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Saturday Matinee: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

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No Matter Where You Go, Here It Is

By Peter Sobczynski

Source: RogerEbert.com

Practically from the moment that I first saw it at the age of 13 during its very brief run at the long-defunct Golf Mill Theaters (thanks for the ride, Mom) in the fall of 1984, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension” has been my all-time favorite movie. And yet, it occurs to me that while I’ve been lucky enough to write at length about any number of favorites over the years, I’ve never had the occasion to do so for that particular film. Oh sure, I’ve proclaimed it as a favorite many times and have made reference to it every now and then—I even gave “Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens” an extra half-star for nodding to it—but I haven’t had the opportunity to properly explain my love of the film. Happily, it is now making its long-awaited Blu-ray debut in a package from Shout! Factory that includes all the bells and whistles that members of its ever-widening cult could possibly ask for. Even more happily, it gives me a chance to sit down and once and for all explain why I love this film so much.

Of course, that is easier said than done because, as anyone who has seen it can attest, it’s not exactly the kind of movie that can be summed up in a sentence or two. Even the most basic, no-frills explanation of it will send many heads reeling, either out of excitement or confusion. Perhaps the best place to start is to look at its hero, the one and only Buckaroo Banzai himself. The Japanese-American son of a pair of brilliant scientists, he first studied medicine and became a brilliant neurosurgeon. However, he chose to become a modern-day Renaissance man and soon branched out into particle physics, designing high-powered automobiles, occasionally saving the world with the aid of his band of Blue Blaze Irregulars and performing with his other band, the hard-rocking Hong Kong Cavaliers, a group made up of geniuses from other scientific endeavors. (All of this is summed up for viewers in an opening roll of text not dissimilar from the ones that kick off the “Star Wars” films).

As the film proper opens, Buckaroo (Peter Weller), along with his men and mentor Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito), are ostensibly preparing to test a new Jet Car with the capacity to drive at the speed of sound. The real experiment, however, involves the Oscillation Overthruster, a secret device that they hope will let them drive through solid matter. This is not the first attempt to make a go of the Overthruster. In 1938, Dr. Hikita was working for the eminent physicist Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) when he tried to pass through—the experiment was a botch that lodged him partway through a wall, and landed him in the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane. In 1955, an attempt by Hikita and Buckaroo’s parents was sabotaged by crime lord Hanoi Xan via a bombing that killed his parents. (A flashback to this scene was cut from the original release but can be seen in the deleted scenes, where we discover that Buckaroo’s mother was played by Jamie Lee Curtis.) Buckaroo, however, succeeds and not only manages to drive through a mountain with nary a scratch, he has returned with some kind of alien organism attached to the Jet Car. Upon hearing this news, Lizardo breaks out of the asylum, claiming that he is going home. (Get ready because now things are about to get a little confusing.)

As it turns out, when Lizardo was trapped in the eighth dimension all those decades ago, he had his mind taken over by Lord John Whorfin, a fearsome Red Lectroid who was banished there alongside many of his followers after an unsuccessful attempt to take over their home world of Planet 10 from the more peaceable Black Lectroids. Before being locked up, he managed to bring many fellow Red Lectroids to Earth, where they have been living in plain sight and are now running a defense contracting company based in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey that is currently in charge of building a new bomber for the US Air Force. What they have really been doing with the government’s money is building a spaceship that will allow them to rescue their comrades still trapped in the 8th Dimension and return to take over Planet 10 once and for all. Now that Buckaroo has perfected the necessary Overthruster, all they need to do is steal it and they are home free.

