And now there is no help for it but to be cast adrift in the new month. One plucked from one month to the next; the year is like a fast-moving Ferris wheel; tomorrow all the riders will be under the sign of February and there is no appeal, one will have to get used to living with its qualities and perhaps one will even adjust to them successfully before the next month arrives with a whole string of new implications in its wake. Just to live this way is impossibly difficult, but the strange thing is that no one seems notice it; people sail along quite comfortably and actually seem to enjoy the way the year progresses, and they manage to fill its widening space with multiple activities which apparently mean a lot to them. Of course some are sadder than the others but it doesn't seem to be because of the dictatorship of the months and years, and it goes away after a while. But the few who want order in their lives and a sense of growing and progression toward fixed end suffer terribly. Sometimes they try to dope their consciousness the shifting but ineluctable grid of time that has been arbitrarily imposed on them with alcohol or drugs, but these lead merely to mornings after whose waking is ten times more painful than before, bringing with it a new and more terrible realization of the impossibility of reconciling their own ends with those of the cosmos. If by chance you should be diverted or distracted for a moment from awareness of your imprisonment by some pleasant or interesting occurrence, there is always the shape of the individual day to remind you.  – John Ashbery 'The System'

Hicks quote

“The comic is a flame—like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are. He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.” – Bill Hicks

John Henry Mackay poem

(Mackay was a socialist radical and a great gay activist.)




“Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.

"Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,
"Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage."

0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven
The 'truth that lies behind a word to find, 

To them the word's right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.

But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true,

Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.

I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.

Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see!

I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will

Not rule, & also ruled I will not be!”



― John Henry Mackay

Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

The naming of the intolerable is itself hope. – John Berger

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said
is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express
themselves as we did. – Sophie Scholl, The White Rose Society

• 
  
  
  

From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, we are witnessing a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics. In recent months the US has moved decisively towards becoming an authoritarian kleptocracy, replete with a violent, vengeful new nationalism, and a renewed war on women and minorities. It is now clear this administration does not care about ordinary working people of any hue and that the administration is peopled by those who caused the 2008 financial crisis, which cost 8.7 million people their jobs and may have destroyed as much as 45 percent of the world's wealth.

And yet... as I write, thousands of people shut down the airports in major cities across the United States to protest the forcible deportation of Muslim citizens from seven nations by executive order of the new president. In Cincinnati, members of Black Lives Matter have joined with immigrant rights actvists, labor organizers, and those who attended the city's women's march to form new, lasting coalitions that not merely defend the most vulnerable members of our communities but also build forward towards alternatives to capitalist society. The fact remains that with the tyrant Trump in power we are seeing the erosion of basic liberal rights that took centuries of struggle to win, yet hope grows in the dark. Resistance is no longer an option, it is a necessity, but we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective.

I suspect we spend too much time worrying about the Presidency and Congress, sites of power we have little or no access to. What we ought to be doing is spending our time focusing on the sites of power we have ready and absolute access to: the street, the workplace, the school, the community, the classroom, the neighborhood. That’s where we ought to go.

We must create combative organizations with prefigured structures, ones that reject hierarchy and practice democracy. Furthermore, they must go beyond the workplace and enter the everyday lives of workers and their kin. Direct democracy is never going to be enough. We’ll still need representative institutions.

The difficulty of even attempting to draft an alternative to the existing system is symptomatic of a general political impasse.Issues of democratic content (what is to be done?) must take precedence over the fetishizing of democratic forms as solutions in their own right (how should we proceed?). As a matter of survival we need a grand collective refusal to conform to the rule of capital and, at the same time, a creation of something else, a self-determination. We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.

One of the political imperatives today is to break the spell of automatically endorsing the frame we limit ourselves with, to break out of the debilitating alternative of either we just directly endorse free market globalization or we make impossible promises about how to have one's cake and eat it, too, of how to combine globalization with social solidarity. As Martin Luther King pleaded in his letter from a Birmingham jail: if we sit back too long, justice delayed may become justice denied for yet another generation. On February 15, 2003, between 15 and 30 million people too to the streets in 800 cities around the world, representing the largest day of anti-war protests in world history, and all over the world right now many more people are protesting the Trump presidency. There are always simple alternatives at hand, e.g. ‘If this person is hungry and we have bread, we should share” or “If this person does not share their bread we should seize it in order to export it where there is a real need (rather than an ‘entitlement’).” The Bolsheviks were reported to have said in Russia in 1917 that “power was lying about in the streets,” and at recent Black Lives, antiTrump and international womens' protests we see equality made manifest through mobilization. This is what democracy looks like.

