anthroamerican

This is my friend Hadzilla rapping. Watch him absolutely KILL IT. Seriously.

Jusky, Hadz, EmpPalp, CuddlyNinja, Yzupp, C-Gilmo, and GoneAwayGal sing Stand By Me.

Directed, produced, filmed and edited by me, TrolleyCat, drunk video genius.

Read up on anti-fascism and fascism history

Read up on U.S. repression and McCarthyism

Read up on security culture and the surveillance state

Read up on resistance tactics

Read up on black liberation

Read up on resisting ICE and deportations

Read up on Chicano oppression and resistance

Read up on borders and walls

Read up on black migration

Read up on muslim surveillance and muslim resistance

Read up on Indigenous resistance

Read up on feminist history

Read up on reproductive health

Read up on trans and queer rights

“Jeffersonian democracy is a vision of America that idealizes the self-sufficient farmer and constructs a narrow, exclusionary ‘plain folks’ identity. In recent years, the promises of Jeffersonian democracy have failed those who identify with this rural and white ideal. This is the very real dispossession white people are feeling right now.

But we must acknowledge that this is a dispossession of something they only had at the expense of so many others, so many of us. This vision and its expansion requires the continuous and ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples, the consolidation of property and political rights around whiteness, the exploitation of enslaved and immigrant labor, and the reinforcement of the heteronormative family as the sole site of property transfer.

The solution is not to turn around and reinforce Jeffersonian democracy, because that vision of the United States is not only flawed, it is also fundamentally violent. To refuse to acknowledge this is to create its own insularity. It is to shield people from the truths of history.”

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill began April 20, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. 

     — Wikipedia, “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill”

The BP disaster was by far the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. It spewed as much oil in just a few days as the entire Exxon Valdez spill and eclipsed the notorious Ixtoc blowout of 1979, which leaked 138 million gallons of crude. Astoundingly, BP refused to help scientists gather the information necessary to determine just how much oil was actually spewing into the Gulf ecosystem. But government estimates of up to 2.6 million gallons per day put the total as high as 205.8 million.

     — Center for Biological Diversity, “Catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico: Devastation Persists”

The name Macondo had been the winning selection in a BP employee contest as part of an internal United Way campaign. It comes from the fictitious cursed town in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

     — Wikipedia, “Macondo Prospect”

… a woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day suddenly ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion. “It’s coming,” she finally explained. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.”

     ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

…and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

    ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

There was a slaughtering of so many cows, pigs and chickens for the endless parties that the ground in the courtyard turned black and muddy with so much blood. It was an eternal execution of bones and innards, a mud pit of leftovers, and they had to keep exploding dynamite bombs all the time so that the buzzards would not pluck out the guests’ eyes.

     ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 

For months, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. 

     ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

     ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use…. At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo” and another larger one on the main street that said “God exists.”

I don’t know, but if I hated him I’d wish he were. To be a genius is a bad fate, one whose badness has been painted over by our present way of life. This way of ours demands constant production, productions of ever more sophisticated function and intricate design. That’s the nature of selling in a market where consumers must be tricked to make them buy one more thing. In reality, the consumers know this, know that they must be tricked, and that their Consumer’s Choice is really only spent on choosing which of the tricks they will choose to be tricked by. (Think of your parents telling you which Superbowl ad was their favorite.) Geniuses thrive in this swamp in the same way that Hollywood runs on manic depression. Think of the energy that rises off of celebrities like a stench. (Repellent and annoying energeticness is btw the most common substitute for being a genius in a market economy.)

Borges said that genius was an ugly word (“nocturnal, Germanic.”) He’s not far wrong. I’d add that it turns artists into little Rudy Giuliani’s of the spirit: Officious little shits who snore their way through the lives of others, people for whom ambition is always quarried from their native greed, and creativity from the need for attention, people who nurse an inner, weeping wound of self-hatred, a wound whose obvious and insufficient bandage is a bogus self-confidence. These and other flaws drive these poor people to produce as much and more than any market can sell. And so they serve their ultimate economic purpose by setting the shoulder of their own tragedy against the walls of a marketplace. Expending themselves by expanding it. But this isn’t real genius. 

I think that people confuse the fruits of genius with its work. More and more I am convinced that ‘genius,’ in the sense that you meant, does not set apart a certain group of people, people with extraordinary talents or intelligence, but that ‘genius’ describes something much more humble: only a way of working. What you mean by ‘genius’ is an unusually pure love for work. In practice, it is seldom more than an obsession with crawling further than anyone can run. 

—David Foster Wallace, David Lynch Keeps His Head

An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

—David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, post modern stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

—David Foster Wallace. interview

Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

—David Foster Wallace, interview

Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help…a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.

—David Foster Wallace, Introduction to Best American Essays 2007

We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries–we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

…to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood — that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

Because of Them, We Can

US students will be able to shield themselves during school shootings with the latest in body armour, the Bodyguard Blanket

But it must be a statistical flaw, you say, there weren’t that many massacres before 1996, right? No, WRONG.  In the eighteen years leading up to Port Arthur, there had been 13 mass shootings. 

But April, you ask, this couldn’t possibly have worked could it? Wouldn’t it only have reduced the mass shootings? WRONG. Since 1996, there have been ZERO mass shootings. That’s right, ZERO. FUCKING ZILCH. There have been scattered homicides, however:

How many schools have been raided and children murdered? NONE. How many film buffs have been murdered in their seats? NONE. How many innocent lives have been lost to the barrel of a gun? NONE.

On top of this, homicides involving the use of guns, and youth suicide involving the use of guns has declined dramatically, by up to 60%

Australia, however much the environment tries to kill you, is a safe haven, and you can walk the streets with 99% assurance that you won’t fall victim to a drive by shooting.

in 1996 another lone gunman killed 16 children and their teacher, and then committed suicide. again within six months the uk government outlawed all handguns. special dispensation had to be issued in order to hold shooting competition as part of the 2012 olympic games, and british hopefuls had to train overseas.

you can legally own certain types of shotgun, .22 calibre rifles over a certain barrel length, and antiques. that’s it.

in the nigh-on twenty years since the uk has had one mass shooting. one. and we’re down to about 30 gun-related deaths annually.