WUSSUP WI’ FUCKING KERRY?

(Ask a science fiction writer.)

‘Tis the weekend and the Doc is tired, okay? But I’ll pose y’all a question, and damn the typos. Is the Kerry campaign stone blind to the parallel Dump Bush (LEB) movement, or just staying above any embarrassing agitprop? Either way it sucks. United we stand, even if the next guy is an asshole or Howard Stern. I like that Kerry is ex-VVAW. Why the soft pedal? It’s playing totally by the Republican rules. Kerry has to take over the poker game. Go ask the Duke of Wellington about defining the battle even though out-numbered and out-gunned. And ask the dead Duke now, while there’s still time to whistle up Bucher. (And if you don’t know the history, shame on you. Without Wellington, we’d all be eating soufles and fucking in the afternoon. Look it up.)

And while on a relevant history jag. Let’s not forget that, had Bobby Kennedy not been shot, the Yippies would almost certainly have been backing Bobby as the anti-War candidate. In the last month of his life, Bobby was down. He’d lost his tie and suit coat, and was doing soundbites in the fields with Caesar Chavez, quoting Bob Dylan, with poll numbers building to beat Nixon (and thus shot dead). In this parallel universe we would have seen Mayor Daley’s cops beating on Kennedy supporters, for chrissakes. I suspect the so-called pros around Kerry are Havard schmucks who failed to make it onto The Simpsons writing team, and they just don’t fucking get it.

And where is the Kerry cyber-kommando? Doc40 is on a million mailing lists. I get shit from Arriana and Nader and even Wes Clarke, but not a damn thing from Kerry. And don’t tell me there’s no money. There’s no money over here, either. Know what I mean? We depend on the kindness of strangers. It just requires work, ingenuity, elves, and hackers

Let’s not forget, if we can’t get Bush out of office this November, that’s democracy in the toilet, and the only other option will become riot and revolution. Bringing it all back home, so to speak.

PORNO-PROP

YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/2004/April/ashcroft.jpg
Sent by some girl. All I can say is that it takes a long time to load on dial up, but it’s so worth it. And be warned, it isn’t what you initially think. (Adult content.) The folks who labored so long don’t need lives. They’re already demented. You also probably need to save it to some place of graphic tools to reduced the whole thing in size. Or blow it up. And check out the Heinken bottle 4 squares down and 8,9, and 10, across (l-er)

HASTA LA VICTORIA CHARLIE
If you want fine-slick cultural cross-crafting about Che Guevara and Charlie Manson, try my piece in LA CityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=906&IssueNum=49

And our pal hipspinster blogs in horror after watching the Berg beheading...
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

FLATTERING BUGGERS

We’ve been getting a lot of stuff from the Buggers. Now they shamelessly stroke my ego to the point that I groan aloud, “Fuck false modesty. I’ll post it.” (And yes, Phun City did look like VC free zone.)

BUGGER!

When in 1970 Mick Farren, Edward Barker and David Goodman named the festival
that they were organising Phun City, they condensed much of the commitment
of the Western counterculture of that time in just those two words. Phun
City: it reminds of a North-Vietnamese free zone in the middle of England. A
hotbed of revolt and dangerous fun.

The three-day Opeople's festival near Worthing brought together drug-fuelled rebels like The MC5, William Burroughs, The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, Farren himself, and combined music, radical politics, literature, graphic design, and visual arts. It was one of the last large multicultural events that successfully mixed politics, arts, and fun before the music industry commercialised these events and pulled their teeth. Musician, writer, editor, and anarchist Mick Farren, at that time the spearhead of the London underground, was one of the few Europeans who joined forces with the Detroit based White Panthers. The White Panther Party was infact an artists' collective founded by John and Leni Sinclair that modelled and named itself after the militant Black Panther Party. In 1968 this collective dedicated all their creativity to cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on. Because of their strategic
use of various art forms we regard Mick Farren and John & Leni Sinclair as
pivotal figures in Western revolutionary art.

When multi-disciplinarity serves no other purpose than crossing nominal barriers between art disciplines or between various fields of research, it is no more than tame artistic play. We, The Buggers, feel that multidisciplinarity is only vital when it leads to dangerous or genuinely
innovative mixes. In our view the drive to cross barriers in art should also be a drive to tear down conventions in thought. Farren and the Sinclairs demonstrated that multidisciplinarity is as much an artistic as a revolutionary tool and that it can be fun at the same time. Mick Farren and John Sinclair would probably have been rebels in any society. But much of their revolt resulted directly from moral rejection of the repressive and racist Anglo-Amercian societies of those days and the
American war against the people of Vietnam. Farren and Sinclair are romantic revolutionaries. They take as much inspiration from political revolutionaries as from literary heroes or musicians. Ho Chi Min plays drums with Bo Diddley. Music is revolution.

In the 60s and 70s Farren and Sinclair reclaimed public space through riotous multidisciplinary events but also through self-created media: records, magazines, writings, photographs, posters, pamphlets. Part of their program was taking fun  sex, drugs, music  out into the streets. Their assault on official culture consisted of vandalism of public space (in its broadest sense) and the creation of free zones, Phun Cities, strategies that evoked serious repression before they were adopted and used for commercial ends by capitalist industries.

The Buggers repeat their call to reclaim public space and to develop contemporary strategies against the occupation of public space by capitalist industries. In our previous pamphlets we already mentioned vandalistic strategies like self-destructive art, hostile modifications, desexualisation and sexualisation as circumstances or times require, and now we add to that the creation of free zones. Bugger the sham!

The Buggers.

http://www.sea-urchin.net/radiobaghdad/

And if you want to know more about all this, buy a book, dadnabit, buy two. Buy my own Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, or pick up a copy John’s Guitar Armies. Or both, and give them to friends. We elders of the tribe have bills to pay.

PETS CORNER

Vegetarian cat food? Who is kidding whom?

CRYPTIQUE – I‘m just a patsy.

LANDMARK

The Funtopia site (to the right) just logged its 20,000th hit. Which makes me irrationally happy. It almost happened once before, but then the counter malfunctioned and ran it back to 14,000. I know porno sites do the same traffic in a day, but what the hell?

NEW EMAIL
I have a new email address that is good for now and the future – byron4d@msn
Note it if you need it. The old on will die around Tuesday.

YOU WANT ICE 9 IN THAT?

Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I ran a couple of chunks yesterday and here are two more tomorrow. http://www.inthesetimes.com/

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:
Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?
How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

SCAREY
And here’s one fearsomely fucked up web-site courtesy if some girl.
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Smile when...

THEY’RE BACK!

I believe I’ve already mentioned my concern at how the aliens, grey or otherwise, seem to have been totally out of the picture since G. Bush took over. You can therefore imagine my delight when a whole formation of UFOs showed up over Mexico City as detailed in this report from Sky News...

Mexico's largest television network has broadcast film taken by air force pilots of what they claim are unidentified flying objects. The film shows bright lights with "movements and characteristics that do not have - up to now - a scientific explanation," according to the Televisa network. The air force pilots are heard expressing amazement on the tape. A frame-by-frame analysis shows 16 UFOs, according to the network. Televisa said the film was taken with an infra-red camera and there are no alterations. "It is one of the most important film documents we have been able to access, especially because it comes from an official source," said Jaime Mausan, a journalist who has been tracking the UFO phenomenon for more than 25 years.

Leaving aside dumb and racist comments like “who knew Mexico had an air force”, I’m damn pleased to see them, even if they’ve only arrived to retrieve the Chupacabra, the nasty-fanged goat-sucker frequently sighed in Mexico when The X-Files was still on the air. I always figured, the Chupacabra had to be some kind of grey alien pet that had somehow escaped it’s alien masters’ flying suacer. I mean, what species that can supposedly cross galaxies and circumnavigate the infinite wants to suck goat? (Don’t all answer at once.)

PETS CORNER
Since we already seem to be discussing pets, some girl forwards a link for The Infinite Cat Project that needs to be seen and not described. Suffice to say the Newton finds it silly and undignified.
http://www.privatehand.com/infinite/

Meanwhile HCBeck contributed a link to curly fries and heroine on Johnny Lehman’s Spot – http://blogs.indiewire.com/jonny/archives/000473.html

YOU WANT ICE 9 IN THAT?

Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I present a couple of chunks (and maybe some more tomorrow.) http://www.inthesetimes.com/

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddleypoo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF NICK BERG

On the comments board, agahastgrl wants to know what happened to Nick Berg’s head. I don’t have a clue. I’m still looking for the head of Ralphie Cifferetto. And, to be frank, I’m not that shocked. Okay, decapitation is a bummer. Jayne Mansfield taught us that. But the execution is being used yet another smokescreen to cover that systematic torture of suspects has been okayed from the top in the Iraq occupation. It’s sad the dude died, but he was hanging round in a war zone, in their country, trying to hire on as a low level merc.

