Man Without a Country

See you wherever Free Thinking-Humanist-Socialists end up, Kurt. In my Utopia, beakerkin would be required to put down his Stephen King or Tom Clancey and pick up Breakfast of Champions or Timequake every April 12th. You to ,anonymous.

"One of my favorite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana...Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all? When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. 'As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element ,I am in it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform."
Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man without a Country

I think Jack Kerouac hit it on the head in On The Road: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or SAY A COMMON PLACE THING, but burn, burn, burn.." Kurt burned and struggled with life and meaning. RIP

From the latest Adbusters: "..freedom has taken a perverse, hyper-individualistic turn.We now drink more ,do more drugs, live more promiscuously, spend more money, use up more resources, create more waste, and deliberately flaunt our wealth, power and sexuality more than any other culture on earth. When a modest, pious man living in a poor villiage a world away looks at us, what does he see?"

This post-modern crisis of "freedom" was not part of Jack and Cassidy's reality and while I applaud the work Adbusters does, the anti-consumerist-anti-logo-anti-capitalist analysis remains a little fuzzy for my re-constructed ,neo-Marxist tastes. Raised in Palo Alto I got high with the re-incarnated Prankster Cassidy in what was our own "fuzzy" form of anti-politics. More of an anthropological experiment as we reverted back to primitivistic rites and mescaline induced Coltrane carnivals. Plenty of drugs but we sure weren't flaunting power and wealth.