Life in the Empire
Who's the enemy?
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Permalink Reply by pan on
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The Cannon Song (Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht/Marc Blitzstein)
John was all present and Jim was all there
And Georgie was up for promotion
Not that the Army gave a bugger who they were
When confronting some heathen commotion
CHORUS
The troops live under the cannon's thunder
FromSind to Cooch Behar
Moving from place to place
When they come face to face
With a different breed of fellow
Whose skin is black or yellow
They quick as winking chop them into beefsteak tartar
Johnny found his whiskey too warm
And Jimmy found the weather too balmy
But Georgie took them both by the arm and said,
"Don't ever disappoint the Army!"
CHORUS
John is a write-off and Jimmy is dead
And Georgie was shot for looting
And young men's blood goes on being red
While the Army just goes on ahead recruiting
CHORUS
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Permalink Reply by waldopaper on
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Hydrocarbon Handmaid’s Tale
The hydrocarbon handmaid’s tale is that socialists and communists of the far left are pushing us into becoming a European nanny state. Rubbish. They don't understand memes any more in the 21st century than we understood “germs” in the 19th.
Memes are complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units, like “communism.” Like bacteria, memes are inside everybody. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes harmful. Propagandists have used memes for thousands of years.
The study of memes is only a “trendy new theory,” like the study of germs was in the 19th Century. Occupy Wall Street is a meme deliberately designed for what Kalle Lasn calls “meme warfare,” which is sort of like throwing live squirrels at each other.
Memes replicate by definition. They make copies of themselves. Each copy is subject to mutation. Ideas have their own agency, and they don’t care whether they are brewing beer or causing a typhoid epidemic. Memes have an agenda of their own.
Abortion and gun control are memes diverting us from real issues like energy, environment, economy and peace. Overlords maximize profit, not “create jobs.” Pop culture is now obsessed with “jobs” because we are susceptible to the meme.
“The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought,” Chris Hedges writes. Lack of critical thought keeps the domionists agonizing over embryos and demagogues locking up forks and spoons.
We need to keep the lights on, stop poisoning ourselves, find meaningful work, and stop killing real people. The illusion of a “two-party system” makes us willing executioners of the hydrocarbon overlords’ crimes against nature and humanity.
All but the hydrocarbon handmaids should be able to see through the con-trick by now. There is no “government.” There is no “political process.” There is no “country.” Power does what it wants, and non-issues like abortion and gun control are pacifiers.
Such pacifiers are deliberately designed to camouflage oligarchy, and critical thought is merely collateral damage. By now, we should be aware of the con-trick of “lower-taxes-and-less government.” Reaganomics is laughing all the way to the blank.
But destruction of critical thought enables us to believe what we want to, despite the evidence of science or history. And the result is that we accept cartoon simplistic sound-bite “history” and use comic-book “religion” to believe whatever we want to believe.
The debt is never paid to bank or Karma or country or momma, and that is our original sin. We had to pay the price of being conscious. Once aware of it, redemptions seem second nature and religion is business. Fundamentalist capitalism is debt slavery
Pop Culture is not only throwing a party, he is also throwing squirrels. Its racket blares from screens and assaults eyes in supermarkets. Metaphors we live by are barking up the wrong tree. Others sound Orwellian when all parties are fabricated equal.
Notice to the party: “the occupy movement” continues. We no longer call ourselves “Americans” unless you include Canadians, Argentines, and all who occupy every socio-culturally named land-mass in-between. We are all citizens of planet Earth.
Tradition of working-class self-emancipation will continue. That sounds Marxist because it is. But people who deny evolution should have no problem denying class struggle. The paradox of self-evident truths will elude them because war is a racket.
What reactionaries and authoritarians like to call the “far left liberal agenda” is the inevitable tide of human history. It is not an agenda, it is evolution; selection pressure suppressing things like slavery, witchcraft, and the divine right of kings.
As regressive elements become detached from complexity, diversity and nuance, they become more derisive, delusional and dangerous. You may expect them to become violent if memes triumph over minds. Perpetual patriots are tomorrow’s traitors.
Nature will end fossil fuel rule and mulch the fugue state. Eventually.
Gbw is a life-long occupier of Fort Wayne and participated in recent local, national and global demonstrations since 1963. He the author of Preliminary Remarks on The Meme and The Text, available for free online.
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Very good. Little surprise you haven't filled it with hyperlinks but I enjoyed it immensely. Damn! you are one fine wordsmith!
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Hydrocarbon Handmaid is for general publication... but glad you noticed the hyperlinks that were not there. Volk Ja Were Socialist is eating my brain. Spent the day going thru 39 or 47 posts on the 11th Corps at Gettysburg.
The terrain tells quite a tale... but gotta watch for hyperlinks that aren't there...
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Compost Modern Ja
"We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields." -- McCrae 1915Was composTing a ditty here on the screen a while back... got kinda extensive... and kinda drunk... accidentally back-paged and lost the whole thing. was depressed about it for days.