After receiving a mysterious electric shock that allows him to see Lectroids as they really are and prevent the attempted theft of the Overthruster during a press conference, Buckaroo learns of the existence of Yoyodyne. But when the Hong Kong Cavaliers hack into their computer database, they discover that every single employee has the first name of John, a bizarre surname and an application for a Social Security card dated November 1, 1938. Around this time, a Black Lectroid emissary arrives with a message from their leader stating that if Buckaroo is unable to stop Whorfin/Lizardo from using the Overthruster to return to the eighth dimension, they will protect themselves by faking a nuclear attack that will start World War III. With the fate of the world now in his hands, Buckaroo and his team, including new Hong Kong Cavalier recruit Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum), a neurosurgeon and piano player who dresses up in full cowboy gear (including chaps) and calls himself New Jersey, and Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), a mysterious woman who meets Buckaroo after being accused of trying to shoot him during a concert (she was actually trying to kill herself but was accidentally bumped by a waitress at the key moment), set off to do battle with the Lectroids, recover the Overthruster, save humanity and if time permits, explain exactly what that watermelon is doing there.

In other words, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” is your typical sci-fi/action/comedy/rock&roll/kung-fu/political satire/neo-western/guys-on-a-mission extravaganza. The film was the brainchild of writer Earl Mac Rauch, who had written a couple of novels and co-wrote the screenplay to the Martin Scorsese musical “New York, New York,” and W.D. Richter, who had already established himself as a writer of quirky screenplays through such films as the goofy action comedy “Slither” and the masterful 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” One day, Mac Rauch dreamed up this character that would eventually be called Buckaroo Banzai and Richter encouraged him to write a screenplay involving his adventures. Supposedly, Mac Rauch would start one, get about fifty pages into it and then abandon it to try again with a new story. Eventually, Richter and producer Neil Canton formed a company to make “Buckaroo Banzai” and got Rauch to write a new treatment, using material from his previous attempts, that was then called “Lepers from Saturn.” Although it was rejected by many, it got noticed at MGM and studio chief David Begelmen agreed to finance it. Unfortunately, the project was then delayed for nearly a year because of a writers strike and Begelmen left MGM after a number of his expensive projects died at the box-office. However, Begelmen formed his own production company, bought the script back from MGM and made a deal with 20th Century Fox to produce it.

This would prove to be good news and bad news for the project. On the one hand, it was Begelmen’s enthusiasm that eventually got the film up and running. On the other hand, he apparently saw it as a straightforward action film in the mold of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and either overlooked the weirdo humor in the screenplay or just assumed that Richter and Mac Rauch would dump all of that nonsense somewhere along the way in order to ensure that it would be a hit. Once it became evident that the weird stuff was not going by the wayside, Begelmen began battling with Richter, Mac Rauch and Canton over the most inexplicable things in a misguided attempt to exert authority and make the film that he wanted. For example, Richter has hired the great cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose credits included such titles as “Brewster McCloud,” “Altered States” and, perhaps his most famous work, “Blade Runner.” The story goes that Begelmen agreed to his hiring as long as he didn’t make the film look in any way like “Blade Runner” but after several weeks of shooting, he decided that it was indeed looking like “Blade Runner” and had Cronenweth replaced with Fred J. Koenekamp, who had shot such epics as “Patton” and “The Towering Inferno.” At another point, he threatened to shut down the production over a pair of red-rimmed glasses that Buckaroo wore in a couple of scenes on the theory that heroes don’t wear red glasses.

The struggles to make the film were equaled only by the struggles to get it released and find an audience. Perhaps realizing early on that trying to sell the film to a mainstream audience at first might not be a wise idea, Fox decided to promote it at sci-fi conventions in the months leading up to its release by stressing that it was a cult movie in the making. Unfortunately, this approach wound up backfiring as the sci-fi audience was understandably wary of anything announcing itself as a cult movie before anyone had actually seen it—in their eyes, a cult movie is one that is discovered and nurtured by a loyal audience, not one that arrives in theaters proclaiming itself as such right from the get-go. “Buckaroo Banzai” was originally scheduled for a wide release on June 8, 1984 (which would have pitted it against the opening weekends of “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins”) but was bumped at the last minute to a much-reduced opening in a few cities in mid-August that barely made any impact, though it did receive good reviews from the likes of Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. Over the next couple of months, it opened in a few more cities before finally disappearing from theaters altogether.

