Kill Your Parents (2)

Part One of this review of Diana West's The Death of the Grown-up is coming at a later hour, (now below.) This installment is in progress.

When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothing ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog that's
always changing things
Makes wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don't wanna grow up

I don't ever want to be that way
I don't wanna grow up
Seems that folks turn into things
that they never want
The only thing to live for is today…
I'm gonna put a hole in my T.V. set
I don't wanna grow up
Open up the medicine chest
I don't wanna grow up
I don't wanna have to shout it out
I don't want my hair to fall out
I don't wanna be filled with doubt
I don't wanna be a good boy scout
I don't wanna have to learn to count
I don't wanna have the biggest amount
I don't wanna grow up
Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna grow up
They all go out and drinkin all night
I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
Nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old tomb on grand street
When I see the 5 oclock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float on a broom
Fall in love, get married then boom
How the hell did it get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up.
Tom Waits/K. Brennan

I think it's possible that it took two people to write the lyrics above. It tells ya somethin'.

A bit of searching the Internet turns this up, for which you can thank me later:

C. Roark "tri-zeta"

(from under the floorboards and through the woods...)

Those vocals. Those lyrics. That mood. This was My first foray into Tom's world: a gift when I was 14. I haven't looked back. From the alpha (the thumping primitive drums of "Earth Died Screaming") to the omega (the howling chorus of guys and guitars finishing off "That Feel"), this CD is like nothing else on the planet. This is a macabre, twisted world: a vision entirely of Mr. and Mrs. Waits devising (Kathleen Brennan is his wife and they write together- what a team!)
http://www.amazon.com/Bone-Machine-Tom-Waits/dp/B000001DVZ

[O]riginally recorded by Tom Waits on his 1992 release "Bone Machine" later to be covered and made famous by the Ramones on their 1995 release "Adios Amigos".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Want_to_Grow_Up

"I Don't Wanna Grow Up" was the "hit" off this album, strangely enough & it's no surprise. Not only is it probably the most accessible song on BONE MACHINE, but it's truly one of Tom's best songs ever. MTV even gave the video a fair amount of airplay & the Ramones later covered it, creating one of their last great recordings.
[See amazon above.]

Meanwhile, back at the Anglican Church in Ottawa, the capitol city of Canada:

"Ven. Christine Piper spoke about a blessing her family received after her ex-husband had a sex change operation. The ceremony provided all the members with a healthy way of accepting this new version of a father and former husband."

Enough preamble, this is part two of my review of Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up.

There will be those who don't care for this kind of book, and they might rather turn to Gay Family Values. I'll stick with West, a book that should be 'easy reading', meaning it's low on the Fogg Index, short, pithy sentences, clear and vivid examples, conversational tone, explicit and concrete argument laid out plainly. I'm finding it one of the most difficult books to read that I've encountered in years. I have to put the book down every page or so and try to catch my breath, to look around me to reorient myself in the present, in what I naively take to be the real world of normal and decent people. A few pages of West's book make me feel like I'm swimming in a sewer. This is very difficult reading. "Party with your children" leaves me feeling ill. Page after page.

I'll return with something more concrete as the day goes on. Please feel free to preempt anything good I might write later.

Kill Your Parents (1)

The following "paragraph" seems to be denouncing the formation of a new and improved version of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). If not, then please excuse me for not getting it.

I got news for you asshole, this is a new SDS that means that it might not be exactly the same as the old SDS. Not only that but my parents wouldn't buy me an x-box nor would I want one, wasting all your time on those stupid video games is not something I want to do. I am actually commited to changing things in this country and am working towards that instead of living in some happy little fantasy world where everything is just peachy. Soldiers and families in Iraq are dying right now, womens and queer rights are being flushed slowly down the toliet, corruption is running rampant as well as poverty, workers are getting screwed, and you know what rather than be a complacent whino like you, I am trying to work against all that stuff and I think maybe you should try it too or just stay the heck away from politics. It seems like you can't take the heat, but for some reason you won't leave the kitchen so your just standing in the kitchen whining!
http://dc.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/150639/index.php

