I love the look Long Live Vulgargrad

Continuation on a theme

Mazaltov! Thanks Trevor

 

Thanks to Trevor, You got me through all kinds of shit

My Friend Gianni

This my friend Gianni cool guy, great player.

An offering from Badalato.

Why does leather shrink?

Something that has been exercising my mind recently is the question does leather shrink?

I would have to answer in the affirmative.

 

Yes leather shrinks! Case in point are the eight leather Jackets in my wardrobe. I use to have a 46 cm that shrunk, so did my 48 cm. I am now looking to a 50cm. Yep that is half a ton. Which is goo when you are riding a bike but not when it is the measurement of your chest.

I can state categorically LEATHER SHRINKS!

Here one for thought

Yelling at little old ladies never felt so right.

It’s the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It is the ultimate norm of high morality in our culture. Sure there are other morals by which we live, but this one phrase embodies our most cherished value: that we should treat people as we would like to be treated.

We are taught it from childhood. We learn it from our parents. We learn it at school. But more than any other place, we learn it in our churches because it comes straight from the Bible. Found in Matthew, chapter 7 verse 12, it is in essence a summation of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes from Christ’s teaching. If you don’t want to be ripped off, don’t rip off others. If you don’t want your spouse to cheat on you, don’t cheat on your spouse. If you don’t want to be judged, don’t judge.

Now it’s true we don’t always abide by the Golden Rule. We often hurt others in ways we, ourselves, would not like perpetrated against us. Some of life’s hardest lessons are actually reminders that we have treated another in a way we would hate to be treated ourselves.

But there are some among us who never seem to break the Golden Rule. Rather than struggling just to live up to a moral code, these people are on the other side, the high moral ground as it were, and they spend their time helping to enforce it. These people are our culture’s guardians, our vanguard whose presence keeps reminding us that we should live by a higher standard, particularly the one embodied in our most Golden of rules. As stated above, they are our churches.

But even among these valued institutions, there are some that take their role more seriously than the rest. They are on the forefront of the battle to keep our nation, its institutions, and its citizens abiding by the morals encompassed in the Golden Rule. They are vocal, political, and committed. They are known collectively as the Religious Right, a name given them by the Press, and more commonly function under such names as The Christian Coalition, Operation Rescue, The Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, The Southern Baptist Convention, and scores of others. They include many denominations and a host of unaffiliated churches that call themselves “nondenominational,” “community,” or often simply “Bible” churches. Though they function as separate entities, they are loosely united in their role as cultural overseers, bound by the common goal of defending traditional moral values in our society.

Can we not assume, then, that this group – the Religious Right, who have set themselves up as the defenders of the Golden Rule – that they, themselves, must clearly be following it? And if that is true, can we not also assume, therefore, that the things they are doing to others are the very things they wish others would do to them?

We must assume it is true. For if they are not following the Golden Rule themselves, then how can they expect others to believe they are defenders of it? And if they are indeed doing things to others that they would not want done to them, then how can any of us believe them when they speak of other values we should embrace?

Either they are liars, and we should simply ignore them; or our assumption is true, and we should be doing to them as they are doing to us. Based on the belief that the Religious Right indeed see themselves as defenders of the Golden Rule, it is not inappropriate, therefore, to make the following suggestions on what we should be doing to them.

1. Picket Their Churches

The Religious Right have taken the position that verbal and sometimes physical confrontation is an acceptable method of enforcing morals. They picket abortion clinics, often getting physically in the way of women entering and leaving (even where new laws apply to prevent it), and almost always emotionally battering the woman exercising her constitutional right to control her body and her reproductive system. It isn’t bad enough that these woman have already gone through long hours of torturous debate and have finally chosen an abortion – probably as a last resort – these picketers must lob their emotional atomic bombs on already tortured women, giving little thought to the devastation caused when a horde of angry protesters focus their attention on one person at a most vulnerable time in a most private issue.

And this does not even take into account those in the Religious Right who believe God wants them to inflict bodily harm on these women, as well as on the workers inside the clinics. Claiming a little-discussed but widely-held belief called “Justifiable Homicide” (this is the belief used by many Christians to support the death penalty for convicted murderers), these extremists of the extreme blow up clinics and shoot women and doctors in their attempts to defend their morals – and they do it in the name of a moral God.

Based on their actions, it is clear that the Religious Right would like us to do the same to them.

While blowing up churches and killing preachers is surely a violation of other morals we hold dear (as well as being downright illegal), it should be perfectly acceptable for us to picket and confront members of Religious Right churches and parachurch organizations as they enter and leave their buildings.

Go to their churches on Sunday Morning. You can find out when services begin by reading the Saturday newspaper. Take big signs with horrible pictures of people who have committed suicide because of the torment caused them by the Religious Right, and wave your signs in their faces. Yell at them. Pick out the nice family with kids in their Sunday best, and get in front of them. Confront these people with the damage their kids will suffer by being raised in such an intolerant institution. Wave your gruesome signs in front of little old ladies, and tell them how their donations are being used to cause such carnage to young women at abortion clinics, and to women who wish to get equal pay for equal work, and to young Gays seeking answers.

