GUTTER GOSPEL by GENERAL LABOR & THE BEREAVEMENT GROUP

“Escaping from the matrix of the mainstream western worldview is like escaping from a cult: it starts with one tiny heresy. One small, secret thought that goes against all your indoctrination.Maybe it’s the realization that you’ve been lied to your whole life about Israel and Palestine. Maybe it had something to do with watching the mass media manufacture consent for the invasion of Iraq. Whatever it is, it starts out as a tiny little mental suspicion that the information sources you’ve been trusting to help form your understanding of the world might not be nearly as trustworthy as you’d been led to believe. If you talk to anyone who’s ever left a cult, they’ll generally tell you that it started out the same way for them. They see a sign that the cult leader claiming he’s Jesus might actually be kind of petty and egotistical. They find themselves questioning whether Sri Baba Shiva really needs that many Rolls-Royces. They wonder if maybe Pastor Jeremiah is saying God wants him to have so many wives for reasons that have more to do with what Pastor Jeremiah wants than what God wants. These little heresies eventually add up and snowball into an avalanche which collapses the indoctrination that was keeping them in the cult that whole time. It actually tends to play out this way when it comes to leaving any psychologically abusive relationship. A little spark forms in the back of the victim’s mind questioning whether the thoughts their partner put in their head are really true — and noticing who would benefit if they weren’t. Enough little sparks like that, and you eventually get a fire that burns the whole relationship down. Those are the kinds of sparks we’re trying to get flying when working to wake people up from the indoctrination of the empire. We’re trying to get those first tiny heresies to form in people’s minds, using whatever’s happening in the news at the moment or whatever relevant ideas are trending. We don’t need to get anyone to wake all the way up in one go — we just need to get the snowball rolling. One little heretical thought can be all it takes to get someone seriously questioning whether everything they’ve been taught about the world is a lie. So we point out the lies wherever we find them. Any glaring plot hole in the official narrative anywhere it pops up. Right now Gaza is a constant deluge of information and raw video footage that can spark some major heresy if it is truly seen and ingested. The way we were just told to cheer for Syria being taken over by Al Qaeda is another. The lies we were told about Ukraine and the events that led up to the war is another. Every day there’s something coming up that you can show anyone who will listen to you, saying, “See? Look at that! They lied! They’re lying right now! I wonder what else they’re lying about?” And it just takes one. One well-placed spotlight on one obvious plot hole is all it takes to get someone pulling on a thread that will eventually unravel the whole matrix of delusion for them. And once they’re awake, they can join us in helping to wake up the others. So make a vocation of being a serial blasphemer. Get people asking the inconvenient questions, and spark as many small acts of heresy as you can. People are only going to awaken from the imperial narrative matrix one pair of eyelids at a time, and we each have the opportunity to spend some time every day trying to help open them.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION

I’ve lived through some bad years of homelessness, social blacklisting, barfights, blackouts, psychwards, riots, divorces, breakdowns, real promising with mondo potential band breakups, extreme poverty, estrangement from loved ones, you name it, but never had I seen so many people I used to know witness a real time genocide on their prestiegious phone gadgets and collectively shrug and resume talking about their old age middle school popularity and supposedly grown up capitalist show and tell. My dear friend Martin died, he was a seventy something old hippie who spoke Latin and knew shit was going fascist a long time ago, a good eight years back he was saying that both parties were corrupt and under control of foreign entities and extortionists, secret societies of billionaires and murder happy depopulation ghouls, seemed a bit hyperbolic to me, but all his forecasts came true, but worse. He was a dear, sweet man who helped teach my youngest kid how to ride a bike and put locks on all our doors and installed a swamp cooler for us, he was totally vital and outgoing and used to ride his bike to my house on Sundays and then suddenly, gone. I was supposed to speak at his memorial but I could not stop crying long enough to get my thoughts together. My childhood drummer Bart died suddenly and that killedoff what little shreds of a dream I had left as far as always wanting to reunite my adolescent street gang in the recording studio-they were the handpicked kids I’d discovered as a hated midestern Ramone in the eighties when tattoos, boys wearing makeup, underage drinking, noserings, dangerous shoes, and loud, unapologetic partying while wearing leather jackets were severely frowned on by Catholic school sports cults in tank building factory towns, and the juvie judges and PMRC moms who wanted anybody who spoke out about truth or soul or injustice pipleined into the behavior modifying punishment institutions.. That town was a brainwash frathouse from hell, that whole state, really, and those who stayed either got sucked into the system via petty DUI’s and drug busts or assimilated into that gross as fuck thank a cop, rah rah, go team, sports culture. I always missed my unlikely lads from my first rebel goth gang, thought it’s be fabulous to take ’em back into the studio but it was sadly not to be. My original bass player Bobby Cloyd dropped dead a couple years back and I am still in shock and denial the good brother is gone. Fell outta touch with most of the other originals who grew up and did grownup shit. They all went on to do some good stuff and I was always gratified to see how they mostly escaped all that tv programmed “greed is good” police state culture, but always carried a big weight from the survivor’s guilt of seeing so many of our other lifelong associates crash and burn in those hateful hellholes, cause it is getting harder and harder to get out of those evil places. Have not been able to write much, might not write songs again, still processing all the horrific changes and coping with the terror of life at the bottom in 2024, I always presume the tv is lying about whoever they say did what, you start to see the empire managers using the same playbook to drum up blind dummy support for more gore and forever wars, I can usually smell the rats from miles away, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I always knew us poor people really had no voice in this fake democracy, but man oh man, it just keeps getting worse, the homelessness all around us, a guy down the street had his house burn down last year and lost over twenty animals and all their family’s stuff, my wife gave him our old car but I saw him on the corner today with a “will work for food” sign, We did one of those gofundme’s for his family and the town only chipped in twenty fucking bucks for them, it’s dark. I’ve had some shitty Christmases on the streets and stuff, but this one was the worst, people I love had violent mental illness breakdowns, others just kinda ghosted all the poor people they used to know, my outlook on humanity is pretty Dim, but thank you to those of you who still abide by some kinda higher code, that aint based on money, murder, and merely owning shit. Look out, all you rocknrollers, it could happen to you, too. Only good news on the horizon is that my revered comrade the Barman sent me some sounds from Australia I can’t wait to hear. Also, check out that new cd by John Dissed, it’s “Too Radical For Rocknroll”. (The General)

GUTTER GOSPEL by GENERAL LABOR & THE BEREAVEMENT GROUP

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