Killing culture Oct. 24, 1985
“I’d love the change the world, but I don’t know what to do.”
This old Ten Years After lyric certainly predicted what would
come ten years after, the predicament of our race when the deluded radicals of
the 1960s witness the rise of a new right.
There are stirrings of a new underground, Marxists
organizing in places like Manhattan and Chicago, but it is still something
still incubating as radials take cover on college campuses and community groups
to regroup and rebuild a revolution American people never wanted, never
supported, and will need extreme brainwashing to ever accept.
We’ve always had a division on the left, the radical
nutcases who want to blow up banks, and the quieter social revolutionaries who had
more in common with the rural right than with the left, whose who philosophy is
based on “doing their own thing.”
Arlo Guthrie – perhaps the quintessential hippies – put it
best when he said that everybody should sing their own song.
But it’s weird that so many people who claim to be so tied
up to that part of the political spectrum are determined to force you to sing
their song, complaining the whole time that the other side – the Ronnie Reagan
types – want to force you to sing theirs.
We seem to go back and forth between other people melodies,
not our own, singing Revolution on one hand, and then the Star-Spangled Banner,
then back to Revolution, when most people – the common people – just want to be
left the fuck alone.
Whole decades pass with one side or the other telling us how
to live and think, and very few in between moments when we can just hum
something neither side wants to hear.
We are currently seeing the celebrity of the right wing. But
it is at times like this when the side out of power begins to organize, such as
with the Marist gatherings at Cooper Union earlier this year, spouting the old
crap, inspiring a new generation of brainless radicals to carry on a revolution
they want to shove down ordinary people’s throats.
As much as I dislike Ronnie Reagan, I hate the radicals
more. They are sneaky and dishonest, telling us they are tearing down the
structure of civilization for the good of the people without bothering to ask people
what they really want.
Back in the old days, there was a strong underground press trying
to stitch together the real wants of the people – the hippies – and the diatribes
of self-righteous radicals, a press where real discussions about real issues
took place.
Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do with our zine, recreate
a platform where ideas get tossed around, left, right or in the middle, without
one side trying to censor the other side because they disagree with the message.
We’re trying to start something, and be creative about it,
even though sometimes Michael and I sharply disagree with the content. He
harkens back to the radicals of the 1960s, who wanted to drown out any opinion they
disagreed with, less interest in discussion than promoting propaganda. Michael
sees some of our contributors as Neo-Nazis, a typical accusation against
anything the extreme left disagrees with. Michael isn’t really a radical, he
just wants to be, seeking a place in the pantheon of radical thought.
The problem is that once you start creating an agenda, talent
vanishes, and all we get is somebody’s rhetoric, dishonest thought.
I tell Michael if he or other people don’t like something
another contributor publishes in our zine, he and other should write something
to counter it – creating a dialogue.
Michael, of course, has moved on from poetry temporarily or
rather found another venue for his in music, a bit late for the punk movement
he would have embraced had he been old enough when bands like the Sex Pistols
first emerged.
He is trying to upend classical education, and seems to love
pop culture, equating modern media such as television on the same level as
Shakespeare. He tells me over time, those great contemporary elements of media
that survive will prove as powerful and lasting as something written by The
Bard.
He complains that many of the professors who teach us as
stuck in the mud of the past, refusing to acknowledge new emerging art forms in
their desire to perverse the dinosaur of Western Culture.
I disagree to a degree. Culture evolves out of culture, and
what we do now is not as ground breaking as Michael wants contemporary things
to be, but built on the foundations of what came before, without Shakespeare
there would be no Sex Pistols. Those seeking to destroy western culture do a
disservice to people who helped make it possible for me, Michael and others to
create. Yes, professors tend to be dinosaurs in their desperation to keep ancient
culture alive, but radicals seeking to over throw everything old, to paint old
customs are wrong-headed or evil, are completely out of touch with their own
roots, seeking to reinvent the cultural wheel without any understanding of how
a wheel works.
Preserving the past is the only way we can preserve the
future, and the minute you tear down icons of the past, you are destroying
everything that makes civilization civilized.
I already believe much as been lost, radical movements wiping
out everything they disagree with and so one-time inspiring people, the
unrecognized Shakespeares, cannot share their wisdom with us today or even serve
as a lesson from the past of the mistakes we have made.
This leaves us to wonder are we the forgotten Shakespeares
and William Blakes of today who will be plowed under by some radical movement
who seeks to silence us because they don’t want anyone to hear what we have to
say?
Hopkins, a monk, once tried to destroy his poetry because he
saw it as violating his faith, and we would have lost some of the greatest
poetry in history had not someone intervened to keep him from doing so. Art,
poetry even music would have been altered. We might never have seen Bob Dylan,
Bruce Springsteen, or the Beatles, all of whom were in one way, or another influenced
by Hopkins and his sprung verse.
Revolutions are not positive forces of nature, even when
they become necessary, but regressive, painful movements designed to force
people into thinking inside a box.
It’s up to real artists to keep real thought alive, even
when we clearly disagree with the message.
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