And if the Religious Right truly means what they say, then they will thank you for following their example.

2. Disrupt Their Meetings

The Religious Right have shown support for the idea that public outbursts at gatherings of the “morally-challenged” is a justifiable method of spreading the word. They have disrupted rallies that support equal rights for Gays. They have gotten into shouting matches at meetings of Liberal politicians. They have heckled leaders of Planned Parenthood when they give speeches.

Based on their actions, do we not have a mandate to do the same to them?

In your Sunday best, go into their sanctuaries and wait for the service to begin. Plant yourselves in different places interspersed between the regular members. Then, in five or ten minute intervals, take turns standing up and yelling at the preacher and the congregation. Heckle them about their support of oppressive legislation. Shout out against their opposition to equal rights for women. Disrupt their services with arguments against their stance on homosexuality.

By spreading out and waiting between outbursts, you can avoid the possibility of all of you being escorted out of the building after the first disruption. The church leaders won’t be able to pick you out of the crowd until you are already standing and shouting. With enough people, you can effectively disrupt the entire hour-long meeting, making it impossible for the church’s members to ignore your protest.

And if you do it well, the Religious Right will be truly impressed with your ability to do to them what they have been doing to us.

3. Picket Their Schools

The Religious Right have been active in our education system for decades, but now they are hanging out en masse at public schools in order to picket the curriculum or hand out anti-abortion pamphlets. They are preying on our children in a covert attempt to infuse certain values that the parents somehow failed to instill or to rally students against values being taught in their schools. They meet kids as they get off the bus, pushing flyers with pictures of aborted fetuses into their faces. They march back and forth in front of the curb, where students are trying to enter the school, chanting against sex education and condoms. They rally at school board meetings, trying to force a curriculum that is more in line with their moral ideals.

Based on this example, we need to be doing the same thing to them at their Christian schools.

Meet their students at their buses, or at the curb as parents drop them off, and give them flyers on safe sex, or better yet, hand out free condoms. March back and forth in front of the curb, so kids walking to school have to pass between you, and chant against their anti-gay or anti-abortion rights teachings. Be loud and forceful. Go to their board meetings (if you can, since a lot of them are private) and proclaim your desire that they promote a more diverse curriculum.

Do this, and the Religious Right will surely take your imitation of them as the highest form of flattery.

4. Boycott Their Companies

The Religious Right have now taken to boycotting companies that promote a lifestyle that exists in opposition to their moral code. The Southern Baptists have entered into a year-long boycott of Walt Disney, its parks, its movies, and its products, because of the company’s television show, “Ellen,” whose central character has come out as openly Gay. Focus on the Family has put out a fact sheet naming companies that offer benefits to same-sex couples just as they do married couples, such as AT&T, and are asking members to boycott them. Some of those companies also host Gay-oriented events, so they are particularly targeted. Other Religious Right organizations are now calling for their members to abide by these ongoing boycotts. Their goal is to apply pressure in order to defend morality by making it a financial hardship for those who don’t comply.

In light of this demonstration of power brokering, we should follow suit by boycotting businesses owned by members of the Religious Right.

Get a copy of the “Christian Yellow Pages.” Most large cities have one, and they can usually be found in the local Christian book store. In smaller towns you need only talk to the locals to discover which businesses are owned by members of the Religious Right. Find them, and print up a list of the best targets. Hand it out on street corners. Send it to the local media (unless the paper is owned by such a person, in which case they will do the unethical thing – they won’t cover the story). Picket in front of the targeted businesses if you must. The important thing is to let it be known that you are boycotting these businesses because they are owned by people who promote an agenda that discriminates against a person’s right to choose whom they love. Use your purchase power to make it a financial hardship to those who wish to control your love life.

By using your power in such a way, you’ll surely impress the Religious Right with your ability to learn from their methods.

5. Put Up Candidates In Small, Local Elections

The Religious Right have tried for years to get their agenda recognized by major political players. In 1988, they went so far as to run for president, in the person of Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network. They have tried to seed the ranks of the Republican party with their members and have threatened to pull their support from candidates who don’t bend to their moral demands. But they have failed to gain a large enough foothold to change things on a big scale.

What they have done, however, that has had a major impact in the local arena is to target small but important local elections and work to put their people in those positions. They have placed their supporters on school boards. They have placed their supporters on health boards. They have placed their supporters on city councils. They have done it by picking fights that won’t draw much attention to their ultimate goal and that generally have a low voter turn out. All they need do is convince their members, in the protected confines of their churches, to turn out in large enough numbers that their sheer presence will assure a victory.

The end effect has been the gradual filling of key city and county administrative positions by people with enough power to affect educational curriculum (targeted to keep Gay-friendly materials out of schools), health services (where funding for pregnancy prevention programs can be cut), and local laws (where measures that would protect Gays from discrimination can be voted down).

In light of this brilliant, if subversive, strategy, we can learn a lesson on how we should be doing the same in order to protect our civil liberties.

