ovo

Previously published in OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991).

THE STATE CREATES ITS OWN ENEMIES

Goulishly capitalizing on the tragedy of a mass murder, the anti-gun forces are surging forward with their plans for total gun confiscation. If law-abiding private citizens were disarmed, they claim, criminals and crazies would be unable to kill and maim. That’s an obvious lie–criminals, by definition, disobey laws, and madmen can kill with knives, cars, or champagne bottles as easily and as senselessly as they can with guns. The not-so-secret agenda of the State and its apologists is clear: disarm peaceful citizens to render them powerless. Turn law-abiding Americans into criminals with the stroke of a legislative pen. Anyone who refuses to surrender his or her weapons would become an Enemy Of The State, much the same as any armed citizen is right now in the Soviet Union, or Communist China, or Socialist Nicaragua, or Fascist El Salvador, or Monarchist Great Britain. Gun confiscation is non-partisan–it is always and forever aimed at anyone disliked by the current gang in power.

GUN SEIZURE SPARKED 1776 REVOLUTION

The American Revolution began in a dispute over gun control when British Redcoats marched toward Lexington and Concord to disarm farmers there. London claimed to be the “legitimate” government ruling America, just as Washington or Sacremento or Albany claims to be today. And their attempt to disarm us, stems from the same power lust that drove King George. We must, therefore, hold onto our guns–legally or illegally–for the very same reason the colonists did.

THE TRUTH ABOUT GUN OWNERSHIP

The anti-gunners, certain that the role of government is to grant privileges and dictate behavior, shout that citizens have no reason to be “allowed” to own assault rifles, which have “no legitimate sporting use.” The Constitution, though, says nothing about “a well-regulated sporting club” being necessary. We do not own handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, and other powerful weapons because we are hunters or plinkers or collectors. We do not even own guns because the Constitution “allows” us to. The Constitution does not “grant” rights. It recognizes rights already and irrevocably held forever by the people themselves (individuals), and forbids government from trampling on them. We have a right to keep and bear arms regardless of whether the Second Amendment exists or not! All Article Two guarantees is that we shouldn’t have to defend that right against “our” federal government. We’ve seen that simple guarantee erode, though, haven’t we?

The real reason for gun ownership is to protect the individual from the State, whether it be an invading State from accross the seas or a domestic State grown tyrannical and oppressive. The goal of total, repressive confiscation is clear in the subtle, shifting arguments of the anti-gun forces. When handguns were the target, they clamored prohibition because handguns were not militia-type weapons protected by the Second Amendment. Now they cry for assault rifle bans because “mere citizens” have no business possessing “military-style” weapons!

These eager confiscators rightly point out that assault rifles, handguns, and indeed all “weapons” have only one purpose: to kill. Again they speak a truth, but only partially. The unasked question is, “To kill whom? And under what circumstances?” The answer is, “To kill any who attempt to rob, maim, rape, or kill us.” Even that answer, though, does not fully express the most important reason for gun ownership. Only a small number of people are actually touched by criminal violence. The State, though, touches each and every one of us every hour of every day. People in government seek to tax our earnings to pay for their whims, to draft our children to fight in wars they start, to regulate and interfere with our lives out of pure love of power and their desire to wield it. They have become as tyrannical as any Tory redcoat, Soviet Commissar, or Nazi Gestapo. And they are coming to steal your last line of defense against them. Will you meekly obey?

GUN CONTROL ENFORCED AT GUNPOINT

When any law against guns is passed, how is it backed up? How will the State remove banned weapons from private hands? How will agents of the State disarm the citizenry? Why, by the use of guns, of course! This contradiction has never bothered statists. Why are handguns and assault rifles evil and wicked in the hands of private citizens, yet perfectly fine in the hands of employees of the State? If this is truly “government by the people” why do we see the servants disarming their masters by force? What do they fear from us, if theirs is a legitimate, benevolent government? If the State does not seek to control us, why does it want us disarmed?

