James Lee Manifesto

But I see the emergence of porn as much larger than that – it very literally is evidence of our world coming to an end. I may be very liberal on many issues, but when it comes to sexuality, I can feel like a fundamentalist Christian. As it stands now, the spread of porn is somewhat akin to Global Warming – both evidence that we are mistreating the Earth, but also has the potential to totally transform our behavior for the better. Porn is evidence that we’re being totally careless with our sexuality, but taboo-breaking could be useful if we don’t devolve completely.  I’m not entirely optimistic about our chances.

The trouble with porn is that it is currently forbidden. Even though people decry the mainstreaming of porn – Jenna Jameson on Oprah – the mainstreaming is as senseless as any other cultural artifact. Jenna Jameson shows you can make a lot of money in porn and there’s even some glamor in it, but the real porn story is how this trickles down to everyone else. Just as people debase themselves eating cockroaches on “Fear Factor” to get 15 minutes of fame, porn is bringing the same impulse to the bedroom.  No, sex isn’t the same as eating cockroaches, but there’s a similar senselessness in a lot of porn. “To each his own” is a little too easy.

In an interesting (though overly conservative) interview with Pornland author, Gail Dines, she says:

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

Actually, that’s not really the core of the porn revolution. It’s not that people are seeking out new and stranger types of porn, it’s that everyday, average people are filming themselves and feel nothing about broadcasting it. Jenna Jameson is irrelevant – it’s the porn self-publishers who are worth intensive sociological study.

What she fails to grasp is: promiscuity has been around for a very long time. Now people are just pointing a camera at it. I remember a friend telling me about opening up for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the nineties. Afterward, there was a long line of girls into their dressing room dubbed the “Blow job line.” Each waiting for their turn. Who would do that? The answer: the people who are filming themselves today.

Still, there is a dividing line between doing something in private and wanting thousands of other people to witness it. And this speaks of a general boredom and emptiness, as well as dumb superficiality. The reason it’s destructive is because porn is still taboo – people think by fucking and broadcasting it they’re actually accomplishing something. Giving the finger to authority, parents, society, whatever. Doing something naughty. If sex was seen as just another bodily function – which it is – there wouldn’t be as much satisfaction in making your own porn movie.  The fact that it’s forbidden makes it more attractive in an American culture where nudity is off limits.

So maybe we’re in the middle of a crossroads. The pornification of the world through the web is helping us reach a point where nudity is as nice and normal as it should be. Trouble is: most people putting up home porn movies aren’t quite evolutionary sociologists so they’re mostly just being stupid and careless. Which really does seem tied together with how the human race is thoughtless about everything. For every Nina Hartley, who’s a genius, there are thousands more who have no idea what they’re conveying.  Porn isn’t evidence that we’re breaking taboos, it’s evidence of our dissolution.

Basically, porn is about a lack of imagination.  Turns this may not just be the case for the actors, but for viewers as well.  See Scientific American:

I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?

I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but I do think that over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game-changer.

This comment at the Pornland interview gets to what I’m getting at, except I do think of this as possible “end of history” behavior:

All of universal behavior is commodified. Not just sex, but recreation, eating, aesthetics…they are all turbo-charged by multi-billion dollar industries compelling its participants to consume more. And all of these facets of life lead many people to extreme behavior built on the mediated experiences all around them (ever see enraged soccer parents light into a ref at their kid’s match?). The point, while valid, is academic. Unless the professor is stating we’re near an “end of history” with respect to pornography. I doubt that she is, or she would be in great company with those who declared Elvis Presley the end days or painting the visage of Christ a sign or Armageddon.

The real culprit isn’t porn, but culture which sells sex repeatedly without ever representing it directly. A confusing message which says: sex is more important than everything, but it’s dirty and wrong. In a fame-obsessed culture, of course people would think they’re being interesting and deviant by recording sex. They’re not – or at least they shouldn’t be. If the overall attitude towards sex was healthier, porn wouldn’t exist. The result wouldn’t be porn being in a sitcom (which happens in my novel – “Stick it to Me”), the response would be, “Yeah, I fuck too, so what?” Porn would primarily consist of instructional videos.  Simply, you take the dirt out of porn and it loses much of its purpose. If this isn’t the “End of Days” maybe that’s where we’re heading.

