for the weekend, where the lovely but unproblematic marion winik is teaching in an mfa program. i'll leave you with this, year-end roundup #2:
2005: The Year in Anarchy
By Crispin Sartwell
Every year since 1648 has been a bad year for us, the anarchists. That was the year of the Peace of Westphalia, establishing the modern European nation-state. Since then history has been a long strange power trip: colonization, wars of incredible destructiveness, genocides: all the happy results of handing unlimited power of taxation and the wondrous weaponry that goes with it to human beings.
Government separates the world into two sorts of people: those who long above all else to subordinate other people and those who long above all else to be subordinated by other people. The only folks who don't fall into either of these categories are us, the anarchists. By the beginning of 2005 there were six of us left.
And 2005 was especially bad for us, the anarchists: easily the worst since the fall of communism. All over the world and in New Orleans, people blamed their problems on "failed states," i.e. on insufficient oppression.
The United States bestrode the world like a brain-numb colossus, and reached a degree of authoritarianism that is the highest in its history. Our beloved government discovered and explored the universal human enthusiasm for internment without trial, torture, and universal surveillance, modeling its new form of government on the charming statecraft of Augusto Pinochet.
Vlad Putin continued this year to write all the stories appearing in all the newspapers and magazines in Russian, to jail his opponents, and to slaughter the last few Chechens. The rest of the world's governments, as you can well imagine, greeted these developments with enthusiasm.
The Chinese state, just to prove that it's still a true People's Republic, fired on dissatisfied peasants and repressed unhappy old women, while hiring American internet companies to prohibit their people from Googling "liberty."
Officials of the New Iraq continued the happy traditions of the Old Iraq, flaying dissidents and calling it democracy.
The government of Iran lurched into holocaust denial, nuclear armament, and other premonitions of genocide.
In short, a bad year for us, the anarchists. But there was some encouraging news as well.
The more moronic and counter-productive state power appears, the more obvious the need for immediate, complete anarchy. The public housing programs of New Orleans and the nimbleness of FEMA were demonstrations, if further demonstrations could possibly be needed, that all government should hang itself this afternoon to avoid further embarrassment.
However, some perverse enthusiasts for hierarchy managed to conclude from such events that what we need is "more effective government," government capable of preventing natural disaster, curing the scourges of American poverty and racial division, and sending everyone large checks all the time. We, the anarchists, note that these are precisely the arguments that gave us public housing and FEMA in the first place, and we hope that 2006 brings these enthusiasts what they deserve.
One undeniably encouraging development: in its desire to saturate every aspect of the life of every person entirely, the American government continued a cycle of deficit spending so extreme as to constitute an infinite abyss, a yawning pit into which everyone will one day tumble screaming and fall, fall forever. Except us, the anarchists.
Scooter Libby got caught this year.
And one thing that is extremely encouraging every year: there was no sign of an emerging world state, as the United Nations continued to be snickered at by all human beings the world over.
What will 2006 bring for us, the anarchists? Prediction: a horde of liberty-loving berserkers in styling-salon dreadlocks will sweep implacably down from the Shenandoah National Park and sack Washington D.C..!
The long nightmare of human enslavement to state power will be over! Or, maybe that will have to wait for 2007.
