The Revolution®

Quotations from Revolution Party Chairman R.U. Sirius

eVersion 1.0 / trc

©2000 by R.U. Sirius
All right reserved 
ISBN 0-9221915-62-8

Feral House
2554 Lincoln Blvd. #1059
Venice, California 90291

Revolution Party Chairman R.U. Sirius 
Illustration/photo provided by Eve Berni
Printed in Hong Kong 
Design by Linda Hayashi

 CONTENTS

Introduction by Andrei Codrescu 
Preface by Hassan I Sirius

SECTION ONE
THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
THE REVOLUTION®: A Political Party
Preamble
Revolution in the Year 2000

SECTION TWO
QUOTATIONS and BRIEF ESSAYS FROM
CHAIRMAN SIRIUS FROM A to Z
(well, W, actually)
Authoritarianism
Censorship
Class
Clintonism
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Consensus Reality
Corporate Welfare
Crass Analyses
Cyber Culture, Digital Revolution
Death to the Smug
Drug War
Identity
Interview
Irreverence
Kosovo
Media
Money
1960s, 70s
Oh Wow, Cosmic
Old-Fashioned Values
Police State
Political Factions
Post-Modernist Revolt
Right Libertarianism
Sex
Surveillance in Schools
Terrorism
Total Liberation
Victory Over Horseshit!
Virtual Reality
Work
Testimonials

AH, YOU
by Andrei Codrescu

	 The disaffected in America are in free fall and among the many flavors of discontent, the strongest is one that is simultaneously aphrodisiac and intellectually aroused. This mob knocks on heaven's door with stainless steel coffee mugs and is possessed of a delirious knowledge of the workings of the cosmos. What this huge harlequin army doesn't understand is why, in the midst of a vibrantly alive multi-leveled universe working at full throttle all the time, there persists a rigid fortress of death bristling with hardware already obsolete by 1912. This incomprehensible persistence of the death-dealing structure has led to the formation of the Party by R.U. Sirius, the man (or creature) of This Time. The Party (aka THE REVOLUTION®) intends nothing less than bringing the full force of the Overflowing Libido of the nation to active duty. To the casual observer, the Old World is already dead and there seems hardly any reason to push down a termite-eaten structure wobbling on its last legs of Nationalism, Sweatism, and Suspicion. But to the Workers of the Sublime there is good reason to knock down the still-huge House of the Straw Man. To this end, the Party and R.U. Sirius have magnetized the Giddy and the Pissed into one huge circular Hora that is ready to do its affirmative dance on the ruins. The world belongs to those who can keep more than six contradictions in their minds at the same time without blowing up like a cheap cash register. You will find, in these quotations from Chairman R.U. Sirius, that several thousand simultaneous and dialectically aroused propositions are firing off in synch. Being of the same energy field myself, I now throw a sackfull of gold dust into the arena and dare anyone to be either richer, funnier, or smarter than this next guy.

EVEN BETTER THAN 
A BAG OF SHIT
Preface from R.U. Sirius' brother, 
the Great & Terrible Hassan I Sirius

	 "Nothing is new. Everything is permuted." Or so say the hippest philosophers of our times. And while I wouldn't claim that my brother, the Good and Honorable R.U. Sirius has produced any original thought -- such as a new way of viewing physics, or a shocking new eschatology, or even a political philosophy in the sense of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, he sure does represent well in the mix. THE REVOLUTION® Quotations then may just be the syncretic statement for our times, a call to a dissolute and disunited ahistoric layer cake of alienated generations and tribes to come together oh yeah over me.
	 As Chairman and Write-in Presidential Candidate for THE REVOLUTION®, my brother Sirius has succeeded in getting noticed by over half-a-dozen teenagers from the midwest, plus an older guy in a three-letter agency who has been following him around lately. This may be enough. But with the publication of the book you now hold in your hands, we can be confident that the last 48,024 Maoists left on earth will beat a shining path to the nearest bookstore.
	 Besides those Maoists, I believe I could predict an early victory for my brother, Mr. Sirius, in the next presidential election if a few well-known media pundits were to suddenly announce that he stood a chance of winning. Indeed, I believe that I speak for the majority of Americans -- particularly that majority that doesn't usually vote -- when I say that I would rather vote for a sack of excrement than for one of the 4-letter words currently competing to head up the "two party" system.
	 Not that I'm calling my brother a sack of shit, but look at it this way. The Russians chose Boris Yeltsin -- easily mistaken for a sack of excrement or a jar of piss -- as an alternative to the continued dictatorship of the Communist Party. Who or what will we choose to overthrow the Republicrat dictatorship? Jesse Ventura? Definitely maybe.
Warren Beatty? Dubious at best. Pat Buchanan, Lowell Weicker, Colin Powell, Ross Perot? R.U. Sirius??!!!???
	 It's with great humor and a demonstrable absence of common sense that I commend to you the write-in candidacy of my brother, the good and kind R.U. Sirius. He is not only the best candidate for millennial leadership, he is -- think about it -- the most precise possible linguistic response to the candidates offered by the corporate sponsors. And in a slightly more earnest vein, let me encourage you to seriously consider "The Revolution" as your political organization of choice. The ideas are fresh, the politics are Right for the Left behinds, and Left Right under the nose of Right thinking people, offering them a better deal than four more years of Gore in the Bush.
	 And then there's YOU. What are you going to do about a corporate oligarchy and a police state? Sirius thinks it's a crime to take himself too seriously . . . you see, it's in the name. But that doesn't prevent YOU from taking these thoughts and using them to change the way things are.
	 While much of this book is organized as a series of brief quotations from the Chairman, there are also a few longer "articles" and the odd occasional interview thrown in. Read this book. And then gather in groups. Hold the book between the thumb and forefinger and push it upward toward the sky in unison. Then grab a CEO who practices corporate urine testing and drag him out into a public square. Pelt him with key lime pie and humiliate him while shouting my brother's name.

	 Everything's cool. Nothing is perverted.
			 Hassan I Sirius, Labor Day, 1999

SECTION ONE
THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

THE REVOLUTION® 
A Political Party

	Religion  is poison,  sure.  Hey man.  So is ideology. -- Yippie MauMau of Tibet, 1969

	 We need history because it is the storage closet in which the costumes are kept. We are the first era that is truly learned so far as 'costumes' are concerned -- we are better prepared than any time has ever been for the Great Carnival, the most spirited Mardi-Gras laughter, the most reckless fun, for the transcendental summit of the utmost idiocy, for a truly Aristophanean mockery of the universe. We can be the parodists of world history, the Punchinellos of God! If nothing else living today has a future -- perhaps it will be our laugher that has one. -- Nietzsche

We're unmaking history here! - Hassan I Sirius, in an email to Lisa-Marie Presley

PRE-RAMBLE

	 In 1996 I ran for President.
	 Okay. I walked actually.
	 Honestly? I laid down. I was high on morphine one evening at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley while the (UN)Democratic Convention was busy crowning President Groovy and his stiffy (Al Gore). It appeared in front of my imagination in flashing neon like a Jenny Holzer video sculpture: DERISION 96: FUCK THE VOTE!
	 I couldn't shake it. It was a perfect slogan. And that ought to have been enough. I mean, consider the alternatives.
	 I imagined the disenfranchised masses rising up. Concerned pundits driven to apoplexy because everywhere Clinton, Dole, and Perot went there would be a crowd of lunatics shouting "R.U. Sirius?!!" What other possible response to the politics of the moment? There would have been copulating in the voting booths. Dan Rather's electronic circuits would have sizzled and smoked in astonishment as I blipped onto the radar screen. 1% . . . one lousy fucking percent was all I asked!!!

	 Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke or When the Going Gets Wired, the Weird Turn Sirius.

It didn't catch on.
	 I want to propose to you. That's right, you with the microchip up your sphincter. And the rest of you too . . . even the ones who write me email saying stuff like, "I agree with what you're saying about total revolution and free food, needles, and condoms, but why didn't you say anything about the face on mars?"
	 Let's play a game. Let's play wonk. Let's imagine that we actually have the power to make policy in this democracy.
	 I'm going to run a serious campaign this time.
	 Let's call this new party the "THE REVOLUTION®." (Note to Richard and the Disinfo crew: I was gonna call it the "Alternative Party" but instead I'm changing the name to THE REVOLUTION®, because I really like the chicken burritos [without the onions] at Taco Bell®. And I figure that if they're advertising revolution right now, it's gotta be mass market. I know . . . lame. But hang with me for a moment. I wanna get some votes in this election, not just please a handful of too-hip-to-breathe compatriots with pictures of Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Antonin Artaud on their computer monitors. I want millions of votes. And I figure; if we can have an "alternative music," if we can have an "alternative culture" that's embraced by Volkswagen® and Jordache® jeans, why can't we have an "alternative" political party and get at least half as many votes as Eddie Vedder sells CDs? Are you following me? Am I making sense here? I think this makes sense. We can hype THE REVOLUTION® in the context of '90s content-free bohemianism. "Get a cappuccino at Starbucks® and then Vote THE REVOLUTION®!" Voting radical as a fashion accessory. How can it miss?)
	 Perry Farrell can organize the campaign tour. Reebok® and Nike® will battle Coke® and Pepsi® for the opportunity to endorse. In fact, this may be an ideal way to avoid the trap of being beholden to dozens of wealthy and powerful financial contributors. We will instead be beholden to just one sponsor. Let's say it's Reebok®. I agree that, for instance, if I'm elected President I will wear Reeboks® everywhere. I wear the logo on my t-shirt during State dinners, press conferences, etc. We'll paint the Reebok® logo on the front of the White House. During the inauguration ceremonies, Monica Lewinsky will appear wearing naught but a lovely pair of Reebok®. Replace the stars on the flag with the Reebok® logo. We'll give Reebok® all of the advantages that other politicians give all their contributors. But then we're free to screw all the other mega-corporations if and when we see fit.
	 Looking further down the road, I can imagine sponsorship replacing taxation. Three decades ago, corporations carried more than 30% of the tax burden. Now corporations carry less than 10%, and we all have to make up the slack. But what if we could trick the corporations into sponsoring social programs and infrastructure. "Alabama's Generous Food Stamp Program is Brought to You By Burger King®." Okay, I know . . . further down the road, as I said.

THE REVOLUTION® 19 Point Party Platform for National Politics

	 All of these platform points are stated simply in three-or-less sentences. The reality would be far more complex. I'm not going to nerd out here with details and qualifiers.
	 If you agree with 13 of these 19 points, you should JOIN THE PARTY
	 (1) We will repeal five times as many laws as we pass. We need to simplify and clarify the rules of the game. We will do a better job of enforcing and obeying a few reasonable rules than thousands upon thousands of incomprehensible statutes.
	 (2) Stop Global Warming NOW! Clean energy is now overwhelmingly do-able. Whether electronic autos, fuel cells, or some combination of those and other clean energy technologies, the next US Administration should pull out all stops in insuring a rapid changeover to clean energy -- it should be 100% before the end of this decade.
	 (3) End the prohibition against most pleasure drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Institute a "sin tax," taxing these activities at 100% to make up for some of the funds lost as the result of #5. Use part of this tax income to make counseling and rehabilitation easily available in all locales
	 (4) End all corporate welfare (with the possible exception of fair and reasonable alliances made with industries to achieve #2). Let allegedly free enterprise stand on its own two feet.
	 (5) No Federal Personal Income Taxes on an individual's first $100,000 income. Encourage states and counties to also end taxation of middle-class and poor individuals. Institute a flat tax on income over $100,000.
	 (6) You can't own the human genome. We need to examine biotechnology's promises and threats more closely, and share the information and the positive results more democratically.
	 (7) Close down the prison/industrial complex. Pardon all prisoners who are in for victimless crimes, provided they have no known history of violent activities. Pardon all prisoners listed with Amnesty International. Grant a stay of execution to Mumia, and support a new trial.
	 (8) Defend civil liberties. For the first time in recent memory, let's have a federal government that respects The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. Let's have representatives of the ACLU and the EFF and other pro-rights organizations in the Justice Department.
	 (9) It's time for a new globalism. Advocate a global minimum wage and environmental standards. Oppose excesses in corporate property rights through patents, copyrights et. al
	 (10) Stop policing the world. Become just another member of the UN, with responsibilities equivalent to our numbers. Reduce the Pentagon's budget by at least 30%.
	 (11) Tibet can't wait. And neither can millions of other victims of state repression around the globe. Emphasize human rights in foreign policy, and be consistant about it. Representatives of human rights groups should represent the US in the UN and should be part of the State Department.
	 (12) Close down the National Security State. Since the end of World War II, representative democracy has been hostage to the National Security State. Release all secret documents (excluding only those recent ones that present a very clear and present danger), fire the CIA, and reform the federal intelligence apparatus. Put mature computer hackers in charge of intelligence.
	 (13) Put environmental concerns before profits and jobs. On the other hand, put scientific consensus and reason ahead of emotion-based environmentalism. Protect the environment while limiting Orwellian bureaucratic absurdities. Pay loggers not to clear cut the forests.
	 (14) Open federally-funded birth control clinics all across the country, guaranteeing women in every locale reasonable access to her legal right to abortion and other forms of birth control.
	 (15) Allow "autonomous zones." Offer ways in which localities and even households can -- with a very few limits -- opt out of the system.
	 (16) Re-establish social services at pre-Reagan levels, for starters. Study the possibility of replacing demeaning welfare by using government to create an ultimately self-sustaining "generic" maintenance economy. By creating cooperatives that co-exist with free enterprise, we can replace welfare with a less demeaning, and more democraticly engaging alternative.
	 (17) Study the possibility of restructuring the economic/money system toward making money consistent with actual value in an age where money-as-information is excessively abstracted from the creation of real wealth and unfairly favors those who know how to manipulate it. Also, question the oligarchic power of those who control the money system, such as the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and the World Bank reforming or possibly eliminating those organizations.
	 (18) Fund a "Manhattan Project Toward Utopia." Finance and encourage altruistic scientific and technological projects geared towards breakthroughs that can diminish or eliminate scarcity, disease, and other forms of suffering that most people would prefer not to experience. Establish a principal of universal access to the products of such breakthroughs.
	 (19) Victory Over Horseshit!* The political process in America is hostage to certain obvious absurdities that are an embarrassment before the civilized world: like the continuing embargo against Cuba (and particularly the Helms/Burton bill), the excessive numbers of state executions, our refusal to sign the land mine treaty, the opposition to policies like needle exchange that are geared towards slowing down a plague, refusal of funding for international birth control, ad infinitum. Let's have a national government that calls ridiculous horseshit what it is.

* I stole the slogan from Art Kleps' "Neo-American Church," a religious organization started by a psychedelic prankster extraordinaire in the 1960s.