Who's the "enemy?" Monoculture. Check it out. The Lowell Mill Girls wrote about the "class struggle shit" 20 years before Marx did... so My German Boys were well aware it way before the Civil War. What "caused" the Civil War? Some say it was "slavery" Others say it was "racism." Meanwhile, the neo-con(federate)s are wanking in the corner saying it was some kind of Mushroom Act or some such shit. The Factory Girls saw the solution almost 200 years ago:
"When you sell your product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress.
"Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism."[17] c.1840
Well- DUH. Commercial feudalism. Sound familiar? They were same white-male-supremacy crackers who want to bust unions everywhere. "Collectivists" they say. "Fuckheads" I say. The same fuckheads who see looting as "god's plan." Naturally... anybody who believes "god" has to "plan" anything... is probably a fuckhead. Anthropomorphism and all that.
Humans have to post now and edit later. "Nationalism" was in the public discourse, but I'm not sure that "imperialism" was... it seems to be a 20th Century term. As for "the first 'modern' war"... that's crap. Define "modern." Yeah... the common small arms had about the same range as they do today. But the equipment they were using at Gettysburg was really fucking crude. The aerial component did not exist. Radios? Fegget Aboutit. "Telegraph" like radio? In yer fukkin dreams. Info tech? Spreadsheets and pencils.
Not the first "modern war." Last "ancient war," maybe. Look at the ground. You can see it all from a few strategically-placed 40-foot towers. I saw Flanders (WWI) from a 100-foot tower over the flattest land in the world... and it went way beyond the horizon. Yet I could see where over a million people butchered each other with shit like poison gas. Why? They were infected with the same ancient memes... among others. "Militarism," "Nationalism" and "Patriotism." Who's the enemy? Personally... I would say the fuckheads who don't know how to use Wikipedia.
Still fighting Unculpsalm for they rats.
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Permalink Reply by BO on
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Great read, Waldo. Love that Grant White fellow. He must have inspired Mark Twain.
150 years, and not a whole lot has changed. I think you've found your calling in pointing out the parallels between then and now. Between the prison industry and outsourcing our manufacturing, slavery is alive and well. And apparently, Muslims are the new indian nations to be robbed. What goes 'round...
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Reminds me of the Jute Mill Song
Oh dear me
The world is ill divided
Those that work the hardest
Are the least provided
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"Bromance." I had not heard that neologism until this week. (do you believe this thing got 24 MILLION hits?) Bromance is definitely part of the Civil War meme. Zeke and I looked at that huge deco thing at G-burg and agreed it was totally fukkin gay. Dude.
Gotta admit... am developing a real affection for My German Boys. Check Sam Watkins' story about Schwartz and Pfifer (except they were southrons). Still, you can tell a Deutschmann, ja.
Maybe our thinking has changed about this shit. My Old Man warned me that I would come to hate them... because "...they will always be heroes... and they'll always be nineteen." Well-- I don't hate them. I feel sorry for them. They were not quite heroes... almost victims.
Like when I watched the big C take my oldest friend some years back. He fought it all the way. Didn't complain much. Took it in stride. We talked about getting together in that old Airstream by the lake (which never did exist in this world) Maybe. Who knows?
I think the kids see this "patriotism" shit for it really is. Just a meme. And a nasty one at that.
Yet... whenever I was away... couldn't help missing me "home." Great Lakes. Da Blues. And I aint got the heart to see what's left of New Orleans. And then... there's Gettysburg. There was never any "pride" for me here. Only a great sadness that has been with me for overt 50 years.
The kids saw me lose it once... at The Wall. Warned them it might happen. Didn't think it would happen at Gettysburg... after all these tears. But came across a stone in Evergreen Cemetery... a nine-year-old girl... gone only a few years. "Once and Forever," it said. I cried then. Makes me cry now.
"Dammit, that's hard," I said to Zeke. "Dammit boy. That's so goddam hard."
Life is hard. Then you die. That's just the way it is, I guess.
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Klaus Theweleit explored German boys and bromance.....and the Freikorps.
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I turned back to the text itself, seeking to decipher some of the references obscured both by time and by the author’s penchant for “archaic-cizing” proper nouns. It took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize that “Unculpsalm” was Uncle Sam, while the “Tshivulree” (Chivalry) and the “Ephephvees” (F.F.V.’s, or First Families of Virginia) were more immediately apparent. Reciting these terms out loud helped — though distilling “Quakers” from what now seems to be the very obvious reference, “Cooacres,” occupied a good deal of one morning.
Much like my experience working with Waldo's brilliant wordplay for Tacoma and Double Blind Sided!
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Aye, soor... ye'ere too kind!
In the place of noble thinkers
Of scholars and great drinkers
But above them all for splendour
Shone the Queen of all Argyll
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Saw this over at the Chimp - linked it to the original site.
The Secret History of G.I. Joe
Barbie, Joe, Darth Vader, and Making War in Children’s Culture (Part 1)
By Tom Engelhardt
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