(-review by Geordie Pleathur)
“I have two rules in life – to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done. You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
(-Ray Bradbury)
“I’ve never understood why CONservatives despise the idle poor, but worship the idle rich.”
(-Peter Crowley)
“The hardest job I ever had in this country was being a homeless person with no money. ”
(-A. Razor)
“Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.”
(-Hunter S. Thompson)
“The Tea Party is low hanging fruit—Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachman were all literally invented by the Empire as persons for the “left” to loathe and ridicule as Obama and Hillary serve these purposes for the “right.” Can we focus on the root and quit hacking at all these branches? The only reason I ever mention any of these people is to point out the hypocrisy and fraud of the Empire.”
(-Cindy Sheehan)
“We are not good at anything else anymore… can’t build a decent car or a television, can’t give good education to the kids or health care to the old, but we can bomb the shit of out any country…”
(- George Carlin)
“First the terrorism-industrial complex assured Americans that they were only spying on foreigners, not U.S. citizens…Then they assured us that they were only spying on phone calls, not electronic communications. Then they assured us that they were not spying on American journalists. And now both [major political] parties and the Obama administration have assured us that they will not detain journalists, citizens and activists. Well, they detained journalist Chris Hedges without a lawyer, they detained journalist Laura Poitras without due process and if allowed to stand, this law will permit the military to target activists, journalists and citizens in an unprecedented assault on freedom in America.”
(-Carl Mayer)
“Rebels have always been a small minority of the young, even in the 1960s. A lot of the men were in college to escape the draft and being sent to Vietnam. People did turn out for occasional large peace marches, but in between most of the organizing was done by a small number of people, while the rest of the young focused on getting their degrees and qualifying (they thought) for the middle class. Which does not rebel because it’s too comfortable. And because they don’t know anything, including the college graduates.”
(-Lynn Porter)
“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”
(-Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“There is not even a lone voice of dissent straining to be heard over the chest-thumping, war drum-banging, and jingoist palaver within the self-referential bubblescape of the U.S. corporate media. Nor, it seems, is there a member of the political class, who is endowed with any political power or clout, who even holds a scintilla of deference regarding the will of the people — the vast majority of… whom stand overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. military involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Yet: The machinery of empire trundles towards war, as the media truckles to authoritarian power on bended knee and promulgates a 24/7 propaganda campaign in its behalf. Why is this so? The populace of empire sups on the blood of the colonized, thus empire’s operatives feel zero need to garner our consensus regarding how empire is sustained. They believe that they have the public’s implicit support, so there exists no need for consultation; we have granted the elites the power to wage war by the plebiscite of our appetites, by our feelings of entitlement insofar as maintaining our way of life.
The nation’s elite, unlike the toxically innocent general public, possess the ruthlessness to be frank with themselves: They know that the soil of empire is fertilized by blood, its gaudy, bloated mansion is constructed upon a mountain of corpses. But they will never publicly admit to such a thing; no one will who is allowed to be part of the mainstream dialog would dare to venture such an utterance. To even ever such a thought would be cause for instant and permanent banishment.”
(-Phil Rockstroh)
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
(-Ivan Illich)
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs…”
( –Excerpt from Howl, Allen Ginsberg )
“Feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance today between twerking, Miley Cirus’ pathologically-desperate-MSM-fuelled-need-for-attention, Chelsea Manning, Syria, chemical weapons, and a nation that has seriously lost its moral high ground between Iraq, secret rendition, torture, GTMO, and the NDAA. I feel stretched to extremes inside, and a little bit hollow. It’s hard to be sane, while living in an insane time. I just want to remind myself, and others, that it’s ok if you feel rather odd today. Or regularly.”
(-Tangerine Bolen)
“A whistleblower who exposed US war crimes just got sentenced to more jail time than murderers, slave dealers, and people who sell nuclear weapons to terrorists.”
(-Abby Martin)
“I don’t even know what American liberalism is anymore in the era of Obama. I don’t know what set of principles and beliefs they’re adhering to when you see so many liberals on a network like MSNBC lashing into people like Edward Snowden and defending the NSA. I don’t understand what liberalism is when they’re defending endless drone warfare. It really seems to me like Obama has dragged liberalism along with him and dragged it into this kind of abyss where it’s become hollow.”
(-Max Blumenthal)
“I was a top student in college. They feed the egos of such people until their sense of identity depends on being smart and they equate smart with being able to regurgitate official academic explanations of everything, for the ‘benefit’ of the ‘un-educated’, of course. Advanced indoctrination is a difficult handicap to overcome. It’s basically the ‘teacher’s pet’ syndrome internalized and carried beyond the school walls– easy to see past if you’re not the one– difficult to get over if you are.”