Some might recall Tom Hayden as more than Jane Fonda's ex-husband. He was in his prime, a co-founder of the SDS. I was thinking Hayden and his lot earlier this evening as I considered writing a review of Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up . I thought of titling the post "Go West, Young Man." Then, thinking of Hayden, I recalled the slogan from the 60s that I'm using here as headline. I might not have been the smartest kid when I was growing up in Slackjaw, Alabama, so that probably explains why I assumed the slogan was meant metaphorically, as some fancy-pants Yankee hyperbole. Now, having read some large portion of West's book, I'm not so sure it was not meant literally by the Haydenesque totalitarians of the time. Nor am I so sure this evening that if it was meant literally that it would have been such a bad thing. Yes, dear reader, that is an instance of Walkerian humor. "Ha." (Wait for it because another approaches.) "Ha."

Enough preamble.

Diana West, a writer I was not until a few days ago familiar with, or rather, with whose writing I was not familiar, has won me over in a matter a few short hours. How could it be otherwise? The kiddie Lefties like the one quoted above above hate her. She's a -- gasp-- conservative!

This brief analysis from amazon.com sort of sums it all up.

By Preston C. Enright (Denver, CO United States)
Another hate-mongering, arrogant conservative, imagine that?
Actually, these so-called "conservatives" are simply corporate lobbyists throwing out these bigoted arguments to delude/divert their audience about the realities of US foreign policy, global corporatism, ecocide and other pressing issues that the ruling elite doesn't want us to think about. West is fortunate that there is a segment of the US population that is profiting off of our society of mass destruction, so they welcome these ridiculous books with open arms.
If people are worried about how people are being encouraged to be irresponsible, it may be worth their while to study the most powerful entity in the world today, private transnational corporations.
The Corporation
West and the corporatist cabal she works for must just laugh at how easy it is to get some people to believe this nonsense, and also the way some will consciously avoid any ideas that challenge their world view.
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Grad. School ain't what it use to be.

According to Diana West, things aren't what they used to be since the end of World War Two when American parents decided that their children knew better than adults. News to me. News that such a thing could be seen so early on as the late 1940s and the 50s. Parents, West writes, gave up their responsibilities as adults and as parents, seemingly en masse, and decided that Buddy and Sissy were so special that they should run the family and then the world. Cool, daddy-O.

Except that it came true and it's totally fucked up.

West doesn't make the argument that we should kill our parents. (I don't either.) West's book makes the argument that leads me as a reader to wish the parents of the hippie generation had killed themselves and saved us all a world of hurt. I feel that way. So it must be valid.

West has written an easily accessible work, a few hundred pages long, word-witty, and insightful. Reader reviews at amazon make it clear that this is a book one either loves or hates, the five star system there being mostly fives or ones. I'm a four and a half guy here. I don't quite grasp, if its still to come, why the Greatest Generation abdicated their responsibilities as adult parents in favor of grotesque indulgence of children. I don't understand, from reading this book, why adults want to be perpetual children in the Western World.

This post has caused some dissension in the world. I leave it here as is for others to decide.

A Lifetime of Cruel Nightmares

Tunisian imam Said Jaziri is gone from Canada. Deported. Put on a plane and shipped back home. It's a terrible thing. In America it's known as a terrible thang. No matter how you put it, this is horrible, terrible, unconscionable treatment of a poor honest jihadi. Dear reader, it might take you a lifetime to get over this if you continue reading the CBC report below:

The Muslim cleric said the way he was treated qualified as psychological and physical torture, a nightmare that would take a lifetime to get over.

The Tunisian-born imam, deported from Canada for falsifying his refugee application, complained about how he was treated by Canadian authorities during his 13-hour trip, calling it torture.

In an interview with CBC's French-language service Tuesday morning, Jaziri said he was deprived of any outside contact in the hours leading to his departure, including with his pregnant wife, and said the handcuffs he was forced to wear hurt him.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2007/10/23/qc-jaziri1023.html

Whoa. That was mighty harsh.