And this is the point where the film and I finally crossed paths. Back in the prehistoric days before the Internet, a kid obsessed with the world of film would have to get himself down to the local bookstore or newsstand to purchase magazines that contained articles about upcoming releases. One such magazine was Starlog, which was dedicated to new and classic films in the sci-fi/fantasy genres and even though they were not necessarily favorites of mine, there were usually enough items of interest in each issue to make it worth the purchase. Now, 1984 provided a bumper crop of titles for genre fans—this was the year of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Ghostbusters,” “Streets of Fire,” “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” “Gremlins,” “2010,” “The Last Starfighter,” “Dune” and the proverbial many more—and while not all of them may have lived up to the hype, they sure looked tantalizing at the time. As good as most of those looked, it was this “Buckaroo Banzai” thing that looked most intriguing to me. Even at the borderline precocious age of 13, I had already fancied myself as someone who knew more than a thing or two about movies but I had never seen or heard of anything like this before. Needless to say, that June release date couldn’t come quickly enough and even though the August delay was frustrating, my enthusiasm did not wane. However, it was devastating to discover that Chicago was not a part of that August release and that when it did finally open locally a month or so later, it was only in a couple of theaters with the nearest one located about 40 miles away. Thanks to a supremely indulgent mother, I made it to that theater during its opening weekend and sat down in what was, aside from myself, my mother and maybe five other people, an almost totally empty house to finally bear witness to the film that I had been obsessing over for months. I must admit that as the lights went down, the pessimist in me was thinking “What if this isn’t that good after all?”

Fat chance of that happening. Not only did “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” live up to all of my insanely inflated expectations, it somehow managed to exceed them. I loved that it took any number of film genres and slammed them all together into one crazy-quilt narrative. I loved the idea of a hero who was valued more for his brains than for his ability to beat the bad guys into a pulp. I loved the funky New Wave aesthetic. I loved the decidedly offbeat humor, especially since one of my problems with science-fiction has always been its tendency to occasionally take itself a little too seriously at times. I loved the idea that all of the spaceships on display looked more like seashells or rotting fruit than the gleaming craft that whizzed through space on “Star Trek.” I loved the jaw-dropping performance by John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo, a hilariously audacious turn that saw him using “frothing mad” as a mere stepping-off point to a level of pure craziness that at times seems more like a possession than a performance. I loved the sight of Ellen Barkin in that slinky pink dress. (Hey, I was a 13-year-old boy.) I even loved the end credits sequence that found Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers traipsing through an empty L.A. aqueduct to the tune of the film’s jaunty theme music while the titles breathlessly promised that they would return in “Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League,” despite sensing (correctly, as it turned out) that the lack of people in the theaters meant such a prospect was unlikely at best. Watching this film, it was almost as if someone was tapping directly into my mind’s idea of a great movie and projecting it before my eyes. (For those of you who are curious, venerable Mom wound up enjoying it as well, though the few other patrons seemed more than a little bewildered when the lights went up afterwards.)

However, unlike a lot of things that seemed cool back in the day and eventually look fairly silly with the wisdom of age, my admiration for “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” has only grown over the years as I have been able to appreciate just how innovative and groundbreaking it was. For example, while genre mash-ups are a relatively common occurrence these days, they were fairly non-existent back then—the fear being that such things would be impossible to market to people who preferred a undiluted take on their preferred genre over one that mixed up with with several others—and it is amazing to see how well Richter and Mac Rauch juggle the various generic tropes in ways that clearly have fun with them without crossing the line into overtly making fun of them. Additionally, I love the way it dropped this bizarre and complicated mythology in the laps of viewers without any elongated explanations and assumed that they would have the intelligence to figure things out as it went along. Now this wasn’t a completely unheard-of approach—“Star Wars” began in much the same way—but it was taken to such a level here that it almost felt like you were watching chapter five of a serial where you had already missed chapters one through four. Admittedly, this approach may have alienated as many viewers as it enchanted—some reviewers complained that they felt as if they were watching someone else’s private in-joke that made no effort to let them in on the fun—but to these eyes, the notion of creating this oddly detailed world (with stuff practically bursting out of every jam-packed frame) and then immersing viewers in it was an audacious approach that paid off beautifully. If you ever wondered what might have resulted if Robert Altman had ever been given the reins of a large-scale science-fiction project (not counting “Quintet”), this film may be the closest that we ever come to answering that question.