(-Martin Truther)
“The sentencing phase of Manning’s trial revealed that contrary to the claims of pundits and politicians, Manning had no blood on his hands — the Departments of Defense and State were unable to tie his releases to the deaths of any U.S. informants…”
(-The Young Turks host, Cenk Uygur)
“A man searching for paradise lost can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world.”
( Jim Morrison)
“The blood-sodden Neo-Con agenda trundles forth, with Syria in the crosshairs, and Iraq and Libya reeling in the kind of tumult and terror required for the imperial plundering of a nation’s resources by ruthless, foreign interlopers.
Empire’s nasty, little secret: Denied of the militarist-enabled stealing of resources,… the U.S. empire would collapse within weeks. This is why it is essential that the minds of the rabble (that would be you and I) on the homefront remain colonized. A collective sociopathic mode of mind must be maintained. The knowledge that the structure that sustains what is termed our lifestyle is, in reality, a deathstyle that could cause members of the general population to have a bit of difficulty swallowing their hormone-bloated, antibiotic-ridden slabs of animal flesh at family outings at their local Applebees. First, as a starting course: What is required is.to swallow whole the lies of empire.
For example, crackbrained casuistry, such as the following: Those will be humanitarian bombs tearing to shreds the bodies of Syrians when the U.S. Military makes its move on the nation. Sure thing, bestowing humanitarian values are the abiding concern of the leadership of imperial powers. The people of Iraq would simply love to testify as to the beneficence of the forces that invaded and occupied their nation. Strange isn’t it, that no one, possessing power and influence, in the U.S. seems interested in soliciting their opinion on the matter?”
(-Phil Rockstroh)
SINGING WITHOUT A PERMIT….
America has no visible artists like the Manic Street Preachers, perhaps they could have had some, before the media consolidation, but now, all our would be gutter-poets, prophets and whistle blowers are wearing hairnets and sandwich artist golf shirts and trying not to get fired from Subway and Arbys. Our entire controlled media is corrupt. Industry has captured the regulatory agencies. The medical establishment might as well be the mafia and no one wants to face it until it’s there own grandma who dies because of naked malpractice, otherwise suffering some bad side effects (the ones everybody now knows from http://sideeffectsofxarelto.org/xarelto-lawsuits/, for example). University campuses harbor torturers and war criminals like John Yoo and David Patraeus and war machine recruiters have invaded our gutted public elementary schools.
Congressional approval rating was only 6% in June. Psychologists tell us that about 6% of the population are sociopaths, while war profiteer-owned big-media claims that 9% of Americans are pro war in Syria/Iran/Etc., so you gotta figure in that six percent, plus another three percent probably comprised of private mercenary families, military brass, weapons building families and big-oil shareholders, but my gut says even that 9% statistic is high. Nobody wants America to spill more blood in the middle east for G.E., B.P., Exxon, Halliburton, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, but the orders have already come down from the chain of command, from high above Obama.
Besides the willfully and diligently uninformed, soy chai tea latte sipping, Prius drivers who believe you affect positive change by wearing shoes shaped like your toes, juicing, and sitting on pink pillows, oh so many of us understand we now live in a full fledged, clampdown, Beyond Orwell, Beyond Kafka, fascist surveillance, war horny, police state; where graffiti artists can be tasered to death over the price of a coat of paint. For writing the letter “r”. Thugs will laugh and high-five over his body fully certain that the cop union will protect their jobs while rightwing state radio does a number on the victim’s good name.
Cops use military grade chemical weapons on peaceful demonstrators and get paid forty thousand dollars for the stress of the negative publicity. Secret agents search every cavity, it’s stop and frisk, non-stop. Everyone is demoralized, except for those in dedicated flight from reality; or these eager blue-gloved and badged participants of state violence—the steroid drunken tough guys who use pain compliance holds on waifish, peaceful protesters, fire-fighters and seniors, who are assembling in public spaces and standing up for their pensions; and public schools, standing up for THEIR right to organize, standing up for the right to know what’s in their food, but the chairs are on the table for democracy. Dennis Kucinich tried to impeach the Bush administration, so they gerrymandered him out of office. Dr. Cornel West has said that justice allows suffering to speak. Ever since the Bush gang’s corporate coup de tat and the Murdoch media-grabs, loudmouthed liberals like the Dixie Chicks or Sean Penn are relentlessly pummeled by the Ann Coulter whores for war, while belligerent blowhards for fascism and state violence are reWARded with cushy jobs in bullshit broadcasting. Rich people treat the rest of us like objects.