What reproduces capitalism in developed countries today is largely the fact that workers can keep most of their achievements if they do not protest or think too much about the suffering of countless others. To understand the world you need to feel like it can be changed. We must exemplify what we say we believe. To this extent we 'pre-figure' a possible future in the insatiable present. A set of words initially formulated by a committee supportive of Polish Solidarity, read: “Start doing the things you think should be done. Start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” It means taking initiative, refusing the safety of cover, and – although it’s taboo – thinking and fighting to win.

The kind of hope I wish to advocate comes when participation begins to generate a kinder public life, built on intrinsic values. As Nancy Fraser writes, “Absent a reinvention of public power, there is no hope of successfully addressing the ecological, economic, or social dimensions of crisis.” Participatory politics creates social solidarity while proposing and implementing a vision of a better world. Most importantly, it can appeal to anyone, whatever their prior affiliations might be. We cannot afford to accept that roughly 62 million Trump supporters are irredeemably bigoted because, if we do, there is no hope. We need to persuade these citizens that if we don’t let race-hatred break us up we can win and improve life for everyone. For this reason concepts like race ought to be a regular topic in every zine, newspaper; at every meeting; and in every organizing conversation. While multi-racial coalitions are best the white part of the coalition must be the responsibility of white organizers.

Already in projects like the McMicken FreeSpace we can see how to develop anti-racist, feminist initiatives into a wider social revival by creating “thick networks”: projects that proliferate, spawning further ventures and ideas that weren’t envisaged when they started.  They then begin to develop a dense, participatory culture – a society in movement – that becomes attractive and relevant to everyone rather than mostly to socially active people with time on their hands.

What makes movements a force is the deployment of a distinctive power that arises from the ability of angry and indignant people to at times defy the rules that usually ensure their cooperation and quiescence. Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to spark a general strike. They are also our best locus of hope. As many Americans are realizing, right now, resistance works. What will you do to fight back?

from John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'

When one is in one's late thirties, ordinary things – like a pebble or a glass of water – take on an expressive sheen. One wants to know more about them, and one is in turn lived by them. Young people might not envy this kind of situation, perhaps rightly so, yet there is now interleaving the pages and indifference to suffering a prismatic space that cannot be seen, merely felt as the result of an angularity that must have existed from earliest times and is only now succeeding in making its presence felt through the mists of helpless acceptance of everything else projected on our miserable, dank span of days. One is aware of it as an open field of narrative possibilities. Not in the edifying sense of the tales of the past that we are still (however) chained to, but as stories that tell only of themselves, so that one realizes one's self has dwindled and now at last vanished in the diamond light of pure speculation. Collar up, you are lighter than air. The only slightly damaged bundle of receptive nerves is humming again, receiving the colorless emanations from outer space and dispatching dense. Precisely worded messages. There is room to move around in it, which is all that matters. The pain that drained the blood from your cheeks when you were young and turned you into a whitened specter before your time is converted back into a source of energy that peoples this new world of perceived phenomena with wonder. – John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'

How to Prepare Yourself and Others for Encounters With Immigration Enforcement - National Immigration Law Center

How to Prepare Yourself and Others for Encounters With Immigration Enforcement - National Immigration Law Center

Calvin Johnson - Ode To St. Valentine

Play For Today : Destiny. (David Edgar, 1978)

A small town shopkeeper is conned into standing for an extreme right-wing party at a bye-election. This remarkable play is as relevant now, if not more so, as it ever was.

you know you're making a difference when you get profiled and trolled by far-Right religious extremists all over the internets who, in a pathetic attempt to smear Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati as a 'terrorist' organization, don't seem to understand that my faith (largely in the Judeo-Christian tradition but with plenty of wiggle-room to other religions and secular beliefs) and interfaith work is an integral part of my antiracist, labor and social justice work, as it is for so many of us in the struggle.

Wendy's: Unfreeze your frosty heart! - YouTube

Wendy's: Unfreeze your frosty heart! - YouTube

my favourite book from Ohio

The 'Red Bishop' Brown sees the free development of the individual as the moral task given each one of us, unconstrained by ideologies, leaders or trust in higher authority: "No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals." (Communism and Christianism pp. 46-47)

Standing Rock's Last Stand

Noam Chomsky on President Donald Trump

Noam Chomsky - How to Deal with the Trump Presidency

Blade on the bloody feather....

With the recent rise of Trumplandia and neofascism swimming ahead in the futility and banal evils of capitalism, we can all learn from Potter's classic Blade on the Feather, and his theory that the immoral upper class loves only what it owns, and it doesn't own quite enough of any particular nation any more.....  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf9_D095H_E

SST Promo Video Compilation