Another aspect of the film that may have bewildered viewers but now seems startlingly prescient is how it depicts a world in which popular culture has extended its tendrils into all areas of life in unexpectedly goofy ways. No matter where one goes in the film, there is an odd cultural reference there to comment upon it. During the Jet Car experiment, we see a scientific gauge labeled “Sine” that is eventually followed by ones marked “Seeled” and “Delivered.” When it is announced that Dr. Lizardo has escaped from the asylum, he is mistaken by one person for Mr. Wizard. During Whorfin’s manic speech rallying his men as they prepare to leave for Planet 10, he sort-of quotes the Beach Boys cover “Sloop John B” by exhorting “I feel so broke-up, I want to go home!” Orson Welles (“The guy from the old wine commercials?”) is the basis of a couple of gags, one fleeting (when we get a glimpse of the President of the United States, played by Ronald Lacey, he is made up to look exactly like Charles Foster Kane) and one that inspires one of its funniest conceits. As it turns out, the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast was not fiction at all—it was Lectroids landing in New Jersey, not Martians, and they hypnotized Orson Welles into broadcasting that it was all made up. Even Buckaroo himself is often depicted as a pop culture hero just as much as he is a regular hero—we see his face plastered upon comic books and video games and he is, to be sure, the rare hero who tops off a day of derring-do by playing a sold-out concert with his band that finds him belting out an especially soulful cover of the classic “Since I Don’t Have You.”

And yet, the oddest and perhaps most arcane cultural reference is the odd connection the film shares with the works of legendary author Thomas Pynchon. Not only does it share a certain thematic similarity with the dense narratives and weirdo humor prevalent in Pynchon’s work, his cheerfully surreal novel The Crying of Lot 49 was largely centered around an shadowy aerospace manufacturer known as Yoyodyne Systems. In fact, one could argue the case that long before the arrival of “Inherent Vice,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” at least in a metaphorical sense, was the first real stab at bringing the Pynchon perspective from the page to the screen. (The plot thickened when Pynchon published his 1990 novel Vineland, which itself contained a couple of not-so-subtle references to “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” leading to speculation that either Richter or Mac Rauch actually were the reclusive novelist.)

As for the performances, all of the actors clearly found just the right way to connect with the admittedly quirky tone of the material. Some have slagged Peter Weller for being a little stiff at times but they are missing the point—this is a character who is so cool and above the fray that he doesn’t have to be constantly calling attention to himself. More importantly, he serves the necessary duty of being the anchor of the film that keeps it from flying off amidst all of the other oddball characters—it is a smart piece of underplaying from an actor who has never quite gotten his due despite starring in two all-time genre classics (the other, of course, being “Robocop”). Jeff Goldblum had already proven himself to be a more-than-reliable supporting player by the time he did this film and his ability to put a unique and often hilarious spin on even the most seemingly mundane bit of dialogue never shone brighter than it did here. (He also deserves credit not only for donning one of the goofiest Western outfits ever seen but somehow making it work against all odds.) As Penny Priddy, the one female character of note (perhaps the one aspect of the film that does not date very well today), Ellen Barkin more than holds her own with the guys. Christopher Lloyd turns up as John Bigboote, who has been in charge of the goings-on at Yoyodyne over the past few decades and whose name inspires a great running joke involving Whorfin repeatedly mispronouncing it as “big booty,” and he is a blast throughout. However, the scene-stealer of the bunch—indeed, one of the scene-stealing performances of all time—is unquestionably John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo. Given the rare opportunity to play a character where going too far over the top is simply impossible, Lithgow pulls out all the stops with his astoundingly flamboyant turns in which everything from his accent (which genuinely sounds like an alien trying to approximately an Italian dialect) to his wardrobe (which finds him wearing two of everything) is cranked up to maximum effect. And yet, even though he is playing a character who is clearly out of control, the performance never is—Lithgow knows exactly when to go for laughs or menace and hits those beats perfectly every time. He also gets many of the film’s best lines as well and I guarantee that after you see it, you too will be quoting (no doubt in your best approximation of the accent) such classic lines as, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” and “Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife/Doomed is-a your soul and damned is your life!”