The usual answer–stripped of equivocation–is that “mere citizens” are like half-witted children, incapable of safely handling “dangerous” commodities such as weapons or explosives or medicines or information. And only when some half-witted children pass a civil service exam or are elected by other halfwits to work for the wise and benevolent State do they magically become smart and honest and trustworthy enough to carry weapons and decide whom shall be “allowed” to possess guns and what sort of design, shape, or weight such weapons shall be.

Sounds pretty condescending and paternalistic, doesn’t it? That’s how they view us. Sheep for the shearing at tax time, cannon fodder during war time, and dangerous idiots the rest of the time.

And they dare ask us to obey their decrees?

GOVERNMENT CREATES CRIME

What many gun owners refuse to face, usually by saying “it can’t happen in America,” is that the government can and does create new classes of criminals with the mere stroke of a pen. In 1919, Prohibition turns millions of people overnight from sociable drinkers to Enemies Of The State. The victimless crime of ingesting alcohol turned neighborly, peaceful people into fair game for imprisonment, fines, and seizure of property. Some fought back, often with simple shotguns against “revenooers” armed with assault rifles (the Thompson sub-machine gun) in a modern version of the Whiskey Rebellion. The Prohibition amendment created crime by definition. If, tommorow, smoking or drinking coffee or owning a book were declared illegal, the State would suddenly point to a new “criminal underworld” of massive proportions. In the eyes of the State they would become “a new breed of criminal” to be weeded out of society and thrown into prisons. So it is with any prohibition of popular activities, including gun ownership.

GUN PROHIBITION DISARMS THE POOR

Let’s face it–police respond faster to calls from Beverly Hills than they do to calls from Watts. And the rich can afford armed guards, to boot! When so-called Saturday Night Specials are banned, does it affect those who can spend hundreds on a fine pistol? No. Does it prevent criminals from stealing whatever weapon they want or buying it on the black market? No. The only people harmed by a “cheap handgun” ban are the honest poor who have hardly enough money to feed their children, let alone defend them from inner-city marauders. Any form of gun control disarms those least able to defend themselves. And what good is a 15 day waiting period to someone who is threatened by an armed criminal coming by tonight? When one perceives a threat, one should be able to aquire protection immediately.

GUN PROHIBITION IS RACIST

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was rammed down the throats of the American public, blatantly exploiting then-current fears of gun-toting black rioters by implying that the law would help to disarm American Blacks, other minorities, and all dissenters at a time of civil upheaval. to paraphrase a popular slogan, “If the government does not trust minorities with guns, minorities cannot trust government.” Ask any Native American.

In a mirror image case 20 years later, assault rifle bans are being ramrodded through legislatures by appealing to fears that gun-toting white racists are on the loose.

The real and only purpose of gun control is to disarm the innocent and the peaceful, of whatever race, creed, or social status.

GUN PROHIBITION IS SEXIST

The same goes for women. Police and purported feminists urge women to resist rape with fists, fingernails, keyrings, and screams. But why should any woman allow an assailant to get within arms length of her? Why don’t Women’s Rights activists in or out of government reveal the most effective way for a woman to defend herself: to buy a gun and learn to use it? The truth is, they want women to feel weak and perpetually threatened so that they will beg the State for protection. A woman standing proud, armed, and fearless is the last thing most self-proclaimed “feminists” want (since that would undercut their perverse longing for a huge paternalistic government!)

GOVERNMENTS KILL MORE THAN ANY MASS-MURDERER

How can people who work for or worship the State–statists–point to the murder of five children in a schoolyard or twenty people in a restaurant and claim that as sufficient reason to disarm tens of millions of Americans? Are they so presumptuous as to suggest that we are capable of such violent madness? Perhaps there is a degree of psychological projection going on here: statists feel within themselves the urge to kill and project it onto the people they fear the most–us, the victims of the State. For while tens of millions of people own guns, only a minuscule fraction ever use those guns to aggress against others. Every State, however has guns and even more powerful and terrifying weapons in its clutches and every State has used them, will use them, and are using them to murder hundreds, thousands, and millions of innocent, unarmed people.