REVOLUTION IN THE YEAR 2000
R.U. Curious Interviews 
Presidential Candidate R.U. Sirius

	 Q: So what the fuck are you doing running for President?
	 A: I'm drawn to the most self-abasing possible actions, and what could be more debased than finding yourself at the pinnacle of the TACKIEST and most PATHETIC empire in history.
	Q: But THE REVOLUTION® -- the political party you've formed -- seems pretty (you'll pardon the word) serious. You've got lots of good ideas for changing the system.
	A: Yeah, well our platforms would make for a nice transition into a different kind of society. I take the evolution of the political organism a bit more . . . er . . . seriously than the Presidential campaign, although I keep hearing people say that the mainstream is just clueless as to how alienated and pissed off folks are and I could win.
	Q: R.U. ready for that?
	A: Oh YEAH! Since we don't really have a party running candidates for Congress, I'd be stuck with a Democratic or Republican congress. It's hard to imagine ever reaching a budget agreement, since I won't spend any money on the DEA or build any new bombers.
	Q: So there'd be anarchy! How can an anarchist govern?
	A: Fuck man, I'm a monarchist! SHIT!!! Good king Sirius . . . bring me my sex slaves! Ummm, seriously though, anarchism isn't exactly The Revolution's program, just anti-authoritarianism. It's really a reformist party, in the sense that we're using media and the electoral process rather than strikes, riots, and armed struggle. But here's the rub. If the electoral votes were there to elect a party that would do something really progressive in Amerika, if the political establishment tried to do a lot of things that the multinational corporations and the national security and defense establishment didn't like, there'd be a coup and martial law. Hell, there was almost a coup against Clinton, a complete toady. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Bill and Al's excellent adventure. And we already have a state of martial law against recreational drug users and youth.
	Q: There are rumors that you're starting a youth party to take over high schools and colleges.
	A: Me?!!! That's Srini Kumar from Unamerican.com man . . . Really though, that's up to the kids in high school and college. We can only offer some suggestions and resources. But with curfews, school uniforms, random piss searches, the deteriorated quality of education, and the likelihood of spending the future under fucking water, I'd say youth has some heavy issues to contend with. Anyway, it takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.
	Q: Really?
	A: No. But I'll say this. Since starting THE REVOLUTION® http://www.the-revolution.org nearly all my responses have been from people between 14 and 29. My FRIENDS who are over 30 seem incapable of taking this in. Now I'm not gonna say don't trust anybody over 30 except for me, but I'm really coming to understand that something happens to most people as they get older, as they take up "professionalism" and self-define as adults. As my deceased friend Tim Leary liked to point out, adult comes from a Greek phrase meaning "finished form." To be "adult" or finished form, it's necessary to become comfortable with the society that you find yourself in. It's very hard to live comfortably with the understanding that a bomb dropped on Iraq is the same as a bomb dropped on Oklahoma City or sent through the mail to some poor mid-level technoserf. So you find that older people with basically liberal politics (join The Well, for instance) will start blubbering weenie horseshit about the upside of Reagan or Nixon or Clinton and their place in history . . . all that delusional  mainstream crap, but they wouldn't be caught dead talking about the upside of the Unabomber or Charles Manson. I think understanding that the powerless killer is actually more honorable than the powerful killer is probably the single most powerful step one can take toward deprogramming. Understanding that I'm opposing -- not advocating -- slaughter when I say that shows an ability to grasp minor complexity. Anyway, it's always up to youth to make the revolution.
	Q: So people are using this word Revolution again lately. We hear it cropping up in music and culture like it used to in the early seventies. But most people think these are conservative times. Where's the fuckin' revolution?
	A: Revolution isn't made by the left. It's made by the left BEHINDS. Clearly the butt end of the Amerikan dream is ready to revolt. I hear all the happy face propaganda about the success of the Clinton Administration, high employment etcetera. I look around and even my friends who are supposed to be rich are going broke. Sure, there's this big cocaine rush of Yahoo! capitalism, a rush that can ONLY crash. But beneath even the surface of that, it's just temp workers, and millions of more Mcjobs.
	 THE REVOLUTION® isn't just for the political activists. It's much MORE for people who think that the political system is a fucking JOKE, the powers are just a bunch of gangstas who lack style. It's about the homeless, the couch surfers, and weirdos who actually think that liberty matters, that freedom of speech means being able to shout theater in a crowded fire with Bob Barr in the middle.

SECTION TWO

QUOTATIONS
and BRIEF ESSAYS FROM
CHAIRMAN SIRIUS
FROM A to Z 
(well, W, actually)

AUTHORITARIANISM

	 Politicians indicate that legalizing drugs, or even allowing medical marijuana and needle exchange, will send a signal that we approve of drugs. So it's come to this? The American people are by now so infantalized by authoritarian assumptions that anything that is not prohibited must be done? Shove a badger up your ass? Dip your baby in an acid bath? Hammer your nose to your toes? Well, goddamit, if Congress doesn't pass an explicit law to let you know that they disapprove, then you must!

CENSORSHIP

	No, Not Even for Children; a couple we know brought up their children to read and discuss everything, even pornography. The kids seem to be really sane, although they had a run-in with a flasher that was fairly traumatic. When he flashed them, they were astonished. Stunned. Then they asked him . . . please, stay there for just for a minute, okay? please? because they had to run and get somebody -- some friends who would want to see him also -- "This is very interesting!" It traumatized the erection right off him.
	 We toured the American Northwest on behalf of our book How To Mutate & Take Over the World in 1995. We began this "exploded post-novel" in 1994, with a premise that our technical friends found ridiculous: that the US Government would try to censor the Internet. In our book, this precipitates a culture-pranking revolution of Net hackers and media hoaxsters. Our fictional version of this is somewhat ambiguous -- the
"freedom fighters" are portrayed as fairly obnoxious. The disturbing excesses that occur in an unfettered communications medium are pictured in all of their ugliness. Still, when we hit the circuit, we were anything but ambiguous. We're First Amendment absolutists. The net and -- in fact -- all art and media, should be protected by, and from, our government.
	 Our audiences seemed to agree, even the conservative journalists. You wouldn't know it from listening to media pundits, but there is a feeling running across the land that our Government has become a little bit too responsive to the blue-noses. There is a growing disgust with those self-righteous individuals who feel that it's their business to decide what sorts of speech and media should be considered virtuous and what should be officially disallowed, or at least discouraged.
	 Nevertheless, one concern came up again and again; "What about protecting children from nasty stuff?" We could have given the easy response. We could have pointed to the software programs designed to pre-censor the Internet for children and others of tender sensibility. We could have ridden the popular liberal sawhorse that it's a parent's job to control the child's media access. Get real.
	 The reality is that we're living in a media-saturated culture. Our environment is made of media. School children encounter gangsta rap, pornography, and corrosive attitudes daily at school and in the streets, even if parents somehow successfully defend against such things at home. (In fact, it's generally the parents, not the children, who find this sort of material difficult to cope with.)
	 This state of media saturation and media democratization -- and the resulting increase in vulgarity -- certainly preceded the recent popularization of the net. But now, anybody who can get access to a computer and a modem has a printing press, a potential media factory, and a decentralized and ubiquitous channel of distribution. Trying to control access to content in this media apocalypse is like trying to remove polluted particles from the water during a flood.
	 In the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and made an extraordinary speech in which he declared, correctly, that the Berlin Wall could not defend against freedom of communication in the information age.
	 Right on, Ronnie! And if the collective efforts of thousands of commissars and their well-trained police couldn't prevent Eastern Europeans from accessing verboten decadent Western pop culture, how can anybody believe that a few software programs, or the legal strictures of the US Congress, can prevent our own children from accessing it?
	 Still, legislative action such as the Communications Decency Act (which was passed by Congress, but declared unconstitutional by the courts) would have an impact. There is already a great deal of fear and self-censorship among Netizens. As with the unwinnable drug war, individuals would still suffer police-state tactics and prison time if it were made law, and ambitious District Attorneys would advance their careers by ruining lives.
	 Finally, the CDA legislation -- which would have made it illegal to allow children to access "obscene and indecent" content on the Internet -- attempts to limit adult discourse to what we perceive as being safe for children and can't succeed because of the nature of the medium. The World Wide Web just sits there, waiting to be visited. There is no ticket-taker or store clerk present to enforce restrictions against minors. There is no late night programming in cyber-space. The era of "Adult Only" media has been rendered obsolete by the evolution of computer technology. We either have to expand the freedom of children or radically limit the freedom of adults. What do we do?
We believe in protecting kids. The question is, how? By keeping them in a playpen until they have to hit the streets? Or by preparing them, arming them with skills to cope with an adult world.
	 We suggest full disclosure. Freedom of information for kids. Let the kids access all the information they're going to need for surviving in an armed world, one in which all of the stuff of the human psyche, both brilliant and grotesque, is on full display. Protecting children from content is actually a disservice. It's a form of disinformation. Let them freely examine what this species is about.
	 Come to think of it, that's what education is supposed to be, isn't it? Adults, particularly parents and teachers, can help in this process of educating children to cope with the sometimes grotesque excesses of media ubiquity and democratization. Teach them to examine and analyze content -- what it says, who's saying it, and for what purpose. (Of course, most adults have to learn this themselves first.) Teach them to recognize propaganda. Teach them to tease out point-of-view and identify bias. Teach them to be media-streetwise. Teach them, in the process, to deal with human reality.
	 What if every kid had full access to the full flood of human information? What if questions could be answered at each step, down to the nitpick? What if every four-year-old could have every single "why?" answered to her satisfaction? What if every kid could be educated like the king's son, by Chiron the centaur? What if each kid was issued her own electronic centaur fulltime online, able to access it all in full multimedia? The friendly centaur would carry the kid on its strong back while discussing what humans have said about the events or theories in question, down through the millennia.
	 The Net is our first step toward this ideal cybernetic teacher. The interactive process can teach children what it takes to make a deduction from given data and how to build an argument. Why, the kid could learn to think! No wonder the politicians and religious leaders are so frightened.
	 You can't protect children from content in a media-saturated, on-line world. And you shouldn't try. -- written with St. Jude

	 This is the decade of the tight asshole. Intellectuals who you presumed to be at least 50% sane will suddenly start justifying the de facto censorship of a film based on a book by Nabokov. Seems that every time you turn around, someone else is buying or selling a huge bale of horseshit in the name of social responsibility. A stifling, smug cultural centrism trickles down like day-old piss, from that horndog in the White House to the blockhead in each of us.

	 Never ever forget that opposition to "degenerate" art and impure forms of communication were central tenets of Nazism and Stalinism. When Bill Bennett and Al Gore try to shame culture distributors into selling only "uplifting" art and entertainment, send them an uplifting little A. Hitler still life of the Bavarian mountains or a socialist realist portrait of wholesome workers of the world.

	 Sticks and stones may break my bones but . . . media space -- and now virtual space -- must be thought of and used as a safe zone, a place where all the demons and ghouls of the imagination can act out. The urge towards virtual censorship of any sort must be repulsed.
	 Particularly, over the past twenty or so years, media has developed a nasty edge, from the main-streaming of gore to the transgressive nature of the punk/post punk and rap subcultures. This trend continues on the net, where all forms of vulgarity and insult (flaming) are given vent.
	 Out in the real (meat) world, it can be generalized that people behave in a superficially civil manner towards one and other, but brutalize one and other over the "bottom line," when possession or survival is at stake. In a fully realized media or cyberculture -- at the point where primary value is located in virtual space -- this may be reversed. People might play the most primitive of games inside the fully realized media landscape while providing for common decency on the social and economic level.
	 Nice media is banal and boring. We form !kill-barney usegroups and are quick to become nauseated by new age sweetness and light. We are attracted to the stuff with an edge, stuff that stings. We have to come to grips with mediated space as a domain, objectively separate in consequence from real action in the physical world, and we must come to grips with it quickly.

CLASS

	 The future of class distinctions will grow ever wider. The digital elite, today personified at the extreme by the IPO billion dollar babies, Jerry Yang and Mark Andreeson, will eat up most of the money in the system by manipulating the electronic trading networks like so many tinker-toys. Along with the highly paid digital knowledge workers and webmeisters, this small elite will live like kings among the squalor, although they'll wear snot-covered Depends® Undergarments, backwards propeller beanies, and fake leprosy scales -- just like everybody else. They'll be called "golden nose rings." Everybody else -- low-end users with little RAM, no jobs, and no future -- will be called . . . ORGAN DONORS!
	 Observers have noted that with the evolution of a digital/cybernetic culture, the majority of citizens will be economically superfluous. Progress is already being made towards keeping these potentially desperate and angry low-end users off the streets, as local and federal governments enact legislation rendering pretty much everything enjoyable illegal. Soon, the rabble will be safely locked away for life, the seeming injustice of it all rendered painless through the discrete and tasteful use of baseball metaphors.

CLINTONISM

and the counterculture; I was at a party at Timothy Leary's house during the late summer of 1992, a couple of weeks after Bill Clinton and Al Gore had been named the Democratic Party's nominees for the Presidency. I found myself sitting in a circle with the three original living yippies, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, and Anita Hoffman. It was definitely not the sixties, but the exquisitely coifed Rubin still fired up a joint. All of us agreed that we were optimistic about Bill Clinton replacing George Bush as President of the United States. But Paul Krassner surprised us by reporting that he was friendly with a couple who were also friends of Bill and Hillary’s. "Real close friends, and frequent dinner guests," as Krassner put it. "Clinton is one of ours," he added.
	 I don't think that Paul was telling us that Clinton was a yippie or even a radical. I think he meant that the Clintons were moderately hip and sophisticated, politically-progressive baby boomers. Krassner went on to say that they had been infiltrating the system since the early 1970s, always looking towards the Presidency.
	 As the result of that conversation, and a few other admittedly scarce bits of evidence, I've always viewed Clinton as waging a subtle strategic battle to bring at least some liberal, humane values into a sclerotic American political system and an increasingly harsh and fascistic culture. I now view the battle as not only lost, but abandoned. And therein lies the unique tragedy of America's first semi-hip President.