Although the film tanked in theaters, it eventually began to develop a genuine cult following once it hit cable and home video and brave viewers were given the chance to experience it for themselves. The promised sequel never emerged (due in part to a tangled situation involving the rights and the bankruptcy of the original production company), but “Buckaroo Banzai” has continued to live on in the pop culture firmament in odd and unusual ways. A couple of installments of the “Dick Tracy” comic strip made arcane references to the film and the finale of Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” paid homage to the end credits sequence (and, of course, included Jeff Goldblum in the mix). After a long delay, the film came out on DVD in 2001 in an edition that deepened the meta-textual joke, positing that Buckaroo Banzai was indeed a real person and that the film was actually a docudrama depicting real-life events. Strangely enough, in 1998, Fox attempted to develop a TV adaptation that was to be titled “Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries” that never got off the ground save for a brief bit of test computer animation that can be found as an extra on the new Blu-ray. Even more strangely, it was announced earlier this year that another attempt to bring it to television was being attempted by none other than Kevin Smith and that Amazon Studios might be producing it.

Whether or not this particular endeavor pans out remains to be seen. However, until it happens, the new Blu-ray should more than tide over fans of the film. The two-disc package contains all the material from the original DVD release—the original commentary with Richter and Mac Rauch maintaining the illusion that what they are presenting is fact, deleted scenes, the alternate opening with Buckaroo’s parents, a short featurette and the trailer—along with a new commentary from sci-fi experts Michael and Dennis Okuda. More importantly, there is “Into the 8th Dimension,” a full-length documentary that chronicles every possible aspect of the film from its strange beginnings to its occasionally tortured production to its long and fruitful afterlife that is packed with fascinating tidbits of information. For example, we learn that when Richter first found the actor he wanted to play Buckaroo, Begelmen refused to cast him on the belief that he would never become a movie star—so long, Tom Hanks.

Of course, the best feature of all is the film itself in all its crazy, one-of-a-kind glory. For decades, I have loved this movie beyond all others. Watching it again, I realized that love had not been misplaced in the slightest. Now, those of you who have never seen it before may not react in quite the same way as I did, but I can pretty much guarantee that you have never seen a film quite like it—maybe the one that came closest to approximating its wild mixup of genres and strange humor was “Big Trouble in Little China,” on which Richter served as a co-writer—and that if you are able to accept its offbeat nature, you are in for the cinematic ride of your life. And when it is all over and you begin to delve into the special features, you will even finally learn exactly what that watermelon was doing there.

 

Watch the full film on Hoopla.

Global billionaire wealth tops $10 trillion as COVID-19 deaths mount

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By Jacob Crosse

Source: WSWS.org

The collective wealth of the world’s 2,189 billionaires has risen to $10.2 trillion, an increase of nearly $1.3 trillion in the past three years, according to a new report by the Swiss bank UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The unprecedented surge in wealth takes place amidst a global pandemic that has killed more than one million people worldwide, including more than 215,000 in the United States alone.

The report, “Riding the Storm,” is based on data from 43 markets, including interviews with 60 billionaires, accounting for around 98 percent of global billionaire wealth. It sums up the results: “Most of the decade was a time of exceptional prosperity for billionaires regardless of sector…”

The US continues to have the largest concentration of billionaire wealth, accounting for 36 percent of the world’s total, or $3.6 trillion. China ranked second with $1.6 trillion and saw the largest growth over the decade, by 1,146 percent.