How can the insane mind of a Patrick Purdy ever dream of matching the death toll of the most minor skirmish in the smallest of wars or “police actions?” The murder of five innocent children is heart-rendingly tragic, but how many thousands of innocent children were roasted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many unarmed, peaceful, young people were slaughtered in Tienanamen Square? How many women, children, and old people have been shot by the bullets of “their own” government in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, India, Israel, Afghanistan, Tibet, Argentina, Libya, Ireland, Russia, South Africa, Chile, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Iran, and on and on and on for every State you can name, even “our” United States. For statists to use the “mass murder” of a few people as an excuse to disarm Americans when the State is the largest, bloodiest, longest-lived institution of mass-murder in all of history is appallingly hypocritical. Do we owe allegiance to the apologists for such atrocities? NEVER!

Private ownership of weaponry is the last defense against all tyranny, foreign and domestic. The thought that there might come a time when peaceable gun owners (even members of the patriotic NRA) must take arms against an American Li Peng commanding the local police and the US military is anathema to nearly everyone. The possibility, however, must be faced. A lot of American colonists were horrified at the thought of defending themselves against “their” king’s army, too.

CIVILIAN-BASED DEFENSE PREFERED TO STANDING ARMY

Some say that the Constitution “granted” the right to keep and bear arms to provide for a “well-regulated militia.” Since we have a standing army, the argument goes, civilians no longer need to own guns. Yet that amendment was written precisely because the British used that exact argument in their attempts (from 1768 to 1777) to disarm the colonists. Americans detested the standing armies of the British government and knew that civilian-based defense was the ultimate, perhaps the only protection against any threat to liberty, whether from London, Moscow, or Washington, D.C.

DEFYING UNJUST LAWS IS RIGHT AND PROPER!

When the day comes (and it will, if we don’t raise our voices in protest now) that the Imperial State commands its subjects (that’s how they view you and me, regardless of what they say) to turn in our weapons, what will we do? Make no mistake–if people refuse to surrender or destroy their weapons, they will be dealt with by heavily armed police; they will be imprisoned, fined, perhaps even shot if they try to defend their Constitutional–nay, their human–rights.

Of whom should we be more wary–invading troops whose rule we would never sanction, or “our own” government, to which most of us grant some legitimacy and which is right here, right now, all around us? Perhaps paraphrasing a parent’s question will help provide an answer: If the State passed a law telling you to jump off a cliff, would you? No fair answering that “good, pure, sober, honest politicians wouldn’t let that happen.” With guns, it is happening right now.

And when that friendly cop on the beat (whom most gun owners exalt as a good man just doing his job and who may even be a fellow NRA member!) comes around to your house, he will come armed with “good government” handguns and assault rifles. “Sorry pal,” he’ll say, “but the law is the law.”

That possibility is something many gun owners–staunch defenders of law and order and supporters of local police–refuse to face. They blank out the fact that even–perhaps especially–in America, they may have to choose between owning their guns and facing the full implication of the Declaration of Independence,

“…that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…”

Some would rather surrender meekly to the State, giving up their last shred of defense against tyranny, rather than face that choice. But if they do surrender their firepower, the choice will have been made. And it won’t matter whether our new masters speak Russian, Chinese, Japanese, English, or American Bureaucratese. They will be our masters nonetheless.

WHAT TO DO

First of all, keep your guns! Do not turn them in just because some law is passed ordering you to do so. That’s just what they want–sheeplike compliance. you are not a criminal. Don’t let the State treat you like one. The colonists who turned in their weapons to their Tory town governments soon learned the folly of their actions. Any government that outlaws gun ownership is an outlaw government! It is no more necessary to obey an oppressive, tyrannical State than it is to obey any thief who demands that you turn over your property under threat of death. We know the free person’s answer to such a demand. So does the State. That is why statists seek to browbeat us into disarming without a fight. They need the sanction of the victim. They cannot hope to disarm us by force. That would tip their hand and guarantee a revolution. But by stealth, instilled guilt, and appeals to our peaceful, law-abiding natures will they attempt to expropriate our only defense against their continued and increasing predations.

