“We heard a gunshot. Neda was standing a metre away from me… I saw blood gushing out of her chest”.
Despite a doctor’s attempts to stop the bleeding she died in less than a minute.
A Chronicle of the Current Revolution
Let’s talk about Iran. It’s the single most relevant public protest the country has seen in decades, ever since the 1979 revolution. Here’s the current situation, as reported in the New York Times: ‘an influential cleric suggested that leaders of the demonstrations could be executed, and the council responsible for validating the election repeated its declaration that there were no major irregularities’ in the election results. Come on. International analysts have determined that there were significant irregularites in the election results, and have identified that in certain Iranian cities there was more than 100% electorate turnout in key Iranian cities. Ahmadinejad received almost 100% support in the home cities of opposition leaders, something inconceivable given the historic propensity of citizens to vote for candidates that are from their own city.
The ruling regime, under the current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is behaving as if the civil unrest of the last week or so is finished and meaningless. Yet a true groundswell of active opposition occurred that seriously questioned the election results, and it is troubling to see it achieve no immediate result as of yet.
How many times in recent months have we seen citizen protest completely disregarded by governments around the world? It has to be asked whether we are seeing a trend in the modern world towards authoritarian governments masquerading as authentic democracies. This trend is nothing new. However, the frustrating thing is that citizens are no longer accepting ‘soft despotism’ (as Charles Taylor terms it) but action and protest is having difficulty dislodging or overthrowing soft despotic governments. Quietly hard regimes (if I may coin that term) are ‘sticking to their guns’ and quelling protest, maintaining their supposed legitimacy, and it is important for all global citizens who possess a political conciousness to question how it is possible to change the current state of world affairs and the political system of their respective countries if governments are in fact illegitimate and fail to represent the views of the populace.
If you doubt the Iranian government is sticking to its guns at all cost, I’m going to post a video of an Iranian women shot dead by the Basij (volunteer militia wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) right after this commentary. She stepped out of her taxi for fifteen minutes to get some fresh air and caught a bullet in the chest.
In the West we soldier on in ‘freedom’. In England the MP expenses scandal has ruined public belief in the legitimacy of Parliament; commentators say if such a scandal had occurred in France people would have rioted in the streets. All protest over the expenses scandal has been safely canalised through the media in England. How much civil discontent is safely canalised - rerouted through channels that expend significant social anger uselessly rather than effectively - in the West, allowing suspect governments to stay in power? Too much, it is my belief, and current events are proving. When government fails us, ceases to represent the views of the majority, or proves itself illegitimate it is our responsibility as citizens to protest and see a new government into power.
Yet Iran rioted, and saw the riot repressed. Opposition leaders, namely Mir Hussein Moussavi have fought tenaciously, but it is a huge blow to the belief that citizens can hold government accountable if the Iranian protests achieve no significant turnover in power. What is the solution, then, if direct action protests prove ineffective in global politics and the other option is the governmentally controlled status quo? The answer to that question is the reason I am writing right now. I am caught in a dialectical struggle between largely ineffective normal political methods and potentially ineffective active, alternative direct solutions. Clawing for an impossibility perhaps, but there has to be a solution, and that is why I am watching the Iranian protests so closely. They stand to show us the proper way forward for political change. I suggest you watch the outcome of the protests in Iran too, and think carefully on the best methods for securing serious political change.
When you discover the means to get good politics done, make it happen. Share the answer with the rest of us. I promise to share it with you if I get there first, and God knows I will be running to that goal as fast and determined as I can. I hope you will do the same. Read the news, think, and get the world right, now.
Watching the wire. Reading the news. Thinking about how to change it all.
Greeting Certain People
‘Hello’ = ‘Hell O’ viz. ‘Hell - O!’ Life was hell until I saw you just now. Your sudden presence is a heavenly surprise. I was a damned soul torch; now I shiver in the cool of heaven after two decades and four of burning.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I am in a band now, called ‘Revolutionary Discipline’, playing drums and doing percussion! Here’s a demo track we recorded in practice, our version of the old folk tune ‘Wayfaring Stranger’. I bruised my thighs trying to provide audible percussion for the recording without proper drums (the practice room was booked). Music love.
Snow + Britain = Tizz. Struck by the contrast between the chaos the snow was causing across the country and how calm it looked falling in the back garden.
