by Travis Mateer
While I enjoyed performing last week, I am NOT going to repeat that performance this week at a different location, like I had planned, due to an ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION for the feelings of others.
Yes, while people like me are being demonized on social media, including explicit wishes for us to be denied medical care, denied freedom of movement, and ultimately squeezed on every front until we experience enough pain, bullying and social pressure to acquiesce to the jab, I’ll change my truth-amplifying strategy because of how OTHERS feel unsafe.
If you have ever watched the show Stranger Things you might be familiar with the UPSIDE DOWN.
I’d like to make that fiction again.
It’s very strange, the degree to which some organizations’ determination of the bona fides of an individual turn not on that individual’s relevant experience, accomplishments or devotion to the organization’s espoused values and objectives, but rather turn on whether the individual maintains a friendship, or even mere dialogue, with a person the organization has deemed a boogeyman or demon.T he same organizations may hypocritically insist that collaboration and partnerships with institutions controlling an inequitable society are essential, until it’s time for the organization’s fundraising drive.
As to the first point, the putative vanguards of brotherhood, egalitarianism and dignity for all, will atavistically shun one of their flock who too frequently or by invocation of judicial remedy insists on the group’s faithfulness to its espoused principles, and like a pack of hyenas will tear to pieces one seeking their imprimatur who dares to violate the group’s unwritten folkways by being “associated with” someone on their persona non grata list. That is precisely the sort of “groupthink” about which Orwell wrote in “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Most who read those works do so without the knowledge that Orwell was a socialist. A libertarian socialist, in contemporary lexicon.
Two local organizations, one with a powerful political machine and the other espousing political revolution while serving the former, emulate “1984” and “Animal Farm,” respectively. This, in nation states, is how populism garners such mass appeal. When that appeal reaches a critical mass, the population will amass behind Right Populist reactionary demagogues and Left Populist revolutionary demagogues.
The libertarian socialist then is left to observe, memorialize, and appeal to reason, until the spectre of fascism compels alliance with anarchists, who in turn are in temporary league with the united front of the Left.
And the blood then flows, to the sound of Morrison’s poetic apocalyptic voice crooning the one indisputable Truth: “The future’s uncertain and The End is always near.”