“Folk singers sing songs for the workin’ baby.
We’re just recreation for all those doctors and lawyers,
But there’s no relief for the bleeding heart
‘Cause they’ll be losing bodies tonight.”—The Absence of God, Rilo Kiley

 Goddamn, we’ve been building these pyramids for freaking ever…

 I’ve always found it odd that the thing that we spend the majority of our childhoods preparing for and most of the rest of our time left alive doing happens to be named after the biblical character with the most, um, curious occupation.

 ***

 I’m currently 36 and have been in the US workforce since age 14. My back is starting to hurt. I thought about trying this then remembered where I currently reside. All I know is I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

 Clockwatchers

 “Does someone have a case of the Mundays?”

 Monday: Denial – “I feel fine.”; “This can’t be happening, not to me.”

Tuesday: Anger – “Why me? It’s not fair!”; “How can this happen to me?”; “Who is to blame?”

Wednesday: Bargaining – “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”; “I’ll do anything for a few more years.”

Thursday: Depression – “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?” Time for Happy Hour gang!

Friday: Acceptance – “It’s going to be okay.”; “I can’t fight it” We’ve got it pretty good…

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself…

 Ya know, I heard somewhere that freedom isn’t free. I’ve also heard it said that work makes you free. Sounds like a continuity.

 Injun sez: Yo. Back in the day everything was free. Now in the Land of the Free everything has a fee, sounds backwards to me.

 ***

In Brave New World the sub-theme is that all the while amidst this elaborate division of labor the technology already existed to make almost all labor unnecessary. If they took away all of the meaningless labor what would be reveled was an equally elaborate, somewhat arbitrary but well planned class structure. What would happen if it ever came into view? It wouldn’t come into view: Soma.

Some people argue the Grand Ole’ US of A is nothing but an elaborate Psyop. Maybe. I just know that for the last few thousand years we’ve all been born into a massive involuntary game, that isn’t that much fun, seems to be rigged and is never officially announced. And no matter what the game is called at whatever time…we always just seem to be building pyramids, but with increasingly bizarre rituals.

Are many of us just doing busy work?

 “Career opportunities, the one that never knocks, every job they offer is just to keep you off the docks, career opportunities, the one that never knocks.”–TheClash

 Uh, don’t hate the player, hate the game

 ***

At the restaurant I manage whenever you ask a worker about a really slow shift they say, “It was dead” and when asked about a really busy shift they say “we got killed.” I guess either way we know where this story is headed. Is it any wonder that the chorus to the feel good song of summer 2010 went, “We’ve got to live like we’re dying”? Yeash!

 A moment of despair I have from time to time is when sitting in traffic and it hits me that this really is our real lives…

 “Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”
And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.”—Paris, 1968

 …and it might get worse real fast. What gets me is that most of us will never even retire at all. We’ll all just keep bumbling along, doing what we’re told, working five or six days a week, with ever diminishing expectations, an occasional little vacation, sometimes we read about The Wars, sometimes we’re mad, sometimes glad, usually just tired, its real hot in the summers, vacations are a little less pleasant, and all of the fucking immigrants trying to escape their deserts, trying to steal our jobs, we’re angry about something…

 And then we’re dead. Where we can rest, (finally!) in Peace, (it was bound to happen sooner or later huh peace activists?!) and be in a better place (Hey, I thought Jesus was supposed to be here!) Maybe before we die we should take one of our little vacations to Easter Island and get a glimpse of how these pyramid building scheme cultures end…

 “In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure
the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.”—Paris, 1968

…and back. Pardon me, I had to work through some serious political cynicism and learn how to be a father in the past months. The fatherhood adventure has gone wonderfully! Nothing is better. As for the cynicism? Fuck my cynicism: if we love our children then we better learn how to fight for their future. As it is, well, their future has No Future.

Speaking of fighting, what was I saying…

Our blood is red and theirs is blue,

you ask me what we ought to do?

Seize the streets and pillage the estates,

It’s time for civil war in the united states!

Totally.

