Archive - 2008 - Blog entry

A spirit of the people is formulating - or being formulated - under the gaze of media and popular culture. How the ballot will interpret or represent that spirit is anyone's guess. Crooked elections and bad political lies have rendered the U.S. government an international persona non grata, yet popular elections in the U.S. still manifest the majority's desperate desire for representation in government. The electorate votes through the electoral college, whose job requires them to heed the cry of the ballot and cast their lot for the appropriate candidate. Though the argument is often made that the only choice in this democracy is that of superficial representation - a mere artifice disguising the tacit verisimilitude of the candidates - I would argue further that the representation called upon proffers a repetition of past candidates, offering no actual 'change' between presidencies.

Austin is a very different place from Houston. Although it is smaller, it feels larger - mostly because there is a larger, more spread out anarchist community. At first I took the distance as a harsh level of communication, but then I remember my post-modernisms: Paul Virilio is right, it is not the not the open spaces that separate us that we should fear, but the lack of space itself. This 'pollution of distances' where everything immediately presents itself before us destroys our sense of being together, and makes us even more isolated.

My name is Sasha Reid, I'm with Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, which is a new animal rights groups formed to unite animal rights groups against Free Trade and to form grass roots groups throughout the U.S. to hold events, promote direct political action, and continue the struggle for global justice. I want to give a powerpoint presentation we made about Free Trade and ecology called 'Free Trade Kills Animals' in your hood, so stay hooked in - this could be a long ride.

YESTERYEAR

[So Passes the Glory of Baghdad]

Horses of the mist gallop through a mountain pass,
Desert legions straggle home through shafts of phantom suns.
Chieftains lie in tents of silk on rugs woven in dreams
Of curling domes and jinns. Stories tell themselves in thread.

*Stain the page with lines of blood.
March in time to finger drums.
Conjure paradise out of paint
Chipped in lost futurity.*

A bowed head, born of busts sitting on shelves of dust,
Reads and pores on its fateful past, a dim glory
Of incipience, a marble thought enshrined in hope.
The feather of progress flies on wings of arching stone.

*Trace the routes of brave vanity
Through dugout graves and leather books.
Search for the heart of man and wife
Twined on love-beds like twisted twigs.*

A throat made loose on wine will sing with night-charmed bards
A chant that dies forever on the lips of verse,

Does Sarah Palin remind you a bit of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, in her dress and mannerisms? She does me.. except that she only fights for right, the extreme rightwing of the low-information zealots that wish to keep women pregnant and barefoot, so to speak; real men armed and ready to kill at will; and children uninformed and innocent of any knowledge about the realities of sex, protection, contraception, evolution, and human-caused global warming.

So welcome to the bizarre comic book world of Palin and the crazed limbaughtomized lunatics who believe that they have found their Wonder Woman in this pitbull hockey mom wearing lipstick. It sure comforts me to think that W squared is on the side of right and the new American way of keeping targeted groups ignorant and oppressed, while paving the way for big oil, huge corporate profits at the expense of everyone else, and well.. just more of the same ol same ol.

<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUM5WfO60AA&amp;feature=related">Anarchist Anthropologist</a></p><p>Sort of surreal to watch this on a PBS video, but still a wonderful interview. Graeber is a magnificent anarchist intellectual, and here gives brief accounts into current insight about radical history and the role of anarchism in the world pre-WWI.</p><p>(Incidentally, for a more literary presentation, check out Pynchon's latest book <b>Against the Day</b>.)</p>

On appeal now, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has authorized Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County to become the next national nuclear waste dump - which opens the doors for eight proposed nuclear reactors for the state.