Resist the urge to obey the edicts of self-proclaimed rulers. Don’t walk timidly into a concentration camp filled with once-free men and women. Decry with every fiber of your being this trampling of our fundamental human rights!

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS A CIVIL RIGHT, WITHOUT WHICH ALL OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEND.

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS THE RIGHT TO OWN–AND PROTECT–YOUR BODY AND YOUR PROPERTY.

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS THE RIGHT TO RESIST TYRANNY.

ANY WHO SEIZE GUNS ARE THIEVES OR TYRANTS.

Every law restricting free, immediate access to firearms is a direct attack on individual freedom. The course of action is up to you. Demand the repeal of all such laws or ignore them with impunity. But never accept them as legitimate restraints upon your liberty. Nothing legitimate can issue from the pen of tyrants.

Stencil by Trevor Blake. Seen at a popular web site by a good friend.

As of 29 November 2009, there are 18,756 posts at ovo127.com.  Every one of them has been bundled into a zip file and is now available as a 54 MB download here. Like everything else at this site, it is offered into the public domain…

The person or persons who have associated their work with these documents (the “Dedicators”) hereby dedicate the entire copyright in the works of authorship identified below (the “Work”) to the public domain. Dedicators make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicators’ heirs and successors. Dedicators intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicators understand that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. Dedicators recognize that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

Radley Balko, How to Get Ahead in Law:

Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry. Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children. Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place. In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same questions over and over – even after repeated denials – until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers. [...] In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.” So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.

Religious Tolerance, The Baran Sexual Abuse Case:

The Bernard Baran indictment appears to have many factors in common with dozens of ritual abuse cases which surfaced during the 1980s and early 1990s. Bernard is a homosexual. That has proven to be a tremendous personal liability, because of the high level of homophobia in American society. On 1983-AUG-1, Bernard Baran was hired as a teacher’s aide by the West Side Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) in Pittsfield, MA. Pittsfield is located near the extreme western border of Massachusetts, very close to the state of New York. The uncle of one of Baran’s students complained to the ECDC that he did not want a homosexual teaching his nephew. Shortly after this complaint, he and his sister-in-law called police and said that the boy had accused Baran of molesting him. On 1984-OCT-6, Baran was charged with sexually assaulting two three-year-old children at ECDC. The number of charges reached nine after most of the 160 children at the ECDC were interviewed. Baran was 19 years of age at the time. On 1985-JAN-30, he received a sentenced of 3 concurrent life terms. Because of his age and slight build, he was easy pray for other inmates. “During his first four years, he was raped and physically assaulted 30-40 times. He has suffered serious eye injuries and many broken bones. [...] In all probability, he is innocent. In fact, the criminal acts for which he was charged probably never happened. However, the children (now in their twenties) probably retain “memories” of the abuse that were implanted in their minds as a result of improper interview techniques.

Articles continue at links.  See also the Free Baran archive.  I lived in a small town as a teenager in the 1980s.  I read books, including books on taboo subjects.  I played role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  I listened to music that wasn’t to be found on the radio.  I was very aware that a satanic panic was occurring in the United States, and that I could be caught up in it for my interests.  I could be accused of the kind of nonsense that Baran was caught up in.  I found two strategies that worked well in keeping myself safe.  Those strategies were knowing when to be public about my interests and when to be private.  Being public (including publishing OVO) meant that any argument I was a secret agent for evil would be weak.  Being private meant that what the do-gooders didn’t need to know about they never knew about.  But it was my dumb luck that the do-gooders didn’t try especially hard.  Now I’m an adult and it turns out reading those books, playing those games and listening to that music didn’t do me or anyone else any particular harm.  Turns out the good guys were the bad guys and the bad guys were innocent.  I’m the one who stuck by my guns.  The judges and therapists and police and teachers and clergy who made bank on the satanic panic are the ones who tucked tail and shuffled into an underground tunnel.   I don’t deserve any particular reward for what I did.  But were this a just world, they would be held accountable for what they did.  Bernard Baran spent half his life in prison to satisfy the blood lust of those who serve an invisible monster that lives in the sky.  And that’s one of the reasons I’m public about my interest in the withering away of religion under the twin suns of scorn and reason.