Rage Underground seems like something to watch.

Meanwhile, Palin says,

As far too many in the media, and in various governments, rush to condemn Israel, we must put the recent events off Israel’s coast into the right perspective. This “relief” convoy was not about humanitarian aid, as the liberal mainstream media keeps reporting. The whole operation was designed to provoke Israel, not to provide supplies to Palestinians held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Anyone who sees the video of Israeli commandos being attacked as they land on that ship knows the people aboard were vicious thugs, not “peace activists.” The media insults our intelligence with their outright mischaracterization of who these enemies are.

Ackerman:

A generation ago, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, two Jewish writers whose work has helped shape the conservative agenda in America, argued that American Jews ought to get over their residual fears of what was then known as the “Christian right” and embrace them as fellow lovers of Israel, even if that love is predicated on a millenarism in which the Savior eventually rids the world of Jews who fail to see His light. Pew’s findings have made them prophetic. And there is new mortar for the bonds of this conservative American-Israeli coalition: mutual hatred for Barack Obama, the American president whose meagre efforts to midwife a two-state solution have been greeted with contempt by Netanyahu.

Netanyahu offers the evangelicals a key defeat for Obama’s foreign-policy agenda, helping pave the way for a conservative restoration. The evangelicals offer Netanyahu rear-guard counter-pressure against Obama’s peacemaking efforts. They are not likely to fret about dead or dying Palestinians or dead “aid workers” – or are they terrorists? – aboard a flotilla off of Gaza. They share Netanyahu’s instinctual contempt for humanitarian do-gooders, his opprobrium for international institutions, and his antipathy to an independent Palestine as an endgame for the conflict.

Israel isn’t an American ally, it’s an American right ally, also known as the American Taliban.

The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress.

I actually find this weirdly comforting. I spend far too much time obsessing about the deranged, delusional stupidity of the teabaggers and how its evidence of the country’s dissolution – if not evidence of our species devolution. At least incapable of evolving.  Yes, I think in these terms, which is not entirely healthy.

But teabaggers aren’t the problem any more than the targets of some teabagger anger – like illegal immigrants. The problem is not “illegal immigrants took my job” the problem is “Some corporate owner thought it was cheaper to hire someone illegal and put me out of a job.” In other words, the people with the least amount of power shouldn’t really be the concern, as they don’t wield a lot of power.  Same goes for the teabagger sign holding up a sign of Obama as “Hitlir.”

Then again, a small band of loudmouths can have a very big impact in this media age. The fact that the electorate is so fickle to vote Republicans into office in 2010 shows how quickly things could change on a dime, and Sarah Palin could become President. As much as I’m disappointed in Obama – including the health care bill, which in any other generation is a right-leaning bill – I’ll contend that it’s vitally important to have someone of reasonable, rational intelligence leading the country. I’ll take a right-leaning pragmatist over a far right lunatic any day. That’s not saying much.  And the health care bill is an improvement – sometimes that’s all you can ask.

What’s striking is how the rhetoric on the right and the left is so similar (”Government doesn’t work”) yet the far right is too stupid to see who the actual perpetrators are. It’s not “big government.” It’s corporate government. It’s today’s capitalism. Effective government could potentially stop what’s now occurring. Amnesty for illegals is the least of your problems. Neither is homosexuality, and guns don’t bring “liberty.” If there was ever evidence of “slavery=freedom” it’s “guns=liberty.” Yes, a gun can kill an encroaching government agent come to burn your copy of the constitution, but if you’re spending your days believing that’s going to happen, you’re hardly “free.”

At this point, I get back to thinking the country is doomed again (which I think is a veiled form of self-pity).

As I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration….

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press.

Obsessing that this is around the corner isn’t too much healthier than a second amendment nut stroking his gun and constitution, but it’s hard not to feel a dispiriting sense of malaise. Of course, if I stopped reading the news reports and self-righteous vitriol (like this article) maybe it wouldn’t get to me so. I need another form of entertainment.

This is not a new thing – mainstream culture has always been stupid.  If you look at the top sellers in any given year vs. what has actually endured over time, it’s pretty embarrassing.  The lowest common denominator is always pretty low.  It’s just that we’re reaching a point where if people don’t actually sit up and pay attention to what matters, the system could break down.