A Modernist Revolutionary Army of the Just

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12

Cultural relativism has a specific origin, as we have written of often in detail here. Boaz, Benedict, Meade, et al counter-posed relativism in reaction to Social Darwinism, as a perhaps well-meant or good-intentioned foil against the rip and tear of Modernity's plunging into the defenseless world of primitives. No, Trobriand Islanders could not thwart the designs of Modernity's giants on their hut-steps. Yes, the giants of Industrialisation of the world were brutal and rapacious. In defense of the weak and helpless, the childless anthropologists of the age determined to save the Children of Nature from the evils of the modern world and its cold machines. No, the primitives were not capable of withstanding anything of the modern world, and thus it was wrong to impose upon them any of our Modernity. Yes, they were defenseless, and because of that very reality they had an inner authenticity that had to be respected even by those who were incomparably superior in other aspects. Relativism: that all cultures are of worth even if different; must be respected and left alone to develop organically. The multi-culti Romance of von Herder led quickly to the philobarbarism we see now as the obverse of the reactionary hatred of Modernity: That Nature is good, cities bad; that collective living is good, individualism bad; that organic is good, mechanical bad.Thus, the sentimentalization of the feudal times and the reactionary longing for a return to the Golden Age of the Middle Ages, the Romance vision of happy peasants living in harmony with nature, everything in its place, a harmonious balance struck and maintained. The reactionaries of Romance who fight against our beautiful Modernity have never ceased from 1789 to try in all ways to destroy the world of our Modernity. They engage ever in turning back the times to a time when men were owned as farm animals, kept penned and servile, crushed and churlish, brutal and stupid but colorful and simple. The sentimentalization of the Middle Ages and the reactionary longing for the past is a hatred of freedom of Mankind. The Death Hippie cliches of our time win too many conversants; too many to stand in the middle posing and emoting for they know not what; too many who attach themselves to phantasies of paid povertarianism and the professionalist careerism of the infantalization of the masses. It's all very pretty from a distance, the fairness, the sharing and the caring; but dare not look too closely at the devilish details of life in the pre-Modern world so highly lauded by the Death Hippies who do not live in it. It is a hatred to promote philobarbarism, infantalization, the sentimentalist cult of Romance authenticity. Leave it to the anthropologists who dare strike out into the wilderness and "experience" life as a primitive. Let them emote and theorize thereupon. But do not let the world's people be crushed to death and worse by the evils of life for no other reason that to appeal to the phantasies of well-to-do adventurers who return to their tenure in Modernity"s safe shelters. No, do not let the hippies of Romance indulge their phantasies at the living expense of the world's primitives. Do not fall into the relative comforts of sanctimonious moralisms half-grasped and slippery. No pose. Drop the rose-colored lenses of Romance phantasies and see the life of people as they are. Have some respect for Human life rather than indulging in the creepy exercise of flattery and self-abasement for the sake of late-night cock-tail chatter.

There are those who hate our beautiful Modernity. They point to this or that outrageous insult to Humanness, point at pornography, drug abuse, unrestrained criminality, the moral vacuity of the masses-- as if it matters. The moralistic minders do not care about the details of the Modernist reality; they care only for the phantasies of the imagined perfect past. They will never be satisfied with life as it is, never be pleased with the life of others as others live it. They will forever herd the masses, corralling then, roping them and branding them. The life of the free man will forever be under attack from the Romance fascist. Forever. And it is time we begin to fight back.

There are those who are in their own minds Gnostic seers, those who have a deeper and grander vision of the life of Man than does the man himself. There are those who feel they know better than you how your life should be. And they take power whenever they are able, using it against the man and against Man. These "experts" and moralistic minders, these Manichean haters of the world of the man-made, these are people who are the legitimate enemies of free people and the world of the primitives. Those whose grand visions of the realities of the universe exist only in the confines of their own minds have gathered by stealth and guile too much power in our time and in our lives. These controllers attempt at every turn to return Man to the prior condition of farm animal that he has escaped in the years of our revolutions. Man, who has crossed the threshold of Modernity, is grabbed by the mane and pulled back to the corral of feudalism. The filthy slaughter-house of feudalism is the place in the mind of the Gnostic minder wherein Man shall dwell again. All men turned again to docility and the obeisance due the minders in their infinite wisdom. Dhimmitude.