John Dolan, Lord Byron the eXile’s Patron Saint (via):

[Lord Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism” in a normative sense – God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth. Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

The Guardian, Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro (16 February 2003):

A bizarre political statement by Saddam Hussein has earned Iraq a windfall of hundreds of million of euros. In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar – ‘the currency of the enemy’ – for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. On Friday the euro had reached $1.08, up 30 per cent from that time. Almost all of Iraq’s oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001. Around 26 billion euros (£17.4bn) has been paid for 3.3 billion barrels of oil into an escrow account in New York. [...] The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme.

The US went to war with Iraq in March 2003. “Since currently worldwide oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, changes in the value of the dollar against other world currencies affect OPEC’s decisions on how much oil to produce. For example, when the dollar falls relative to the other currencies, OPEC-member states receive smaller revenues in other currencies for their oil, causing substantial cuts in their purchasing power. After the introduction of the euro, pre-invasion Iraq decided it wanted to be paid for its oil in euros instead of US dollars causing OPEC to consider changing its oil exchange currency to euros, although after Iraq’s invasion, the interim government reversed this policy, and the subsequent Iraq governments stuck to the US dollar. Member states Iran and Venezuela have undergone similar shifts from the dollar to the Euro” (Wikipedia).

The Independent, The demise of the dollar (6 October 2009):

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.  Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

Will the US go to war with Iran soon? Maybe not, maybe these talks never happened.  Still… William Clark wrote: “Although completely unreported by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking – it is in large part an oil currency war.”

Previously in OVO on the topic of currency wars… Klint Finley contributed “The New Currency Wars” [revision] to OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008). This essay is reprinted in Digital Gold Currency Magazine (January 2009).

For immediate release!

OVO has recently added the contents of two older online projects that I was a part of: my links at delicious.com and my first blog. OVO now has 18,689 posts from June 2001 to the present.  Later I hope to import all of my flickr images, BBS messages and usenet posts.  The earliest surviving evidence of my being online appears to be from October 1991.  OVO in zine form goes back to 1987, and I’ve scanned a few pages of an earlier zine going back to 1985.

Nobody likes press releases.

Fourth in a series – collect them all! A few more examples of links I’ve posted (harvested in turn from other sources) showing up later at boingboing.net.

Heavy metal monk
posted by David Pescovitz on 18 March 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 18 July 2008.

Ritually Stolen Penises and Vaginas – Not a Joke Here
posted by Xeni Jardin on 18 March 2009,
posted by Trevor Blake on 23 April 2008.

Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse Performed by Harmonica Quintet
posted by Mark Frauenfelder on 16 April 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 16 July 2008.

Atheists Who’ll Take In Your Pets After the Rapture
posted by Cory Doctorow on 27 August 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 1 July 2009.

As J. R. “Bob” Dobbs said, “If you want to be known as a creative, original person, make sure you imitate the right people.” I know I do.  I don’t know where boingboing.net gets its links, and I doubt it is from me.  But I can say where I get mine.  You could do much worse than to spend all of your free time reading metafilter, Dark Roasted Blend, digg and Everlasting Blort.  Places I’d like to see quoted more often are Mutate!, Less Wrong, Overcoming Bias and The Hoover Hog.  And OVO.

Today is the second anniversary of OVO blog. Thank you to my readers, thank you to my critics, and thank you especially to two men who have influenced OVO online the most: Klint Finley and Daniel Rafatpanah.