Female academics can still speak sometimes, as long as they keep to the approved script of gun control, gay marriage and abortion, but otherwise, the lower classes are kept away from the microphones, and expected to stay quiet in our little boxes, or face the wrath of the Pinkerton brutes. The middle-class has been trained by their universities and cable brainwashing subscriptions to identify with tyrants and slave owners and blame the poor for the crimes of the rich. Only property is sacred. In Columbia SC, homelessness is illegal. In Raleigh NC, it is now illegal to feed the poor. Diane Feinstein wants to narrowly define a journalist as a paid flack for war-state propaganda. She also wants to make it a crime to say anything critical about the NSA spying. Teacher’s salaries are tied to standardized testing in over-crowded class-rooms, while oligarchs install overpaid administrators to slash funding for public schools, lay-off employees, and scapegoat educators. This push to privatize is a fully bipartisan effort on behalf of the plutocrats who shape our destinies-the Koch brothers and AIPAC. Bill Gates, the Heritage Foundation, CFR, and Rahm Emanual. The Walton family and the shadowy ALEC business group, who writes the nation’s laws. Rahm Emanual closed sixty schools in minority neighborhoods and is building gigantic sports stadiums and prisons, and sic’ing his uniformed goons on students and teachers, exactly like Koch whore, Scott Walker, in Wisconsin. He gives raises to cop brass willing to oppress their community. We live in a society that allows one man to make fifteen million dollars A DAY while a low-income mother gets $4.50 for food, and much of Congress and many of your own misinformed friends wants to slash the $4.50.
WELL SO LONG, LIBERTY, LET’S JUST FORGET YOU DIDN’T SHOW…
With more and more of our most vulnerable and powerless citizens being typecast, slandered, demonized and disenfranchised, with the bully culture mass-media, lack of jobs, foreclosures, cuts to food-stamps nation wide, the bulldozing of community recreation centers, the greed of all the juicer-crazy, ex liberal, yoga mat homeowners who refuse to rent to low income families on government assistance, the planned absence of affordable housing in a post-Nafta, deindustrialized war economy, with frequent police attacks on Food Not Bombs and other charities who nurture, feed, and advocate, on behalf of our meekest populations, people are feeling the fear.
The drone lobbies are instructing the corporate media not to use the word drone. Talk-radio trains the enforcer class to talk tough, and indiscriminately “intimidate and dominate”(Viper team TSA motto) like the Nuge and Bill O’Reilly. The Pentagon is staffed by war machine lobbyists and Raytehon lawyers, who keep gifting local law enforcement with these gigantic tanks and Lrad weapons of war that all have “Rescue” painted on the side! Even ex punks spew hateful venom at the vulnerable populations while sucking up to fascists and white collar criminals. As a pal of mine says, if you want to do a lot of cocaine, you have to wear very expensive, pin-striped clothing and own a fine time-piece, because only poor kids with small amounts go to jail. But the criminal class in office have promised their private prison shareholders with manufacturing contracts a fresh wave of “new offenders”. Cops are registering croc-wearing college dude partiers who urinate outside of crowded festival porta potties as sex offenders at Burning Man.
I warned you ten years ago they would come also for the middle class. We’re seeing hundreds of armored vehicles being moved around the so-called homeland. Rabid enforcer class bureaucrats and frothing monsters call for violence against advocates and activists for the poor and still call themselves “Christians”. Uniformed hard-ons will mace and taser anyone, indiscriminately at most anytime, but generally, if you look rich, or drive a newer vehicle, they give you a wider berth. The rich can drink in the streets at sidewalk cafes and craftbeer stocked coolers at summertime softball games in the parks and at their drunk-driving, tailgate parties, and out-of-town vendor, summertime wristband public-intox orgies. A poor person with an unapproved beverage in a brown bag on a hot day, gets twelve cops responding to the scene to mace and cuff him for open container and always the bogus resisting arrest. Local office professionals see no problem with this. Ten thousand raging football fans drunk and shirtless, screaming, fistfighting? They call that All-American. A couple of dreadlock hippies sharing a joint under a tree? The police state calls that criminal, a justification for a beatdown and arrest. Honor students asking war pigs like Kerry and Patraeus uncomfortable questions on university campuses? Tasers, beatdowns. Punk rockers questioning classist bigotry spewed by rightwing punks? Avalanche of hate mail from fame worshipping fanboys hoping for a backstage coke and stroke with their idol. If you live long enough you may discover your blessings become a burden if your “Got Mine, Jack” Donald Trump programming prevents you from sharing them. It takes a lifetime for some privileged folks to figure it out. Who needs love when you have enough high-quality, legal, white people prescription drugs? Who needs friends, when you can hire employees and interview personal assistants? Who needs mercurial bands when you can manufacture underage beta slaves to lip synch to slutty techno excrement? Who needs Republicans when you have Obama and Biden, Clinton, and Kerry?