People of conscience, who are opposed to the agenda of the Religious Right, must band together and put forth their own candidates for these positions. Churches have a ready-made avenue for doing this. We do not. It will be more difficult for us, then, because we must first create an environment where we can work together as well as local churches already can. But we must do it, and we must then put forth candidates who can be voted into office without disclosing their objectives. And then we can assure them victory simply by voting en masse at these low-turnout elections.

And if we get our people elected, we will surely earn the praise of the Religious Right strategists who have championed the idea through the years.

6. Mislead Their Youth.

Our final suggestion may seem less brash than the previous ones, but it is by far the most devious – and the Religious Right have been doing it for years.

It’s simple, subtle, and effective. What they do is create a social or cultural event they know kids like and then force their message as a part of the event. A good example is the “free rock concert.” Kids love rock music, and, being poor for the most part, they like events that are free. Knowing this, a local Religious Right church or parachurch organization will rent a local school auditorium and hire a Christian rock band (most of which simply borrow their musical styles from what’s playing on the radio rather than create their own) and hand out flyers inviting young people to a free rock concert. This brings in lots of unsuspecting teens. Then, either during or at the end of the show, the band will stop and the preaching will begin. Kids who would not normally go to a church suddenly find that the church has come to them. And parents who don’t want their kids to be instilled with the values of the Religious Right are nowhere around to protect them. Some groups even block the exits to keep people from leaving during the sermon.

The band or preacher then does what is called an “alter call.” This is where they ask these kids, now in the spotlight and under pressure from the other Christian kids, to come forward and choose a new lifestyle, one replete with the church’s morals and values. The pressure is enormous, and many kids who would otherwise reject such beliefs find themselves going forward to proclaim something they don’t fully understand.

An extreme version of this happened recently in Colorado Springs, home to a large number of Religious Right organizations like Focus on the Family. A Baptist church hosted a carnival for neighborhood children. While at the carnival, and without their parents to intervene, kids were pulled aside and told they would go to hell unless they were baptized in the church. Many kids, out of fear, complied. Some later complained to their parents that they were forced to take off their clothes and put on robes and be briefly held underwater as part of the ceremony. The parents are now suing the church.

But if the Religious Right feel these kinds of subversive tactics are acceptable as a means of defending good morals in our country, then we should use the same tactics on them.

Find a local Gay or Lesbian band that is willing to go along, and set up a free concert. Bill it as a free Christian music event, and print up flyers to be passed around at all the local Religious Right churches and parachurch organizations. Put them on car windows in the Focus on the Family, 700 Club, or local church parking lots. Get the word out. And make sure you use the right jargon. Just as unsuspecting teens are attracted by a “free rock concert,” kids indoctrinated into the Religious Right’s mentality will be attracted to an event that appears genuinely Christian. Use the word “Christian” a lot. Also put in words like “Born Again” and “Family Values.” These are flag words used by the Religious Right to test whether an event is truly to their liking. Create a name for your concert promotion entity that also serves this purpose. Use titles like, “Family Values Crusade” or “Born Again Entertainment.”

At the event, place a large number of “helpers” near the back of the auditorium to “encourage” kids not to get up and leave. Then, toward the end of the concert, stop the music and start preaching about the need for kids to practice good safe sex. Use examples of both Gay and Lesbian sexual encounters, and even have a Gay band member give a testimonial of how a condom saved his life. At the end of the speech, ask those kids not currently practicing safe sex to come forward and receive free condoms. Use persuasive language. Make them feel guilty if they don’t come forward. One way the Religious Right does this is to have everyone close their eyes and bow their heads, and then in a low, soft voice ask all those who have sinned to raise their hands. No one else is suppose to see them, but of course the leaders in the back of the room do. You can do the same thing by asking those who have practiced unsafe sex to raise their hands, and then encourage those who did so to come forward and receive the gift of the rubber condom.

To be sure, it sounds like a devious ploy, but we have to remember that if the Religious Right believe it is a good tactic to reach our children with their message, then they must also believe it is a good tactic for us to reach theirs. Put on a good show, and they will surely be amazed that we believe in our values as much as they believe in theirs.

Indeed, all of the aforementioned suggestions might seem quite brash for good people to perpetrate against our churches, but we must remember that in doing these things we are merely doing unto the Religious Right as they have done unto us. We must remember, that in using these strategies against us, the Religious Right is asking us, dare we say, begging us, to return the favor. For indeed, people of such high moral values most certainly would not engage in activities that they would not desire to be done unto them.

So break out the signs and look through the papers. There are churches everywhere waiting to be touched by our protests (after all, they want us to be good Protestants don’t they?). It’s time to show them we love them just as they have shown that they love us.

 

Posted by Elroy

 

Still here?

I havn’t posted for a while. I have been getting myself in to other trouble.

I am not over posting but it seemed like everyone was blogging so I thought I would give the world a break from my thoughts.

Meanwhile back at the GFC, a lot of my friends are starting to struggle. One has just been put off. CONVENIENT.

Although there has been a lot of talk about getting rid of people in a workplace I know some are being put off while others are being put on, and others are being promoted. This is why I like the union has a place despite what some of my more conservative thinking friends may say.

