The Apolitical Activist, Ch. 3

The Apolitical Activist

became hopelessly co-opted

somewhere between Cherokee, Leland and Skinker

Like this:

"It was like living in the satire of a police state
within a police state
that was within a police state."

and this:

It was like watching a musical event of "The Wall" where the performers were dressed in simulated police garb with simulated police helicopters circling overhead with simulated flood lights simulating that the simulated audience was in a simulated prison.  Then when the hippie accidentally (?) brushes up against a simulated police barricade near the actual stage, a swarm of real life police smother him to the ground.  Or was this part of the act?

and this:

Its not what you think.  Its how you live.  

or this:

"It is not", Marx wrote, "the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."  And Marx's "social existence," do we really want to go there?  A dark cloud seemed to follow him everywhere.  And after he died, it only seemed to get worse.  Was there ever a State that benefited from communist rule?   Kerala? Cyprus? Can anyone think of any others?

 I feel sorry for Marx's family.  All seven of his kids died before they were teenagers.  And his poor wife.   Born an aristocrat.  Ended up in poverty supporting her husband.  Reportedly, and this is allegedly the part that Stalin tried to expunge from the history books, while the wife went back to Germany to beg for more money from her parents, Marx was sleeping with the housekeeper in a liaison that eventually led to Marx having an illegitimate child.  Engels also sounded like a  bunch of  fun if you are into that sort of thing.  Born rich, supposedly chased around everything with a hole.  Dude, you sound like my kind of guy, taking daddy's money to start a revolution to overthrow daddy and his kin.  Can we bring Oedipus and Sigmund along?

or this:

Jose Ortega y Gasset.  Remember all that between Skinker and Forsythe?  The Revolt of the Masses (1930) torpedoed the activist impulse.  The tendency now is that the radical prefers to act like a spoiled child who wants everything without accepting the obligation to submit to the hard work in order to develop what he/she has.  Its all about self interest, anyway, isn't it? If you are a poor or middle class educated but unemployed young man, why wouldn't you tend to gravitate toward a ideology that would glorify the sharing of societal resources?  It would be money for nothing.  And your chicks for free.

or this:

Endlessly undercutting your own motivations behind any action.

not this:

The ends justify the means.