I believe in
love. I believe in
music. I believe in
anarchy. That’s it. Its no different than believing in
God, except I don’t
worship anything. I just think. Anarchy is a beautifully flawed idea that spited or embraced by people who have no real concept of its meaning, with very few people actually taking the time to analyze their love or hatred to form a coherent argument for or against it.
I do not believe in a system-less society where we all live in happy bliss and don’t kill or rob or hate. Utopia, that load of crap perfect society slopped onto our philosophical plates by Thomas Aquinas and the incipient socialism fomenting in Europe and the Americas since the 1600’s. You can’t tear everything down and expect it all to survive without any supports. Neither can you expect to keep building on some great idea for a civilization and expect it not to topple. If you stay too long in your foundations, you’ll sink into the ground.
I think that it would be a beautiful thing for our whole consuming American society to collapse into itself and have to start over from scratch with a new idea. Lessons from the past and the progressing social ideas accumulate and form the only strong base for a society to rest on. Anything tangible, unfortunately, can’t stand forever without being questioned, studied, placed into a museum. Rome serves as a perfect example. Built upon the fallen Greek society, new and improved and marketed to one quarter of the world’s population, its hubris and worship of its own accomplishments, its worship of anything, proved its downfall. Roman civilization didn’t fall to some superior society, it didn’t fall to progress. It tripped on its own massive feet trying to evade the scurrying mouse of Christianity and dodging the tides of time. The Dark Ages followed, where we again found the plans to the Tower of Babel. The post-Roman ended with the Renaissance when the individual stopped relying on his lord and his past and looked to himself, to other places for his beliefs. The Catholic church nearly died at the hands of Martin Luther, who attacked its snowballing corruption, and THIS was which gave way to anarchic revolutions in America and France which spawned new social ideas, governmental systems and eventually the most powerful global civilization ever.
But now I look and don’t see accomplishments, don’t see progress. I see black tar expanses abutting never ending plains of well kept man made environments which contain us until we jump off the ocean liner and sink into the uncontrollable. I see self-righteous wars, vain "our way or the highway" atom bombs, I see botox treatments making bigger news and more money than AIDS research. We’ve deified the system of capitalism and fully participatory democracy (which has progressed and replaced what our visionary fathers saw in the first place as a Roman Republic). In our respect, our holding sacred of man made means to survive, we ignore the fallibility of all people, the fact that believing so deeply in something ignores its relative nature to some other deified (or not deified) idea.
I can’t spark a revolution. We’re too prosperous, too self-sustaining to fall right now. It’s the wrong time to expect anyone to be as jaded with the system as I. Little discrepancies in the inhumanity of our actions don’t bother many people because it is so easy to ignore exploitation when Nikes are so comfortable. In fact, I don’t even want to start a revolution. That would be holding something sacred, saying that what I think is better than what you think.
What I CAN do is spray paint your fence, loot your store, egg your car and punch you in the face.
Some anarchists reject the early punk rock Sid Vicious “destroy” days when random acts of nihilism dominated the image of punk rock, and when self- destructive irreverence characterized punk to the masses. Now we see wholesome old Billie Joe Armstrong replacing snarling, heroin addicted Sid Vicious as punk’s poster boy.
True beauty can be found in the nihilists’ degeneration into the gutters of the imposing downtown skylines. They hold nothing sacred and by defacing the edifices of tradition, they tell people in a very in your face way that what they hold sacred is bullshit as well. Angry anarchists whose only purpose in life is to “fuck shit up” will say you in a very loud, physical voice what they think of the “system.”
I suppose that someone could unite a bunch of angry kids to go and fuck up all the shit in their paths, with nothing saved but human life. But unity under a cause does not go along with the entropic credo of the nihlistic, idealistic youth, or anyone for that matter in such a complicated society. Neither liberals nor conservatives can find one specific thing to agree on wholly, and the only consensus comes from the abstract idea of progression versus stagnation. Any “movement” under the Black Flag would find two angry kids next to each other spray painting the wall for the sake of anarchy. A true awakening would be the two fuckers getting in a fist fight and leaving blood on the sidewalk purely for the sake of deconstructing any idea that could prolong the existence of society as it is.
I guess its impossible for enough teenagers to find themselves jaded enough to take a crowbar to the nearest car to make any significant anarchic impact without organizing into a movement. That’s a problem. One of the only things I can believe in is a paradoxical crock of shit. But dying with that crock on my lips is better than grasping a hollow, conceited idea called America. Fuck the flag. Fuck you.