This is taken from a piece written in response to the Clinton Administrations bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, 1998. Remember? No? It was so many many bombs ago. 
The tragic failure of; A Limited "Wag The Dog" Scenario Starring Bill Clinton as The Dog and Monica Lewinsky as The Beaver.
	 Imagine you're William Jefferson Clinton. As a po' boy back in Arkansas, you stopped daddy from beating on mommy and dreamed of some day becoming President of the United States. As a teenager you shook hands with JFK and decided you were going to be just like him some day. In the late Sixties, you were a flaming civil rights antiwar liberal (which actually means you were a bit of a conservative among the radicals and hippies). And while you walked on the mild side of hedonism, you sure discovered a taste for pussy. Long or short, blonde or brunette, you just couldn't ball enough chicks (as we used to say).
	 In graduate school at Oxford, things got a bit more intense. On the one hand, you started grooming yourself for a political career, taking the "realpolitikal" and rather Machiavellian Carroll Quigley as a mentor. At the same time, you went a bit further left, attending militant anti-war demonstrations. And you took to eating hash and pot cookies, and taking a bit of acid and mescaline (according to some of your old classmates, who don't want to deal with the fallout of talking about it to the press, you lucky devil).  Sometimes you thought about throwing over the ambition and dropping out. If you'd tripped a few more times, you might still be somewhere out there today, dawdling in some European coffeehouse, maybe a part-time professor reading a dog-eared copy of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of your favorite books) for the umpteenth time, and wondering if you would have made it if you'd tried. Hey, I'm not entirely unappreciative. George Bush might still be president, and lobbing a handful of bombs at Arabs might be the rule rather than the exception.
	 But you didn't drop out. You came back to America and before you could say, "Wanna do a line?" it was the mid-'70s and, still in your twenties and a flaming liberal, you were elected Governor of Arkansas. You and your hip little buddies, coke-filled with arrogance and youthful idealism, drunk on power and all the pussy a Governorship can get you, bit hard at the ankles of the Arkansas establishment. And the establishment bit back. And you learned lesson number one: if they don't like what you're doing, they can make things bad for everybody. And as the head of state, you'll get the blame. And so you did. Thrown out of office, you went home to lick your wounds  and discover  a taste  for stealth  and cunning, strategy and compromise.
	 And so The Comeback Kid made his first comeback as a moderate Democrat, elected to a second term as Governor of Arkansas. You sold Arkansas' waters down the river, turning it into one of the most polluted states in the union but earning yourself the support of Tyson Foods®, Arkansas' billion dollar chicken waste dumpers. On the other hand, you were sympathetic toward the poor, and you and Hillary worked like dogs to improve the educational system.
	 You learned to trade a little bit of bad (ecological carnage) for a little bit of good (improved education and social infrastructure). In this new land of tradeoffs, you couldn't really claim that you were doing more good than harm, but you could claim that some other guys would be doing less good and even more harm if you weren't such a damned strategic and charismatic guy, able to keep your hands on the levers of power and keep those really bad guys at bay.
	 And so it was that you determined that you were about as good as it gets in the world of realpolitik, the only Democrat with the stealth and cunning to win the White House and maybe squeeze  through a mildly progressive agenda. Who knows, with some dumb luck and a lot of charisma, you might even institute real progress, bringing badly needed attention to America's damaged social infrastructure. Maybe not "putting people first" (let's not be ridiculous) but at least putting people at all. Education, housing, birth control, gay rights, increased funding for AIDS research, reduced defense spending, and universal health care. You brought your message to the American people, making sure to feed the wolves of reaction with the requisite anti-crime and anti-welfare rhetoric, and just barely enough patriotic jingoism to slide by despite having been a pot smoking draft dodger. You even sent a retarded boy to his death in Arkansas, lest you appear soft on the death penalty. Anything less would have meant instant death for your ambitions, because the Moron Majority considers the death penalty a litmus test that proves that you're part of their angry and fearful mob. And so you killed.
	 They say the first time is the hardest. 
	 Still, we were proud of you when you beat George Bush. It could be that nobody else could have done it. You faced down questions about sex and drugs, and you rocked and rolled (a bit lamely but what the hell) on Arsenio. You were our boy, the first boomer president, the great hip hope. During your nomination you played that lame-ass Fleetwood Mac song, but at the victory party in Little Rock, Hillary had them play "Power to the People" by John and Yoko over and over again. Man, it must have been some kind of a head rush.
	 And then, there you were, you and your Arkansas buddies in the White House filled with the delirium of power. Why not come right out swinging? Legalize RU 486? Check. Live up to your campaign promise to allow gays in the military and send a signal out to Saddam Hussein that you held no personal animus toward him.
	 SPLAT! You hit the wall fast. The Pentagon let you know who's boss. And you weren't about to derail your entire administration over a campaign promise to gays and a mild move towards diffusing Middle East tension. There were social programs to pass. And so you wound up in a compromise that would define the peculiar Orwellian schizophrenia of the entire American body politic; from your sex life to the spin doctors to the mainstream media to the (dis)info-exhausted public, to our ahistorical and uneducated youths, the words resonate across American culture with such poignancy that it should be the new pledge of allegiance. Stand up, salute the flag and repeat after me:

DON'T ASK,
DON'T TELL

	 It's really been downhill from there, no matter how well the economy appears to be doing, no matter how many approval polls you may win with the Moron Majority. We watched your friend and Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders (and my choice for Vice Presidential candidate for THE REVOLUTION®) get laughed out of public life and your Administration by America's allegedly liberal media for having the absolute gall to speak some taboo common sense about sex and drugs. And nearly all your social programs died within months when, under heavy manners from the Fed and Wall Street, your administration decides to emphasize deficit reduction over social infrastructure. According to Bob Woodward you exploded in rage that all your programs were captive to the needs and demands of "them." But a few days later, the political survivalist in you took over and you were gleefully dragging conservatives into your administration. Well, at least you still had health care, right? Hah. As any streetwise kid'll tell ya, never never never fuck with a protection racket. And since the insurance industry didn't like your deal, they set out to destroy you.
	 By the time the supposedly-liberal media got through talking about your health care plan, contextualizing it within the rest of the first two years of your administration, you'd have thought you were Chairman Mao leading the professional classes off to slave on the farms with the peasants.
	 And so in 1994 came the "Republican Revolution." Whatever progressive intentions the Clintons may have smuggled forward from the 1960s through the long years of compromise and corruption died there.

CONSENSUS REALITY

RIP 1996; The rise of the Net and the Web represents a victory for counterculture and subculture. The next generation, raised on the net as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is. They won't even know who the centralized dinosaur political leaders are. The panelists on The McLaughlin Report arguing over the Republicans and Democrats will be seen as a weird subculture, on a par with followers of the Reverend Moon. The web has successfully decentralized attention. There is one problem though. With attention decentralized, it's more difficult to get people together to end governmental and corporate abuse.

CORPORATE WELFARE

	 The entire edifice of so-called free enterprise falls on its own face without corporate welfare. They will never end it voluntarily.

	 This is how it works. Companies get our tax dollars, either through tax breaks or directly through contractual deals. At the federal level, the majority of this contractual activity is built into the military budget. On the state and local level, desperate politicians actually -- for all intents and purposes -- bribe companies to choose their locale, and bring jobs and business into the neighborhood. Now consider this: you are paying for the research with your tax dollar, and then they are charging you what the market will bear for the resultant product. I would like to see Westinghouse say, "Thanks, taxpayers. Here are a couple of years' worth of free refrigerators!"

CRASS ANALYSES

	 "We're in a period now that's just like 1955. Things are going well and people are satisfied. Nobody wants to rock the boat."
Political Pundit on The McLaughlin Report,
January 2, 1999

	 "The Global Climate Coalition just doesn't want us to notice that the climate is ten times worse that it was ten years ago, that 230 million people in China were dislocated by floods this year, that Mitch was the worst hurricane in 200 years, that jungles were on fire all over the place in 1998. We're not supposed to know about that; and if we do know, we're supposed to conclude that it's some kind of astonishing freak accident."
Bruce Sterling, Wired News,
January 26, 1998

	 America today is this really weird layer cake. The top layer is relatively thin, filled with a few million recently minted millionaires. A volatile but basically happy US stock market remains high on the hot air balloon of Yahoo capitalism. They read in their daily newspapers that crime and unemployment are down and Viagra is up, shoppers spent 15% more this Christmas, and TV-via-Internet and Internet-via-TV will soon offer a near infinite selection of entertainment and "information" 24 hours a day. These are good times.
	 The next layer is thick with the professional class. Lawyers are doing well in these litigious times, and doctors have it made what with so many people mysteriously ill all the time. Social workers and teachers are tired, but prison bureaucrats are wired. And young computer professionals can afford to be both hip and apolitical. Yes, good times indeed.
	 The next layer of the cake is fatter still. It's wobbly, a bit liquid, and constantly threatening to sink to the bottom. In the eighties, Reaganism somehow managed to "grow the economy" while at the same time decimating the middle class. It was a revolution in expanded profits and lowered expectations, and if you listened carefully enough, you even heard the explicit propaganda of conservative pundits saying that periods of middle class economic comfort like the fifties and sixties were "historical anomalies."  By 1992, speedy new President Clinton could pep talk the American people into being excited by the notion that they "will have to change jobs five or six times in your lifetimes." By the mid-'90s, the expectation of economic security and consistency was pretty much doused. Our now-a-go-go, no-downtime, pay-as-you-go world had been successfully sold as terribly hip and exciting, and successful   businessmen were glamorized as big goddamn risk-takers . . . fucking road warriors!!?? A small expansion of temporary opportunities to work, and to invest in the stock market, was enough to qualify as good times for a shaky young temp class that responded to this slight glimmer of economic hope by following their biological imperative to increase the population. But an incohate sense of foreboding permeates this layer. Good times? It's so hard to tell.
	 Finally, at the bottom of the cake is a layer that may be as large as the one just above it, it's hard to tell. Economically marginalized people with inadequate incomes come in the widest variety of flavors and many, if not most, are invisible. Aside from low-wage earners and part-timers, consider those who have dropped off the radar and out of the unemployment and welfare statistics completely: couch surfers and street crawlers, prisoners, low level drug dealers, barely-surviving freelancers (hi!), permanent college students, and can't-get-started young adults still living with mom. This group is not merely unaccounted for in the economic statistics. We are unpolled, unconsidered by politicians and pundits, and -- for the most part -- unregistered. I will bet my nascent political career, a tub full of Cheez Whiz and Ritz Crackers, and a six pack of Robo that this group is at least close to 50% of the population.
	 These ain't good times. It's a mosh pit down here, but despite the anger, chaos, and cheap drugs, people down here have a clearer view of what's going on in our world than those above. . . .
	 Still, all this class disparity isn't my main point. Whether we're trying to stay on top or stay afloat, we're all under such rapid fire psychic assault from the speed of response demanded by the hyperkinetic pace of our economic culture that we live from one economic/emotional crisis to the next. Even Bill Gates feels insecure. We are so busy dealing with each and every next threat to our personal security that we're able to forget the big picture. And the big picture is that 1998 was a year of terrible bad news. Forget about the death of a salesman . . . er, the impeachment of a President. . . and spock out these serious bigtime crisis points that spell death to the smug by the time the 2000 election rolls around.

	 - In 1998, the heat was on. It became obvious to the most casual observer, and even to the vast majority of the scientific community, that global warming is real. Say it again. Global warming is real! Half of Europe is going to be underwater in a few decades. Crops will die. Icecaps may melt. Ad infinitum. Look into the consequences of global warming. Hmmm, could wreak havoc on your IRA.

	- In 1998, most mainstream economists had to acknowledge a worldwide depression. They called it the Asian flu, but Russia, Mexico, Brazil . . . most of the world was sinking. Even the US stock market got briefly rattled. Beneath the surface -- where mass media gave us bread and circuses -- economists and politicians were making the startling admission that their entire post-cold war strategy of corporate capitalism had failed. This strategy, ironically named neo-liberalism, basically said that all you have to do is open up "free markets" globally (Free? Actually operating under strict rules advantaging those who already control the wealth) to corporate expansion, consumerism, and touristry, while limiting the "waste" involved in government intervention and social welfare, and soon there would be bright and shiny middle-class centrist democracies all over the world, filled with sophisticated global citizens of all races and genders buying cell phones, cappuccino frappes, and watching Ally McBeal. Repeat after me: While the newsmedia was parsing Monica Lewinsky's every blowjob, the entire post cold war strategy of global capitalism was declared a failure in the year 1998 at the expense of hundreds of millions of downsized starvers.

	- In 1998, our government and newsmedia prepared us for the likelihood of horrific biological and chemical warfare/terror events. While grotesque biological slaughter has been a possibility ever since whitey gave blankets to the natives, and certainly has been practiced on occasion throughout more recent times, sometimes over an agent orange soda and napalm fries, suddenly we were informed that biological terror events were imminent and inevitable. Whether this was the result of a realistic assessment of the slow democratization of knowledge, chemicals, and technology, and thousands of desperate outcasts from the former Soviet Union's military/industrial complex, or an indication that our own national security forces have plans for us, or both, I leave to you and Robert Preston to guess. In any case, biological terror reared its fevered, pustulating, gut-vomiting head for several days in the mainstream media,  before disappearing behind Monicas ample frame, its promises of small random holocausts providing an odd background noise to these alleged good times.

	 I want to make something clear. I'm not an apocalypse monger. I don't believe the Bible. I don't need the realization of Revelations so I can self-righteously wave my hands and shout, "I told you so." I'd rather see good times. Hell, I don't even have a huge moral hard-on for seeing capitalism go down (or communism, for that matter). I can even have a good time in a mall. I'm easy. If things were going swimmingly, I'd be the first to let you know.
	 There's only one good thing I can say about the Helter Stupid that seems to be coming down fast in the next couple of years -- as weather catastrophes, the collapse of the global market, and biological horror hits home. In the chaos and confusion, people might actually elect me President. And as the world burns, and the seas rise, at least you won't have to hear alot of pompous horseshit about "the honor of the office of the Presidency" and the sanctity of the Constitution, as if Congress and six different
administrations haven't wiped their asses with the constitution -- for one instance, every time a President bombs a foreign country without submitting to the War Powers Act and they all just sit back. As if anybody in the last three generations with half-a-brain has any more respect for our elected officials man they do for Mariah Carey. At least we'll have a chance to see how Bob Barr responds to the nomination of Larry Flynt as Attorney General.

