Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Manifesto of the PRICK

Welcome, people! Hope I can interest you a little revolution...

Here is the manifesto of the PRICK. To give you a little background, I wrote this as an assignment for my writing seminar. We were asked to write a manifesto, drawing on its conventions as a distinct modernist genre. I took the assignment fairly seriously, and looked to the (as I would argue) failed or stalled revolutions/movements of the sixties as inspiration.

As Fred Hampton once said, "You can’t jail the revolution." You don’t need to. You can kill it. Ask Chief Joseph where his people now stand. Better yet, ask Socrates. Better still, ask Fred. You can kill the revolution and wait—-wait for the people it could have helped the most forget, while THE ESTABLISHMENT remembers and re-forges its armor. You can kill a revolution.

Sometimes the revolution will eat itself. Ask Jean-Paul Marat if he thought the Storming of the Bastille was just the beginning of an extended political holiday or the beginning of the end of aristocratic oppression. Ask him if he though his people would need fascist aggression and occupation to remember what freedom was. Ask Judas Iscariot if the money he received for his services was enough. (It wasn’t.)

Sometimes the revolution gets eaten. Every idiot with a Ché Guevara T-shirt is thinking, "¡Viva la revoluciόn!" or "Fuck the man!" and they never see the irony in buying a mass produced piece of clothing (probably manufactured in some Third World country in exchange for substandard wages, naturally) emblazoned with the image of a PINKO. Anything worth believing in or fighting for is bought up and resold to the first person who’s ready and willing to ignore the fact that their revolution’s secondhand. You think, "¡Viva la revoluciόn! The ideals those brave men and women fought for will live on," etc., etc. News flash: NO ONE KNOWS THEIR HISTORY. We are a species in perpetual relapse, recovering heroin addicts constantly discovering methadone, and finally, returning to heroin. For the same reason that the same shit (i.e. the whole of human history, i.e. genocide) keeps happening over and over again, is the reason that YOU ARE NOT FREE.

Ask a 17-year-old freshman in a co-ed college if she sees the contradiction in being reminded how important her education is every waking hour, when the first and last marker of her person is her appearance. A black man might see it in his shiny new car as he offers up his license and registration to a feckless white highway patrolman. A pair of "life partners" might wonder why words as simple as EQUALITY, always seem to have stipulations. Forty-nine percent of the electorate might wonder if cutting a person in half with a chainsaw gives the murderer "a mandate" to do what they want with the corpse. Seldom does the revolution live on or reach the reach the finish line.

It should be known that life is a terminal illness. You catch it, shit happens to you, and you die at the end. No ifs, ands, or buts. Ah, but
why does shit happen?

IMPORTANT!>>If you are a shit-starter (i.e. a brutal dictator who rose to power in a violent coup), stop reading and await judgement. PRICK is not for you.

It happens because people conspire to make others suffer, shooting themselves in the foot along the way. The forms that oppression takes to attack us on a daily basis would be easy to defeat if it weren’t for IGNORANCE and APATHY. You are ignorant and everyone around you is ignorant, or worse still, apathetic. You oppress yourself and others daily with your apathy (the known evil) and your ignorance (the unknown evil). This condition, replicated several billion times over, means that we are currently fucked as a species. You, me, everyone. It is IGNORANCE and APATHY that the corrupt people of the planet depend upon to operate.

THE REVOLUTION IS DEAD. AS THE REVOLUTION IS DEAD, NO ONE IS FREE. AS NO ONE IS FREE, THEY MUST BE MADE FREE. What is left but to liberate yourself and your fellow woman and your fellow man? What is left but the truth? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is from these higher truths that our specific belief derives its authority.

1. No one is born to be subservient. All races, [colors,] genders, creeds, religions, and sexual orientations are equal. If there is a GOD, his only mistake would have
been to allow hatred into the world.
2. No government has absolute authority over any individual. As government is not infallible, the right of civil disobedience must be preserved. As the LAW can hold any individual responsible for their actions, so must the individual take responsibility for herself or himself [or their self]. That which is wrong must be treated as such.
3. No one has the right to be poor. Until the final revolution comes, economic inequality will always continue. It should be the goal of every government, working in concert with every other, to END POVERTY. Hard work should always be rewarded, but is that the issue? Everyone has the right to be healthy and live their lives; the alternative is nothing short of murder.

Until these three ideals are realized, suffering will continue in our world.

Ignorance is the enemy, and those who choose to weaken the populace by disseminating will be destroyed. We cannot pat ourselves on the back while we picket the back doors of the centers of power on the planet. We cannot bring REVOLUTION if we are on the outside. We must work within the system to destroy the system. "The master’s tools can never destroy the master’s house," but we have our own. We will storm the MTVs and Congresses of the world and the Halliburtons, and twist them from the inside until the ignorance-mongers are gone, and the people are stirred from their apathy. Do you think that if people know where and how they are oppressed they will sit still and wait for death? No. Ask Rosa Parks, ask the French why they have July 14 off. We must be the vanguard that Lenin spoke of, but we must always be humane.

The reactionaries are on the march. So long as we allow it, they will continue to devour and slay the revolution, contaminating with amnesia wherever they go. We must meet and defeat them, for the future depends on it. The establishment my catch us, and imprison us, but we must never be afraid to show our commitment. I do not expect your help, but I hope for and demand it. "FREEDOM IS A ROAD SELDOM TRAVELED BY THE MULTITUDE." For the punks, funksters, jazzbos, feminists, Panthers, suffragettes, Freedom Riders, Free Speech-ers, Ghost Dancers, campesinos, Boxers, paupers, poets, beatniks, dadaists and every other Lost Generation you must rise. For the proletariat and bourgeoisie alike you must rise to face the sufferings of your species. To borrow from George Clinton,
YOU MUST RISE ABOVE IT ALL, OR DROWN IN YOUR OWN SHIT.

PRICKs UNITE!


Granted it's not perfect, but I feel like I've covered most of the bases I wanted to cover.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So Shad, I finally got around to reading this today... I guess I am a little slow... but I have a question for you. It sounds as if, from my brief reading at least, that you are saying that individuals have to be free, but that government should still exist in some form as to help the individual live in the best way possible. If this is what you meant, or at least on the right track, what do you mean by "freedom?" Absolute freedom would mean a total lack of control by government, so you don't mean that. But you said the final goal is for all people to be paid the same, and that would, barring some drastic change in human nature, need a government in order to instate and keep the system functioning.

So what is the side you choose? "Big" or "small" government? The individual over the society (that is to say the collection of individuals)? The state over the global community? How much weight do you give to individual sovereignty?

10/10/05 13:12  

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