Bugger, seems in that friends are being hired and promoted while not so friends are being put off. By the way I am consided paranoid for pointing these things out. Some times being paraniod just makes good sense.

Here’s one for an interesting google search

If you like surfing up oddities then here is one.

Click here

The Pilo Family Circus Review From Shelf Monkey Blogkey

The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliot – review

The Pilo Family Circus
by Will Elliott
Underland Press, 2009

Who here hates clowns? Raise your hand if you find their frantic capering less hilarious and more creepy, their makeup less laugh-inducing and more terrifying. And what’s with that car, endlessly vomiting forth all manner of the greasepaint monkeys?

Not for nothing has the Barnum & Bailey jesters become almost a staple of horror fiction, as well as nightmares – who can forget Kramer’s meeting with Crazy Joe Davola (clad as Pagliacci) in Seinfeld? What about Pennywise in Stephen King’s classic IT? Ramsey Campbell’s newest horror release The Grin of the Dark? Clive Barker’s horrifying short storyDread? What about John Wayne Gacy, full-time serial killer and part-time children’s party clown? Jerry Lewis’ legendary unfinished film The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who (no kidding) entertains Jewish children on their way to the ovens? There is something disturbingly surreal and upsetting about clowns, and it’s not merely their inch-thick face paint or their thick bloody smiles plastered over frowns. And we’re supposed to find this amusing? Feh. They may pledge allegiance to the classic tenets of commedia dell’arte, but they are simply insane.  

Will Elliot understands the clown. He knows that underneath their floppy shoes and fuzzy hair lies a malevolence that cannot be concevied of by mere mortals. The clown is an immortal evil, a hilarity terrorist (hilarrorist?).

Clowns are up to absolutely no good. The Pilo Family

Circus proves it.

The Pilo Family Circus (published by Underland Press, and rapidly becoming a publisher to watch for the eerie, unusual, and crazy good [see: Brian Evenson's Last Days]) does for clowns what Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon did for psychiatrists and Alone in the Dark did for Christian Slater’s career. That is, alter the subject in such a way that you cannot ever look at them in the same light again. In Elliott’s skillful hands, clowns are not merely evil; they are capital E Evil, spawns of Hell, monsters of the id, and responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.  

Pilo centres on Jamie, a rather unassuming chap, saddled with a lousy job and unpleasant roommates. On his way home one night, he happens to run into a trio of strangely-clad individuals, and becomes targeted by a cabal of clowns the likes of which no one has ever seen (or remembered). Turns out, they like Jamie, and are giving him a chance to join Gonko, Rufshod, Winston, Goshy, and the rest of the maniacal troupe, which in turn is part of the legendary Pilo Family Circus. But when in makeup, Jamie does not remain Jamie; Jamie transforms into J.J., a seriously demented mirth-maker of the lowest calibre. J.J. is sly, cowardly, and not to be trusted. And he’s not Jamie’s biggest fan.

Elliott mixes Jamie’s struggle with the day-to-day goings on of the circus, a monstrous creation that Elliott clearly had a ball with. A centuries-old institution run by Pilo brothers Kurt and George, the circus is a menagerie of everything bad under the sun (not that the sun ever shines on the Pilo Family Circus). What the circus is is left vague, but it is intensely clear that its members are responsible for some of the world’s most awful crimes. It is a purgatory, a circle of hell Dante never dared dream existed, and Elliott revels in its twisted labyrinth of doom.

It sounds weird – hell, it is weird; how could a novel about evil clowns in a demented limbo populated by carnival freaks and oddities be anything but – but Elliott artfully balances the more overt horror aspects of  Pilo with those of the more psychological nature. There is much in the way of physical brutality in Pilo’s pages (another creepy clown thing I’ve never fully gotten behind), but what drives the novel is Jamie’s desperate fight to hold onto his identity. The psychological horrors of addiction are well-represented in Jamie’s plight, and Elliott does a masterful job at outlining his plight while at the same time keeping the story moving. And move it does, like a mother. 

The Pilo Family Circus is one nasty machine, a kaleidoscope of black magic, pratfalls, and subconscious desires best left unsaid. Will Elliott is definitely an author to watch.

Great Review  thanks COREY REDEKOP

Insanity

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Thanks Mark

Beyond the war hero

Beyond the war hero

Bernard-Henri Levy embarks on an adventure of anti-Nazi dialectics. First stop: Tom Cruise

The release of “Operation Valkyrie” first in the Unites States and Germany and now in France is without question a good thing. Because it’s always a pleasure to see the world honour its heroes. Riveting as it is however, this film poses certain questions that are too complex and too delicate to be resolved solely within the logic of the Hollywood film industry.