I’ve written two books about Hollywood.  One’s about a celebrity stalker who writes letters to “the Golden Calf,” a movie star who sells superficiality to the world.  The second novel, North of Sunset, is about a similar type of movie star who starts believing so devoutly in the power of celebrity that he starts killing people, thinking he exists in a different moral universe.  I switched gears somewhat for The American Book and wrote a book about fundamentalist religion and the end of the world.  Not that big a switch, though, because I think the influence of pop culture is as damaging as the influence of corrupt religion.  In fact, it might be more so, because not everyone has religion, but just about everyone watches TV.  And it’s worse because this kind of fundamentalism doesn’t get the same amount of attention.

Just found this immense quote from David Foster Wallace on Andrew Sullivan:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship….

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.

The premise of North of Sunset is that the movie star becomes so addicted to celebrity that he needs to take it one step further – so murder becomes real power compared to the fleeting worship of celebrity.  The irony is that those who call themselves atheists on a place like Daily Kos are worshipful of the political process, as if fixing the schematics of government will fix our problems – that takes some amount of faith.  Setting aside the argument that atheism is a kind of worship, people will find other things to believe in.  “Belief” doesn’t equal “in God.”

Which is why pop culture can be a kind of religion, and why it’s effects are as damaging as the idea that the earth is 6000 years old.  Except the people who mock that concept might not spend as much time mocking the effects of pop culture, even if those effects are just as damaging to the progression of human intelligence.

An example, one of many. People seem to like Flo, the Progressive insurance lady, but really watch this.  She’s talking to an adult like she’s in preschool.  It’s demented:

Infantalizing an adult’s intelligence to this degree is treated like it’s normal.  Eventually, people start thinking it’s OK to have this level of intellectual rigor.

The Golden Calf

This weekend’s the Oscars (that gold statue is the new Golden Calf – I’m not religious, but if the mythology fits…), where the too rich get together to celebrate themselves.  The incongruity here is equal to the lunacy of the teabaggers.  The Bush-supporting teabaggers tend to vote against their self-interest, protesting against a health care bill that is intended to help the middle and working class.  By the way, remember when McCain and Palin were selling themselves as reformers?  Reform means writing new laws – and writing new laws does not equal government takeover.  Teabaggers are really moronic.

Same time, while celebrities tend to vote against their self-interest by being liberal and accepting higher taxes, they also promote the idea that being fabulously wealthy and pretty is the pinnacle of success.  It’s one very-believed American Dream that dicks the country as much as corporate conservatives.  They are corporate America.  They are propaganda for money.

More dementia:

This isn’t even that bad, it’s by rote, but the fact that’s by rote is the insanity.  I’m not anti-entertainment.  I think Steve Carell as Michael Scott is a genius.  He manages to be both offensive and vulnerable at once.  But so much of Hollywood is damaging – both in the sense of making people feel inadequate, but also that inadequacy is for something they shouldn’t even necessarily desire.

All told, I’m not feeling a whole lotta hope.  Stupid messages are sent out into the ether with the same regularity as greenhouse gases.  The former likely enables people to not pay too close attention to the latter.  They’re both core to how civilization functions, which means they’re both core to how civilization could end. A weapon of mass distraction can reap a whole lot of damage. The insanity of culture in some way allows insane acts, because they’re not far off from what passes for everyday life.  It’s not too big a leap to have a psychotic break from a culture that’s permanently on the brink of breakdown.  Yeah, there’s a reason I wrote an apocalyptic novel.  Weirdly though, the novel’s more hopeful than reality, because the fact that I wrote it at all implies that I still think there might be a future better than this one.

This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality. The murder of the United States President in 1963, the associated murders and institutional subversion, and the manipulation of official inquiries and public opinion, was effected by individuals within organizational structures that play a central role in the United States government up to the present day. The coup regime founded with the murder of President John Kennedy utilizes a number of mechanisms to perpetuate its criminal rule.

In other words, his worldview, absent the psychotic break, is not entirely far off from my own.  What this makes me think about is how much the writing here could look deranged and maniacal if viewed through a certain prism.  I always feel this way when an act of violence occurs that mimics something I’ve written.  My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker who writes hate mail to a college student and a celebrity.  Sounds like the maniacal manifestos of any real-life lunatic.  If I were every to do anything – hypothetically, please, because I’m a wuss when it comes to actual violence, I get out my revenge on paper – the books I’ve written would seem like clues.