Hey billionaire Tea Party backers, shouldn’t a war at least have two sides? See you in the streets. At your limo’s window. To everyone else, with a lot of love, I’ll be back the middle of next week.

I’ll file this video under “he said it, not me.” John Sinclair:

Its good to be back in this space. Say hello on Facebook.

PS: This website does not condone violence blah blah blah etc.

…how about some more baby pictures?!

These are all a little old now considering she mutates every 24 hours. The last one with me was taken her first week home during the blizzard.

We’ve finally hit our stride and gotten through the new parent jitters. We still have her heart surgery in a few months…but I’m allowing myself not to think about it for a few weeks!

I’m getting back into doing my Maxwell Black stuff again, some writing is on the way and I’m contemplating going to this Cindy Sheehan thingy called Peace of the Action. I might just go and get some interviews with people and see what happens. If anyone wants to join me just email.

solidarity

mb

PS: I’ve got one more Essay of the Bizarre on the way which will be followed by my “re-branding” as the Paul Street/Perez Hilton of the Anti-Civ movement. Look for something I’m calling Subversive in the Suburbs.

I was framing some art I recently bought and thought that I’d share.  I got the one above, this and this from JustSeeds art collective. Here is the collective in 2009.

Back Soon…

Sigmund Freud

(this excerpt is from Freud’s work of the same title: pp. 33­35, 91)

(Found at Primitivism)

We come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. I think I know what the last and the last but one of those occasions were. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back enough in the history of the human species; but a factor of this kind hostile to civilization must already have been at work in the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions. For it was very closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine. The last but one of these occasions was when the progress of voyages of discovery led to contact with primitive peoples and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life with few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior civilization. Later experience has corrected some of those judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly attributed to the absence of complicated cultural demands what was in fact due to the bounty of nature and the ease with which the major human needs were satisfied. The last occasion is especially familiar to us. It arose when people came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses, which threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness.

There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier.

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization possibly the whole of mankind have become ‘neurotic’?

Isabella Nicolette Brady January 23, 2010 5:03pm. Welcome Monkey!!

This is a couple of hours after she was born. It was a beautiful moment even though we hadn’t slept in almost two days and she was about to be moved to a different hospital in preparation for her heart surgery.

With mommy at the next hospital

Sophia holding Bella for the first time since giving birth two days before.

Me holding her (and trying not to weep!) for the first time ever.

The whole family (minus Eugene the kitten with Melissa the kitty sitter) together the night before surgery.

Bella had her surgery this morning and it went great! We’re not quite through this yet but right now we are both being guided by a (difficult to articulate) profound, glorious and almost aching love.

But fuck, we’re tired! (Exhibit A: see my face above.)

Now, before  anyone gets the idea that I’m going soft, I would like to mention our daughters middle name: Nicolette. While it is lovely to the eye and the ear it’s translation in Greek is:

People’s Victory

Since we’ve got the whole family here, we might as well bring in Mr. Eugene:

The new website could be up this week. Comments are closed due to a spam/hacking situation, but I can be reached at the usual email options.

 Full of Love

mb

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily; giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

- William S. Burroughs

Greetings Earthlings, check out my favorite internet writer of the moment, Frank Smecker:

The Politics of Awareness, part 2 on Dissident Voice. This article kicked me directly in my ass this morning. Please read it. Read the living shit out of it! (I’ll comment on it later.)

Have I mentioned that me and Soph’s daughter is going to be born, like any day?! More tomorrow.

BREAKING FUCKING NEWS: Mickey Z joins modern civilization (wait..oh no!) and creates a Facebook profile! (I’ve actually had one for a while but it has been managed by Sophia. I’ve now made the transition from MySpace to Facebook if anyone wants to say hola.)

So, tomorrow I want to discuss Mr. Smecker, Bringing Down Civilization, Our beloved daughter, social networking sites and my (late) hatred of the bourgeois yearly fraud “celebration” of MLK. Here is what I said last time.

