The social and economic fabric of the 21st Century world is a highly complex, interconnected web. And all complex systems are fragile. Best to keep in mind that we’re ALL no more than a few days or weeks of disruption from the world of Max Rockatansky. Those charged with holding the lid on the cauldron can testify […]
The Radical Underground — All Foco’d Up — Part II — The Right
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. Eric […]
The Radical Underground: All Foco’d Up — Part I: The Left
I see a bad moon rising I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and lightning I see bad times today — John Fogerty The “bad moon” Creedence Clearwater Revival songwriter and frontman John Fogerty saw on the rise in the fall of 1969 would become an eerie, unsettling Blood Moon as the tumultuous ’60s became the pervasively violent and […]
Red Killer: The Long Afterlife Of Che Guevara
“If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” — Che Guevara, November 1962 Many of the violent protesters at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July were clad in standard-issue anarchist-nihilist riot gear: […]
One Steel Knife; One Copper Kettle — Killer Consumerism
Consumerism is killing us. This is known. The oceans are choked with plastic from billions of packages, used once and discarded. Landfills are crowded with acre upon acre of … stuff. Our insatiable appetite for more and more stuff is not just burying the planet; it’s killing us spiritually. We know this, too. We feel in […]
She Was With The Russians, Too
I went home with a waitress The way I always do How was I to know She was with the Russians, too? — Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” During one of the 2012 presidential debates, incumbent president Barak Obama shanked his opponent Mitt Romney with a well-prepared and well-deployed line: “Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is […]
It’s Not The Apocalypse
Rome was not built in a day, nor did it fall suddenly to a horde of screaming, blue-painted savages. Some scholars argue that Rome never really “fell” at all, at least as we imagine the “Fall of Rome.” Instead, the Empire slowly succumbed to its own weight and rot, like an old drunk with a three-pack habit and […]
The Barbarian Virtues
“Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.” — Theodore Roosevelt — Rough Rider; President of the United States We all know we’ve lost something. Our culture has lost its spark, the element […]
