cheese it, the cops!

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

So if Zombie Ayn Rand eats the brains of vampiric Ted Cruz...

For Crispin and Co....Merry Baby Jesus Birthday and stuff....

Speaking of which, here is the offical Crusader AXE position on CIA torture and such abominations. While I think it's a pretty good piece as these things go, as often happens with VetsToday, the comments are the best part. When a column gets that response, I feel like Sheldon Cooper, doomed to spend my life teaching evolution to fundamentalists in east Texas. On the other hand, they're pretty funny, if you don't mind feeling amazed at the stupidity of a hunk of the American population. Here's a personal favorite --

Since the massive Rhine meadows slaughter of 1.8 million Germans after WWII by your Rat Bastard leader Eisenhower torture has been a part of the US military efforts ever since! You rat bastard Yanks are far worse than the NAZIS ever were they were using these techniques for maybe ten to twelve years You Yankee Rat Bastards have been at it for 200 plus years and you Rat Bastards are proud of it! How long will you Rat Bastards remain in the sewers and latrine pits of humanity? 

Enjoy! good luck! and all that stuff...

 

 

way too much tammy, i know. possibly i'm a bit too drenched in hip hop as i teach my course and need a break. so let me try a different defense of 'stand by your man,' obviously one of the iconic songs of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons. but if you're opposed to standing by your man, you're opposed to monogamy. that's your perogative, of course - you bobby brown bitch. i'm kind of into the idea myself. heterosexuality is a rich, complicated landscape, with all kinds of gender roles and stuff. it might have had some connection to the subordination of women, of course. but you know i don't think we can really help ourselves: we were born this way; this is who we are, not what we chose; it's an identity, not a lifestyle. perhaps heterosexual marriage failed as an idea; it just wasn't practicable. but it had a certain compelling yin/yang quality. and of course even heterosexuals should be able to marry whomever they please. tammy explored every mood and moment of heterosexual romantic love - complementarity - from infatuation to conflagration. but it took hillary clinton to really live this particular song fully.

the slate series on how america will end is actually pretty fascinating. but what if america was over a while ago? (i think that was from about 2005?)

the paper i'll be delivering at the international country music conference on thursday: reactionary progressivism: bill monroe, political philosopher.

in some cultures, time has been understood to be cyclical. in others, it's considered to be linear, a narrative or line of progress. probably, time is best conceived as a scribble: jagged, funky, continuously self-xing: an incomprehensible chaos that is still a single line, unreconstructible: the mad scribble of the insane. but we in the reactionary progressive party want to organize this scribble into a swirl of overlapping circular and ovoid forms, loops and figure-eights: upward and downward spirals: we demand a tornadic time.

we'll start by trying to recapitulate the nixon administration in its entirety. but to do that, we'll have to get involved in vietnam, which will require a full reinstatement of the cold war. this will in turn require re-fighting world war two. in fact, in our profound conservatism the reactionary progressives will have to tear everything down and start anew with the big bang. that's some pretty radical shit!

the most profound innovation would be a sheer, perfect repetition, which is what we of the reactionary progressive party are calling for. if you want to understand the astounding oomph of our amazing program, i direct you to three texts, which are to the reactionary progressives what the contract with america (or maybe burke or oakeshott) is to conservatism:

jorge luis borges, "pierre menard, author of the quixote"
soren kierkegaard, repetition
friedrich nietzsche, the gay science, sec. 341

reactionary progressivism is actually a practical program and has been applied many times. the founders of the american republic, for example, based their revolt against england not on a radical agenda for progress, but on the ancient british constitution and the rights of british citizens. confucius is often portrayed as an arch-conservative, but his extreme emphasis on ritual propriety and tradition constituted a radical reform agenda in a china disintegrating into small warring states. bill monroe invented bluegrass music by trying to make music in the 1940s that sounded like it came from 1880. progress and return are, let us say, always complexly related, and the choice is never flat.

announcing a new political party: the reactionary progressives. forward, into the past. our goal is to ban everything developed after 1820: corporate capitalism; abolition of slavery; woman suffrage. we don't expect to achieve this admirable, sweeping return to basic decency. but we do think that giving it a shot will introduce bizarre, completely unpredictable, extreme change in the immediate future, thus driving us into a 22nd century bright with innovation.