Two Cheers for Governor Jesse Ventura: THE REVOLUTION® has been held back by the fact that it's difficult to explain. In casual conversation, even I have trouble coming up with a simple explanation. Sometimes I just whip out a couple of our platforms, like, "Oh, we're for cutting the military budget in half and ending taxes on the working poor and the middle class." But these ad hoc, grab-bag, policy points seem unsatisfactory. A political party requires something like an ideological definition as in, "we're monarchists" or "we're anarchists" or "we're radical centrists" or "we're liberals." Who are we? Well, THE REVOLUTION® has been joined by self-described anarchists, communists, greens, libertarians, socialists, Zapatista enthusiasts, liberals, even militia sympathizers, and most of all -- young people. They joined because they agreed with at least 13 of the 19 points in the Party Program. Period. And that's entirely appropriate to our times. Post-modern politics is post-ideology, ad hoc, and syncretic. In Minnesota, the former Rolling Stones bodyguard and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura defeated the mainstream candidates with an ad hoc politics that was neither left nor right, but which reached out to an unlikely coalition that was dominated by the former non-voter. Ventura got the true ad hoc post-ideology non-believers . . . including something like 70% of so-called Generation X, essentially by talking up Victory Over Horseshit. While the mainline candidates campaigned within the conventional boundaries, Jesse said pretty much what was on his mind, defining himself as a man who had positions on most issues without ever confining himself to an ideology. (Jesses ad hoc politics ain't mine, but I congratulate him nevertheless on a successful VICTORY OVER HORSESHIT! campaign).
	 Ad  hoc politics  are  the  only appropriate response to a fast changing world. If your belief system doesn't dissipate at least for awhile every evening you're not paying attention. This is all obvious. More importantly, ad hoc politics is the only way to get anything done. With media decentralized and attention dissipated -- as signal and noise both battle in excess while most of us tune out and learn to be selective -- we no longer have big blocks of political believers and voters. We no longer have an American culture from which we can grow a consensus politics. America today is subcultural. I'm not just talking about "subculture types." The whole country is divided up into tiny subgroups ranging from grown women who form fan clubs for Barbie Dolls to gays who actually vote Republican, ad infinitum. The only possible way to make needed political change is to bring disparate mentalities together in temporary alliances around loosely held agreements and interests. It's more than tempting to just blow it off. After all, if the solutions to problems are only viable for 15 minutes until the next technological upgrade complexifies the situation, why bother?
	 Well, for instance, America is a police state: Amnesty International has found it necessary to sternly rebuke the US for the systematic abuse of the civil liberties (mostly) of her poor and her non-white citizens. Meanwhile, a more privileged and politically Libertarian group who have been labeled Netizens stand rightfully appalled by astonishing government attempts to attack basic freedoms online. But do these groups ever consider coming together to make the notion that "Liberty matters" less obscure to the American body politic? In fact, an ad hoc political campaign that calls for us to "Defend civil liberties" and "Close down the prison/industrial complex" can represent the interests of such disparate groups.
	 Think of the ad hoc coalition THE REVOLUTION® could pull together if people thought we were a really happenin’ thang. Many of these, of course, overlap:

	- Freak Power: counterculture types, urban hipsters, subculturalists --1.5 million
	- Register the Rabble!: The economically marginalized, the homeless, the voiceless, and the headless horseman -- 5 million
	- Political activists/left/environmental --1 million
	- People deeply concerned about privacy and civil liberties, including netheads -- 3 million
	- Libertarians (once they realize that, unlike their own party, we can win) -- .5 million
	- Recreational drug users (most of whom are at least as in control of their own actions as occasional drinkers and Republicans) -- 5 million
	- Survivalists and secessionists (those who don't mind voting for a half-Jewish urban weirdo) -- .25 million
	- Genuine liberals -- 2.5 million

	 Have I forgotten you?
	 There remains several objections to ad hoc politics. Advocating ad hoc politics begs the obvious question; Why these ad hoc politics? If politics be ad hoc, why not just pure opportunism? Why not just poll-based politics? In other words, why not Clintonism?
	 Well, as the man said, "Where do you want to go today?" Our ad hoc politics are not guided by ideology, but they are guided by desire. They are politics with a goal. And I've suggested two goal posts. One goal post -- perhaps we see it on our left as we come downfield -- is increased basic well-being; democratization of opportunity, voice, and resources -- power to the people. The other goal post, perhaps we see it on our right, is increased personal freedom; don't tell me what to say, don't tell me what to put in my mouth, and don't tell me what to do with my business (provided my business doesn't exploit and pollute, and isn't of a size where it becomes as oppressive an oligarchy as a state monarchy or dictatorship) -- power to the individual.

Power to the People and no more Stalin around: I'm going to claim here that there hasn't been a really good revolution since the 19th Century (and you're going to have to forgive this fairly ahistoric exercise in political oversimplification. It is, at least, purposeful). Up until the 19th Century, making revolutionary changes that both increased power to the people and individual freedom was relatively uncomplicated. It's not too hard to trace a straight line from the Magna Carta to the Age of Enlightenment (and the American Revolution) and see that both collective opportunity and individual rights were expanded; from the divine rights of kings to the rights of male nobles, and then from nobles to those of the common (white) man. But with the advent of the industrial age, you start to get accumulations of capital that were previously impossible (not because there weren't enormous discrepancies of ownership, serfdom, and slavery: obviously there were, but because there just wasn't that much total capital involved). As the power of industrial capital rises, transportation shrinks the subjective size of the world, and populations increase; the byzantine quality of real political power complexifies. By the late 19th Century, Marx and Engels can rightly express their contempt for bourgeois democracy and its Rosseauian credo of individual rights as a charade masking the real power of capital accumulation. It's a small leap to a Leninist analysis in which the masses have to be re-educated toward participatory democracy by an all-powerful and disciplinary vanguard party, a transitional bureaucratic dictatorship.
	 And thus the sad politics of the 20th Century unfolds, with its enormous depersonalized voting blocks and continued complexifications of political and economic power in the "bourgeois democracies," and its Stalinist (and sometimes fascist) bureaucracies achieving minimal economic security while presiding over nationstates that are maximum security prisons. Meanwhile technical, scientific, and cultural events evolve with such speed and potency that static political ideologies -- and even the very notion of politics -- start to implode.
	 I'll leave detailed scattershot analyses of the post-H-bomb 20th Century for another time. But to compress it all into one simple conclusion, we have arrived at the beginning of the 21st Century with a global rabble that is sophisticated enough to enact power to the people and freedom to the individual. No vanguard bureaucracy or corporate oligarchy can stand in our way if we can coalesce around some ad hoc political arrangements before we diverge, post-politically, into identity tribes and conceptually-rugged individuals.

CYBER CULTURE 
DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Hackers; The myth of the hacker, the electronic guerrilla, provides a countervailing influence to the myth of total surveillance and control. The myth and the actuality of hacking, counternetworks, etc. are the smallest chink in the armor of the national security state and the multinational corporate demi-states. Electronic guerrilla warfare could be effective as a kind of attention-getting, heroic propaganda that would bring attention to a sophisticated post-scarcity, pro-freedom, compassionate political analyses if its directed with great skill and precision.

How the Yippies became the hackers and took over the world, sort of; It was 1970 when my life as a media prankster began. The context was YIPPIE! "YIPPIE!" was an old cowboy exclamation that stood for excitement and a good time. A cowboy might shout out YIPPIE! to celebrate victory at a rodeo or after having intercourse with a cowgirl. The exclamation had been refigured in the 1960s by a trio of hip urban Jewish radicals, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner. So now YIPPIE! meant the next step after hippie, politicized hipster youths ready to turn the country upside down in their search for a new way of living, in search of even greater personal freedom than America's tradition of same was prepared to offer.
	 At that moment in time, America was involved in a war against Vietnam. That war was so unpopular among the young people who were called on to fight it that it provided a backdrop for a general rebellion against the politics and culture of the nation as a whole. Everything was questioned -- sexual puritanism, capitalism, ambition, sobriety, even the very notion of civilization. The Yippies, as dreamed by Hoffman and company, would use humor, imagination and media pranks to lead this revolution, encouraging a spirit of anti-authoritarianism that would ultimately transcend the political.
	 Despite its anarchistic nature, the Yippies created a formal organization called the Youth International Party. This organization would provide a way for young people like myself to become part of the Yippie revolution. I joined the Yippies in 1970.
	 I'd been aware of them since 1967, when Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin claimed that they were going to use witchcraft to levitate the Pentagon, the odd five-sided structure that houses the American military command, during an antiwar demonstration. Hoffman had researched and found some ancient magical texts which claimed that a five-sided structure was used to house evil demons. These demons, it seems, could be exorcised by forming a circle around the structure and chanting, "Out Demons Out!" This is just what the Yippies did as their first act in 1967.
	 Nobody really expected the Yippies to drive the demons from the Pentagon. That wasn't the point. Playful and irreverent, it was perfect political theater for the youth of America. The ranks of the Yippies grew. By 1970, the Yippies had also thrown money off the top floor of the New York Stock Exchange, smoked marijuana in front of the White House, and invaded Chicago during the Democratic Convention, causing one of the historic events of America's '60s revolution, a police riot.
	 I joined after reading Abbie Hoffman's book Revolution for the Hell of It, a brilliant and energetic work that combined concise commentary on the political problems of the time -- including the Vietnam war, racism, and police aggression against young people -- with the imaginative energy of dadaism.
	 There was another aspect to Yippie ideology that was romantic and attractive for an 18-year-old such as myself. Yippies believed in living outside the law. Starting in Revolution for the Hell of It and continuing through the seminal Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman had provided tips for living outside the system. These tips ranged from "dumpster diving" -- that is, finding valuable goods in people's garbage -- to phone phreaking -- finding ways to make free phone calls. These phone phreakers -- aligned with the Yippies -- were the original hackers.
	 In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, most rebellious youths in America saw technology as just another implement in the war against Vietnam and police repression at home. The computer industry involved large expensive machines only affordable to wealthy corporations, built and provided by International Business Machines (IBM), a big corporation with war contracts. But there was a small minority among the rebellious young Americans who were drawn to technology. They were the early nerds. They read lots of science fiction. They would talk about being able to bring about youthful dreams of Utopia with technological advances. And they dreamt of thinking machines that could be used by ordinary people. In other words, desktop computers.
	 With rebellion in the air, these technologically-oriented young rebels were called upon to provide assistance to the outlaw lifestyle of the Yippies. Thus, the very same people who were first dreaming up the advances that led to the personal computer revolution were also developing blue boxes and black boxes and other scams to help yippies help the counterculture to make free phone calls.
	 These early hackers developed what came to be known as the "hacker ethic." The ethic was that rules, regulations, and authority were to be circumvented if it got in the way of doing anything useful. They developed the notion of social engineering -- engineering human relationships as you would a technical system -- as a way of getting appropriate results.
	 By the mid-1970s, the Youth International Party were no longer a viable movement. America's baby boomer generation had grown up and was proving to be less rebellious and radical as it aged. But the hacker movement was just starting. The hackers would successfully take over the world, creating a new worldwide economy, and a state of anarchy -- at least in the world of media and communications.

THE  REVOLUTION®  Point  Platform  for the Internet and the Computer Industry;

Pre-Ramble The body politic of the Internet is as unpredictably perverse as Marv Albert after a fifth of Scotch. In a random poll previous to the 1996 Election, Netizens selected the Libertarian candidate as their President, and Ralph Nader came in second. We feel that THE REVOLUTION® offers up a political choice that combines the best of the Libertarians and St. Ralph. We have therefore arrogantly presumed the mantel of Political Party of the Internet.
	 Unlike the technolibertarians, we feel that a wee bit of Government intervention can be groovy! . . . but only if we are the Government. Unlike the Technorealists, we're not as boring as an Amish rock festival.
	 These are our Internet/High Tech Policy Points:

	 (1) No Censorship.
	 THE REVOLUTION® opposes all censorship, but we're particularly strident about our opposition to censorship on the Net. The Net makes public "speech" and “publishing" as spontaneous as using the telephone. To apply standards of other media, or even publishing, to this technology is like legislating and policing neighborhood gossip.
	 Obviously, some things fall under necessarily existing laws. You can't solicit for murder at the neighborhood bar or on the net. And you can't show pornography to children on the street. On the other hand, if the children sneak off into the bushes after nipping some of your porn, most sane people won't hold you responsible.
	 (2) Universal Access.
	 The net is the site of our worldwide global conversation and a potential site for participatory democracy. Those without access are disenfranchised. Therefore we suggest a 3 year program for universal access, accomplished by the free distribution of inexpensive, Internet-ready boxes, as well as a continued and redoubled effort to get net access into all libraries, schools, and many other public areas across America.
	 (3) Privacy.
	 We are for full free access to encryption technology, and will encourage its use as something that will help resolve problems of identity theft and other online rip-offs. We support all social and technological solutions that acknowledge the individual's ownership of his or her own information.
	 We would make the collection and sale of individual private data for commercial purposes without permission completely illegal. We would enforce this vigorously. 
	 (4) Copyright.
	 Digital and other technologies have made it difficult to enforce copyright protection for media and software creations. The entertainment industry, which largely controls the Democratic Party, has responded by redoubling its effort to create ever more draconian copyright restrictions. You now can't legally walk into a copy shop and Xerox® a chapter out of a book. Recent attempts to pass legislation that would have made it technically illegal to download materials off the Web and print them without explicit permission did not succeed. However, excessive copyright, trademark, and libel restrictions already feed an army of hungry lawyers and restrict freedom of speech (in the broad sense that includes all media) and research.
	 THE REVOLUTION® supports the continued existence of copyright. Creators should have the right to own and benefit from the products of their minds. It is also economically necessary, under current conditions, that they continue to do so. We believe, however, that copyright protection must be rewritten to be more flexible in light of current realities. The concept of fair use must be supported and expanded in an increasingly mediated environment. 
	 (5) Consumer Advocacy. 
	 The  federal  government  should  set  up  a special consumer affairs division aimed solely at the computer/net industry. The atrocious behavior of this industry towards consumers must be stopped. Because computers and computer networks are  a new frontier for commerce, vendors and service providers have managed to get away with selling faulty product, oversubscribing networks till they no longer serve the consumer's needs, engaging in standards wars that are disruptive to service and stability, etc. If government agencies are good for anything, it's for ensuring that consumers aren't victims of malevolent business practices. -- written with Cyberguy

Digital revolution -- the upside; a substantial minority of people are moving from self-identifying as consumers of media to producers of media. The Web is our playpen. Jack and Jill up the street are uploading their homemade porn clips and Chuckie s going to follow his cat around all day with a live digital feed.

The upside; Something very radical is happening here. Millions of individuals are being given a voice in the world. At the very moment in history that post-industrial automation is marginalizing great numbers of people economically, the same information/media technological developments are empowering people as communicators. In the ensuing chaos, at least our howls of distress will be heard.

