In one little sweep of my eye across a distance of about twelve yards I was able to assemble the above constellation in some ghoulish, grafted menagerie of fame, the lot of them stacked up in phone banks like really well-groomed battery hens. It made me feel a bit sick and nervous and then laugh and do a bit of wee. But the density, the density of stars, too many to be a constellation, in such numbers they became more gas than solid, like the nebula of collapsing gas that incites the stellar inception. Like an episode of Celebrity Squares held at Diana’s funeral.
Too much. Just too much, and as William Blake has always said, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The wisdom reached by excess of this nature is that it’s all fucking bollocks, the celebrity equivalent of making a kid you catch smoking a fag do the whole packet. “So it’s fame you like, is it? Well, how about all the famous people in the world jammed into one chilled, airless, glass box? Hahahahahahaha!”
Not everyone who called in by phone to pledge their donation was lucky enough to get George or Bob or Al. Some of ’em got me and after about the third person indignantly inquired, “Who?” and I had tired of explaining Sarah Marshall and Sachsgate, I just started saying, “Yeah, it’s Spider-Man here; how can I help you?” and hoping that Tobey Maguire couldn’t hear me.
In my haste to arrive on time for this glistening festival of opulent first-aid, me and my mates had driven like loonies, the wrong way, up the hard shoulder of a freeway. It’s the only time I ever felt free on Route 1.
I know George Clooney is probably a decent geezer an’ all that and I’m no more condemning him for the vacuity of celebrity-driven humanitarianism than I am David Cameron for capitalism. I’m just saying, how long can you inhabit this sparkling candy palace without wanting to kick down the walls? If you’re not on the inside trying to get out, are you outside trying to get in? Or are you indifferent to the whole charade? Were you never taken in?
Under what circumstances is continuing to live like this the best option? Only if you have no belief that any alternative is possible. Only then.
The celebrities feel better for taking part. The callers feel better for donating. The Haitians get a bit of aid that they should rightly have been given under the covenant of brotherhood that exists between us all, and we all just smile and pretend there’s no alternative.
There is another way. There is the way. To live in accordance with truth, to accept we are on a planet that has resources and people on it. We have to respect the planet so we can use the resources to nourish the people. Somehow this simple equation has been allowed to become extremely confusing.
If I, so close to the peak, could glean no joy from that rarefied air, the air I was told, as soon as I’d acquired language, would absolve me, if in fact all I gleaned was the view from that peak, the vista true, that the whole climb had been a spellbound clamber up an edifice of foolishness, then what possible salvation can there be for those at the foothills or dying on the slopes or those for whom the climb is not even an option? What is their solution? Well, it’s the same solution that’s available to me, the only solution that will make any of us free. To detach the harness and fall within.
Now that’s what I call an extended metaphor.
In Fairfield, Iowa, then, there could be the solution. But none of us want a boring solution. The Revolution cannot be boring.
14
Get Money Out Of Politics
DO WE AS HUMAN BEINGS ALIVE NOW, US, THE SUM TOTAL OF humanity (I assume everyone is reading this book), do we have a vision? A shared vision towards which we can move in synchronicity?
As a man in recovery I must remain in serenity, clean and serene; I’ve spent enough time jazzed, wired, buzzing, and gouching. Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request:
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Junkies and alkies and bulimics and gamblers and sex addicts and love addicts and people who can’t stop shopping, smoking, loving, fighting—whatever it is, there’s someone out there who’s doing too much of it—and for those people there’s a solution and sanctuary, and in those places of sanctuary, this prayer is recited.
The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go.
So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research.
God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet.
The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness.
Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens. I don’t have to live the 25th of May 2022 yet. I might never have to. I only have to live in this moment. That’s why meditation comes in handy, and practicing it as a community has benefits too. How are we to achieve real change, conditions in which practices that lead to a different type of consciousness can plausibly be pursued?
I spoke to my friend Dave DeGraw, a seasoned and let’s say grizzled activist and member of the Occupy movement. Dave knows loads about global politics, protest, economics, and so on, and uses words like “metrics” and “paradigm.” He also speaks a bit like a beatnik and seems forever on the verge of using antiquated Kerouacian slang like “Cool it, Daddy-o.” I wrote to him electronically and asked him how to change the world.
