just re-watched v for vendetta. and of course, how could i not love that movie? (i have reservations about alan moore as a theoretician; but then you might have noticed that i have reservations about everyone except myself as a theoretician. and i'm not so sure about myself.) anyway it puts me in mind of what i actually wanted to be when i grew up: the perfect revolutionary. i wanted to study, you know, bomb-making, locksmithing, guerilla warfare, survival, disguise, propaganda, etc etc. and i was pretty serious: i was actually doing...things. and i made some headway in each of these areas.
now i was 15 in 1973, and as the years went by it dawned on me, as it dawned on a lot of folks, that there wasn't going to be a revolution. also it is a bit hard for an anarchist to contemplate the actual mechanisms and results of actual revolutions. none of the twentieth century revolutions eventuated in anything that resembled the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. and every successful revolution of the twentieth century eventuated in a totalitarian regime. and i got sidetracked of course: love, poetry, philosophy, drugs. i remained committed to the ideas, which i found in emma goldman or developed for myself, and i have tried to express them or stay true to the anti-authoritarian impulse, of which i have found over the years that i have an inexhaustible supply. but i also made some sort of peace with some sorts of authority (even my own: the hardest task).
anyway, no one can be v, who was a comic book because he was a super-hero. no one is going to save us or return us to our supposedly true or pristine selves. but you know i have known moments of regret that i didn't give it more of a try. v is always on about the power of words and ideas. i suppose i might say that i have not witnessed this power in any very potent form. my writing has had infinitesimal effects, and i note that v wasn't sitting around writing books, even if he was always quoting shakespeare with questionable purport. but honestly i'm not sure we've seen much from the power of ideas since the 19th century.