TWERKING, USA…
While the NDAA indefinite detention prez and the AIPAC lobby drags the nation to always more dirty wars based on lies, most Americans are STILL all a chatter over Hannah Montanna’s tongue wagging, fly catching performance; or Justin Timberlake’s klieg lit mediocrity. Where were you when N SYNC replaced the Replacements? Glen Ford calls Obama “the dreamer with the kill list” because he gives a vague, feel good Bill Clinton speech about Martin Luther King Jr., one day, then bombs brown children, the next. The powers that be, who force us to live like we do, are banging drums for more wars, based on dubious and quite possibly manufactured threats. The ocean is a radioactive soup from the Tepco spill that’s still being covered up by the media. B.P. destroyed the gulf and the government sent in mercenaries to hide the damage. Nobody has any disposable income anymore and the few who do are climbing the evil pyramid, claws first.
They poisoned the food and water supply. These “smart-readers” they’re installing in our apartments are dangerous, but the oligarchs obviously mostly fear YOU SMART READERS, the NSA follows your every move. Meanwhile, most of the cable dizzy and hate-radio programmed people are still sleeping. “Shhhhhhhh….Los Angeles is sleeping….”: Hello Disaster sang that line in the 90’s, and it still rings pretty true, as all our best writers, screenwriters, songwriters, and truth-tellers have gotten either shut-out by the Big Machine, or sidetracked by wanting to rub shoulders with bikinis and cigars. I know you know some of the TV people, who just spew non stop Bill O’Reilly talking points and outdated-for-decades bullshit platitudes about how free America is, and all the shining opportunity that awaits us all, if we’ll just take out a mountain sized college loan, and piss in a cup, and jump on George Jetson’s 9-5 treadmill. Don’t you wish you could mute the programmed TV people? The “People” magazine and “Entertainment Weekly” subscribers? It’s only the peace makers and unions and whistle blowers and victims of fracking and Corexit who have been silenced. The really heinous part about growing up in the empire of lies is that most times, no actual black clad adjustment bureau government agency needs to neutralize a critical thinker, the conformist parakeets of the bourgeoisie will do that, just instinctively. They really are Agent Smiths. That’s what all those so-called reality shows are about. Boot camp conditioning, shaven heads, cult brainwashing, weeding out the weird. They promise the khaki class all the privileges of membership. You can be a celebrity DJ for a day. The biggest hot tub, a wraparound sundeck, the V.I.P. pass, CABLE! Maybe that inside job Alex Jones dude is a blowhard, but he’s right about a domestic propaganda war. We’re now seeing anti-war activists accounts suddenly suspended on the Fascist-Crack surveillance grid, as the so-called social networks are being used as effective tools for consciousness raising and peace activism by the waking masses. Homeless people are being vilified and criminalized, even as low wage workers stand up for a living wage in the slave-class retail and food service industries. Nowadays, those heartless robots who yell “get a job” out of their speeding cars are clearly willfully oblivious to the fact that homeless people are competing for minimum wage jobs with college grads, retired people, and former home-owners.
The people that scapegoat the poor, these haves who have no compassion, who brag about their own achievements, while slandering those less fortunate, are sadly everywhere. Sometimes it seems the women are even worse, hissing that third hand Rush Limbaugh shit. Bukowski said a free soul is rare but you know it because you feel very good around those people, most of us adults are so scarred from abuse and baffled by ratrace bullshit, we can’t even tell a friend from a foe, anymore. Roseanne Barre, Rosie O’Donnal, Charlie Sheen are all blacklisted for questioning 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Phil Donahue, Keith Olberman, Cenk from the Young Turks, Dan Rather, they’re all banned from the mainstream airwaves.