“If you’re expecting political legislation to solve any of our problems, you’re barking up the wrong dead ole tree. No matter what issue you care about most, no real lasting change will come from a rigged and corrupt system.”
I’d say his opening gambit there is a pretty good example of what I was saying. “Dead ole tree” sounds like the way that Allen Ginsberg would describe a Republican’s penis.
Dave’s first observation is that to bring about real change we have to act outside the current political system, which chimes with what Naomi Klein said about advance on environmental issues: Real change will not be delivered within the machinery of the current system—it’s against their interests.
“Unless we get money out of politics—campaign finance, lobbying, and the revolving door between governments and the most powerful global corporations—we are not going to create change within those old obsolete and decaying governmental systems.
“Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites.”
This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant
is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don’t even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you’ll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.
“Here in the U.S., and in many countries around the world, these governments were created in a bygone era, in the time of the horse and wagon. It took days to get one handwritten message across state lines. You needed representatives for the government to function. Now, here we are, in 2014, with instantaneous worldwide communication. Now we have access to unlimited information. A kid with a cell phone has access to more information than the president of the United States had only 25 years ago.”
Twenty-five years ago, the president was Ronald Reagan, it’s probably for the best. He didn’t seem like he’d be that at ease with technology. I was quite anxious that he had the power to launch nuclear missiles, and rightly so, as we now know he was already suffering from dementia. It says a lot for our expectations of politicians that no one really noticed.
“The need to have a handful of ‘representatives’ deciding our collective fate, to just have two or three dominant political parties in this age of mass communication, is a sick and perverted joke.”
Dave is getting into his stride now, he’s really moving into beatnik mode—he’s probably on the precipice of taking a mighty puff on his “doobie” and giving the bongos a real wallop.
“Once every two, four, or six years we get to vote for Puppet A or Puppet B, oh, please. Tommy Jefferson was an enlightened cat; he had a lot of brilliantly insightful riffs.”
Yep, thought so, he’s called revered statesman Thomas Jefferson “Tommy,” referred to him as “an enlightened cat,” and called his oratorical pronouncements “riffs.” I bet he wrote this with no shoes and socks on, wearing them little round John Lennon sunglasses. He continues with a Jefferson quote:
“ ‘Every generation needs a new revolution.’ He said that over 200 years ago; not one revolution in this nation since then.”
It’s good to know that a respectable, bewigged statesman like Jefferson knew that to prevent an incremental drift towards hegemony and corruption each generation would need to reassert a demand for fairness. One of the ways the current power structures are protected is through tradition. “You can’t meddle with the constitution, the economy, the monarchy—it’s one of our proudest traditions,” Dave wrote. A tradition is just an old idea, only of value if it remains relevant.
To remain relevant it must resonate with timeless principles, principles of unity and fairness. These institutions and statutes are riddled with language that fetishizes unity and oneness: “one nation under God,” “the monarch’s duty to preserve peace.” When it comes to crunch time, the only time that’s real, the only maxims these ideas protect are elitist and hegemonic.
Dave DeGraw is right: Traditions that do not help us are as valuable as excess fingernail and should be dispensed with in the same manner. I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don’t even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.
15
Spectacular
HOW CAN MODERN TECHNOLOGY AID DEMOCRACY?
“From a technological standpoint,” writes DeGraw, “we are ready for ‘Liquid Democracy’; with Liquid Democracy you can designate your vote on any issue to any person of your choice. For example, if there is an economic policy that is coming up for a vote, but you don’t understand the policy that well, you can give your vote to someone you trust who does understand the policy. With the level of technology that we now have, that’s a common-sense sensible political system that would provide a vibrant democracy and legitimately reflect the will of the people.”
Liquid Democracy, then, is a form of direct, electronic, participatory democracy that acknowledges that a lot of people won’t vote on a tedious issue like planning permission for a new sewage system. Which inadvertently implies that the liquid in this Liquid Democracy is fecal. Nonetheless, in a devolved, collectivized, participatory democracy, a small, self-determined constituency can nominate an accountable figure to act on their behalf. As we’ve said before in relation to Dave Graeber’s input, democracy would be good, but democracy ain’t what we’ve got. An empowered, involved civil society who see their collective will delivered is now a possibility.