The first has not escaped the attention of German commentators and concerns the choice of Tom Cruise to play von Stauffenberg, a man presented as the very incarnation of anti-Hitler honour. Not that Cruise ever showed sympathy for Hitlerism. But he is a leader of a sect, the Church of Scientology, about which the least one can say is that its values have little to do with those that led to the destruction of Hitlerism. Elitism… social and political Darwinism… education as a form of dressage… brainwashing raised to a principle of conviction… sequestration… applying cybernetics to social organisation… black magic… an apocalyptic vision of the world.… This is Scientology, and this is Cruise’s credo. And seen in this light having him play Stauffenberg is a mistake or, as Berthold von Stauffenberg, Stauffenberg’s son, said when he learned of the decision, a very grave attack on the memory of his father.

The second question, no doubt unavoidable with this sort of enterprise, is whether raising someone to hero status does not always happen, alas, to the detriment of precision, nuance and history itself. The film shows Stauffenberg’s integrity very well. It shows his courage, the nobility of his views, his firmness of spirit. But what does it tell us of his thoughts? What does it teach us about why he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party in 1933? Why does it go into no detail on how many of his initial Nazi convictions he had to jettison to carry out his plot and how many remained in tact? A sympathy forErnst Jünger, for example? Or for Oswald Spengler? A fierce hostility to Weimar and the idea of democracy which he shared with the other former members of the Freikorps who remained true to National Socialism and its frenetic anti-Semitism? Did Stauffenberg hope to get rid of Hitler or Hitlerism? Of a bad tyrant or the principle of tyranny? Was his project to destroy Nazism or to rescue it? 

And why does the film not go into the true and tragic paradox of the affair? Why does it not illustrate what one should call the “Stauffenberg theorem“, which involved getting close, very close, to Hitler (a proximity that, bearing in mind the hyper-surveillance of Hitlerist society, could be neither feigned nor fictitious) to acquire access to the wolf’s lair and thus be able to deposit the deadly briefcase? I do not believe I am flouting anyone’s memory by saying that even after “Valkyrie” one can ask what values (oh yes!) Nazism and certain of its adversaries shared, or by maintaining that on second analysis there could be a sort of hidden logic after all, a ruse of history, in this meeting between the Scientologist actor and the conspirators of July 1944.

Thirdly, this film risks having the Stauffenberg tree hide the forest of the German resistance to Hitlerism, such as it is described by Joachim Fest in his book ”Plotting Hitler’s Death: The Story of German Resistance”. This book must be read as a counterpoint to “Valkyrie”, because it clearly differentiates between the latter-day plotters among Hitler’s officers like Stauffenberg and earlier ones such as Hans Osterand Hans von Dohanyi, who conspired against Hitler from within the army as early as 1938. The explosion of the first National Socialist nucleus revealed a whole galaxy of figures. There were National Bolsheviks like Ernst Niekisch who broke with Nazism as early as 1934, and national conservatives like Wilhelm Canaris who looked back nostalgically to the grand eastern alliance dashed by the rift between Stalin and Hitler. There were conservative revolutionaries such as Hermann Rauschning, author of “The Revolution of Nihilism”. 

But above all there were simple people like the carpenter Georg Elser who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939. There were student associations like the White Rose group, there were socialists, Catholics and Jews. There were the workers in Berlin, the heroes of Hans Fallada’s novel “Every Man Dies Alone” which Primo Levy called the most beautiful book on the German resistance to the Nazis. And there were, finally, those who remained true to the ideals of Weimar and who, like Willy Brandt, preferred being labelled “deserters” over risking the irremediable dishonour of having worn the uniform of the Wehrmacht and, consequently, of the plotters of July 20.

Eradicating these distinctions, all of them, is the risk run by such a film. Underlining them, acknowledging them, continually distinguishing between the culture of war of the Nazis and certain of their opponents on the one hand and the radical anti-Nazism of the heirs of Willy Brandt on the other is made imperative by the very confusion of this film. For Germany this is a task, for Europe it is a duty.

*

Bernard-Henri Levy is a French public intellectual and journalist. He was one of the leaders of the Nouvelle Philosophie movement in 1976.

This article orginally appeared in Le Point on January 29, 2009.

Translation: jab

 

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The black marketeers of Bahnhof Zoo

Karl Schlögel looks at the molecular movements that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Looking at “historical moments” renders everything else invisible. The brilliant light radiating from such moments blinds or at least desensitises us to other things that may have happened. One need only look in the newspapers from 1988 and 1989, or leaf through notebooks from the time, to realise just how reductive the heroic image we retroactively constructed for 1989 is. In notebooks, there is no mention of an historic moment but rather scribbled information regarding doctors’ appointments, obligatory talks to attend, parent evenings. That year, as I recall by consulting diary entries, we were looking for a new apartment and a school for our daughter. Pending royalty payments from publishers and broadcasters are also noted. Birthdays of friends and the flight times of a firm that doesn’t exist anymore – Transworld Airways. 

Simplifications, generalisations are unavoidable; we cannot think, let alone live, without them. But it would be wrong to forget that these are simplifications. What does this imply for the historiography of the year 1989? Every historical second is based oninfinite premises. There is no historical zero point. As true as it is that there are points of no return, it is also true that every point of no return has its own history, and a long process of accretion precedes every caesura. There are no jumps without a run-upand no collapses come out of the blue; that 1989 came for many “out of the blue” speaks only to the limited horizons, quality of vision, sensitivities or insensitivities of people of that time. Moments of success aren’t brought about by magic, even if the abundance of puzzling and unexplained aspects make us inclined to speak of a miracle.

