Life, Love, and Liberty

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.

- Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

- Mark Twain

“Toward the conclusion of a recent essay, I wrote:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

And who says otherwise? The Democrats could — and the most forceful means of doing so, the only method that is appropriate to this historic moment, the method that is absolutely required if we are to turn away from this catastrophic, murderous course, is impeachment. That is the one method the Democrats will categorically, absolutely not utilize — because the Democrats are a crucial, inextricable part of the identical authoritarian-corporatist system that has led us to these horrors. They have all worked toward this end over many decades, Democrats and Republicans alike, and now the horrors manifest themselves explicitly, without apology, even with the sickening boastfulness of the mass murderer who is proud of what he has done, and who vehemently believes he is right.

So the dare goes unanswered. These horrors are what the United States now stands for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.”

- Arthur Silber

Please donate to Arthur’s continued existence.

We have a strong civil society that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of it endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.

Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [2004]

    I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal. Throughout my childhood, I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head. I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in the places and times to which books took me. And there was a moment during my junior year in high school when I began to believe that I could do what other writers were doing. I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen.

    Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories.

- Pg. xx of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

I still vaguely remember the first time that I came across this passage in my mother’s copy of the book. How it jumped out at me! I saw the similarities between Lamott’s past and my own immediately. I don’t recall when I first became serious about writing, but I was always an avid reader from a young age. In the 6th or 7th grade, I was engrossed in The Red Badge of Courage, while the classic 1984 left me awestruck in the 9th. Nowadays, I am trying to “pen” my own riveting pieces, and I don’t think I’ve done a bad job so far.

“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books
acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an
ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can
peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching
towards infinity … we cherish books even if unread, their
mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access,
reassurance.”

– A.E. Newton

I have always adored books, and was an avid reader from age two or earlier. I used to check out the maximum of 32 books from the public library. My pet topic in my early years was dinosaurs, and I was able to repeat a lot of the names of different types of dinos. It’s been an exciting reading journey since then, and I can completely identify with the quote above.

So many books, but such a short amount of time in life to read them all. I’ll never be done!

“Except, oh sweet Jesus yes, for the terrorist watch list, that little red flag o’ fascism, another warning light on the nation’s jumbled dashboard, blinking frantically to let us know that something is indeed deeply wrong with our unstable, overheated engine.

But wait, maybe it’s not all that dire after all. Maybe we are merely looking at this all wrong.

After all, Rule No. 1 in the Eternal Karmic Guidebook says that like attracts like, violence begets violence, dark creates only more dark. Hence, the minute you set up a nasty government system designed to screen for hate and fear and violence, well, the more hate and fear and violence the system will find, and the more that must be created for it to find, and the larger the system will get. And on it goes.

But here is the good news: This truism also works in reverse. Or rather, inverse.

Which is to say, I am here to suggest an alternative. I am here to offer up a new plan, a devious little scheme that will run directly counter to the vile U.S. database of death.

I am here to suggest that we can override this insidious system and create a database of our own, one so goddamn radiant and slippery and omnipotent it shall overshadow the TSC’s list and hack into its operating system and stab at its violent little heart and, to put it gently, shut that f-er down.

We shall invent a new algorithm. We shall begin a new list using a complex formula made of simple truisms of delight and honest pain and unquenchable love. We shall call it the Bliss Watch List.

I am only ¼ joking. Our screening process will be rigorous and incontrovertible and true. The BWL will contain only the names of people widely suspected of being savvy, titillating, open-hearted, deeply lovable, sexed-up geniuses of divine intent and hot self-exploration and ravenous intellectual curiosity.

It will contain the names of anyone who is suspected of daring to understand that life is not, in fact, a clenched and harrowing slog, but an actual ongoing, incessant, stunning manifestation of the divine, even when it’s dirty and violent and obnoxious and horribly dressed and seems to contain only a bleak never-ending rundown of doom and decay and Dick Cheney. It’s just that kind of list.”

- Mark Morford

The interesting thing is that he actually bought the domain name. See for yourself here.

I used to be really interested in viewing the forums at Erotica Readers & Writers Association, and I stumbled upon the following quote one day. As a pre-op transgendered woman, I very much look forward to being able to play with my future breasts. It strikes me, as an advantage to being a woman!

I could never be a woman. If I were, I would do nothing but sit at home all day playing with my breasts. — Steve Martin

I am not entirely sure, but this quote may come from Instead of Education.

“Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.”

- John Holt

I am starting up a quote of the day feature, so that my blog readers can get a taste of my blogging, even when I don’t have a lengthy post ready to go. This quote is from a work by Raoul Vaneigem. I put the parts I find the most interesting in bold letters.

“Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it gets fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear of always returning to the same single note: whether there are two of us, or even ten, we will finish up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other’s arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot confront the effect of general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.

Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured a town and offered it to his favourite for a smile. Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve — passionately enough to offer our love to the magnificent bed of a revolution.”

- The Revolution of Everyday Life

Scratch your heads over that one! Philosophy nerds. I am eager to see what thoughts people come up with about it.