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Me: San Diego library talk Thurs

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by fubarista, Oct 21, 2012.

  1. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Consent to Tyranny

    Event Date/Time
    Thursday, Oct 25, 2012
    4:00 pm until 5:30 pm

    Description

    Local author Mark E. Smith discusses two essays "The Counterrevolutionary Constitution" and "You've Got to Stop Voting” from his controversial work, Consent to Tyranny: Voting in the USA. Part of San Diego Public Library’s project: "Searching for Democracy: A Public Conversation about the Constitution." Made possible with support from Cal Humanities. For more information, visit http://www.calhum.org.

    Cost free

    Location

    San Diego Public Library
    820 E Street
    San Diego, CA


    Sponsor San Diego Public Library
    Phone 619-236-5800
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    It'll be on the third floor of the library, probably in the auditorium.

    I'm supposed to talk for 45 minutes and leave 45 minutes open for Q&A

    The expected audience, if anyone turns up, will probably be people who have attended other events in this series, most of which were bullshit presented by law professors.

    Any anarchists who happen to be in the area and have the time free, would be more than welcome--it wouldn't hurt for me to have some friends who know the score around.

    ---------------------

    In other related news, the Election Boycott Movement has been causing a bit of a stir. It has been discussed on FireDogLake, TruthDig, TruthOut, and somebody said a caller mentioned it on the Mike Malloy show. My essay, "You've Got to Stop Voting," has gotten over 18,000 hits on my little website, and the political party operatives on other forums (the rules on my site say they'll be shot on sight) are way outnumbered by angry nonvoters. We're not big enough to make a dent in the system, but the system is so fucked up that it probably could be knocked over with a feather at this point.
     

  2. xXZenyattaXx

    xXZenyattaXx Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Jul 29, 2012
     
    Count me in. :) (probably)
     
  3. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Thanks, Zen. I, like spend a full week honing and whittling my talk, printing out and editing at least 7 drafts, like 16 to 18 pages, practicing and timing it, because a week before it happens they tell me they're gonna pay me a $150 "honorarium" (of which SSI says they might let me keep $85), so I don't want to rip them off, and then only four people show up and two of them are the librarians who arranged it. But I give it my all and had fun, and at least nobody walked out. Then I come home and put it up on my website and sent it to friends and everyone thinks it's brilliant, and some guy from a website called politico.com interviews me by phone for a sidebar that his editor probably won't approve, and then I find an article by Paul Craig Roberts, who was Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration and is now a radical blogger, and he says a few of the same things, but in a lot fewer words, so I point the politico guy to him because Roberts has credentials and nice clothes and stuff that an editor would approve. If they're going to sneer, they might as well sneer at somebody worth sneering at. This country is freakin' insane. I spent years knocking my head against walls trying to find any place that would let me talk, and then the library actually pays me to talk. Apart from a couple of teach-ins at Occupy SD, nobody ever let me talk for more than ten minutes before, and if I'd been clever enough to ask, they probably would have paid me to shut up. :D

    Here's a link to the transcript:

    http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1463
     
  4. xXZenyattaXx

    xXZenyattaXx Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Jul 29, 2012
     
    Hey uh yeah sorry I didn't show up I had to work late that day... :/
     
  5. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Yeah, being old and looking back, Zen, I obviously spent too much of my life working--but then if I hadn't, I might not still be around.

    When is a choice not a choice? When it's an election or an economic necessity--and there are probably a lot of other times too.

    This is something S. Brian Willson wrote this week, and I agree with it completely:

    Re: 2012 so-called US Presidential Selection - by S. Brian Willson

    What a distraction an election is from serious pursuit of our human responsibilities and sensitivities. We are increasingly aware that industrial civilization is on a collision course with life itself on the Planet, and the modern Eurocentric nation state’s political economies such as in the USA are coordinating the plunder toward our extinction as the plutocrats and oligarchs live in the illusion of opulence. Perhaps they feel invincible like cocaine addicts.

    This awareness is made much more distressing, at least to me, because our modern individual and collective consumption patterns form the political energy that both drives the plunder from our dependence upon its continuation, while we fork over our money to the plutocracies and oligarchies that gleam huge profits from our addictions and dependencies.

    I say that our dignity as human beings trumps concern for longevity. I find no dignity at all in thinking and living according to the assumptions and values of our political economy – a total imperial economy that dehumanizes everyone while it destroys everything.

    Albert Camus, writing in 1946 reflecting on WWII, described the absurdity and dangerousness of the state, the illusions of the efficacy of violence, and the decline in political persuasion to achieve justice. The state, like the old church, has subjugated humans to its tyrannical authority. He offered the prescription that it is now a moral imperative for humans to choose to be “neither victims nor executioners.” Camus: “In the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being.”