A tone must have been set – but it can’t have been done without preliminary tests. A self-assurance must have developed – in behaviour, in the violation of invisible borders – in order to be able to assess even the riskiest of situations. People must have developed a sense that something had definitively come to an end, had gone astray, in order to refrain from any further evasions. That’s how many things come together in a surprising moment, and part of succeeding is in fact not being prepared for the successof one’s actions. With regard to writing the history of 1989, this means understanding that there were individual actors but there were also many more people there, and that without their support there would have been no “historic moment” . It means understanding that entire societies found themselves in a prolonged state of trial and error in which nothing was fictive and everything was a test of strength.

The Moscow – Paris Express

In my memory, it is not the fall of the Wall on November 9 that I connect with the feeling in 1989 that the old days were over – that night, as “crazy” as it was, was just the verification. It was the sanctioning of what had already been decided – beforehand and elsewhere. I connect the end of the epoch with other dates, other places, other people. They do not feature in the most recent master narratives. 

A long process of erosion and attrition preceded the fall of the Wall. In my mind this is all tied up with the movement of the East-West Express, also known as the Paris-Moscow Express. Sometime in the second half of the 1980s, this train transformed into a shuttle between Moscow and West Berlin, and the Bahnhof Zoo mutated from an exotic railway station into a grand transfer point in the developing East-West black marketeering scene. Bahnhof Zoo, a West Berlin locus of memory par exellence, the final stop for all the young people wanting to distance themselves from West Germany, for students, for all sorts of travelling people, the last long-distance railway station connecting the island with the rest of the continent, a transit stop for trains with exotic inscriptions, Warszawa-Hoek van Holland-London Victoria Station, Paris-Moskow, Oostende-Leningrad, Aachen-Kiev – but also the final destination for people who themselves had been derailed, whose story was told by Christiane F in “We Children of Bahnhof Zoo.” Bahnhof Zoo: ever seedier, a biotope for junkies and prostitutes, a station that a certain type of West Berliner avoided his whole life long. 

But in the mid-80s something happened to it – not world history, but the sort ofmolecular movement that world history is made of. Students from the Third World, particularly from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University – prospective engineers, agronomists, architects, hydraulic engineers – were using this new freedom to travel, courtesy of their passports and the special status of the “independent unit West Berlin,” to visit the “island” – where not West German but “allied jurisdiction” applied. A “thick description” is needed of this operation, which can only be summoned by impression and memory here. It appears to have been good business, otherwise it would not have happened: Having better possibilities for currency exchange than the Soviet or Polish citizens, in West Berlin the marketeers stocked up on high-demand products: consumer electronics, fridges, fashion accessories, books. Back in Moscow they could sell the products from West Berlin at a profit. Demand was limitless; one could finance a university degree, maybe even become affluent. 

On the German end, a bazaar-city arose. From the late 1980s and well into the 90s, the entire stretch from Kantstraße to Neue Kantstraße was transformed into a giant bazaar. There were back to back electronics shops; wares were displayed on the pavement. Export-import companies shot out of nowhere, like weeds, servicing an endless stream of buyers between Bahnhof Zoo and Kantstraße. First came the Moscow students from the Communist client states – black Africans, Mozambicans, Cubans – and later the Russians themselves, including the “new Russians” with their cafes, real estate, gambling houses, and fashion shops. 

West Berlin was rudely shaken out of its island existence. “Residents” complained that the once quiet Kantstraße had become loud, that they had to clear a paths through all the packing cartons and shopping trolleys. The New constituted disorder; the tabloids played on West Berliners’ old-new fear of insecurity and chaos. A newdiscourse on criminality emerged. Suddenly, languages were heard on Kantstraße that hadn’t been heard in West Berlin in decades. On the trans-European railway platforms, there were scenes that no one had witnessed since the days of refugees: mountains of cartons and luggage that had to be towed to the the sleeping car section. 

But it wasn’t just about brilliant logistical feats. New routines evolved. New mental maps - Kantstraße, West Berlin as a new address – emerged for the inhabitants of the East Bloc, but this also demanded an adjustment from the insular West Berliners, discovering a world beyond West Berlin and Mallorca. The end of West Berlin as an island manifested itself most strikingly when thousands of Poles transformed the godforsaken, sandy stretch of Potsdamer Platz into a gigantic marketplace. On that day, the new identity of the city hitherto known as West Berlin was born.

All of this was a rehearsal for a new mobility, for a routinisation on a massive scale of border crossings that hitherto had been an adventure for the few. The new era didn’t arrive on the paws of tigers, or even of cats, but almost imperceptibly on the suitcase wheels of the black marketeers. They crossed the Wall before it fell. They drove past the border officials when they were still heavily armed and patrolling the area from the Reichstag ruins to the Friedrichstraße station, unaware that the Wall was disintegrating before their eyes. To this day, there is no memorial for the anonymous black marketeers of Patrice Lumumba University at the Zoological Garden railway station. Instead, a freedom memorial is being planned for the exact spot where absolutely nothing happened.