We who live in the West are Modernists, free of the feudal ties of our forebearers. Our triune revolutions, Industrial, American, and French, have set us free from the bonds of slavery of the mind Mankind has lived from earliest times. Right or wrong, Man is free to think as he will. Modern man does not suffer the heretic's martyrdom. The blessing of our Revolutions is the freedom to be individual in the mind. The collectivists of neo-feudalism will stop that freedom in its tracks, if they are able. Obscurantist Romance will return man to the farm to be moved and slaughtered at whim, unreasoned, unconcerned, and righteous. Man, thinking, says "No." Man thinking says "Fight."

We are Modernists, and our Modernity is a revolution in the existence of Man. Never before our triune revolutions has Man been free to think and act. In our small and shrinking parts of the world, Man is free to live as he will by his own lights. It is a revolution in Human existence. It is a revolution the reactionaries hate and have hated from the beginning. The Romance reactionaries fight to this very day to reinstall privilege and entitlement. Our revolutions are again under threat from the reactionaries, and it is our duty as revolutionaries, those of us who have not abandoned our Revolutionary Ethos, to struggle again to maintain and further our Revolutions. The alternative is slavery.

It is enough today to charge our enemies with the crime of counter-revolution. It is enough-- today-- that we turn them out of their positions of power, perhaps ever so gently. Today.

Tomorrow, if we have not done the right enough today, The Terror.

It is enough today to smash the institutions of terror waging violence against our Revolutions. It is enough today to sit quietly in public as witnesses to the damage done to our Revolutions. It is enough today to write and discuss the threat the enemies of our revolutions pose. If we remain silent and allow today the progress of the reaction to gain, tomorrow we must fight.

The Gnostic minders of Romance fascism flaunt their powers and their estate. They trample the rights of Man. They must be thrown down. They must be toppled. Today it requires only The Word. Tomorrow it will require The Terror.

There are those who will not fight. There are those who will struggle against the freedom of Mankind. There are those who will engage in the war to spread our beautiful Modernity to every corner of our Earth and to every man. But there is no man who will not be affected by the struggles we now find ourselves within. A side not chosen makes everyone an enemy of those who decided the Good. There is no standing room for the relativist. He must lie down and be trod over. Words today will wash over the man who makes no stand. Tomorrow, blood. Phantasies crumble and in their place is seen clearly the all-abiding reality. The sentimentalities of Romance fascists fall to the ground as dust. Bare reality shows that there are those who will froth in a herd, and there are those who will wage Modernist Revolution among the just. There will be two armies. There will be the victorious Modernist Revolutionary Army of the Just. There will be the defeated. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now we know in part; but then shall we know even as also we are known that there cannot be two world together; that one world must come from the struggle to survive; that we cannot see the final outcome but that ours is the duty to prevail, ours the blessing of the war. This I see.

Up-date: This is a roughly daily occurrence: http://sioe.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/update-on-the-copenhagen-demonstration-murder-attempt-on-sioesiad-denmark-leader-and-members/
So you'll have to make of it what you will of your own accord.

Phase Change

It's nearing two year that we in Vancouver, Canada have met each week to discuss the nature of jihad and our dhimmi relationship to it within the multi-culti phantasy of our social reality. Nearly two years of talk with intelligent and informed people has had an effect on me that I had no expectation of when we began our meetings. My original intention was to create one group to spread out across the world into a movement of individuals united against fascist Islam and dhimmitude. To that I am more than ever now committed. In seeking to create the groundwork for a universal phase change in attitude toward Islam and dhimmitude and fascist Leftism I find I have undergone a personal phase change.

In this time with the people whom I've discussed the nature of things I have learned many great and important things about myself and life. Unlike my colleagues, I am now more convinced than ever before that we in the Modern world face an implacable enemy in Islam, one that can only be defeated by unrestrained warfare and the eventual if gradual annihilation of Islam as culture. It is time for a path out of the realms of our past evils. It is time for a universal phase change.

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Please stay tuned. We'll be right back.