Feel no pain, but my life ain’t easy
I know I’m my best friend
No one cares, but I’m so much stronger
I’ll fight until the end
To escape from the true/false world
Undamaged destiny
Can’t get caught in the endless circle
Ring of stupidity

Out for my own, out to be free
One with my mind, they just can’t see
No need to hear things that they say
Life’s for my own to live my own way

Rape my mind and destroy my feelings
Don’t tell me what to do
I don’t care now, ’cause I’m on my side
And I can see through you
Feed my brain with your so-called standards
Who says that I ain’t right?
Break away from your common fashion
See through your blurry sight

Out for my own, out to be free
One with my mind, they just can’t see
No need to hear things that they say
Life’s for my own to live my own way

See them try to bring the hammer down
No damn chains can hold me to the ground

Life’s for my own to live my own way

Why?

Dunno. It occurred to me. I used to have this “friend”, see, who in between loading the three-foot “weed eater” for the next bong hit would occasionally belt this one out. An odd thing, perhaps, for a Jew to sing.

And no, we really didn’t have any good friends who just happened to be black… or communists… or Christians.

Let’s hope he got it from someplace… someplace pure. Someplace like The Doctor Demento Show, for instance.

Anyone know who wrote this piece of Ameri-horror-cana?

Speaking of random thoughts which crawl out of the depths of one’s mind late at night… anyone remember the scene from Airplane! where the well-dressed, polite boy comes to sit next to the well-dressed, aristocratic little girl on the plane, bearing a tray of beverages?

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you. I take it black. Like my men.”

Yeah, I thought you did.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

We are a sacred brotherhood, who love our country true
We always can be counted on, when there’s a job to do
We serve our homeland day and night, to keep it always free
And proudly wear our robes of white, protecting liberty.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

[trumpet solo]

The Bible, cross, Old Glory, too, our symbols of a man
A sword and water, robe and hood portray our noble Klan
In search of peace and liberty, we pledge our hearts and hands
We must defeat the communists to save our Christian land

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

From the New York Daily News:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

Via Cryptogon, where Kevin says, “Maybe I need a Zombie Uprising category.”

Oh, fuck it. Here, listen to some Exodus, dredged up from memory by the chance linkage of the word “toxic” in the title to the same word appearing in phrases like “toxic debt” in the media this year…

After this, Americans might just want to get right out there and riot like proper victims.

Exodus, “The Toxic Waltz”, from the album Fabulous Disaster:

Here’s a new dance craze that’s sweeping the nation
It’s called the toxic waltz and it’s causing devastation
You’re jumping up and down like a psycho circus clown
Slamming with waltzers all the way around
You get caught up in the whip
You’re thrown into a flip
You aim for someone’s head
To stain the floor red
Give someone a kick
To prove you’re truly sick
Bounce back from some blows
And blood runs out your nose

Flailing round and round
And you’re injury bound
Waltz it up!
The pit is it!
You can take your chance
On this rough new dance
If you dare!
To dive in!
There are some that try
But they won’t survive
They don’t hit!
‘Cause they’re wimps!
And this exercise
Helps you brutalize
With us!
Exodus!

Everybody’s doin’ the toxic waltz
Kick your friend in the head and have a ball
Come on and do the toxic waltz
And slam your partner against the wall
Everybody’s doin’ the toxic waltz
Good friendly violent fun in store for all
Get up off your ass and toxic waltz
If you hit the floor you can always crawl!

Used to do the monkey, but now it’s not cool
The twist and mash potato are no exception to the rule
So don’t be a dunce and dance like a runt
Just throw your elbows with good friendly violent fun
Don’t start to cry
If you get a black eye
Just dive back in
And give another try
But too much action
May leave you in traction
So you better get insurance
No matter your endurance!

Flailing round and round
And you’re injury bound
Waltz it up!
The pit is it!
You can take your chance
On this rough new dance
If you dare!
To dive in!
There are some that try
But they won’t survive
They don’t hit!
‘Cause they’re wimps!
And this exercise
Helps you brutalize
With us!
Exodus!

Everybody’s doin’ the toxic waltz
Kick your friend in the head and have a ball
Come on and do the toxic waltz
And slam your partner against the wall
Everybody’s doin’ the toxic waltz
Good friendly violent fun in store for all
Get up off your ass and toxic waltz
If you hit the floor you can always crawl!

Get up on your feet
Don’t look so obsolete
And thrash like an athlete!
Don’t sit there on your ass
Don’t look like you’ve got too much class
You’ll be harassed!
You know we guarantee
This is the key
So rage or get the third degree!
You begin frontal assaults
And start your somersaults
And do the toxic waltz!
Do the toxic waltz!

Hat tip to RD.

From Anarchist news dot org:

Santa Cruz: Condo Windows Smashed

Submitted by anon on Mon, 2008-07-14 23:15.
Tags: Anarchist Practice

On the 4th of July, amidst the tourist frenzy and sounds of fireworks, at least 8 windows were broken on a condominium that is being built in the lower Ocean neighborhood.

The homes that once stood there housed primarily Latino families. These families were evicted to make way for more expensive housing. This type of development raises the property values, which in turn, forces out more low-income and working poor people from the area. It is a clear example of gentrification in our town.

We will continue to attack the sites of gentrification when and where we see them.

