"Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals. He uses them like animals and, even if he does not tell them so, in himself he always knows quite clearly that they mean just as little to him; when he speaks to his intimates he will call them sheep or cattle. His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them. What remains of them afterwards does not matter to him. The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them. When they are no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does excrement, simply seeing to it that they do not poison the air of his house."
On November 6th in Oakland, the Spectacle seemed to choke any airspace usually left for critical thought. Everyone was manic off sugary beer and drunk on the success of a figurehead who does Not Give A Fuck About Them.
Drone strikes, indefinite detention, warrant-less wiretapping. "Lesser of two evils." (But perhaps there's another option?) No.
That night I attempted to explain my idea that voter apathy stems from a jargon-dense dialectic which excludes the very people it exploits. This "no shit" statement was to undergird the larger, perhaps more opaque idea that people do not oblige themselves to participate in politics because there's is a cognitive dissonance separating Everyday Life from Politics. Also! I argued the very unpopular point that there are positive aspects to this. Meaning, do I want to invite such a corrupt, monied, invasive, unethical system of "governance" into my everyday life? Can we ever evade it? (What I mean is: can one forge a workable psychology of Resistance? Because, politics is entrenched, obviously, and power structures/[im]balances are visible everywhere, at all times.)
Perhaps the most contentious or problematic aspect of Anarchism is that decentralized societies are incredibly hard to maintain--yet we'll never even get there if people remain blind to how, where, and why that centralization occurs in the first place.
ANYWAY. i watched the TV Party ("The cocktail party that's also a political party!") documentary last night. Glenn O'Brien and Co. stood for freedom, subversiveness, absurdity and dizzying aural/visual elements...just a bunch of weirdos who were doing something intelligent with their friends, outside of network-control. They were also very funny.
So, yeah. Break rank. Create anarchic space, however you define that, and defend it to the last. Because that is our only "third option," at this point.
[This TVP still may not represent any of the above, however: Babes.]
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