How long until they retire Letterman for speaking the truth about the hideous perils of FRACKING? Everyone who still has cable, or reads those shitty corporate rock mags tell me about all the horrible music of today and I can’t believe they think I’m ever gonna like Kanye West. Last bands I liked begrudgingly at all were shit like, oh…Towers Of London, Red Star Rebels, These Animal Men, Tsar, that kind of thing. Forgotten gangs. Boys From Nowhere and Forgotten Rebels, Throbbing Purple. Rock anthems to lost causes and honest punk rock rebel songs. Mostly, I still listen to vintage trash like Mink Deville and Jim Carroll-gutter soul. Some country. Kristofferson and Hank The Third. Jello Biafra & The Guantanamo School Of Medicine. You ever drive around, wondering who these people are, who still own all those big houses? Some are doctors, lawyers, pharma reps, stock brokers, computer wankers, heirs, bean counters, yes-men, accountants, but many others are just snitches, corrections officers, goon squads and agents of organized violence. These people are not to be respected, these roughmen who shoot you in bed. The enforcer class don’t even know they are slaves to the pharaohs.
Others still have Hope & Change stickers on their cars even as Obama and Kerry and Clinton hang around Henry Kissinger planning more coups, more regime changes, more wars. Why are they sharing all our e-mails and phone calls with a foreign government? Really, pause for a second and consider that.
SHOW ME THE WONDER…
I know they are all probably a bit older than me, but the Manic Street Preachers were all my generation really had, aside from Sinead O’Connor, New Model Army, and rap, in the way of provocative, intelligent, socially conscious music. When I first got the “New Art Riot” vinyl, I was like ho-hum. Preachy politics and stenciled shirts, the American suburbs were already teeming with lamesass Clash wannabe boy bands who were heavy on the Murray’s pomade and skint on ideas, or any messages beyond, you know, we like to dress cool. I fell in love with them when I first laid my ears on the “Stay Beautiful” e.p. They had a really fabulous pop feel like Gen X, almost; smart lyrics, but I was still unconvinced about the guy with the Freddy Mercury pipes singing the guy who couldn’t play but gave all the interviews’ lyrics.
They were dreamy pinup boys for kids who missed Sputnik, but also a bit like Cheap Trick, two models and two Regular Joes, all with a Marxist bent, teaching the more erudite and scholarly outcasts of the world about history and literature and persuasively convincing Smiths fans that Guns N Roses and Public Enemy were important. “R.P. McMurphy”, “Motown Junk”, “Motorcycle Emptiness”, “Little Baby Nothing”, “Condemned To Rocknroll”…the Manics started peeling off hits like a stockbroker at a stripclub, they made it look so easy, gave courage to my goth gang who were all taking our own early stabs at songwriting, now we had a reason and I’m still waiting. They were warning us about the banks, the warmongers, the media-fed consumer-zombies while the rest of the world was still in their fecking shiny, happy ska phase. Next, came “Generation Terrorists”, Richie’s slashed arm, and an American tour that failed to ignite the enthusiasm of the “alternative” festival attending, Fox tv discovering population.
The Manic Street Preachers became more experimental after their landmark debut full length, that was too literate for macho sports fans and too rockin’ for college radio Lemonheads dweebs. I’d have to say, they were probably the last band who really influenced my own little clique of heartbroken punk rock losers. This time of year, I always find myself missing those early days, when we wrote our first hits in grimy basements, our hearts seemed to beat in time with that long lost Gabba Gabba Hey spirit I always lament the death of, of former possibilities, faded loves and tarnished dreams. Hiraeth is a homesickness for the home that never was, but damn well should have been. Choose your poison to get to paradise lost.
“Playing all the records
Praying that they’ll never stop
There is too much heartbreak
In the nothing of the now
I want to see it all
Never going to let you down”
…We continued to follow them, as we got older and ruined our lives with pills, bad wives and cursin’, usually identifying with their melodic testimony and defiant upstart objections. Dumbfuck Murkans still don’t know what to make of a Welsh rockgroup who sings something like, “and If I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists”.
Richey went missing, some of my gang died, some of us fell apart and spent a decade and a half trying to pick up the shattered, missing pieces of our former selves. Early on, our own personal fortunes seemed to rise and fall with Bradfield and company, but whereas they gained entry to epic recording studios and the big media, we splintered off into various factions, and watched in horror, as most everything the Manics, and the Clash before them, warned us might happen, happened.
Now, some of us are getting older, facing death, still asking questions, and the Manic Street Preachers continue to grow and ache along with us. We are often reminded that the past is past, how we had our window of opportunity and blew it, and now we should shutup and die quietly, but some of us remain haunted, just like the Manic Street Preachers.
