and deaf to the smaller voices of conscience, balance, and progress that speak within each of us. Once we can all grasp this and shake ourselves loose from this paralysis of submission and exploitation disguised as self-interest and democracy, then many, many other social and political pathologies will show themselves as interrelated and very mortal enemies: Justice for the environment, Animal and human liberation from production and industrial slavery, and an end to war and the international system of economy and profiteering from genocide and corruption.
There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with the world today, but not as many proposed solutions. Have you read or come across anything that’s made you feel hopeful or inspired lately?
It’s sometimes hard to get a grip on what many Americans are doing with themselves. There is so much ignorance and exhaustion passing for consensus and activity, but I don’t believe for a second that this is all people expect from their country, or their lives. We get a steady stream of 24 hour news overwhelming us with surface mediocrities and really dumbed-down, infinite hysteria. Couple this with an under resourced education system, and the sense of unsustainable, adolescent entitlement which trickles into all of us as an affect of this cultural deprivation, and I think we can begin to address the solutions.
I believe the intelligence and outrage that flickers underneath all of these disguises and placebos will break though, and many more folks in this country will start waking up from their slumber. Whether this effects electoral politics immediately, or another kind of change in consciousness needs to sustain us first, I am down to see it happen, and, in whatever small way we can as a punk band, increase the pressure and help save lives wherever possible. Local Economic Exchange Systems, Participatory Economics, Social Ecology (Rest in peace Murray Bookchin), hell, even this cool micro-secessionist movement in Northern New England and Maritime Canada called ‘The New Atlantic Republic’ are all newer, inspiring theories and practices that are harnessing human potential in communities right now as I type this. These bad ass theories in action that show that, along with economies, nation-states themselves need to be reclaimed by their inhabitants, shriven of their godhead status and utilized as liquid, flexible fabrics in which to continue our evolution beyond their need. There are a lot of well-researched and efficient ideas out in the world… It’s up to us to use our creativity and collective will to synthesize new movements, new alliances and new hope from the past century’s overflowing toolbox of ‘isms, and ‘ologies.
What advice would you give to some of your fans who are disgruntled and frustrated with current politics?
As my answers above may reveal, I feel that the solutions are way beyond elections.... It’s about changing consciousness, or building ways of life around the numbness, isolation, and false competitions that are sold to us in pretty packages. But! It’s also still about voting, too - a process so maligned by radicals for it’s imminently corruptible dependency and ‘confessional booth’ moral compartmentalization. No doubt, the modern attitude, the ‘fantasy sports league’ approach held by large populations on voting proves radical theory on point with its critique, but there is still a community moment, a third theater of connection and public potential even as elections get stolen, primary votes (like mine here in Los Angeles) get mysteriously lost and uncounted, private corporations monopolize voting technologies.... It’s still important I think to look at and participate in this fucked up and dehumanizing system, if only to repeatedly educate the individual on their own powerlessness. The sense of ‘is this all we get?’ from the process of choosing who will run the world; the absurdity of a two party system; the losses to our humanity and the future we endure if we ONLY vote for presidents.
As far as getting inspired and engaged with your life at the community level (this is what I would recommend to inoculate against the National Election Blues, and the ‘fuck politics’ flu) - - - Follow your curiosity, research the rebel histories of your hometown, and stay open to the radical community in its many forms… A quick search of your hometown’s Indymedia.org will start this fire in most cases. Hell, I found out about a protest against the Minutemen happening in Richmond on a day after a tour when I as just visiting friends and family, waiting for a flight. It was great to roll down to the Capital and represent for Immigrant Rights and Human Rights in the face of the ridiculous theater of misguided nationalism and their dangerous reading of (and mind blowing costumes regarding) Colonial America. The Minutemen are so whack.
Okay ! I guess I’ll leave you with that .
Solidarity,
Thomas
Strike Anywhere.