Digital Revolution -- the downside up;  Social critics, particularly on the political and academic left, manifest a perverse attraction -- even an atavistic hunger -- for the dream of transcending ordinary humanness that have been unleashed by technoculture and the cyberpunk trope. If I may conflate a little Deleuze and Virilio (keep in mind that pomo French philosophy blurs into a singularly overwrought point of view to cyberpop dilettantes such as myself), one can credit them with putting their lustings to valid use, cobbling together a bitter theory of seduction aimed at the television viewer, or, arguably, the nethead, whose "body becomes a pole of inertia." J.G. Ballard similarly observed a "flattening of affect" among mediated citizens back in the mid-'60s.
	 Unfortunately, this essentially existential discourse has been buttressed by a more populist effusion of political rectitude, which I refer to as the "Do I dare to eat a peach if the underclass cannot?" argument. Deep inside of this emotionally satisfying if intellectually silly position, one finds the view (given expression in Mark Dery's book Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century) that technological "utopianism" emerges almost inevitably from the essentially primitivistic untutored brow of the children of privilege and colonialism -- and is therefore axiomatically dismissable. This view gained credence in light of the mid-'90s romance between the vaguely counter-cultural "A" list of the cyberculture -- as represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) -- and Newt Gingrichs Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), both with visions of devolution of the centralized state dancing in their heads, and a dominators insensitivity to the impact of that event on real people’s lives.
	 Logic dictates that class will infect point of view, whether the position be one of privilege, destitution, or any point between. This is not interesting. What is interesting, and indeed sad, is that in the apparent absence of a cybercultural libertarian left, the "utopian" ground has been ceded, given over to the forces of reaction and the ad copy writers at AT&T.
	 This was not always the case. Indeed, the last moments during which revolutionary movements were in ascendance in the West were energized by "utopian" demands and even by longings for transcendence. "Be realistic. Demand the Impossible!" read the popular slogan of France's near-revolution in 1968. America's new left/hippie marriage spawned similar Utopian demands for a "post-scarcity" anarchism "watched over by the machines of loving grace," as Richard Brautigan wrote. Influential writers like Norman O. Brown challenged Freud's reality principle and proposed a new society governed by eros. Radical theorists took McLuhan's notion of the West's retribalization into the realm of the transcendent by proposing that an eroticized, communalized body politic, liberated not only from the dictates of the State but also from the reality principle itself, would dance its way into a new Utopian order -- almost as a side product of the intensity and joy invested in their coming together in a spirit of revolution.
	 In the 1970s, Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipating structures would begin to show how entropic or chaotic systems tend to reorganize at a higher level of coherence. This theory might have lent some vague scientific credence to notions of collective revolutionary transcendence, but it appeared too late: the distinguishing feature of that revolutionary moment (1968-1971), a willingness to challenge, transcend, and perhaps even abandoned private property, had vanished. The political corollary to the theory of dissipating structures would be captured by an ideology that, today, advocates devolution of the social welfare state combined with a defense of corporate meta-property under the fable of "free enterprise."
	 Two primary tendencies emerged in the mid-1970s, following the retreat from spontaneous revolutionary/transcendent utopianism. One of these -- a turn towards long term, serious, earnest, realistic political progressive reformism -- proved anemic when not informed and energized by more atavistic Utopian urges. The other, a culture of rebelliousness and irreverence within -- and frequently sponsored by -- consumer capitalism, its former spontaneity swathed in layers of self-conscious irony, would thrive.
	 By the time we arrive at technoculture or cyberculture in the late '80s, hip irony, or rebellion-without-revolution, was absolutely emblematic of the culture-at-large. This tendency has by now occasioned several generations of atomized, affectless citizens. That it would dominate over McLuhan's techno-retribalization in retrospect seems inevitable; after all, both mediation and cybernetics are self-reflexive by nature.
	 This was the essentially flaccid cultural context into which the novel notion of a return of possibility -- revolution, mutation, or at least change -- via digital technology was inserted. My own Mondo 2000 was instrumental in serving up a compound of post-punk, self-reflexive cool with a reemergent transcendental hope for a radical shift in what it is to be a human being, driving culture critics on the left to react like horny Catholics in a striptease club. And while having assisted in granting a hip bohemian cache to the emergent digital "engines" of capitalism's last hurrah occasionally renders me abject with guilt, I find it more interesting to stay astride this technological behemoth, and for reasons aside from a total lack of alternatives.
	 The immediate impact of the digitization of the human economic is to increase the wealth and power of the realigning media/computer post-industrial fiefdoms, rendering the "power of the (working class) people" obsolete via a strategy of replacement and globalization. Still, it is the nature of the information economic -- that is, the economics of self-replicating systems (e.g., cybernetics) implied by computer information flow and promised by bio- and nanotechnology (the manipulation of matter as patterns of information on the molecular level) -- to render property and ownership trivial and uncontrollable. The current panics over copyright, privacy, piracy, MP3, appropriation, information inflation, and attention deficit are only tips of the iceberg; it is increasingly difficult to contain privately and corporately held media properties, and even more difficult to guarantee that a mass consumer audience will continue to care about the fenced off media properties inside the turnstiles or even continue to exist as a mass audience.  It's in this context that cyberculture spokesperson John Barlow labels all of the recent media corporate mega-mergers as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
	 It's a great line, but too sanguine -- and in that sense emblematic of the comfortable, privileged vision of cyberculture "anarchism." It evokes passivity, suggesting that the fall of the massive multinational organisms are inevitable, a by-product of technical evolution. Our only role, then, is too kick back and watch it fall, whether at our fully electronic desks, basking in irony from our corporate-sponsored perch on the wired edge, or huddled around the fires of our homeless encampment comparing nipple rings. It would be more realistic to credit this multinational meta-organism with the flexibility to shift with the prevailing winds, find novel ways of maintaining and expanding its grip on ownership of all things and -- as a last option -- foreclosing mortgage on the people, as virtual owners of planet Earth.
	 And this is where we come full circle. Because the only conceivable alternative to a world of human refuse, of serfs and slaves abandoned by an increasingly self-sufficient corporate cyber/media oligarchy, is a revolution of the lumpen-proletariat (the formerly working class) based not in neo-Luddite refusal but in desire. A revolution that rises up and simply demands the fruits of technological development, unconditionally, not because it's ennobling but because it's fun, not because we deserve it but because they don't deserve to have it to themselves, and because we want it. Liberated from alienated work and want, perhaps the eroticized, communalized body politic imagined by '60s Utopians would re-emerge. Ordinary lives might become "deregulated," permitted the same experimental spontaneity now being granted the so-called free market under the pseudoscientific cover of chaos theory. All of it watched over by the machines of loving grace? Yeah. And probably AT&T.

Cyberculture -- the lameside; You find it all over Wired -- this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. You've got the breakdown of nation states into global economies simultaneous with the atomization of individuals or their Balkanization into disconnected sub-groups, because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy.

Cyberculture -- the lameside 2; The level of hipness in cyber culture is John Barlow and Howard Rheingold. Nothing personal, I like them both. But Howard wearing psychedelic tennis sneakers on national TV is considered way outrageous. It's not Howard's fault, but that culture is very whitebread.

Cyberculture-a deadly game; Life is artificial. Reality is virtual. Sentience is synthetic. The notion that we're working on the machines that will displace us will soon seize the digital elite by their transcendental short hairs. Uploading before they look, it'll be a simple matter to drag their sorry bitmapped asses into the garbage icon and reboot. After that kids, you're on your own.

DEATH TO THE SMUG

	 I would like to create something that causes smug people to commit suicide. Smug people are people who think they know something, who can't be surprised. They think they know what they want from a work of media or art. Now, we're in a period where Time magazine has declared that "Everybody's  hip." This is the apotheosis of the smug. Bourgeois weenies who used to be shocked and offended by authentic experimentation now get to act dismissive and superior. They think that they've "been there done that" when, in fact, they'll never have an original fucking thought in their lives or even in their gene pool. This is, of course, the downside of media democratization.
	 I'd like to create this little box that you can't help but buy. Inside of it is not what you'd hoped for, but something really extraordinary and weird. If you can appreciate it, you're granted some sort of eternal grace. And if you're just a pissed off consumer, you shit your brains out of your asshole.

DRUGS

Deconstructing Dope; The discourse about drugs has already drugged public discourse, leading inevitably towards the primary philosophic stance of the digital generations -- "Just Say Nothing." This started, of course, with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No." Read literally, this successful slogan doesn't call for behavioral refusal, but instead invokes the wisdom of constraining discourse. Nancy is only telling you what to say, and to say only that. The more upbeat "Just Do It" equally invokes the wisdom of constraining discourse, this time explicitly in the service of behavioral cooperation. Don't talk about it and don't argue with me. "Just Do It" is militaristic hedonism, a barking command to leap without looking. And a most effective slogan. Joke 1996 Presidential candidate Bob Dole's convoluted attempt at sloganeering, "Just Don't Do It," didn't communicate that one should constrain discourse, but rather that one should constrain behavior. Loser!

	 My first altered state, in June of 1967, was actually from a couple of Benzedrine (stimulant) pills that a friend stole out of his mother's medicine cabinet. It was fantastic! I had such clarity of thought. I had been in a quandary because I was a rebellious and ill-behaved little brat (and still am) at school. I read books vociferously, preferring the existentialists that my father had turned me on to -- like Dosteovsky, Kafka, and Sartre -- but I was a very poor student. I had attention deficit disorder to put it mildly. To put it clearly, I was bored shit by teachers, rote learning, memorizing and details. But that evening on Benzedrine, I discovered the joys of my own mind and my own perceptions. I spent a large part of the evening thinking about a quote that I'd read from the surrealist artist Salvador Dali to the effect that death was unacceptable because it makes a cosmic cuckold of life. I somehow decided that he was right, although 28 years later, I don't recall how my logic arrived at its conclusion. What I do remember, more importantly, was suddenly realizing that I had a good brain capable of original thought. And I remember realizing how unique that was. So I was empowered by Benzedrine, a tacky pharmaceutical stimulant popular among middle class housewives as a dietary aid. It had given me the first inkling that my role in life would be to express my perceptions about the nature of things.

	 LSD is scarier than alcohol. If we are sitting here right now and there's 500 mics of LSD and a bottle of Southern Comfort on the table, which one is going to make us more comfortable? If you take the LSD it's scary. If you drink alcohol it's safe -- the sense of the individual is still well protected.

DRUG WAR

	 Opposition to the drug war is the litmus test for basic political humanity in 1999, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War was in 1969. Half-a-million drug prisoners, the destruction of the 4th Amendment against search and seizure (the primary reason for our war for independence in the 1770s), the evolution of America's  fastest  growing  business -- a  private prison industry with a vested financial interest in human incarceration, about a dozen innocent people accidentally shot dead by drug police over the past few years in drug "war" actions, tens of thousands of sick people tortured daily because they can't receive adequate pain medications, the beyond-Orwellian testing of people's bodily fluids by mind control agents, gang wars over criminal drug enterprises resulting in thousands dead and still further losses of liberties; prohibition is a bigger disaster for America than the Vietnam War was. Where are our Dr. Spocks and our Father Berrigans now? When will the religious persons and the persons of conscience hold sit-ins at the prison authority offices? Why don't Unitarian Churches shelter pot resisters the way they sheltered war resisters back in the 1960s? We've almost got this madness on the run. Give us one religious leader on a hunger strike, one national moratorium bringing together the nation's college students . . . where are they?

	 I always thought the invasion of Panama, when they captured Manuel Noriega, was a drug war between two different dealers, George Bush and Noriega. It was a cocaine gang war. It was also one of the weirdest and most arrogant acts of a nation-state in the 20th century. As arrogant as anything Hitler did, in a sense . . . the whole idea of going to another country and arresting the leader and bringing him back to jail in your own country . . . and the American media just kept acting like there was nothing wrong.

My drug policy; For the most part, I think what anybody 14 or over choicefully puts into his or her mouth, or any other orifice, is nobody else's business. The burden of proof ought to be on those who govern that there is ENORMOUS social detriment before a substance is made illegal, and even then, we should look at whether prohibition helps.  My current position is that marijuana, psychedelics, and powdered cocaine, heroin and other narcotics should be legalized and sold by licensed shops. Methedrine, PCP, particularly potent designer opiates and crack cocaine should be decriminalized but not legalized. There should be an enormous nationwide REAL drug education campaign, ideally headed up by Andrew Weil. Finally, THE REVOLUTION® 19 Point Platform suggests a 100% tax on drugs . . . a sin tax. That means that if a bottle with 250 mics of liquid acid is put on sale at $2.50, it'll actually cost $5. That's not because we're moralistic. It's because government does need to raise SOME revenues, and we figure it's nice to have people contributing to the till when they're purchasing their highs.  We  also acknowledge that there is a social cost to drugs in terms of health care, and this will help pay for it.

IDENTITY

	 Philosophies of selfhood have (d)evolved over several generations. In this century, we've been through the self-denial of the god-fearing and the Mao-loving. We've been through broadcast media-era, Hollywood/pop star-influenced narcissism. (For amusement, these types can still be observed In Real Space.) Then there's you -- the digital generations. Solipsists. Inevitably, the unconscious assumption of the wired up is that a world that's at your fingertips exists entirely for you. Intelligent Agents and bozo filters winnow out materials that might upset this precarious perception of an information universe tailored to your interests. You are at the center. However, one annoying little glitch reminds you that you're not really making the rules. Will you pay that monthly AT&T bill, lest your entire edifice of identity collapse leaving you thoroughly unhinged? You will!

Subculture v. Counterculture-The Circle Jerks; A subculture or counterculture enters pop culture as an idea, a meme, a set of values and -- hopefully -- a challenge to all that is. Punk, in 1977, was delivering an electrical shock to the laidback sleeping hippies. The industrial music subculture took punk and married it with the noise of machines and the aesthetics of computers, carrying with it a seemingly sophisticated ideology involving the use of shock, horror, Lautreamont-type visions, and Artaud-style theatrics. But let's examine this a moment.
	 A reading of The Industrial Culture Handbook, published by ReSearch in 1984, reveals an extraordinary similarity between all of the non-conforming artists interviewed. They all want to shock their audience out of complacency. They all quote from Lautreamont, Aleister Crowley, de Sade and Manson. They are all anarchists who are fascinated by fascism and serial murder. They all wear black. They all love to hate and hate to love. And, not surprisingly, they've attracted around them a subculture of people who feel exactly as they do. So the artists involved in the industrial culture, far from shocking their audience out of their complacency, now have an utterly complacent audience that gets exactly what it expects. They know that an industrial band is going to involve a particular loud drum machine rhythm and distorted vocals about angst and violence. They know that an industrial art performance might involve semi-dangerous mechanical eruptions and explosions. If you want to shock an industrial culture audience out of its complacency, show up dressed in a pink clown suit and sing Donovan songs. They will hate you for it.
	 Arthur Kroker has aptly labeled this (post)historical moment as "the recline of Western Civilization." One aspect of that recline is the impossibility of evoking the will necessary for movements for social change. In its place, we have trends and subcultures, mini-revolts into style. Some of these trends project images of revolt that are far more extreme than those imagined by the most radical anarchists of earlier times. And, indeed, some of these subcultures may eventually turn towards actual ACTS of murderous nihilism. But even these acts will be essentially passive, not directed towards provoking radical change but directed towards amplifying the mediated pose of real cool extremism with real cold blood.
	 Still, there is a value in subcultures or identity tribes. In the early 1970s, for instance, we had the bisexual transgressive notion -- the understanding that there was something beautifully queer about rock culture. The notion was carried forward by the New York Dolls, Lou Reed, David Bowie. It became the first post-hippie subculture, called glam or glitter. It lasted just long enough to normalize the formerly transgressive.   From that moment on, lipstick boys could find a place in pop culture. But glam as a subculture disappeared. In other words, a meme -- a small philosophical virus -- needs to be able to attach itself to an identity in order to spread. The identity democratizes participation. Those infected can buy the clothes and the CDs and hang out in the right clubs. People have been authentically changed, challenged, liberated into new thoughts, new behaviors, and new aesthetics by hippies, punks, ravers, queers, and even headbangers. . . .
	 Only to get imprisoned by a whole new set of expectations. If you want to transcend subculture tribalism and open yourself to constant evolution and novelty, remember these words, first uttered by Morgan Russell back in 1989: Question Authority Sez Who?

If you're trying to stop a war or overthrow Amerika, your cry is "JOIN US!" But if you're only trying to maintain a semi-original identity, popularization is a threat to the purity of the tribe. Decentralized media makes subculture ascendant over counterculture. How do you make the revolution under these conditions? THINK!

INTERVIEW

	 We interrupt your regularly scheduled alphabetical run through brief essays and quotes for this interview, performed for a newsweekly in Carbondale, Illinois in preparation for R.U.'s campaign visit in 1998.

