Yay, Capitalism: Tom Morello

"When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes and Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart."

Is a quote from Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who's justifying the band's use of capitalist media to promote their anarchic music. It's half fifth column and half realism. Personally, I'm a fan of capitalism, but that's a topic for another more cerebral discussion.

How Skyscrapers destroyed the Revolution

Radicalism is quashed by tall buildings. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from continued habitation in North America. Mexico plays host to many small buildings and is rewarded with zealous revolutionaries. We, living in the shadows of towering international finance, are led to believe that Mexico is plagued by ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’. North of the Rio Grande, we mistake Tim Hortons for freedom. France, fervently dedicated to buildings with fewer than three storeys, is regularly shaken by the revolutionary will of its people. The Eiffel Tower shadowed its people with reactionism, but still the whisper of 1789 haunt the banlieus. Nonetheless, Paris will fall. Japan’s proud history of righteous warfare shook the world till its buildings choked on the depraved narcotic we call upward mobility. Imperialist occupation sent its buildings soaring, and the will of its people was forever crushed. See how the fools of New York are led blindly beneath the citadels of pain and oppression. The world’s miseries are churned through the blinking monitors of Manhattan’s depraved machines whilst the forgotten masses huddle in the continent of genesis, sighing fearfully in their low huts, yearning for the taste of liberty. Liberty is a lie. It will heighten their ceiling but it will not feed their children. It drips like rancid saliva from sharpened teeth. In the lands where men waste their lives marketing liberty’s falsehoods, the buildings are tall. Their height crushes the innocent. The innocent are contemptible.

They are doomed.

K: Nouns

In the first post of its kind (on here, at any rate), I've decided to write about something that I feel vaguely irritated about, instead of writing about violence.

Nouns: they're not verbs. So, for example, "How will this impact on us?" is wrong. However, I'm aware of an inevitable transition here. Apparently "contact" used to be a noun only. There are probably a lot of misanthropic men somewhere (not too dissimilar to me, except older and wiser) who bemoan the loss of "contact", and its usurpation as a pseudo-verb, even though to me it's perfectly justifiable to use it as a verb.

The upshot of this is, of course, that I am doomed to be forever angry at these inevitable shifts, unless I can learn to embrace them. I've already created one of my own: I "fonzied" a broken vending machine and got it working. And we all use "google" as a verb (both of these examples are also non-capitalised, which should irk me more than it does). Also, I started the previous sentence with a conjunction. Is nothing sacred?

VP: Canadian Syrup-Boarding

It was the end of another hard day of Canadian syrup-boarding. Once again, every one of their terrorist suspects had suffocated when the maple syrup clogged their nostrils, and Conrad suspected that syrup as a method of torture was too viscous. He frequently articulated this idea to his immediate superior, who vigorously slapped him and called him a Yank. Conrad dreaded telling people of his profession when he attended social events such as parties, not least because every person he told tried to fit the phrase “sticky situation” into their response, with varying degrees of success and self-satisfaction.

A few weeks’ later, Conrad arrived in the torture chamber to find every one of his tables occupied. There were so many potential terrorists that they had brought in desks from people’s offices to use as temporary agony-tables. Conrad groaned as he realised how late he’d finish if he had to tackle all these potential terrorists alone. As one of them frantically flapped around on his table like an expiring fish, Conrad realised he recognised him as a member of the local hockey team, the Sticky-Bears. In fact, every potential terrorist had identical clothing identifying them with the Bears. When Conrad asked his immediate supervisor about this, his supervisor explained about a bomb threat against the Bears’ bitter rivals, the Sticky-Salmon.

After another hard day of syrup-boarding, when the last Sticky-Bear’s corpse had been wheeled out and the cleaners had entered to begin mopping up the gallons of syrup which now covered the walls, floor and ceiling, Conrad reflected on the mediocre quality of the information that the Bears had delivered. A few weeks later, the captain of the Sticky-Salmon phoned up to confess to falsely reporting the bomb threat as part of a night of drunken tomfoolery. Fortunately, Conrad didn’t have to receive the news himself, as he was busy with another potential terrorist.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary on love:

'She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech... To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she went on soaring and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis this taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their possession rejoices.'

VP: The Adventure of the Dead Dog

It was raining outside, and the postman was bored. Since his wife had died in mysterious circumstances, he had passed much of his time by eating microwave curries and using his faithful dog for taser practice, but since the dog’s heart-related demise, he had little in the way of entertainment to occupy his evenings. To ease the boredom, the postman penned a detailed plan of serial tasering, in which unsuspecting members of the public would be surreptitiously stunned by him as he hid from view. As he got up and went to retrieve his taser gun from the basement, the postman fortuitously slipped on a novelty rubber phone which had belonged to his dead dog, and tumbled down the basement stairs, breaking his neck.

When, a few months later, his elderly neighbour contacted the police because of the foul smell now emanating from the postman’s house, a couple of young officers entered his abode and discovered his festering body, and his diabolical plan, which was still scrunched up in his rapidly rotting hand. As they read his scheme, their initial sadness turned to relief, as they comprehended the needless suffering and inconvenience that had been averted by his timely demise. Later on, the Chief turned up to make an exciting quip on which to end the day, but could only muster up a stuttered joke about dog being man’s best friend, which his subordinates didn’t think quite fitted the situation. In the end, they decided to laugh politely, instead of vocalising their concerns about the joke. He was the Chief, after all.

VP: Republicans and Vending Machines

It had been a hard day in the House, and several prominent Republicans were congregating at the vending machines, eyeing up the pickled onion Monster Munch and chatting quietly. One of these men, "Rad Mad Thad", became distracted as the conversation moved from relevant political matters to theories on gender relations, and decided to purchase a tasty snack. He reached into his pockets and pulled out a grubby fifty pence piece, and pushed it into the coin slot. The coin disappeared, but the machine failed to register any credit.

Rad Mad Thad was, by nature, a bilious and belligerent old man, and was not prepared to have his patience tested by a machine. As he felt rage pulsing through him, he lashed out at the machine's keypad, to the horror of his colleagues, who halted their trite conversation, and hastily offered to purchase him some Monster Munch from the shop next door. But Rad Mad Thad's choler could not be contained. After launching a tirade of abuse at the silent machine, Thad pushed his face through the glass, which sliced his skin and ruptured his eyeballs. Blinded by blood and trapped by the jagged glass, Thad thrashed wildly, opening his jugular and drenching the snacks, which were thankfully waterproof, by virtue of their foil wrappings. As he attempted one final time to free himself from his blood-soaked - but still scrumptious - prison, he unintentionally tipped the hapless machine onto its glass front, crushing his body and dislodging several of the snacks.

After the excitement of the preceding minutes had ebbed away, a semblance of calmness gradually settled on the group of Representatives, who lost interest in the now-defunct machine and the now-defunct Republican. Thad's Republican colleagues saw they could no longer see the pickled onion Monster Munch, and, having lost their main attraction to the area, decided to continue their discussions elsewhere.

V for Vendetta

'People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people'.

So says V in V for Vendetta.

Hitchens

From Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian:

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

Voltaire

From Candide:

'A great work must be novel without being far-fetched; frequently sublime, but

always natural. The author must know the human heart, and how to make it speak; he must be a poet, without letting any of his characters speak like poets; and he must be a master of his language, using it purely and harmoniously and not letting the rhyme interfere with the sense.'

'Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part, I read only to please myself, and like what suits my taste.'

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Which seems relevant, seeing as I will probably never write a great work, or even attempt to. Still, it's a nice quote to start this off with.