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Underground > Head Shop >

Attitudes?

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:22 / 18.11.01

I found this over at the Tiger Lillies' website: an essay called Life is utterly miserable because of you personally. A bit deep, I initially thought, to be found on the website of a band who devoted an entire album to animal-fuckin', but it's full of stuff like this: quote:You seek to sustain the unsustainable by grouping with the equally flip-minded and then insisting that your collectively held lies define some universal truths - with the remarkable coincidence that you emerge at the centre of things.and this: quote:Issues of injustice are passe: you complain of compassion fatigue. When in your car, you curse the traffic. A sacrifice for you is not buying what you know is tainted. A luxury is buying it anyway. If your hypocrisy is illuminated you smirkingly quip lighten up. Your desires are steeped in boredom: neophilia overrides ever appreciating what you might know well. Thinking, for you, is something that one can do too much of - it's the only thing that you do in moderation. When you choose to perform the indefensible, you moan that you were tired if there is no one else to blame.Thoughts? Fair call or ranty bollocks? This could well be a Head Shop topic - are theory and action not connecting? - but I figured I'd post it here, as it might get pissed on in two minutes as fluff. I don't know how long it's been up, so this could be written in the wake of 9/11 - but I'm not sure. Has anyone noticed behaviour described in the essay on the increase? Some of it's rather familiar...

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:04 / 19.11.01

I think it's pretty clear that a lot of this is true and applies to not only myself, but almost everyone I know: we live in a part of the world that sustains its prosperity by royally fucking over huge parts of the rest of the world. The details of this are available - if not readily available, then certainly freely available, and would be presented more often by the mainstream media if people really wanted to know. But they don't. By and large, we don't. We choose relative ignorance because we like our luxurious lifestyle, and we don't want to face the truth about what the cost of that lifestyle might be for others. Our idea of what the average human lifestyle is like, for example, is utterly warped and serves only to reassure us that we aren't living in luxury at all.

However, if all you do is focus on these details and the awfulness of it all, you risk ending up as Richey Edwards. The question is: what is in our power, what can we reasonably be expected to do about it? And that's kind of why we're 'here' - it's what the more serious forums like the Head Shop and the Switchboard and I guess now the 9/11 forum are for - one of the things they're for, anyway.

(So yeah, I reckon maybe this thread does belong elsewhere...)

The Return Of Rothkoid

10:53 / 19.11.01

Moved. Thanks, Tom!

11:34 / 19.11.01

While I'm touched and moved by that. It reminds me of a series of posters I did years ago:- red and black ink + photo montage. I particularly liked:-

quote: A sacrifice for you is not buying what you know is tainted. A luxury is buying it anyway.

So it's a fair call.

It gets right to the heart of the rich world: but it is also ranty bollix, and it won't change anything because you can't change things by shouting at them. All you end up doing is extending the perimeter of your own sense of existential despair by dragging other people into it.

And SFDyke, I too hate

quote: 'lighten up, it was only a joke'

We've had it here (on barbelith) today. And its neither an apology nor an explanation but an extension of the insult.

The interesting thing for me, as a parent, is getting thru to my kids how fucked up the world is without giving them this sort of angst; in other words to crack the dichotomy we all are given between feeling rich (we give to children in Need) and feeling poor (choosing managed debt as a lifestyle).

Flyboy asks
quote:. The question is: what is in our power, what can we reasonably be expected to do about it

The answer might be to know the world but to keep a kind of distance from it. To neither buy into the high maintenance despair that Killed Richey Edwards or to opt for the sullen indifference that the Tiger Lillies site spits bile at.

It's about owning your own values, and not getting wants and needs confused. Thats why the western world is both simultaeneously wealthy and in debt, it stops us feeling guilty about wealth by helping us feel poor.

It's a sick old world; but it's all we've got. Be good to each other.

11:43 / 19.11.01

If you mean me, I never said "lighten up, it's only a joke." However, it was only a joke, and as the person making the joke and then the apology I think I'd be best placed to decide if I was extending any insult.
Or are jokes, no matter how inappropriate or "fucked up", unacceptable here these days?

14:09 / 19.11.01

Sax I did not mean you. And am sorry for any offence caused. The event I was refering to was backwash from Knowledge + 1's bad day yesterday. And I was being snide. (See conversation + comics)

I was expressing sympathy though to SFD, about something much nastier, that in my mind ties back to the bulying thread, wherein a gang pick on a single kid and say thing's like "we were only having a laugh!", when their laugh has been a someone else's pain.

I'm not sure what your apologizing for though.

14:43 / 19.11.01

Hmm. Me being oversensitive on the back of a fucking bad day. He apologised, making things worse. No, I posted a crap joke in the thread about misogeny and computer games which was, frankly, mysoginist, and SFD rightly pulled me up about it, and I apologised, and thought you were referring to me. Which would have been right anyway.
It's been a general day of bad communications for me today. Anyone else found that? Loki in the works, I think.