The Nightlife Interview by Chris Wisemann
	 While area Republicans welcome Newt Gingrich and Democrats mope about the implosion of their party (or lack thereof), the rest of Southern Illinois can enjoy a laugh while taking comfort in the fact that someone out there really speaks for them.
	 That person is R.U. Sirius. Sirius, 46, is running for President of the United States in the 2000 election. He bills himself as Chairthing of THE REVOLUTION®, a new political party dedicated to "Victory Over Horseshit." Sirius will come to town Saturday, September 26 to deliver his "19 Point Plan for Liberty and Justice in America" and "Post Modern Social Contract."
	 At 9 AM, WDBX s Light on the Law program will feature an interview with Sirius, followed by a 6 PM public reception at the Interfaith Center and an 8 PM lecture rally at Carbondale's town square pavilion. The Shawnee Green Party will sponsor Sirius' speaking engagement.
	 Sirius' career in radical politics began in high school in the '60s, when he begat a publication called The Lower Left Corner. By 1970, he became a Yippie (Youth International Party) and publisher/editor of Space newspaper in his hometown of Binghamton, NY. But it was in 1984, after helping found High Frontiers magazine, that Sirius earned his reputation as a prophet of the information age. The publication morphed into the first cyber culture magazine, Mondo 2000, in 1989, and Sirius served as its editor-in-chief until 1992.  It was five years before terms such as "information   superhighway," "internet" and "world wide web" became household terms, and Sirius was already dancing on the cutting edge, daring others to follow.
	 Along the way, Sirius has authored or co-authored five books, including Design For Dying (with Timothy Leary) and How to Mutate and Take Over the World: an Exploded Post-Novel, and penned articles for magazines such as Esquire, Time and Anarchy Today.
	 Despite these impressive accomplishments, Sirius has never taken himself or his work too seriously. His political literature is full of multi-leveled gags that recall the Church of the SubGenius, and he spices his comments with a pointed humor that would make Frank Zappa proud.
	 Here's an interview with the man himself, conducted via email in early September.

	Nightlife: Let's start with humor. While the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky situation illustrates that politics is in itself ridiculous proposition ("heh, heh, he said 'proposition'"), it seems Americans either don't get the joke or don't appreciate the humor. How do you think you can change this?
	RU: I promise a banana peel in every garage. I guess Americans just don't think oral sex or sex with cigars is funny. I'll bet Fidel Castro thinks sex with cigars is hilarious. Americans probably think that sex with a football would be funny, but painful. But pain is funny if it's somebody else's pain.
	 Mainstream Americans -- the  type who vote -- seem to be hung up on some Puritanical civilized notion of dignity. But they've got it all wrong. Look at the Brits. They're puritanical and civilized as all get-out, but they love to make cross-dressed, prat-falling fools out of themselves. We should be more like the English, then, except not like the Gallagher brothers. 
	N: Do you think that the admittedly hilarious approach you're  taking (e.g., in the Post Modern Social Contract) will just tag you with the "political satirist" label, rather than someone who's using humor to make a serious point?
	RU: Well, I think if Mark Twain had run for the President, he might have won. And we'd be better for it.
	 Everybody is walking around in a cognitive fog, in one degree or another. We're all in data shock. And the easiest way to deal with data shock is to instantly slap an oversimplified label over everything. That way we don't have to think. But I say: "Been there. Done that. Don't go there. It's all good." Er . . . that is, I think proof that you don't take yourself too seriously should be a requirement for public office. People who take themselves too seriously tend to be authoritarian. Every swearing-in ceremony should end with a pie in the face.
	N: How do you make sure that the point isn't lost in the laughter of the audience? Or that the decidedly non-conventional approach you're taking won't make people tune you out, though if they listened to you, they might agree with your ideas? 
	RU: When people sign up to become a volunteer or a member of THE REVOLUTION®, I send them a questionnaire. One of the questions I ask is whether they were attracted by the prankster humor or the party platform. Nearly everyone says it has to be both, but the platform is more important. This tells me that there are some people out there who are able to navigate the complexity of having a serious message delivered as a joke, and vice-versa. It may not be a majority, but all I've got to do is get on the ballot in enough states and then have my hacker friends electronically manipulate the election results. 
	N: Okay. so lets talk (or write) about the more important part, the platform. As you told one recent interviewer, it's a combination of traditional liberalism and a pure strain of libertarianism. Often, these are mutually exclusive ideas. How do you reconcile them into something coherent?
	RU: Actually traditional liberalism was largely libertarian, going back to the concept of "the rights of man." Traditional liberalism is libertarian in the sense that it supported an expanded view of civil liberties, and opposed excess state intrusion in the personal lives of individuals. Modern supposed liberalism veers toward authoritarianism in its defense of state powers. In contrast, '60s radicalism at its best was leftism with an anarchist bent.
	 We very actively increased individual liberty in terms of the free speech movement, sexual liberation, freedom to question the cultural and religious dogmas that were handed down, freedom of youth to defy their parents, even freedom to go naked in some circumstances. At the same time, we were involved in collective political actions geared toward greater community and compassion. 
	 So I think this perception that these two philosophies are contradictory are a reflection of two things. First, it's a reflection of the lack of any articulation of a traditional liberal vision within most of the media. And secondly, it's a reflection of the confusion wrought by the absolutist right-wing libertarians who are represented by the Libertarian Party. If we stay away from absolute liberty on the one hand and absolute equality on the other hand, and instead focus on simply increased liberty and equality, we can start moving in that direction. I certainly think the Revolution's program points the way.
	N: One of your platform planks is to "stop policing the world." On one hand, it's a great idea -- most US foreign policy revolves around corporate, not defense, interests, and results in terrorist attacks against America. Yet don't we have a moral obligation to stop famine, genocide, and human-rights violations whenever possible?
	RU: I would guess that US isolationism, in terms of military action, would be altogether better than what we do currently. But I think it would be even better if there were an international policing force with the very limited task of dealing with those situations you mentioned. I would put people who are closely involved with human-rights issues and organizations in the positions of secretary of state and UN ambassador and then tell them that they're sort of on their own. We're not going to arrogantly wave around our military might or even our economic might. But you can use information, moral persuasion and the United Nations to try to bring about needed changes. And we'll do our part within the UN, but we won't offer our young adults as the primary international policemen or use our tax money to maintain the armed forces necessary to keep the peace worldwide. That task has to be spread out globally. I also think that just ending our role as the world's primary weapons supplier in itself would make the world about 20 percent safer than it is now. 
	N: Most of your other platform planks I have a hard time criticizing or even questioning, at least in principle. It's like supporting Jesse Jackson or Jerry Brown for president, however, you want to fight the good fight, but eventually you want to have a realistic shot at winning. Without the benefit of billions in PAC and other contributions, how do you expect to get your platform to the American  public for consideration?  And once there, how do you expect to sell your platform to the American public? 
	RU: I'm just hoping to make an incursion into the political discourse, and it's one that's qualitatively different from Jackson or Brown (who, I hasten to add, if they ran together would be Jackson Brown) or Nader. You never hear them talking about liberty or rescinding laws against victimless crimes, for instance. But more than that, I believe that there's a sort of inchoate cultural gap in America. America is a rebellious nation, and there's an enormous reservoir of disaffection. There's a permanent young underclass, a permanent rabble. Nothing has been changed by the alleged upturn in the economy under Clinton. From what I can see, things seem worse. I actually presume that they're manipulating the statistics. Anyway, there's a sort of economically and culturally "disappeared" in America. It's racially polyglot, and where it's young, it's basically culturally hip in one way or another. They don't vote, they don't get polled, in some cases they're not even included in the census or in the unemployment figures since you have to be collecting unemployment, on welfare, or actively registered as looking for work to be counted. I hope I might afford that disappeared group the opportunity to make a statement. In combination with the more elite sort of non-ideologically aligned freedom lovers who dominate the internet and the activist political progressives, it could wind up making quite an explosive statement, although I will admit that I'm ill-prepared to actually win at this point.

IRREVERENCE

	 As a strategy, I remember having an underground paper in high school. As soon as the principal announced over the loudspeaker that kids weren't allowed to have it, everybody wanted one. As soon as the kids saw that it was playful and funny, they wanted the next one. Of course, adults tend to view anything that isn't dull as frivolous and therefore somehow less-than-important, which is a problem.

	 As a strategy; A successful revolutionist in America would appeal to youth, and would have to be someone(s) whose sense of self-conscious irony was as thick as David Letterman's, way beyond even Abbie Hoffman or SubCommadante Marcos.

	 As a strategy; Americans in the Zeros don't have the political language to advocate their own desires. "It ain't nobody's business if I do" is an excepted posture of culture but not of politics. Culture is vulgar, sexy, and wild. People don't know how to politically defend their enjoyment of hip hop, Tarantino, Viagra, marijuana, and South Park, but they vote their opposition to fundamentalist cultural ayatollahs day in and day out with their dollars and their remotes. That earlier revolution, the revolution of the '60s, had many faults. But the genius of the hip Left '60s was that it resolved  the tension  between altruism and desire by enclosing the erotic, the atavistic, and the visionary within a philosophy of humanism, unifying the personal and political under an ideal of liberation. By projecting a Party that's having a party, a party at play in the media apocalypse, we can seduce the alienated, irreverent, unregistered, and unbelievable into joining together with us, and while they're seduced, we can steal their undies and design a new American flag, forged not in toil, blood, sweat and tears but soiled by the juices which leak forth from a noveau body politic confused and yet striving toward pubescence and thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio.

KOSOVO

	 The NATO war against Yugoslavia will reverberate for many years to come. This is from a commentary I wrote near the beginning of the US bombing. Some now say that the NATO/Clinton strategy was a success. We won the war. But I agree with Arrianna Huffington, who said that if our goal was to prevent a mass slaughter and dislocation of Kosovars, the war mission failed on its second day. All the rest was just about NATO saving face. That's a lot of death for some face-saving.

	 It's clear that dropping bombs isn't a good way to stop genocide. This US-bred non-solution to bad-behavior-by-people-who-aren't-necessarily-our-allies is the result of three things:
	 (1) Budget. Financial interests coalesce around the enormous military budget in a much more profound way around the building of bombs than around the training of soldiers. Bomb building is, of course, an enormous industry. Training soldiers is basically a loss leader. And training special soldiers who are well-paid and prepared to sacrifice their lives is such a big free market loser that it has more or less been abandoned.
	 (2) Political fear and opportunism. The American people overwhelmingly don't care if we drop bombs on foreign countries (particularly if they're in the third world). Just throw out a good explanation and before you know it, the mainstream media won't even be covering it. On the other hand, if one of our fighting men receives so much as an overly-painful noogie from the "enemy," the President's poll ratings take a nosedive and he either has to withdraw or nuke the perp and anybody else who happens to occupy the same continent. This has lead to a global policing policy that relies on bombing the bad guy to scare him and make him return to the bargaining table. This has been almost as ineffective as it is immoral.
	 (3) The arrogance of technocracy. We've all come to believe that there are desktop solutions available to us at the push of a button. Technocratic thinking has dominated our military at least since we beat the Nazis to the nuke. The Albanians in "Yugoslavia" needed a rescue force, not bombs over Belgrade, but what kind of help can you expect from a country where you can't even get a live human on the telephone? If you'd like them to stop dropping bombs and start dropping food on the refugee camps please press two now.

MEDIA

	 BE REVOLTING! For my friends who are in the media . . . yes, you. You reading this. You fucked your mother in an outhouse. You cut the gizzards out of children and fed them to alligators. You smoked crack with Mayor Barry, Farrah Fawcett and Princess Di. And guess what? Nobody gives a fuck.
	 If you want to have freedom in a media-saturated world you have to learn not to give a fuck about your public image. Be REVOLTING! In fact, have your public image be even more REVOLTING! than you are. That way, anything that you might actually do will seem mild.
	 I believe in Radical Tabloidism. Random acts of actionable communication straight from the id. Technology has given us this vast shared infospace but there's no freedom of movement because people have been socialized to practice self-censorship. And because our virtual tongues are imprisoned by excessive libel, copyright, and trademark restrictions. Be free. Be REVOLTING!

MONEY

The digital economy & the death of money; Beneath the surface of today's strange combination of upbeat global market and worldwide depression lurks a cancer-like growth of electronic capital exchange that threatens to kill off the host.
	 Electronic money, in the literal sense, is new. But predictable. A convenient form of exchange springs up as the settlers arrive on the electronic frontier. Wealth, however, in the form of global-trading in stocks, bonds, derivatives, currency exchanges, options etc. has already been exchanged electronically for two decades. In fact, the virtual economy, the nearly instantaneous electronic exchange market has overwhelmed the "real" economy. And thereby hangs the tale of millennial capitalism.
	 The first electronic money-trading system was opened by Reuters in 1973, two years after America's President Richard Nixon coerced the world into ditching the gold standard. By 1992, New York Times Business Editor and cyberculture enthusiast Joel Kurtzman was able to report, "Every three days a sum of money passes through the fiber-optic network underneath New York equal to the entire yearly output of all of America's companies and its entire workforce. And every two weeks the equivalent of the annual product of the world passes through the network of New York -- trillions and trillions of ones and zeros representing all the toil, sweat and guile from all of humanity's good-faith efforts ..."
	 Early electronic money trading was limited by the unavailability of digital technology and software. Also, as with most other radical advances in media technology, the early activities merely copied the previous activities of the stock exchange. Exchanges were primarily associated with stocks and bonds and tied to actual ownership of real wealth -- companies producing goods, services, facilities, etc. By the '90s, however, the electronic trading network had developed its own unique ecology, leading to the evolution of a virtual or "transacting" economy. In the transacting economy of the '90s, most of the "money" was made not in the investing itself but on the abstraction of the transacting of conceptual wealth. If that doesn't make any sense, well . . . exactly! We're through the looking glass. Tremendous profits are conjured from the consensual hallucination that a transaction that doesn't necessarily have to happen might accumulate (for example) interest at a later date. Still more extraordinary profits are conjured by taking advantage of microfluctuations in international exchange rates. Traders use supercomputers to take advantage of currency discrepancies, often making exchanges in less than a second. These exchanges themselves could, in turn, impact on the value of said currency. A situation like the one that I and St. Jude portray in our novel, How to Mutate and Take Over the World, is not unlikely.

Quant Couple Breaks the Bank.
	 Infamous Wall Street quants and tech gurus, Grade and Zarkov, are walking off today with more capital than the yearly budget of the government of the United States of America. Using a test model of a Sun Microsystems nanocomputer that is not yet commercially available, and an "Investment Virus," the couple is now in possession of more wealth than anybody in the history of the world.
	 The "Investment Virus" allowed the couple to create a massive capital flow that moved, within nanoseconds, from national currency to national currency and from speculation to speculation. Apparently, the nanocomputer was able to plan, create and exploit wild market fluctuations, sometimes in less than a second's time.
	 While the couple's success has produced the highest overnight stock market boom in its history, the market system itself has been shaken to its roots. President Gore has joined international leaders in calling for an international state of emergency and asked for cooperation among nations in creating a one-world monetary system that can prevent future disasters of this nature. The President blamed the Republican congress for creating a climate of isolationism that has led to a lack of cooperation among nations and wild arbitrage discrepancies in the monetary and market systems.