    My reflections have included reading more of Ivan Illich and Michael Foucalt and I am struck and impressed by their suggestion that we are in the midst or on the eve of an epistemic break – “a sudden image shift in consciousness in which the unthinkable becomes thinkable”, and “a rupture in consciousness” the equivalent to a “catastrophic break with industrial man’s image of himself.” Perhaps this is what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described as what happens once in awhile in all of evolutionary history – “punctured equilibrium.”

    Somehow I think we are at this “epistemic” moment in the long unfolding journey of human evolution, with the last 6,000 years or so of what some describe as “civilization” being extremely regressive/repressive (patriarchal vertical power, slave labor, violence, military enforcement of obedience to the hierarchy, expansion of territory, etc.). I think we, at least some of us, know this, and are stumbling (at least in my case) as to how to redefine our relationships with one another and power, as we recover our humanity from the conditioning that so many of us were successfully dehumanized in.

    I am so estranged at this point that I refuse to fly in airplanes, refuse to ride most of the time in fossil fuel cars, refuse a handheld electronic device, etc., such that I am somewhat isolated by my own choices. Meanwhile I am also seriously compromised: my partner Becky has just flown to Viet Nam for the 5th time as she works on the Viet Nam Friendship Village in Hanoi dealing with the Agent Orange victims caused by the USA many wars ago, and we are communicating by electrons via email. Go figure.

    So, I am revisiting the whole way humans (including myself, of course) relate, or not, to power. I just read one account of the collapse of the Mayan civilization circa 900 AD in which it appears that the vast majority of workers who were struggling to keep the kings and their palaces well fed with food, clothes, and trinkets, as they themselves were receiving fewer calories, simply walked away and refused any further cooperation/complicity. Some died, as others went to the mountains to subsist. But the kings starved. And in my several trips to visit with the Mayan Zapatistas over the past 17 years, I am relating to the offspring of those Mayans who refused cooperation 1200 years ago, and continue to do so today since their 1994 revolution coinciding with NAFTA coming into effect. So withdraw of support for and complicity with the state is a model of empowerment. The Zapatistas live very simply as they refuse any payments for utilities or taxes to the state, yet they celebrate everyday their liberation to dignity from their previous cooperation with their own slavery. As they say, “our dignity is everything, longevity without it is horrible, unthinkable now.”

    And then I am reminded again of Gandhi’s 2-prong approach for liberation from living under empire: strategic moments of visible risk taking acts of noncooperation while, more importantly, building the local food and simple tool sufficient communities from below, i.e, relocalization, extricating one’s dependency upon the imperial overlords.

    All this to say I cannot take any US elections seriously, certainly not at the national level, while striving to regroup here in Portland, Oregon, piecing together components of more regional sufficiency and simpler living, perhaps part of the epistemic break. I am rooting for collapse as a necessary element of survival, even as I likely go down with it. I now think of myself as an apocaloptimist, and a neolithic conservative, even considering paleolithic features. But, I am clear, dignity trumps longevity.

    Link to source: http://www.brianwillson.com/re-2012-so- ... selection/
    October 23, 2012
    ----------------

    Fuck yeah! An APOCALOPTIMIST! Can I get a hyphen for that? I wannabe an anarcho-apocaloptimist! (Or is that just a hippie way of saying anarcho-punk?)
     
  6. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
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    Call it whatever you want Mark...its good shit, and sorry I wasn't able to attend but I had a previous engagement..great signature by the way.
     
  7. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Thanks, Mar. I think I'll stick with punk, although I lack the musical and any other relevant background. Brian has deep ties to hippie communities, but all the ones I ever knew did was kick me out, including the one I founded, so fuck 'em. I can't even pronounce apocaloptimist. :lmao:

    Oh, by the way, I had joined Friends of PM Press and got several books a month from them for almost a year, but had to stop because I couldn't afford it any more. One of the last books they sent me was, Punk Rock: An Oral History, by John Robb. I'm about a third of the way through it, and so far it is aging Brits talking about who their friends were and what was trendy when they were teens. If you want it when I'm done, let me know.
     
  8. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
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    Sure why not, its always good for a laugh...nothing worse than crackademics in punk...no matter who writes these things they always get it wrong in one way or another...
     
  9. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Okay. I'll let you know. This book might not be all that bad--Robb had a band called the Membranes and, according to the back cover, currently fronts for a band called Coldblade. I think the problem is that he wanted to get this history of how punk rock started, so the whole book is just punk rockers telling anecdotes of what they remember. Maybe it gets better, but in the first part it seems that a lot of them remember how much they paid for the fashionable t-shirts they bought when they were thirteen. :(
     
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