I found this here:

The Christianizing of Tahiti

Reacting to the stories of Tahiti, and troubled that the crew of HMS Bounty could have found life among the Tahitians preferable to life among Christians, the religious orthodoxy of England founded the London Missionary Society in 1795 (which included their own armed police force). The sole purpose of the society was to bring Tahiti under Christian rule, in effect to remove a more pleasant alternative lifestyle that threatened Christian power (my emphasis.) Two years later the first missionaries arrived in Tahiti and were as warmly treated by the Tahitians as had been earlier visitors. But after 7 years of missionary work (children were required to recite, “For what is Jehova angry with thee? Because I am evil and do evil.” in Tahitian) there were few willing converts to Christianity.

What happened next is documented in a letter to home by one of the brethren, J.M.Orsmond. All the missionaries were at that time salting pork and distilling spirits. Pomare (the local chief) was introduced to the bottle by the missionaries. Orsmond describes the compact by which Pomare, reduced to an alcoholic, would be backed in a war against the other island chiefs on the understanding that his victory would be followed by enforced conversion (This is the same deal that Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli made with Hitler, trading the Vatican’s support for Hitler’s promise to declare Catholocism Nazi Germany’s state religion).

Since Pomare was supplied with firearms to be used against his opponents’ clubs, victory was certain. “The whole nation”, Orsmond wrote, “was converted in a day.”

There followed a reign of terror. Persistent unbelievers were put to death and a penal code was drawn up by the missionaries and enforced by the mission police. It was declared illegal to adorn oneself with flowers, to sing (other than hymns), to surf or to dance. A moral code of such strictness was then enforced that a man walking with his arm round a woman at night was compelled to carry a lantern in his free hand. On the island of Raiatea a man who forecast the weather was treated as a witchdoctor and put to death.

Within a quarter of a century the process by which the native culture of Tahiti had been extinguished was exported to every corner of the Pacific, reducing the islanders to the level of the working class of Victorian England.

After their mass conversion it was hoped that the Tahitians might be induced to accept the benefits of civilization by putting them to [servile] work growing sugar cane… The enterprise failed, and Mr. Orsmond, believing that “a too bountiful nature diminishes men’s natural desire to work”, ordered all the breadfruit trees to be cut down so that the lack of a natural food supply would force the Tahitians to seek employment in the mission plantations.

Captain James Cook estimated that 200,000 people were living on Tahiti. After thirty years of missionary rule, only 6,000 remained.

Their power base firmly established in Tahiti, the missionaries moved swiftly to other islands. The methods employed were the same as before. A local chieftain would be baptized, crowned king, presented with a portrait of Queen Victoria, introduced to the bottle, and left to the work of conversion.

By 1850 the Christian conquest of the Pacific was complete.

***

In Related News: the only image of civilization that our new all knowing GOD–Google–has to offer is that of a computer game. Perfect.

In Even More Related News: Are you familiar with what went down in Diego Garcia? No? Here is John Pilger. For those of you who are familiar, here is an image of the end result of the great and glorious march of civilization there.

 I should probably mention Haiti here. Well as the co-creator of this website can attest, it’s difficult for me to talk about that subject publicly without risking trouble with The Department of Homeland (uber alles!) Security [sic]!

***

 So long story short: the “civilized” have spent centuries conquering the world. Now there’s no space left. It’s time for the world to conquer civilization.

 NO SHELTER (The Front Line is Everywhere!)

excerpts from the book

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans 1933-45

by Milton Mayer, 1955

Third World Traveler

But Then It Was Too Late
“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all

Pg. 167:
the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”
“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”
“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about-we were decent people-and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful
Pg. 168:
things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it-please try to believe me-unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-’Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
“Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself)
Pg. 169:
and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something-but then it was too late.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must
Pg. 170:
lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to-to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a
Pg. 171:
stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in-your nation, your people-is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
“You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of
Pg. 172:
most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.”
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
“I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just-a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.”
“And the judge?”
“Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience-a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an
Pg. 173:
innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.”
I said nothing.
“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.”