Adam Curtis has insisted with a tenacity and fervor that truly only belongs in cage-fighting that I point out that social media like Facebook and Twitter are of no use when it comes to bringing about radical change; he regards these arriviste communicative tools as useful only for “clicktivisn” and loose social ties, not the ardent bonds required to get people to risk their lives confronting authority. I think that as new ideologies are nurtured and deployed, new social tools like these mentioned will be as useful as anything else in connecting people and conveying information. As long as Facebook doesn’t at the behest of the FBI stick up a load of moody info designed to put you on a massive downer.
Switzerland is already cracking on with direct democracy, with results which are impeded I think by the context in which they occur: Switzerland. Have you ever been there? It’s peaceful, it’s clean, the chocolate is delicious, but the Swiss people are dependent upon the same sources of information that everywhere else is, so their state of limited electronic referenda reflects that.
Anyone in Switzerland can get a bill voted on if they get 50,000 signatories. Some interesting referenda have been held:
1. Basic income: Give everyone a basic income of twenty grand a year and get rid of all forms of welfare. Welfare carries stigmatization—this policy could address that.
They voted against it.
2. Maximum wage: CEOs of companies, head honchos, and big cheeses are earning too much money. In America your average CEO (if you can conceive of such a being) earns 350 times the average worker’s salary. There should be a cap for top earners, either a ratio, like ten times the lowest-paid member of the workforce, or a figure, say 500,000. The Swiss held a referendum.
They voted against it.
3. Restrictions on the construction of new places of worship, like mosques. A lot of folk, as you know from the media, are worried about the type of vocal and visual symbols people use when envisaging supreme energy fields from which all other energy fields are derived. The Swiss held a referendum on whether to ban the building of more mosques.
They voted for it.
Now, I am not about to claim, as we approach the midpoint of this book, to be a social scientist; there is too much dependence on anecdotal evidence, too much faith in the mystical, and too much radicalism for that. Plus zero education in that field—you almost certainly require A-levels; fuck that. My point is that the outcomes of these referenda are suspiciously concordant with the will of the elites that typically exert their power through more easily manipulated dual-party democracy. Why is that? According to Dave DeGraw:
“The first step toward evolution and freedom is to get a conscious understanding of the mental prison that we are all bred into. Our consciousness is conditioned from cradle to grave. As the ghost of Goethe whispers in the wind …‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ ”
What the results of direct democracy in Switzerland indicate is that even measures that seem to put power directly into the hands of the people are redundant if we are not given access to reliable information. We need a media that isn’t governed by the same ideology as the big businesses for whom our governments administrate. Dave uses this illustrative Guy Debord quote to help us understand the information we are fed through the media and the function of that information:
“ ‘For what is communicated are orders … those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.’ ”
Debord, who was a clever old stick and as French as adultery, was a “situationist,” this was a gang of avant-garde artists, political theorists, and smart-arses who thought that Marxism was basically alright but a bit too strict—what with the gulags and murders and bullying.
That, though, didn’t detract from the irrefutable fact that capitalism, in spite of providing us with lovely tellies and an apparently enhanced standard of living, was eroding the essential experience of being human. The situationists thought that it led to social alienation—us lot all feeling lonely, detached from each other, our environment and our own nature—plus commodity fetishization.
I like the word “fetish”—you’ve probably noticed; I keep using it. “Fetish” was originally used to describe an object of religious devotion—like a relic sold by an archaeologist trickster. “This is Saint Bernadette’s finger—it’s yours for a fiver.” You could then stare at the dubious digit and think a bunch of holy stuff, the object providing a visual focus for devotional mental activity.
These days when we hear the word—when I first heard the word—it was in regard to sexual fetish; “Frank’s got a foot fetish,” you might hear these days. This is where poor ol’ Frank has got himself into such a palaver about how’s yer father that he can no longer express himself through straightforward coital activity, which, due to his childhood or whatever, he regards as a dumb mechanical thrust of flesh pistons and clutching, mucus-covered valves.
His only way back to enjoyment of erotic activity is via a manageable deviation from the pure source, like a lovely well-pedicured tootsie, with violet-lacquered nails, like his Auntie Val used to have when she rocked him on her lap and he felt free from the clammy tyranny of Mummy’s arms and the clattering exasperation of Daddy’s tobacconated sigh. That’s Frank for ya, the poor bugger.
Revolution Page 15