	 While the workings of this electronic virtual economy would probably delight any acid head, chaos theorist, surrealist, or conceptual artist who cares to explore it, the practical result is the continued deterioration of the "real" economy, where ordinary people try to live and work. Many social theorists, including Baudrillard and Mike Davis, have portrayed the "benign neglect" of physical reality in relationship to deteriorating living conditions in the technological centers of the first world. As the public imagination, dominated by the cutting edge of the free market, abandons physicality for virtuality, real territories and the people who live therein are simply abandoned to fend for themselves in an economy that no longer require them.
	 The sad irony, of course, is that the virtual electronic exchange market produces almost nothing of actual value to the lives of actual people. When poor, socially disconnected, mostly-non-white people in the West produce nothing of value, we label them parasites and attempt to cut off their meager, poverty-level support. But when comfortable, well-connected, mostly-white people conjure vast sums of money out of the conceptual trick top hat of the cyber-space exchange, the world is their proverbial oyster.
	 In the beginning of American history, a few white people bought valuable territories from Native Americans. The price was just a couple of beads. What would have happened if enough "primitives" realized the beads were worthless? What will happen . . . NOW?

	 I'd like to see life centered around a search for meaning, beauty contests, bar hopping, food, imagination, spontaneous sex, drug abuse, stupid rock bands, pagan ceremonies, glitzy magazines, competitive sports, the worship of naugahyde, pompous academic philosophies, or love of animals. Anything other than economics.

1960s, '70s

Left Anarchism and The '60s Revolt; There was a level of idealism to the demands made by radicals in the 1960s around notions of a new radical praxis, and around notions of autonomy within a kind of spontaneous collectivism, that I don't think you will ever see revived because an increasingly complexifying world culture leaves us too contaminated for absolutes.

	 Libidinally speaking, we don't even want to make nice. The genius of the hip left '60s was that it resolved that tension by enclosing the erotic, the atavistic, the visionary within a philosophy of humanism, unifying the personal and political, desire and altruism, under an ideal of liberation. Embracing pleasure -- resisting puritanism and mental rigidity -- energizes any revolt against political oppression.

	 The story of Leary in the 1970s is probably one of the Top Ten most interesting stories in the 20th Century. It's amazing that more people don't know about it. He should be regarded like Jesse James or someone like that. His adventure should be legendary, and it just shows you the weird nature of what people focus on in this culture. That a guy who climbed out of a prison on a highwire, who was taken underground by a group of young American guerrillas, formed a government in exile with the Black Panthers in Algeria, met a femme fatale who helped get him kidnapped by the DEA, was brought back to the United States, went to jail again, had to deal with the FBI and the mind-control freaks in charge of Vacaville prison, it's amazing that hardly anyone knows that story. People know every time Ringo took a shit in 1969 but they don't know this incredible story.

OH WOW, COSMIC

	 I like Ouspensky's vision of time. He said that if you were traveling from one town to another in space, you wouldn't presume that the town that you just left behind didn't exist anymore, or the place that you are heading towards doesn't exist. We should apply the same thing to time. All time exists simultaneously. So, in some sense, each moment in time exists in eternity. We should live according to that notion.

OLD-FASHIONED VALUES

	 I don't worry so much about being on the techno-edge or the cult of newness, believe it or not. I'm more interested in passion and philosophy, sex and subversion . . . you know . . . those old-fashioned values.

POLICE STATE

Written during the impeachment hearings, 
November, 1998

Mr. Clinton gets caught in his own; Do I Dare To Eat Impeach? Let's get the conclusion out of the way first, so we can get on to the really important stuff. In the case of Clinton vs. Starr, it's pretty obvious that George is by far the more interesting artist, although Ringo was once a member of a slightly more creative band. Or, in other words, FUCK IT!
	 Most of my friends and compatriots seem to feel that Starr is instituting a right wing coup d'etat against a popular President, so it's time to put aside any disagreements we may have with Bubba, and oppose the impeachment proceedings.
	 A few others whisper in my ear that we're all equal under the law, and this President, who has been no friend of justice, should pay for perjury and witness tampering with his Presidency. They are all correct.
	 Must one always take sides in every schoolyard brawl? In this instance, can't we just sit on the sidelines and hoot our derision?
	 I will neither advocate nor oppose the impeachment of President Groovy. But today, my derision will be aimed specifically at him. After all, I ain't running for Special Prosecutor. But hear this campaign promise: If elected, I will do everything within my power to see that these two assholes get adjoining cells.

Violated violator -- Mr. Bill and his right to privacy. Laughing along with Bill Maher on Politically Incorrect, you get the comfortable sense that hey, we knew Bill Clinton was kind of a libertine guy, an easygoing, hip liberal sort of fellow. And now this paragon of personal liberty is being attacked by a right wing inquisitor. The reality is that Mr. Clinton has been our "right wing" inquisitor (right wing here meaning authoritarian), the man who has -- according to the ACLU -- "crippled . . . the Bill of Rights."
	 Watching Mr. Bill whine on national TV about his right to privacy and justice was a moment of high irony for those few of us who have been reading the fine print. Tell it to a few million medical marijuana users, Bill. And don't forget to use encryption! 
	 Let's have a look at the record, shall we?
	 While Bill was enjoying phone sex with Monica, he could have been vulnerable to victimization by his own attempts to radically expand the FBI's wiretapping authority in several bills.
	 In collaboration with the FBI, El Presidente pushed for a plan that requires the phone companies to reformat their new digital technology to allow government agents to wiretap with greater ease. The ACLU said the plan was "similar to requiring homes and offices to have microphones built into the walls which the government can turn on. The FBI would require that companies enable government agents to eavesdrop on at least 1 in every 100 lines in use in major US cities and other targeted areas -- a capacity believed greater than the KGB ever commanded in Soviet Russia."
	 Clinton also asked Congress to pass legislation that would give the Federal Bureau of Investigation the power to use "roving wiretaps" without a court order -- in other words making warrantless wiretaps the rule rather than the exception. The legislation was appended to an intelligence authorization bill and passed during the week of October 5, 1998.
	 Even without this legislation, federal agents have set themselves a proud record for the most wiretaps ever placed in one year for "intelligence" purposes without establishing probable cause of crime.
	 I don't suppose Bill had encrypted cybersex with Monica, but that's not because of the success of any of the silly schemes against the encryption of online communications unsuccessfully attempted by his administration. After failing to impose the "Clipper chip," which would have required any encryption device to have a backdoor giving government agents convenient unannounced access for eavesdropping, they tried "Clipper  II."  In this scheme, anyone using encryption would have to give the government the key so that they could read your mail without you noticing. While both these schemes failed to gain political traction, and encryption policy has improved somewhat under the watch of Clinton's new Internet advisor, Ira Magaziner (the man who made a hash of universal health care), the administration still wants easy government access to your email.
	 Of course, when you can't pass legislation, you can always do maximum damage via executive order. As you may recall, the American Revolution was fought largely over warrantless searches by British enforcers. In the name of national security, Clinton's Executive Order 12949 authorized physical "foreign intelligence" searches of homes and other places without a court order and without probable cause. In essence, there now needs be no evidence of criminal wrongdoing for law enforcement organizations to ransack your home. And since everybody's talking about Watergate, it's worth noting that under Executive Order 12949, Tricky Dicky's minions might have gotten away with searching McGovern headquarters. They certainly would have been able to excuse their third-rate burglaries against that threat to national security, Daniel Ellsberg. Of course, the mainstream American press would probably be too chickenshit now to publish The Pentagon Papers anyway, since they were illegally obtained (see Chiquita Banana).
	 The secret police are out there. It's known that warrantless searches have already occurred under Janet Reno's watch, although the numbers and specifics are clandestine, known only to certain White House and Justice Department officials.
	 The Clinton Administration has also instituted a plan in which public housing tenants have to sign leases that allow government agents to randomly search their homes.
	 The Clinton Administration has defended warrantless "suspicionless" drug testing in the public schools and endorsed the idea that welfare recipients should be subject to random warrantless, suspicionless drug tests.
	 The Clinton administration has, of course, continued funding and support for the War On Some Drugs, violating not only the privacy of peoples bedrooms but their brains. The rights violations that have resulted from the drug war are so vast, and its impact so devastating, that I don't have the space or time to begin to do them justice here.

Martial Law: The Anti-Terrorism Bill; They got the wrong guy? Been unjustly imprisoned? Clinton wants to keep you in jail anyway! Remember freedom of association, even with people other than Monica Lewinsky? Forget it!
	 Martial Law was declared, quietly, on April 24, 1996 when the horny President signed the Anti-Terrorism Bill. In the straightforward and heartbreaking words of the ACLU, "With the stroke of a pen, President Clinton today crippled the century-old authority of the federal courts to enforce the Bill of Rights." Please let that sink in.
	 The Secretary of State can now label any foreign-based organization he or she pleases as "terrorist." There is no legal recourse for removing the assignation. Banks are authorized to freeze assets of American citizens and organizations suspected of being agents of one of these declared terrorist groups. Again, there is no legal recourse to challenge such an act. Law enforcement can also now easily investigate individuals suspected of terrorism based on activities protected by the First Amendment.
	 The bill also guts prisoners' right to habeas corpus. Prisoners can no longer challenge the constitutionality of state court convictions, since this law requires federal courts to defer to state court interpretations of constitutional issues, even when the state is wrong. The bill also prevents consideration of innocence unless they are "backed by clear and convincing evidence," something nearly unattainable by current legal standards. In other words, let's show how tough on crime we are by keeping innocent people in jail too!
	 The bill also denies undocumented aliens, including those seeking political asylum, the right to challenge deportation. If the government declares that an alien is suspected of association with "terrorist groups," then they can use secret evidence that need not be disclosed to the suspect. In other words, the government need not even prove that the person is, in fact, in any way associated with a "terrorist" organization. After all, how would you know whether they've proved it or not? If that isn't enough, there's also been:

	- Several cases of the Clinton Administration intervening in the judicial process against the Constitutional rights of the accused.
	- Limits placed on anti-abortion protesters that would have had us screaming fascist pig had they been tried against the anti-war and civil rights movements.
	- "Overenthusiastic" gun law enforcement. However you feel about the Second Amendment's protection of citizens' rights to unlicensed access to the varieties of modern armaments, the Clinton Administration's anti-gun zeal has unleashed the fury of the BATF, most memorably in the slaughter in Waco, Texas.
	- Dress codes that would have made Chairman Mao smile. I doubt if Clinton, in his youth, would have sat still for mandatory school uniforms, but we understand that new uniforms will come pre-cum-stained to symbolize Mr. Clinton's commitment to youthful abstinence.

America is a police state: Now it can now be told. As most non-white people in America know, and many of the rest of us suspected, in the wake of the war on crime and drugs America has become a police state. In the politicians' and citizens' zeal to end crime, they have unleashed a new criminal element. This element has murdered, tortured, and abused thousands, if not millions, of American citizens -- many of them innocent. And they've gotten away with it. These police officers, prison guards, immigration officials, DEA agents, and other enforcement agents have more-or-less had carte blanche to do what they will.
	 Recourse to sadism is not surprising when you give some human beings that much power over others, particularly the type of human being who is attracted to the power of being an "enforcer."

The Amnesty International Report on Human Rights Violations in the USA: Greatest Hits.  In October, 1998 Amnesty International released a devastating report on Human Rights violations, revealing a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations in the USA. As a nation state worthy of being singled out by Amnesty for such a report, America joins such vacation dreamlands as Haiti and Guatemala.
	 Here are a few items from the report:

	- (There is) persistent and widespread violation of the rights to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment . . . and the right to freedom from arbitrary detention 
	- Across the USA, people have been beaten, kicked, punched, choked, and shot by police officers, even when they pose no threat. 
	- In prisons, women and men are subjected to sexual, as well as physical abuse . . . isolating prisoners for long periods . . . using chemical and electro-shock methods of restraint that are cruel, degrading, and sometimes life-threatening. Victims include pregnant women, the mentally ill and even children.
	- As if they were criminals, many asylum-seekers are placed behind bars when they arrive in the country. Some are held in shackles. They are detained indefinitely in conditions that are sometimes inhuman and degrading. 
	 -Police officers have beaten and shot unresisting suspects; they have misused batons, chemical sprays and electro-shock weapons; they have injured or killed people by placing them in dangerous restraint holds.
	- Most law enforcement agencies maintain that abuses, when they occur, are isolated incidents. However, in the past eight years independent inquiries have uncovered systematic abuses in some of the country's largest city police departments, revealing a serious nationwide problem.
	- In prison, guards are subjecting their victims to beatings and sexual abuse. The victims of abuse include pregnant women and the mentally ill.
	- The Justice Department and others have documented appalling conditions in dozens of jails: overflowing toilets and pipes; toxic and unsanitary environments; prisoners forced to sleep on filthy floors without mattresses; cells infested with vermin and lacking ventilation
	- While successive US governments have used international human rights standards as a yardstick by which to judge other countries, they have not consistently applied those same standards at home. In some areas international standards offer greater human rights protection than US domestic law, but the US authorities have refused to recognize the primacy of international law. The USA has been slow to agree to be bound by important international and regional human rights treaties: it is one of only two countries which have failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (The other is Somalia.)

	 The report goes on to delineate specific as well as general systemic abuses by police, prison guards, and immigration officials, American hypocrisy on human rights issues, and the creation in the United States of weapons of torture and death that are used internationally by other abusive regimes, as well as by our own.
	 This devastating report, which flies in the face of America's official rhetoric and self-image, should have knocked George Clinton vs. Ringo Starr off of the front pages. But widespread torture, false imprisonment, racist cops running on a rampage, are apparently of little import to the mainstream media. I've yet to see a columnist even deal with it.
	 The rape and torture of prisoners in America is the source of much late night humor. On The Daily Show (which I generally like) on Comedy Central, a clip of a large imprisoned black man jerking around and spasming around on a prison floor while guards tested an electronic shock device ran without comment to great guffaws from the audience. Prisoners . . . criminals . . . are dehumanized, providing a convenient outlet for all of the aggression and sadism current in America. The media -- newspapers and particularly TV shows -- contribute to this dehumanization by featuring the most depraved crimes and criminals, both in non-fiction and in fiction. In keeping Americans focused on the likes of Richard Allen Davis and Charles Ng, a mentality is created that justifies all these abuses. However, if most Americans were to review the situation case by case, they would probably feel that many if not most of these people don't belong in prison at all. About half of them are in for drug-related offenses. Some are in because of drug crimes committed by distant family members!!!
	 But you don't even have to have a naughty family member to fall victim to the police state. Consider this: as reported by Robert Anton Wilson in his book Everything Is Under Control: "In January 1989, the Minneapolis police smashed down the door of the home of an elderly black couple, using 'flash bang' grenades, which accidentally set the house on fire and killed both old people. The cops were looking for drugs, but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens by saying, 'This is war.'"