At the Surrealist film show, someone asked Stan Brakhage about the media’s use of surrealism (MTV, etc.); he answered that it was a “damn shame.” Well, maybe it is & maybe it isn’t (does popular kultur ipso facto lack all inspiration?) – but granting that on some level the media’s appropriation of Surrealism is a damn shame, are we to believe that there was nothing in surrealism that allowed this theft to occur?

The return of the repressed means the return of the paleolithic – not a return to the Old Stone Age, but a spiraling around on a new level of the gyre. (After all, 99.9999% of human experience is of hunting/gathering, with agriculture & industry a mere oil slick on the deep well of non-history.) Paleolithic equals pre-Work (”original leisure society”). Post-Work (Zerowork) equals “Psychic Paleolithism.”

All projects for the “liberation of desire” (Surrealism) which remain enmeshed in the matrix of Work can only lead to the commodification of desire. The Neolithic begins with desire for commodities (agricultural surplus), moves on to the production of desire (industry), & ends with the implosion of desire (advertising). The Surrealist liberation of desire, for all its aesthetic accomplishments, remains no more than a subset of production – hence the wholesaling of Surrealism to the Communist Party & its Work-ist ideology (not to mention attendant misogyny & homophobia). Modern leisure, in turn, is simply a subset of Work (hence its commodification) – so it is no accident that when Surrealism closed up shop, the only customers at the garage sale were ad execs.

Advertising, using Surrealism’s colonization of the unconscious to create desire, leads to the final implosion of Surrealism. It’s not just a “damn shame & a disgrace,” not a simple appropriation. Surrealism was made for advertising, for commodification. Surrealism is in fact a betrayal of desire.

And yet, out of this abyss of meaning, desire still rises, innocent as a new-hatched phoenix. Early Berlin dada (which rejected the return of the art-object) for all its faults provides a better model for dealing with the implosion of the social than Surrealism could ever do – an anarchist model, or perhaps (in anthro-jargon) a non-authoritarian model, a destruction of all ideology, of all chains of law. As the structure of Work/Leisure crumbles into emptiness, as all forms of control vanish in the dissolution of meaning, the Neolithic seems bound to vanish as well, with all its temples & granaries & police, to be replaced by some return of hunting/gathering on the psychic level – a re-nomadization. Everything’s imploding & disappearing – the oedipal family, education, even the unconscious itself (as Andrei Codrescu says). Let’s not mistake this for Armageddon (let’s resist the seduction of apocalypse, the eschatological con) – it’s not the world coming to an end – only the empty husks of the social, catching fire & disappearing.

Surrealism must be junked along with all the other beautiful bric-a-brac of agricultural priestcraft & vapid control-systems. No one knows what’s coming, what misery, what spirit of wildness, what joy – but the last thing we need on our voyage is another set of commissars – popes of our dreams – daddies. Down with Surrealism…

(first published in OVO 7, later published in T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone)

As long as no Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of… an insurrection?

Never mind if it’s “impossible.” What else can we hope to attain but the “impossible”? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?

If art has died, or the audience has withered away, then we find ourselves free of two dead weights. Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist – & potentially every audience has regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences.

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images we’ve been “given” by the organizers of this salon – murder, war, famine, & greed).

We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness – but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure.

For example, the man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacifist & refused to fight for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree..

One day a former fellow-officer came to visit him & accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting – & the officer fell into a rage, drew his sword, & struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the officer & returned his sword. Again & again the officer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire – but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him.

The officer of course became his first disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. We might contemplate some form of metadrama meant to capture a taste of this performance, which gave rise to a wholly new art, a totally non-violent way of fighting – war without murder, “the sword of life” rather than death.

A conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence – at the millennium rather than the apocalypse – or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization & liberation.

Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared – only to re-appear on another plane, where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?

(first published in OVO 2, later published in T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone)