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?