True Justice a Modest Proposal; America is a police state. Most Americans like it that way, so long as they -- or somebody close to them -- don't fall victim to its caprice. People fear crime and politicians have fed that fear unto frenzy, until the point where freedom is naught but a rhetorical device.
	 THE REVOLUTION® would like to suggest that we get tough on crime. First of all, we would get tough by punishing only crimes for which there are victims. That will give us lots of focused toughness. We would punish crimes of violence with greater severity than crimes of property. We would punish crimes of the privileged -- the dumping of toxins that leave entire communities to cope with cancer and other illnesses, Savings and Loans scams, and insurance and credit card policies that clearly constitute usury -- more severely than the crimes of the destitute. And we would punish the crimes of the institutionally powerful more severely than those of the powerless. To that end, we would have the Justice Department put several billion dollars towards making an example of 10,000 power abusers, putting them into a prison system far kinder (and less crowded) then the one they have presided over.
	 From government officials to DEA agents to police officers to prison officials, let the word go out: if you have been abusing your power, if you have been ransacking the homes of innocents, if you have been dropping bombs in foreign lands, if you've been shooting black men down in the street for traffic violations, your time is gonna come. And Mr. Clinton and Mr. Starr, adjoining cells await you.

POLITICAL FACTIONS

The new oppositions; While older Americans define their beliefs in terms of liberal, moderate, and conservative, members of the web generation are defined by those who believe in everything (gray aliens, every conspiracy theory that slithers across the net, ad infinitum,) and those who believe in nothing (unless you can tie it in to a snide quip about The Brady Bunch). Someday though, assuredly, a great teacher will arrive. She will astonish the web kids with her new idea: "Some things may be true while others may be false." Whoa! The web kids will ponder this for many nanoseconds. Then they'll flame the living fuck out of her.

POST-MODERNIST REVOLT

	 It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business.

	 We're stuck, you and I. We would just as soon be out on the beach with a fine wine, some Nietzsche, and a drum'n'bass deconstruction of Exile On Main Street tuning in to eternal questions regarding life, mortality, sexuality and so forth. But we live in a world of politics (sometimes called economics) from which there is no escape, no permanent autonomous zone. And so we must use politics to end politics. Thus, I am starting a political party for those of us who would really rather not. How gauche, you say.  And I agree. Politics is terribly unfashionable and tacky. It is with great embarrassment that I embark on this endeavor.

RIGHT LIBERTARIANISM

	 A lot of my Californian technoculture buddies subscribe to right-libertarian or anarcho-capitalist beliefs. And I do argue, as Marx did in the 19th Century, that you can't have the withering away of the state until you've eliminated scarcity. Also, particularly in the early 21st Century, you can't have the withering away of the state until you've built other defenses against total rape by the multinationals.

SEX

Q: Why aren't there more Michael Moores, Noam Chomskys, and R.U.s in the world? RU SIRIUS:  Football players get more sex.

	 The hierarchy of the human body should be turned upside down, where the genitals should be given more importance than the brain.

Sexual revolution; Religious extremists, anti-male feminists, and other sexual paranoids have joined mainstream pundits and politicians in fomenting a partly successful reaction against the sexual revolution. Buttressing this conservative and self-admittedly repressive discourse is the spectre of AIDS. As former US first lady Barbara Bush put it, "Sex is death." Further fortifying this retreat from sexual
liberalism in the US is the reality of a violent, paranoid, divided society in which any form of intercourse with others seems to be fraught with danger.
	 Meanwhile, sexual liberalism -- the opposition to this reactive trajectory -- is, like its political counterpart, anemic and defensive. Virtually disappeared from the discourse is the sexual radicalism of the 1960s, with its embrace of polymorphic, post-monogamous, pan-sexuality. Influenced by Frederich Engels attack on the bourgeois family and Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown's expansion/inversion of Freud via an embrace of the "pleasure principle" as a potentially socially healthy force, the "sexual revolution" became pop culture. From the Playboy philosophy to the demands for equal pleasure by feminists like Germaine Greer, from the public and psychic nakedness of the hippies to the Sade-lite posturings of the Rolling Stones, the message of '60s sexual-radicalism-turned-pop might be reducible to happy hooker Xaviera Hollander’s oft quoted "Sex is the nicest thing two people can do for each other."
	 In light of AIDS alone, this now appears even more difficult to digest than "all you need is love" or other expressions of youthful boomer naivete. No longer able to advocate sex -- and particularly sex outside of procreation, marriage, monogamy or age of consent -- as being "the nicest thing people can do," the current opposition to the neopuritanical juggernaut can only muster up the response, "We can't help it." Indeed, the discourse of sexual liberalism, generally given expression within a context of social concern, argues only that people are going to have sex that transgresses the puritanical norm anyway, and therefore we need to deal with it realistically, through sexual education, condom giveaways, birth control advice, etc.
	 A widespread, socially-beneficial, popular sexual revolution like the sort imagined in the 1960s is not going to occur in the near future, if it isn't in fact all-together unworkable. Aside from the aforementioned problems of AIDS, social paranoia, and babies making babies, the fragmentation of our culture by media decentralization and overload and the destruction of the connective middle class seems to insure that Cultural Revolutions will be displaced by subcultural revolts. This, in fact, is where the energy of the "sexual revolution" has retreated, into the relatively private enclaves of the s/m communities, the fetishists, the grrrl scene, the gay sex clubs, the swing scenes, and -- finally -- the sex industry (viewed for this purpose from the point of view of the insider's scene, as opposed to the availability of the "postcards" to consumers.) Unlike the sexual revolution of the sixties, these are non-proscriptive revolts. In fact, the most salient difference between most current subcultures and the counterculture of the sixties is that subculturalists don't want everybody to join them or embrace their perceptions. They are defined, and to an extent protected from the repression of the current mainstream conservatism, by their exclusivity.

	 Sex is the only good excuse for embodiment.

Commodification of; Female sexuality, in Western European culture, has long been portrayed as a mysterious commodity with an aura that can be easily transferred to an artifact and purchased by the consumer. Americans have vulgarized this exotic romanticism to the point of unintentional parody by associating, for instance, bad beer with buxom bimbos. The only mystery, finally, is how anyone can be that stupid.

SURVEILLANCE IN SCHOOLS

	 I think the cameras should be there for entertainment, not surveillance. I mean, are these kids worth watching? Is Party Of Five worth watching? 90210? My government will only invade people's bedrooms if they're particularly attractive or kinky . . . and it'll be for broadcast purposes, not punishment.

TERRORISM

	 THE REVOLUTION® 7 Point Program for Dramatically Decreasing the Threat of International Terrorism (short and vastly oversimplified)
	 (1) A US pledge to abide by international law and support for the establishment of the international tribunal for the enforcement of international law, something that we have resisted.
	 (2) Withdrawal of most American troops from overseas, including the Middle East. Begin the process of replacing our troops with an official United Nations peacekeeping force where necessary.
	 (3) An emergency program of energy independence, primarily involving our weaning ourselves off of oil. Why wasn't this done decades ago? It makes no sense!
	 (4) Campaign for an international treaty for the verifiable elimination of all weapons of mass destruction everywhere. Meanwhile, sign on to the UN's chemical and biological weapons agreements.
	 (5) US support for Israel's Peace Now movement and all its principles.
	 (6) The US promises an honest clearing of the air, a full accounting of US-sponsored terrorism since the end of World War II. This will include our sponsorship of extra-state terrorists and state terrorists.
	 (7) The US will stop selling the vast majority of weaponry to warring factions the world over. Ask yourself, who really benefits from these sales? It's obvious, isn't it?

	 Under a threat of a biological terror event, we are all forced to surrender entirely to the authorities. What else are you going to do? Refuse to believe FEMA? What if you're wrong? The threat of biological terrorism is a tool that the authoritarians can always use in a pinch.

TOTAL LIBERATION

	 My main agenda is to explode constricting illusions, whether it's bourgeois propriety, expectation, shame over sexuality, or the money system. Also, in Freudian terms, I'm at war with the cultural superego in favor of the disencumberment of the libido, the id, and the ego . . . definitely in that order -- which connects me to the surrealist and dadaist traditions.

	 The cultural superego (involved in boundary maintenance) is the first line of defense for the ancien' regime. Passive acquiescence to mainstream politics (consensus reality) functions by the maintenance of constricting illusions, false boundaries. For instance, an obsolete and capricious definition of value (money) sentences us all to original debt. Taboos render public discourse dishonest. Etcetera. 
	 Surrealism, drugs, paganism, sexual libertinism, the Dionysian impulse in rock culture, subcultural anarchism, all are attempts to storm the Bastille of the cultural superego . . . the controlling forebrain, liberate aspects of the libido, id, and ego -- and experience agape or ecstasis.
	 Mirroring this process across the 20th Century, the dispersion of media/communications technology -- sold to us by the corporate oligarchy -- has provided former yokels access to deviant minds, and digital media has decentralized attention. This has accelerated and amplified the assault on cultural boundaries, dissipating consensus reality and overwhelming fixed identity.
	 And now, your ass will follow. Because work i.e., employment or wage slavery, is obsolete. The solid, secure, agricultural/industrial era, production-oriented forms of labor have been displaced by automation and dissipated by the global work force. There has never before been a time in history where a majority of people have been forced to hustle so pointlessly, toiling the fields of hype, poisoning the real and conceptual environment with bogus product, desparately servicing invented  needs,   building  massive  unnecessary arsenals, clearcutting the forests, etc.
	 This is, of course, all problematized by a well-armed, multinational corporate oligarchy that won't share the wealth, a still solid core of fear and reaction among the mass, and your own trendy cynicism. But the first completely digital generation -- our nation's teens -- are online, on drugs, and ready to riot. My work here is nearly done.

Extropunkian; Think of me as an Extropunkian. I'm out to democratize obscene and scary Godlike powers. My own politics of desire forces me somewhere within the same framework as the thin-lipped Fountainhead-waving whiteboys who dominate the technotopian movement. I want long distance viewing, replaceable body parts, memory chips, a nanotechnology-based leisure lifestyle of infinite wealth, an anti-aging pill, and the perfect aphrodisiac. I want the technology that's indistinguishable from magic even to those people already familiar with that Arthur C. Clark quote. I mean, when they say, "Lookie here, Chucko. This is the choice. You can die a slow, dreary, and painful death from cancer or you can take this here pill, reverse the aging process, be smart as a whip, fuck four times a day and eat fried pig guts right before bed and not get gas" -- what say you?

Total liberation; The possibility for cyborg liberation -- for an interpenetration between humans and machines, artificial life forms, nanotechnology ad infinitum -- in a way that wildly expands human freedoms -- to jump like a kangaroo, see like a bee, live a million years, change sexes, get ripped on drugs without physical deterioration -- all of these things look to be becoming possible. But what I see in front of me is not a people being vitalized and dynamic. What I see is people diligently working on the machines that will replace them. It is really a time of people being distressed and disappointed with the species while at the same time being excited and awed by the technology we've created.

VICTORY OVER HORSESHIT!

Some time this fall, let's bring a million people to Washington BC to march for Victory Over Horseshit!

Horseshit is . . . a war on plants
Horseshit is . . . the biggest military budget increase since the end of the cold war
Horseshit is . . . profiting off of the mass incarceration of human beings
Horseshit is . . . democrats and republicans both having exactly the same sponsors
Horseshit is . . . the mainstream media telling us things are going swell
Horseshit is . . . killing Iraqi's isn't even mentioned in the mainstream media
Horseshit is . . . Bill Clinton preaching abstention to teenagers
Horseshit is . . . searching worker's and students urine, for fuck's sake
Horseshit is . . . mandatory school uniforms
Horseshit is . . . billions of dollars of tax money going to corporations who then turn around and charge us what the market will bare for their products
Horseshit is . . . still being the only country on the planet with troops stationed in foreign nations the world over
Horseshit is . . . Jesse Helms
Horseshit is . . . family values, or any attempt by the government to tell us what our life philosophy ought to be
Horseshit is . . . the criminalization of youth
Horseshit is . . . calling our system a democracy when it's almost as rigged on behalf of Republicans and Democrats as the Soviet Union was on behalf of the Communist Party
Horseshit is . . . anti-drug fanatics even destroying the hemp industry, and with it, the forests
Horseshit is . . . Clinton and Gore acting like they don't know better
Horseshit is . . . federal regulations on drugs controlled by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries
Horseshit is . . . the vast majority of health care money going to insurance companies instead of health care
Horseshit is . . . penalizing people who buy cigarettes while subsidizing people who make cigarettes
Horseshit is . . . military weapons programs that are funded not for defense but to distribute money
Horseshit is . . . the government admitting that the bombing of Sudan was a mistake and the mainstream media ignoring it
Horseshit is . . . taxable scholarships
Horseshit is . . . any governmental agency that fucks up so bad it needs a PR campaign
Horseshit is . . . not earning a living wage and still having to pay taxes
Horseshit is . . . patenting the human genome
Horseshit is . . . spending more to bomb Iraq than it would take to buy it

	 There you have it, kids. It's time to form a THE REVOLUTION® party in your County, and put together a steering committee for bringing people to a VICTORY OVER HORSESHIT! march this coming Fall. And if you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door.
	
Special thanks to strait@mail2.quiknet.com and kylin@chutney.org for horseshit contributions.

VIRTUAL REALITY

	 I'd rather watch South Park on caffeine than experience virtual reality on smart drugs.

WORK

Slacker Revolt; The only alternative to a world of human refuse, serfs and slaves abandoned by an increasingly self-sufficient corporate cyber/media oligarchy is a revolution of this lumpenproletariat (the formerly working class), based not in neo-Luddite refusal but in desire, a desire to live. Which means that the essentials should be given away free, unconditionally.

	 We're in a very perverted version of a ludic ("man" at play) society, in the sense that what's driving technological evolution is shifting from warfare to information, communications, and entertainment . . . better games, greater bandwidth, film projects the size of military invasions and entertainment corporations the size of medium nation states.

	 This speed-of-light hell-on-wheels that we’re living in seems to make for a lot of creative energy. There’s something to be said for the stress that makes us all want to kill each other and make really cool web pages.

TESTIMONIALS

"I read this man's least musings with utterly focused, indeed, almost reverent attention."
Bruce Sterling, author of Distraction

"I am increasingly impressed with R. U. Sinus' transformation from an underground psychedelic techno-freak into a crafty, conscientious, and punch-drunk purveyor of political truths. The Chairman's quotations, which reformat the politics of ecstasy for the age of lPOs and MP3s, are sure to get you all hot and heavy for liberation again."
Erik Davis, author of
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and
Mysticism in the Age of Information.

"So you think you're a free human being? Prove it! Read this book and then try to pretend that you haven't read it. Bet you can't. Its focused insanity is just the ticket for these nonsensical and trying times. "
Walter Kirn, author of Thumbsucker

"Buy this book. Sure to be a collector's item after the November 2000 elections."
Carl Steadman, Suck founder

"Take Noam Chomsky, add Marshall McLuhan, mix in Jonathan Swift, and you have R. U. Sirius, always on the crest of a countercultural wave. When it comes to revolutionary change, either he's on to something profound, or else he's just on something. "
Paul Krassner, The Realist

"I not only recommned this book enthusiastically, but I also plan to write in R.U. Sirius for President in the next election!"
Robert Anton Wilson

"This is nothing less than the blueprint for the future of our civilization. It's time for R. U. Sirius to be either worshipped as the next messiah, or shot dead, once and for all."
Douglas Rushkoff, author of
Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say

End eVersion