It smells like shit
War war war. Blood and carnage. I'm damn sick of it.
We need more protests. No Mr. Tubbs is going to come down from the sky to take us to a better place. We are stuck in this mire of shit.
We need more protests. Is anybody planning a protest?
Should I buy a crate and go stand on it?
There's a lady who yells no to animal abuse in my neighborhood.
I pounded a snare-drum once, and then the cops came.
I'm tempted to go pound the snare drum again.
If there are any protests in the works, let me know about them. I want in.
Or if we've decided that they don't work anymore, tell me why the hell not? What will we tell our damn children?
4 comments:
well, by the time people of our generation have children or they are of age to ask questions, they will have been so mutated by chemicals that the 'questioning impulse' will have been neutralized. remember the futurlogical congress. the poison has already begun to paralyze the masses. beat that drum and get your friends to beat theirs until the government takes them away for 'disturbing the peace.' i mean until they take away the 1st amendment.
--thod
i often wonder about this. if protesting failed, and we know we're confronted with a fierce & shitty evil, what do we do?
is it okay to be passive? if not, what action is meaningful? (protests tended to seem like they meant more to participants than leaders anyhow)
there are always stories about the lone imprisoned radicals, in police states. they suffer alone, and decades later the regime falls, and the sufferers, if they live, are hailed as heroes.
what's it mean that i'm not willing to sacrifice myself?
maybe if i felt like there was a movement, i would be willing to do this. i know there are brave or foolish (or ethnically disadvantaged) fuckers out there being tortured for america's right to be stupid, at this very moment. how corrupt and morally bankrupt are we not to be willing to join in?
and, even supposing i wanted to make a martyr of myself, how would i accomplish it, and be useful about it? burn a flag? visit tom delay naked? (...tom delay would be such a great DJ name...) hack into the pentagon? i lack the expertise for most of these (except the flag burning, i retired one as a boy scout once, it was fun)
this stuff is really troubling. because maybe it's not enough to be a nice, gentle person. not enough to be a vegetarian or a buddhist or an artist. maybe if we had any fucking courage we'd be setting police cars on fire. i just don't know.
maybe the snare drum is the answer. although you know that next time the cops might shoot first and criticize your rhythm second...
There is no leadership. I've always thnought that movements need a leader, a charismatic spokesperson who isn't afraid to sacrifice himself for it. Without organized, centralized leadership it's just a bunch of people who have the same vague politics.
I've been to a number of protests in D-town and they are all the same- A few local leaders say what's bad, everyone cheers and wave their stick-signs about, they march a couple of blocks and then they go home or get a beer or something. Everytime I go to one of these, I want to see the opposition represented- I want see some arguing, some discourse, something or somebody changing another's mind.
It's all about leadership, passion and representation.
Yes yes yes.
The questioning impulse has almost been mutated out of us. But it's not gone yet.
The protests did not fail. I remember them. Everyone remembers them. Even if they were downplayed by the media.
But imagine if there was a bunch of protests now?
I can bang a drum. And the old lady next door can call the police. She may not connect the politics of it. She reported a gun shot. (Or whoever reported the so-called gunshot.) Norman Mailer said that you run a straight line in any society and you will find its bounds. I found it. I remember it, so does everyone else who was there.
I can't get the idea of Armitron Watches out of my head because I see an Armitron watch billboard everytime I'm waiting for the N train on my way home. It's called a marketing campaign.
Do we not bang our drums because the police arrive? What if we all banged our drums? Is the banging of the drum an unsound tactic because it does not communicate an anti-war stance--it remains only a gesture of noisemaking and attention-seeking...
In other words, by protesting, the opposition sees us as desperate and antagonistic--we're either stupid or were assholes or we're both. But we can't play their game. Only they can play their game. They invented it.
When Chrysler wants to sell cars, they spend a bunch of money and buy a third of all airtime to shove Chrysler down our throats. Car company commercials are rarely subtle. They are noisemaking. I immediately tune them out because I don't want a car.
For some reason we can all tune so much out so easily. But when we really think about all the deathdealing we do, how can you not notice unless you kill something inside yourself? Or maybe it is something that is dead in our culture. Or it is something in culture that never occured naturally--we have to nurture our abhorence to deathdealing.
Anyhow, I guess there's no use in just whining about not protesting. We're all too busy with our lives. We have to wait until someone like Al Franken or MoveOn.org wants us to protest. And maybe they've had enough of all of that.
I mean, we can't even do a Woodstock.
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