And when is everyone going to listen to the low echelon spooks and Theorists of the Obvious like Doc40 and realise that Al Qe’ida is a get-America open franchise, not an octopus command structure?

CRYPTIQUE – Suck my goat, monkey boy!

SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN IN DECLINE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note on the Subservient Chicken, a disturbingly weird-ass promo from Burger King. Now some girl draws our attention to a Yahoo News report that tells how, after it’s fifteen minutes of cyber-fame, the chicken is officially in decline...

Between April 11 and April 18, the number of people who visited the site at least once from their home computers surged more than two-and-a-half times to 407,000, according to tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Since then, traffic has trailed off, with just 186,000 people visiting the site from home in the week ended May 2. Miami-based Burger King has remained mum about the chicken's future but said consumers should not expect to see his image at one of its restaurants.
"That would be far too mainstream," Burger King spokesman Blake Lewis said. "The chicken doesn't do mainstream."
http://www.subservientchicken.com

FROM THE EMAIL

kaymo writes at length...

Who the hell are these people? wonders Doc 40. In Mother Jones this month I see that 61% of Americans now profess to believe that the Biblical story of the creation of the world/universe in 7 days is literally true. We already know that Americans have rejected the sciences of biology, geology, paleontology, astronomy, cosmology, genetics, etc. etc. since a huge majority of Americans reject "Evolution" in favor of one flavor or another of Creationism. The same rejection ultimately has to include Physics, Math and even Chemistry, since all scientific inquiry is tending to move along the same rails towards similar conclusions. (As long as the Higgs Boson really does exist! If not, oh boy....) What does this mean? One could say that these Americans have chosen a
kind of childish wilfulness, a deliberate refusal to see the world as it is. In doing so they have joined the Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, Ultra orthodox Jews and sundry other groups that have deliberately closed their eyes and turned their faces away from the "enlightenment" and the process of scientific inquiry.

Being "enlightened" is hard for some people. It means having to give up notions of being "special", "chosen", and somehow "beloved" beyond others by the lord or lords, depending on your religion. It means having to accept that rationally there are no races, that the very idea of race is a misnomer, although there are slight genetic differences between ALL humans who originate outside of Africa and the various groups that originate on the mother continent. For some reason the idea that we're all pretty much the same and that we're also animals, horrifies a
certain (large) percentage ofAmericans as well as other peoples. This is an area deserving of some
determined work with MRI scanning, psychiatric observation and genetic cross referencing. It might even turn out to be an inheritable genetic trait. Maybe they could come up with a drug or two that would turn it off. One moment a raving religious racist, the next a rational human
being. Part of Bush's popularity is that he shares in the wilful childishness. Not much of a student at school, lacking much of a knowledge base of the world and not caring either, he presents himself as one of them, and they love this.

Other politicians have taken note. We will see more of this and for the possible end consequences I would suggest further reading of works like Ian Kershaw's two part biography of Adolf Hitler. Appealing to the irrational, the mischievous child, the wilful believer in his or her specialness and superiority is a potent political method. Combine it with tons of money from the ruling elite and you've got a successful strategy that no amount of rational good sense can overcome. Bush
doesn't have the personality to take advantage of the situation a la Adolf Hitler, but someone else, as yet unheard of, probably does.

And the Buggers respond to the last post...

Thanks for putting The Buggers positions #2 and #3 on the Funtopia site. I'm really honoured and appreciate your comments. The Buggers had already planned to dedicate a position to you and John Sinclair as seminal figures to revolutionary art in the West, probably the next position. They will make up for the omission of The Who in that same position as the mutual influences of American and British counterculture will be mentioned. I understood that Ron Asheton saw The Who perform when he was in London in the 60s and took the idea of destroying instruments home.
The Buggers would like to start that position with a brief analysis of the title PHUN CITY (the absurdist/anarchist combination of fun plus the association with Vietnam). Before they mention that I'd like to make sure it was you who invented it*. Let me know, if you can find the time. As to desexualisation and De Sade ... you're obviously right. But that will take some more time to work out. The Buggers have been going on about (de)sexualisation a bit too often now.

*The Phun City name and logo (see Funtopia?) was a joint effort by me and the late Edward Barker

CRYPTIQUE – I eat more chicken any man ever seen.