Bush makes Reagan look like Betty Crocker

Hi Joe,

I once accused you of being a Redneck Socialist. After reading the letter from a reader and your reply, "Purpose of government is to control people", I now realize I was wrong and have done you a disservice by this, I apologize. You are actually a Redneck Anarchist, correct?

Yours In Fraternal Solidarity,

Eric

------

Dear Eric,

Redneck Anarchist? Well, I seem to be these days. So yes. But since you've asked an old windbag a question, you get a long winded answer.

Politically speaking, I went all the way around my asshole to get to my thumb. During my most intellectually formative years, the peace movement was still the biggest global alternative movement by far. So after I got out of a small town and from beneath the yoke of fundamentalist Christianity, I met  many other young  people in the peace movement, most of them Jewish, most of them urban and self-declared Socialists. The often grew up with socialist parents in socialist households that had survived McCarthyism, and were affluent enough not to worry about little things like having a job, etc. Still, I admired their convictions and socialism equality made sense to me as I participated in things like the Poor People's Campaign. And we still had the banner of world peace under which to rally. Can you believe most ordinary people still believed what was then called "world peace," and that "world peace" was one of the most common terms one heard in the media? Probably because World War II was still so fresh in the everyone's mind.

As bad as government was then, there was nothing approaching what we have today, except in the most repressive societies, regardless of what banner their repression operated under. Communist, democratic or otherwise. In other words, our government limited its repression and murders to locations outside the sight of America citizens until that festering boil called Vietnam erupted on our TV screens, spilling bloody pus all over America's living room carpets. We liked Che (and still do) and we liked Mao and carried the little red book for a while, though at the time we were unaware of his horrific fuckups that killed millions. Personally, I still find some admiration for him, if for nothing more than the incredibly heart breaking achievements of his peasant army's Long March and the miracle of Luding Bridge. In the end though, he was just another murderer with his own private government.

Over the years, leadership of what little real socialist movement there was in America dissolved into the dogmatic bullshit of those affluent, now grownup children, who, having finally had to get a job, went off to teach in the universities and "pursue the arts," etc. I mean, I never met any of them driving a truck on a pig farm or washing cars to feed their kids like I was. Most had kids of their own and by some mysterious process had ended up in the ranks of affluent middle and upper middle class Democrats while I wasn't looking. I said, "Hey, what the fuck? Aren't the ghosts of Emma Goldman, Woody Guthrie, Che and Tupak Amaru still right?

Anyway, for years afterward I had no interest in organized politics other than demonstrating against the Vietnam war. All I knew was that I hated just about every kind of authority around. Hippie hedonism, LSD, fucking my brains out under the stars and in teepees, playing music, being around Eastern holy men of every stripe, and actually meeting my Beat Generation heroes was far more interesting, not to mention educational about life and art.

Then somewhere in 1981 there was a terrible stench in the air. Ronald Reagan had arrived. And he had a shiv in one hand and a flag in the other. After that, I realized we all avoid the political at our own peril. And now, Bush makes Reagan look like Betty Crocker. But even when he's gone and we have again the Democratic Party's version of authority, in which the shiv is kept concealed and the flag is shrunk down and displayed as a breast pocket handkerchief, not much will really have changed. Those in authority will coerce those without it. Only the means will have been different. I finally understand that now.

Given that the most freedom loving Americans are identifying with the anti-authoritarian aspect of anarchy (it only took letting a race of monsters own the country to get their attention!), I guess I'm on that bus with them. I've been standing on this old corner a long time. I've watched the bus with the newest crop of young socialists go by and they are a damned site better folks than their elders were -- more realistic and with a trace of guts too. But all 12 of them are not gonna change the world. Out of respect for its founders, I keep up my party membership, I still carry the card. I may be able to infuriate an arresting officer with it some day.

In the last decade or so, I've always thought of myself as a universalist socialist humanist. Howz that for avoiding labels? But lately I get the feeling that the anarchists among us might get out there and burn some shit down (or perhaps already do). Destroy some of the machinery of governance and death. Sure, it will give the totalitarian state an excuse to crush down on the country. But they are gonna do it anyway, and as long as they can continue to do it incrementally, they will continue to get away with it. It may sound illogical, but it's like a black guy I knew who voted for George Wallace said: "It'll bring this shit to a head for once and for all."

About the only thing anarchists seem to agreed on is that they hate coercive authority. Which is about the only thing I know about myself politically for certain. So stop the bus, I wanna get on. At least I'll be in good company as we all ride over the cliff of peak oil, eco-disaster and the last days of large scale humanity and civilization.

Destiny leaves us all holding the bag.

In art and labor,

Joe