The same could be said for anyone who writes about darker subjects.  And one of the damaging things reaped by a person like John Patrick Bedell or Joe Stack is that while they call attention to certain ideas, they also make it seem like certain ideas are the purview of lunatics.  Doesn’t do someone like David Ray Griffin any good.  So they destroy more than whatever it is they set out to destroy in a violent act. If you read John Patrick Bedell’s blog entries they’re a strange mixture of total clarity and precision while also being unintelligible.  Cold and distant, no sense of personality comes through. even if some of his ideas aren’t totally off-base.  The guy was plainly mentally ill and used these ideas as a springboard.

There is a basic conflict in the world today between the power of organizations and the liberty of individuals. The greatest achievements of human societies have historically been linked to the freedom of individuals to pursue their unique course. Human liberty has a spiritual benefit for individuals that can easily be overlooked, but it also has a profoundly beneficial economic effect for societies. Ample historical evidence, supported by economic insights, demonstrates that the economic and cultural progress of free societies with secure property rights is unparalleled by that produced by other forms of government.

His writing is really hard to get your head around.  Makes enough sense sentence by sentence, but also seems to be missing a circuit.  Of course that may be hindsight.

What this also brings forward is what celebrity means in the digital age. People have always committed crimes to be famous (Mark David Chapman).  But now that fame is both more instant and more permanent.  In an instant, his Youtube video is getting views, people are going to his Sourceforge page, even looking at his Amazon wishlist (I realize I’m helping these go viral). It is profoundly eerie that I could get more attention for my writing in an instant by doing something horrible than I could ever do by going a more-human route. Again, that’s a hypothetical and worth a short story in itself.

There’s no reason to think these things won’t start happening with more and more regularity – with each new one giving an extra license for the next.  Even mainstream personalities like Michael Moore decry the corporate takeover of the government.  Does that make him a lunatic?  No, it’s not a minority view, and it’s growing on both the far left and the far right.  If the current structure is actually leading to the demise of the planet and entire societies, it’s not lunacy to try to stop that from occurring.  So far, though, it’s the lunatics who have taken action with totally self-defeating and purposeless events.  All they do is increase the sense of breakdown.

The media sucks so much that the right has been given the “outrage” mantle, when the left is just as outraged at the state of government.  Maybe if the left and right could see where they overlap and not devolve into hyperbole (Obama is Hitler) a true populist movement could emerge.  And maybe these acts of violence wouldn’t have to happen because the outrage would have a targeted voice, and wouldn’t just come off as a tantrum.  So far these violent acts have the intellectual weight of the stupidest of teabagger signs:

or

I find someone who writes a sign like that a low-grade lunatic.  They’re a reflection of the dissolution of the country as much as the government they’re protesting against.  Not holding my breath for these protest movements to suddenly get reasonable.

Anyway, that’s when I knew Philip, and now we’ve reconnected. From his piece,

I’ve made frequent work-related trips to the southeast section of the state, particularly to a town called Coffeyville, and seen such reckless toxic industrial waste it staggers the imagination. Whole cities and sections of cities have had to be evacuated (Treece, Kansas, Picher, Oklahoma, Galena and Coffeyville, Kansas). There is a refinery in Coffeyville that is owned by Goldamn Sachs, does $3 billion in sales every year, that dumps its waste straight into the Verdigris River and can be smelled throughout the town and, depending on the winds, from twenty miles away. A business called Safety Kleen (you can’t make this up), owned by Viacom, dumped enormous quantities of dioxin and PCB into the regional ecosystem. No one has yet figured out how to clean up Safety Kleen’s lethal mess. The populous of Coffeyville demonstrates a bizarre array of skin afflictions. The tap water tastes like something you would use to clean a rug.

It’s not entirely hopeless:

What can be hoped for?

Much of it can be resolved by simply stopping the destruction. The landscape has an unstoppable capacity for regeneration. If you don’t mow your lawn, in a few short months you’ll find yourself surrounded by jungle.