They are always able to convey these difficult to articulate, hard truths about life, love, pain, other people’s pain, war, exploitation, and alienation in songs like “Sorrow 16”, “Spectators Of Suicide”, “From Despair To Where”, “Everything Must Go”, “Kevin Carter”, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”, “Let Robeson Sing”, “Show Me The Wonder, “Nostalgic Pushead”, “You Stole The Sun From My Heart”, “Design For Life”, “So Why So Sad” and the new title track, “Rewind The Film” that similarly longs for those fleeting precious moments when we still had friends, we laughed ourselves stupid until the dawn’s early light, rocknroll seemed possible, and we were dumb enough to actually try it. “Rewind The Film” is a heavy, challenging, tough album for some of us fatally flawed lost souls to absorb in autumn, in the midst of our annual depression, where we involuntarily find ourselves tediously still wringing our arthritic hands about a long loathed youth we can not alter, nor revisit, and an ill-starred destiny we can not escape, as we watch on, in sheer horror, as our loved ones are fucked over by their doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies; as the last shreds of democracy and human rights are trampled in the name of glorious winners take all greed-head fascism, genocidal depopulation, and unprecedented income inequality. We see a nation where a little less than half of the population are still enraged by the mere idea of a half black Commander In Chief, while the majority are content to overlook his broken oath to defend the Constitution to prove that they somehow AREN’T racist, that they are down with the hip-hop yo, that they are “post racial”, while Black America is still under the heavy boot of the private prison profiteers and the bogus drug war.
Only nowadays, white poor people, and their family pets, are also being shot everyday, by an insanely militarized 5-0, for no reason. We feel a burning awareness that we have a finite amount of time left, and more dead comrades than living ones, and the leaves crunching beneath our duct taped Creepers only serve to remind us of how we were always alone and that shining moment when we were still part of an optimistic gang of seemingly like-minded rebels was just a smoke ring, a soap bubble, yesterday’s buzz.
Some will call “Rewind The Film” a departure, but attentive longtime listeners will instantly recognize the maudlin mellowness as this once angry young band has always been extremely versatile, and much more nuanced than the familiar Beatles Meets Queen big U.K. radio hits. It’s the voice of weary experience, stamina and fatigue, of grief and longing, compassion, regret, bitterness, defeat and perseverance, and genuinely earnest concern for the generation to come. Maybe James Dean is comfortably ensconced in some posh studio on the beach somewhere but this is one old punk who still has it, he still gets it, he’s not afraid to remember: “It’s the longest running joke in history to kill the working classes in the name of liberty.” Just goes to show that even the losers really do get lucky…sometimes. “Not in MY time, but in our sons and daughter’s times, if you get the feelin’, call…and you got a room.”
http://www.manics.nl/site/literature.htm
Press shots by Alex Lake.
“I LOVE YOU ALL THE SAME”:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19527-lets-get-this-class-war-started
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BszHshieSc&feature=youtu.be
www.frackingourfuture.org
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/f1-np/camera/index-e.html
studies showing that power increases the likelihood of hypocrisy here,
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/5/737.abstract that wealth increases the likelihood of reduced empathy here, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/5/737.abstract and finally that conservatives are more likely to make up facts to justify their beliefs here http://www.classwarfareexists.com
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/10/28-signs-that-west-coast-is-being.html
http://www.conspiracy-watch.com/2013/10/it-is-legal-for-media-to-lie-to-people.html
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/09/22/student-protesting-david-petraeus-punched-in-head-swarmed-by-dozen-cops/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/09/poverty_and_cognitive_impairment_study_shows_money_troubles_make_decision.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_share_chunky
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/356229#ixzz2ednWraok
http://rt.com/usa/barrett-brown-gag-order-423/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pTBJmWVXhA
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/6/iran_contra_redux_prince_bandar_heads
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/09/6-important-stories-silenced-by-syria.html#pgYOUFwLiXLQqU51.01
http://blackagendareport.com/content/dreamer-kill-list
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18539-the-last-chance-to-stop-the-ndaa
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/05/authorities-never-have-issues-with.html
http://www.mediaroots.org/academia-and-the-war-department/
http://www.nationofchange.org/pack-questions-about-boston-bombing-1369145289
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17978-under-nixon-reagan-or-the-bushes-we-wouldn-t-have-tolerated-obama-s-surveillance-state
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15028/how_the_government_targeted_occupy/
Educate.
Organize.
Mobilize.
Resist.
Rinse and repeat until the corporatocracy burns to the ground.
Veglam 