You’re supposed to be smashing the state, not private property, you fucking nitwits!

Also splattered at Santa Cruz Indymedia.

“Oppose the war; support the troops.”

The idea had a certain strategic logic to it. Our opinion was a minority one, and offending the millions with military members in their families or otherwise close to them didn’t seem like a terribly bright way of getting the peace message across. We also somewhat accepted the logic that the people in the military had signed up to defend America; that they were being sent to a criminal war for profit on the other side of the globe wasn’t really their fault, they’d been hoodwinked.

So, all of those well thought out banner ideas like “US Military: Millions of Murderers in Uniform” were left aside so that we might more effectively get the peace message across and avoid offending anyone’s precious sensibilities. We stuck instead to our peace signs and our rainbows and our doves and our “No blood for oil” lines. We endured the taunts from the counter-protests: “My country, right or wrong!” “America, love it or leave it!” “Traitors!” and so on. And we gingerly protested in our carefully cordoned-off free speech zones or under city permit permission, got ourselves in the papers and all cried together and lit candles as the radio reports started coming in of the missiles and bombs striking Baghdad. And, of course, none of it made a damned bit of difference.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

It always bothered me, though, this “support the troops” idea. Sure, it was a smart strategic play, but in stark conflict to the rest of what we thought we were doing. We were here to bring the truth to an ignorant, deluded or sleeping public, and the whole truth, nothing but. That truth must have necessarily included the realization that these amorphous “troops” we were enjoined to support were actually individual, thinking, morally responsible men and women. It must have included the knowledge that each and every “troop” currently engaged in mass murder in our names had volunteered. And we knew, as they should have, that the murderous, destructive, obscene organization they volunteered to serve, hadn’t conducted a legitimate “defense of America” since at least WWII, and maybe as far back as the War of 1812, depending on whose Pearl Harbor narrative you believe.

They weren’t conscripted, they weren’t shanghaied, they weren’t tricked into signing up and donning the uniform and picking up the gun. They sought out the role, they agreed to follow orders, they signed the papers, and nowhere along the way did they somehow become transformed from individual human beings, morally responsible for their individual acts of violence and destruction into those collectively romanticized “troops”. Some small number said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and did the only moral thing possible, which was to desert. The rest marched freely onto the planes and ships and deployed, the willing agents of empire. Certainly in many, the thought was there afterward: “We didn’t sign up for that,” but still they went, perhaps finding their own moral cover in the notion they’d been tricked. Likely, most found no moral problem with going at all.

Even today, the “support the troops” mentality is embedded in the tactics and rhetoric of the organized anti-war movement, implicitly or explicitly. It’s considered bad form to condemn the American armed services en masse for their self-subjugation to the American empire’s war machine.

another victim of empire

Unlike Gulf War I, though, Gulf War II, freshly turned five years old, is an occupation. It is an obviously immoral war launched on the flimsiest of concocted excuses and conducted with the most sinister of aims. The history of Gulf War I, the suffering inflicted on Iraq by a decade of sanctions, the horror of depleted uranium weapons residues and unexploded landmines and other ordnance from the first attack should have made it obvious to anyone that a crime had been committed there. A massive, inexcusable, inhuman, monstrous, treasonous crime.

And yet, most of the military personnel that have served in the current conflict up to the present weren’t in the military for the first. They signed up, willingly. If they didn’t know the history of what the US military actually did for the prior fifty years, flag-waving nonsense and Cold War turned War on Terror hysteria aside, their foolishness should not excuse them. If they learned nothing from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon or other places that the empire had been sticking its nose and its guns into, well, we should let neither ignorance nor willful blindness be an excuse. Unjust, illegal wars do not just happen by themselves. They are the sum total of millions of individual decisions by millions of individually responsible people to obey, topped by whatever dark cabal is giving the orders for the week.

Further, probably close to half or more of those still in Iraq today signed up after the war’s justifications had evaporated, after the stories of casual murder, collective punishment and institutionalized torture were already splashed on television screens and across newspaper headlines worldwide. They, especially, should have known better.

So, I will not support the troops. In fact, fuck the troops! Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders is, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

At the same time, fuck all those who support the troops! If history, recent or ancient, hasn’t been sufficient to educate you on the true nature of war and the true nature of the predatory, inhuman power you seem so eager to serve, then damn you for your stupidity, damn you for your ignorance, damn you for your blindness, damn you for your fallacious morality. And this goes not only for every family member or friend of someone serving in the US military today who is NOT insistently urging their child or husband or wife or friend to desert or disobey, it goes also for every federal employee and for every shareholder and employee from janitor to CEO of the military-industrial-terrorism complex and the companies that comprise it: Blackwater, Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Allied-Signal, Unisys, Westinghouse, DynCorp, Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Hughes, KBR, Kearfott, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Shell, AT&T, Sikorsky, United Technologies and all the rest. There is blood on your hands, real human blood — lives taken, families shattered, homes destroyed, crops ruined, populations displaced, tortures committed, atrocities sanctioned, all facilitated by your unthinking, odious, ignorant, unconscionable support.

This essay is in part a response to the writings of Arthur Silber, in a piece entitled “The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support?“

credit: vredevanutrecht @ flickr

In concluding, he states:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

No, Arthur, I will not support.