Once erosion stabilizes and wetlands renew themselves, they have a near miraculous capacity to filter and break down most toxins. Wildlife populations race into new niches, adapt quickly and thrive when relieved of the stresses of human encroachment.

Philip Heying’s responsible for this very great picture of William Burroughs and Timothy Leary. Other great photos on his site.

Two interesting interviews found recently.  One via Futurismic with the founder of Paypal and principle investor in Facebook who has a sci-fi vision of the future.

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

Wired: You’re worried about economic stagnation, but you’re optimistic about artificial intelligence and space?

Thiel: I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again.

Wired: We need underwater cities and flying cars, otherwise we’re going bankrupt?

Thiel: We go bankrupt if radical progress doesn’t happen and we don’t realize it’s not happening. That’s a dangerous combination.

Next, via Dangerous Minds, a piece from Of Two Minds called “Why I am Optimistic”:

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry…

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maybe not that optimistic, because it still relies on things falling apart before being reborn as something less manifestly stupid. I was at the doctor’s office where I picked up a copy of Time Magazine and this article by Kurt Anderson called The End of Excess:

We cannot just hunker down, cross our fingers, hysterically pinch our pennies, wait for the crises to pass, blame the bankers and then go back to business as usual. All that conventional wisdom about 2008 being a “change” year? We had no idea. Recently Rush Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, panicking not so much about the economy but about how the political winds are blowing as a result. If we finally manage to achieve something like universal health care, Limbaugh warned, it would mean “the end of America as we know it.” He’s right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is the end of the world as we’ve known it. But it isn’t the end of the world.

In a mainstream magazine, it’s basically making the exact same point.  This system needs to die because it doesn’t work.  While anti-government/corporation hysteria makes sense, the trouble is that this sort of rallying cry has been taken over by the fanatical right-wing.  Timothy McVeigh was “anti-government,” and there’s no sense that the pro-militia right have any answer about how to run this very complex system except to burn it all down.  And the right-leaning anti-government types usually have the wrong targets, when it’s the “small government” right wing that enables a further devolution of our system.  From The Economist:

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Libertarians, though, want to do away with the tax system altogether.  Though it would be great to have a Venus Project style Utopia ala Zeitgeist, it’s less feasible than reforming our current system (even if a reformed system is unsustainable).  What’s so striking about Joe Stack’s suicide note is that he’s no right wing teabagger – he references Communism as being potentially preferable (while decrying the tax system, which makes limited sense).  The guy’s no hero – he tried to kill his wife and daughter, so he’s a mentally ill fuckwit.  But it’s not going to be entirely surprising if things like this happen with more and more regularity.  The Economist article concludes, “It’s a massive populist backlash waiting to explode.”

A Second American Revolution is not entirely implausible (or at least an attempt) because imagine a time when oil has peaked, jobs are scarcer due to digital automation, and the planet seems to be killing itself with our help, people would actually need to “take it to the streets” in order to change the system – a form of self-preservation.  This isn’t a right-wing idea – it’s the basis of the hippie movement, or anyone who’s been anti-establishment.  It’s just with Obama in power, the right have lost their collective minds with the incredibly stupid mantra “I want my country back.”  Which country – the one that led to the state we’re in right now?

The idea that this is “Barack Obama’s economy” is myopic bordering on insane – hear that, media?  You’re insane.  There is no way Obama is responsible for our current economy any more than he’s responsible for our oil-based economy or rampant obesity.  Our civilization is systemically fucked-up and if anything, you can fault Obama for zombifying a system that needs to die.  He’s keeping it alive, not killing it, and it needs to be dead and buried. So when people decry “socialism” over the health care debate, when reform is (ideally) meant to benefit people and take power away from the corporations, they are hardly the people to lead a populist revolution against the status quo.  They’re too fucking stupid.

The interview on Of Two Minds led me to the book Operation Serf, which I’m going to check out, though on his blog he refers to the Socialist agenda, which makes me nervous.  That novel in turn led me to the book American Apocalypse – interestingly, both self-published via CreateSpace.  Not sure about the political affiliation of that one.  Most end of the world scenario diatribes tend to be Libertarian.

Pretty volatile and interesting time we’re living in. Or at least an interesting time to be a writer.

Joe Stack’s Suicide Note – http://embeddedart.com/