The Clever Women from Kaunas

The dissolution of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s has many names; national peculiarities and vanities also played a role. But one common feature was certainly the simple disappearance of jurisdictions and responsibilities. An entire class snuck away from its responsibilities. Never before were there so many deserters from power or people profiting from a well-timed resignation. But for “society,” this meant that, from one day to the next, individuals were on their own. Institutions were dissolved, careers and life paths were cut off, entire professional disciplines were devalued, families were thrown off track, the old sense of security was revoked. 

Changes of this magnitude rarely transpire without panic and hysteria. The post-Cold War societies, to speak rhetorically of a collective subject, have preserved tranquility, reacting with astonishing alertness, and prudently making arrangements for the new situation. It was exactly this combination of a new beginning and the cautiously defensive wait-and-see testing of the state powers that contributed to making the so-called “transformation” proceed more or less smoothly. 

But, oddly, there is rarely any talk of agents of change. Perhaps it’s time consult Bert Brecht’s “Questions of a Reading Worker” once again: Who built it – the new Warsaw, the new Moscow, the new Berlin? Who held the societies together as the state and political order fell out of joint? There’s no need to undertake a vast archival study, as the “agents” can be recognised with the naked eye – provided one trusts one’s eyes. The time before and shortly after 1989 was full of improvisations, trial actions and tests of how to cope with a situation in which the state had, for some time, no longer played a role. Millions were practising crisis management, preparing for an emergency in which one could no longer count on help from outside but only on oneself and one’s peers – as a rule, on one’s friends and family. Crisis management was needed – skillful, socially intelligent, groping and yet not backing away from new paths. And a “chaos competence” developed out of this, an advantage which the former residents of the Eastern hemisphere have over their contemporaries in the West and which, in light of the pending developments in the West, is of no small consequence. 

The gurus of the liberal market economy, who imagined themselves in an “experimental and laboratory situation” when in fact the lives and survival of millions of people were at stake, had more faith in their doctrines than in the social intelligence and crisis management abilities of the millions who had to adapt to a new structure of living. No, those millions didn’t even have a medium for communicating the strength of a society that had to resort to self-organisation. What they produced was, in the eyes of the doctrine experts and exporters, not worthy of mention, although the question of whether societies would collapse in chaos and despair or catch themselves depended on them. The concepts of Jeffrey Sachs & Co. have been forgotten. What remains is the accomplishment of the many who prevented catastrophe. 

It is time, finally, for the heroes to return to the stage from which they have been driven by the dramas of men in high places. These heroes are an infinitely large ensemble, from all ranks and classes, consisting of the educated and less qualified, of the old elite and the up-and-coming. They were scattered across Europe. They transferred cars from Rotterdam to the markets of Lodz and Marjampole. They traveled the Minsk-Istanbul route maybe twice a month, stocking up at the bazaar and then going back to Belarus to tend to the business that allowed them to keep their families above water. They boarded planes in Sverdlovsk/Yekaterinburg, heading to Tianjin or Abu Dhabi, and made the connections that helped them get by. By appearances, they seemed to be shopping tourists, but in truth they were on a grand tour, collecting utterly new experiences.

As a result, they became cosmopolitan and worldly – from firsthand experience, not from books. Their motto was “learning by doing.” Their whole lives, they had never escaped their “system,” but now they were looking around: students, housewives, members of academies, former officers, fathers, adventurers. From firsthand experience, they learned in one year what others can’t even learn in a lifetime. These weren’t vagrants; they were people grounded in real life. 

I remember the women on the bus from Kaunas to Warsaw, or, to be more exact: to the stadium in Praga district that had been transformed into the largest bazaar in Europe, “Jarmark Europa.” They made the trip twice a week. Almost all of them knew each other. They knew the procedures and tricks for getting over the border, which of course meant they had to leave a little something for the border officials. They were old hands, and it was hard to unnerve them. This is how amber made its way by the kilo from the Baltic republics to the the bazaars and streets of Central and Western Europe – contributing to the stabilisation of thousands of precarious households.

But this shuttle economy was more than just an economy: It was about entrepreneurial initiative, mobility, organisational talent, and becoming familiar with the outside world. One could meet these people on any route in Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s, at border crossings, at the harbours. Soon, trickles turned into streams and quick visits turned into long-term footholds. It was the ingenuity and perseverance of the women of Kaunas and other places that held together a continent that, politically and economically, was falling apart; it preserved a connectedness that precluded total collapse. In retrospect, there’s no reason whatsoever for giving others the credit that they, the silent heroes, deserve. They were the ones who dealt with the hardships of daily life, not their “representatives.” 

A Charlemagne Prize for Eurolines!