In a completely unrelated note, a true anarchist would probably not write a leaflet statement: language is too ordered. Having such a discourse as ‘anarchist commentary’, similarly, presupposes a level of structure and order a proper anarchist should be uncomfortable with. Can anarchists credibly form political parties? It would be difficult to achieve such a political phenomenon without seriously jeopardising the party’s primary credo. At any rate, though the ‘Anarchist Federation’ gestures at a decentralised structure through its federal moniker, the idea of an ordered party of anarchists along with the ‘Anarchist Federation’s’ given slogan of ‘organising for resistance’ flags up a centripetal, politically restrictive force acting on these well-intentioned, committed centrifugals from within their very own collective. Moral: an anarchist poetics is probably the only literary form an authentic anarchist is truly comfortable with; be brutally honest with yourself about your own politics, and follow up your avowals of political alignment to their logical conclusions, so that 1) you can be certain that you are in honest fact actually of the political creed you have declared yourself to be, 2) you are ready to act on your given political principles when called to do so by history, 3) your propaganda isn’t self-stultifying shit.
Inauguration Poetry
Inauguration day. Solid. Well-done Obama. The poetry reading was dire/grim/awful/angering. For I ask ‘where was the poetry?’ and the poet who read can have no answer and categorically cannot prove that there were more than two or three poetic attributions (not even lines) in her poem.
I am angry, because it is on account of such displays of ‘poetry’ that poetry has no profile in the artistic world today beyond a small group of readers and writers who mostly write and read poetry for themselves.
The benediction given by the reverend had infinitely more poetry in it than the formal poetry reading.
Poetry is about: crushing and breaking language to make striking new visceral word elements and molecules; art; aesthetics; feeling; music. Whether or not people care about poetry, you read real poetry in front of them and if it’s raw, fresh music they will listen and feel some sort of respect.
I am angered because the one moment poetry receives truly global attention, poetry, as an art form, on account of today’s poets, refused to respond and show its true visceral rush to the world -this has to change. To paraphrase Ezra Pound: ‘it is terribly important that great poetry is written, it matters not a jot who writes it’. Pound was challenging poets to rise to the occasion and get real vitality back into the form in new ways. I think we need to remember Pound’s challenge today.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7788784.stm
Head to the link, check the video. Good to see the animals are getting into the Christmas spirit. Secretly I think they are discussing revolution, and a farmyard communism.
Poor, Poor Robinson Crusoe
I was rereading my notes on Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ today, and came across the following impression I had recorded as an irrelevant yet troublesome problem with old Rob as a character:
‘It is preposterous that with so much interminable discussion of invention and making, Crusoe never once digs a latrine. Defoe never once has Crusoe have a slash or drop the hammer for twenty eight years. Crusoe’s body must be impermeable. Defoe’s omission somehow makes Crusoe an unreal narrator - a painfully fictive character. Neither does Crusoe rub one out or discuss his sexual longings for Mrs. Crusoe or a buxom port wench in all that time spent on the island’.
This insight won’t make it into my PhD dissertation on Clare. Nonetheless, I am distinctly troubled by it. If you argue back by saying Crusoe certainly did have a regular waz three times a day, Defoe just didn’t want his narrator to report on it, well you are bringing that to the text yourself and reading it in, for there is no textual evidence that supports the claim that Crusoe had regular evacuations and just didn’t report on them.
Notions of propriety and authorial decorum probably forced Defoe to rely on the following two assumptions to fill in this dire black hole in the text: no. 1:- his readers would bring the understanding to the text themselves that Robin had regular excretions and just didn’t talk about it (as noted above); no. 2:- his readers wouldn’t think about Robin going poo or pee at all. Either possibility suggests a disturbing state of distaste of the physical body in Defoe’s time, and a discomfort with the permeability of the body.
I believe I now understand why Joyce was so set on cannonballing literary decorum by having Leopold Bloom take a massive shit in Ulysses; why Welsh loved talking about Renton’s ‘fetid pish’ splashing into dirty toilet bowls. Thank the good Lord for unflinching literary realism.
Dance Dance Spins
Last night I DJ’d properly (without an iPod, on decks) for the first time. Here is what I ‘spun’ over about a twenty-five minute set:
1. ‘Genesis’ - Justice
2. ‘First Communion’ - Gang Gang Dance
3. ‘Nobody Lost Nobody Found’ - Cut Copy
4. ‘Tabloid Sores [Nosaj Thing Remix]’ - HEALTH
5. ‘Vanished’ - Crystal Castles
6. ‘Romantic Rights [Phone Lovers Remix]’ - Death From Above 1979
7. ‘Waters of Nazareth’ - Justice
Have a listen if you are at all inclined and tell me if it is a set you could shake your booty to! Big musical love from me and here,
Peter