The grand moments with which history usually preoccupies itself are inconceivable without the molecular events that make them possible. And the Europeans who make a career out of standing and speaking for Europe are nothing at all without the unknown Europeans whose stories are never told. We all know the stages of Brussels, Strasbourg, Paris or Maastricht, upon which “Europe’s representatives” play their parts. It’s not enough that that we’re kept up to date on all their entrances and declarations. It’salways the same names, the same faces, the same gestures. In 1949, a group of townspeople from Aachen, Europeans of the first hour, created the Charlemagne Prizefor “persons who have advanced the ideas of European understanding in political, economic, and spiritual relations.”

In the list of those honoured since 1950, one more or less finds all the great Europeans, from Count Coudenhove-Kalergi to Vaclav Havel, from Jean Monnet to theEuro. One can extrapolate this line and list easily and without a great deal of imagination. But one could also award the prize to people who were indispensable to the Europe that has evolved since 1989. There are more than a few claimants for these honours: the transportation ministers and the engineers who built the bridges, streets, and rails that paved the way to a new Europe and brought Europeans closer to one another. The shippers and logistics experts who have made careers out of shortening distances and creating a sense of proximity should also be eligible. Nor should one leave out the transportation companies and founders of discount airlines who have radically altered the map of Europe in our heads. Now, we not only know where Palermo is, but also Tallinn; not only Lisbon, but also Riga and Odessa. They have established lines of transit between the Rhein-Main area and Galicia, between Warsaw and the English Midlands, between Lviv and Naples. The discount airlines have made Berlin a neighbour of Moscow and contributed to an increase in cosmopolitanism. Krakow now has a connection to Dublin.

Entire economies can no longer function without this flow of traffic. The renovation of apartments, the care for pensioners and for the infirm in cities – even those located far from the border – now lie in the hands of personnel crossing over our borders. The Aachen Prize Committee could easily get an idea of the eligibility of candidates by looking at their timetables, price lists, and bookkeeping methods. They would determine that there’s not a place in Europe that can’t be looked up. Every act of research would become a joyous virtual journey to the New Europe. 

But the job of a firm like Eurolines has nothing to do with fantasy journeys and eveything to do with travels in a Europe that is real. Eurolines has been doing this for many years, day after day, night after night, in an unexcited and unspectacular routine and with reliability, independent of political votes, electoral campaigns, and legislative periods: transnational, European, in millions of molecular movements. It is the electric currents that keep Europe‘s motor in motion. Few previous recipients of the prize can make that claim with more justification than, for example, the Eurolines coach company!

*

Karl Schlögel is the recipient of the 2009 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and teaches East European history at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. 

The article originally appeared in Osteuropa magazine on 18 March, 2009.

Translation: Daniel Mufson

 

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Zizek, The Symbolic Order

dtomolson Mar 28, 2009 6:40 AM

The Symbolic Order is the realm of language, signs, culture, and law. It includes official institutions such as schools, political parties, and Churches; as well as quasi-official institutions like codified and non-codified social norms, i.e. handshakes, winks etc. The Symbolic Order is a chain of signs that is grounded in the Master Signifier—a sign which grounds itself. Any attempt to explain the MS ends in a tautology, i.e. God is God because he is God, or the law is the law because it is the law. In the Symbolic Order the subject finds the roles that she is to fulfill, as daughter, or mother, or sister, or wealthy, or poor, or religious etc. The Symbolic Order is anything that the subject experiences as existing independently of an individual. The big Other is what allows the Symbolic Order itself to become a subject. A person must enter the Symbolic Order in order to exist as a human subject, yet in so doing she becomes disconnected from herself, this is seen when a person refers to herself as “I”. As soon as she names herself she is dislocated from herself because she is the subject of the enunciation as well as the subject of the statement. It is not herself who names herself. One can only enter language by first being disconnected from herself or the world as it is in itself. This is dependant on Saussure’s understanding of language being a signifying chain or system that is reflexive, that is, dependant on itself, rather than having any connection to the real world as it is in itself. So, when in the Symbolic Realm we are in an unstable environment because signs change. An example would be the signifier “woman”. “Woman” has come to mean something different than it did even fifty years ago and this has produced confusion in the Symbolic Order. Now that woman no longer signifies the fairer, weaker sex how is one to relate to a female subject? Is being a gentleman a cover for chauvinism or is it still a way to honor the opposite sex/gender? This also points to the inevitable alienation within the Symbolic Order. It is not that the signified, the individual female subject or female subjects as a whole, has changed in thier ontology, or being, but rather our relationship to them has changed because the Symbolic Order has changed. And when the Symbolic Order changes the subjects within that order feel anxiety because their way of relating, and thus their world has changed. As long as the Master Signifier remains the Symbolic Order remains relatively stable but if the MS collapses or is seen as no longer existing the Symbolic Order breaks down and subjects are left in emmense anxiety and possible total collapse.

Get Well Soon

To my friend Jillybean, get well soon!

I am sure that leon misses you.

Bummer about the Chaplain actually doing what they do.

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death

Wall Of Death
Written by Richard Thompson

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House
You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse
The Tunnel Of Love might amuse you
Noah’s Ark might confuse you
But let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it’s the nearest to being free

Well you’re going nowhere when you ride on the carousel
And maybe you’re strong but what’s the good of ringing a bell
The switchback will make you crazy. Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Oh let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death