Third was Germany, where billionaire wealth totaled $594.9 billion, an increase of 175 percent from 2009’s $216.1 billion. While fourth in terms of billionaire wealth at $467.6 billion, Russia saw the smallest growth by percentage, 80 percent, from $260.2 billion in 2009 to $467.6 billion in 2020.

The $10.2 trillion amassed by less than .0003 percent of the global population is more than the estimated 2020 Gross Domestic Product of every country on the planet except for the US and China. The staggering total hoarded by less than 2,200 people, or about the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US within the last 72 hours, surpasses the previous high of $8.9 trillion recorded in 2017.

For a household earning the average US median income, it would take over 16 million years to accumulate $1 trillion, not even enough to cover what has been collectively usurped from global society in less than three years. Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, has calculated the cost of ending hunger in the US at $25 billion, which could be done 400 times over with $1 trillion.

The billionaires who have increased their wealth the most, according to the authors, are in the “technology, healthcare and industrial sectors,” including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The report states: “During 2018, 2019 and the first seven months of 2020, technology billionaires’ total wealth rose by 42.5% to USD 1.8 trillion, supported by the surge in tech shares.”

The surge in technology and medical shares was buoyed by unlimited cash from the Federal Reserve, included as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed at the end of March in a near-unanimous vote by both Democrats and Republicans.

This financial bailout made a “big difference” in the fortunes of billionaires, with the authors writing: “Billionaire wealth is loosely correlated with equity markets, due to holdings in listed companies, and a few weeks makes a big difference. From the end of March, governments’ huge fiscal and quantitative easing packages drove a recovery in financial markets. By the end of July 2020, billionaire wealth was back above its 2019 level.”

Particularly obscene is the surge in wealth of billionaires in the health care industry, in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. The authors write, “Healthcare billionaires’ total wealth increased by 50.3% to $658.6 billion, boosted by a new age of drug discovery and innovations in diagnostics and medical technology, as well as latterly COVID-19 treatments and equipment.”

The report adds: “The number of tech billionaires grew from 68 in 2009 to 234 in 2020, while the number of healthcare billionaires grew from 48 to 167. Tech and healthcare billionaires’ total wealth both multiplied by four times – from $321.3 billion to $1.3 trillion for tech and from $120.8 billion to $482.9 billion for healthcare.”

And what are these “pandemic profiteers” spending their fortunes on? To get some idea, Christie’s auction house in New York held its latest online auction, “20th Century Evening Sale” live-streamed from the Rockefeller Center in New York on October 6. In one night, the world’s wealthiest spent over $340 million on 59 different 20th and 21st century art pieces. The auction also featured the most expensive dinosaur skeleton ever sold, a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex, for $27.5 million.

The massive concentration of wealth is a decades’ long and bipartisan policy of redistribution to the rich. The Institute for Policy Studies measured the tax obligations of America’s billionaires as a percentage of their wealth between 1980 and 2018 and found that it had decreased 79 percent. Over the last 20 years, the growth in US billionaire wealth has been 200 times greater than the growth in median wealth.

While the billionaires are richer than ever, the response of the ruling class to the pandemic has produced a massive social catastrophe for the working class. In the United States, tens of millions are unemployed and being cut off of all benefits, facing poverty, homelessness and hunger.

Earlier reports found that the 643 wealthiest Americans increased their wealth by a staggering $845 billion between March 18 and September 15. During that same time, over 62 million people in the US applied for unemployment benefits. An estimated 10.5 million jobs were eliminated, with major companies such as Disney, United Airlines, and Cineworld announcing tens of thousands additional layoffs in the last week.

Inflation Is Stealth Austerity

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power.

Austerity–bad. Inflation–good. Oh wait–they’re the same thing: both are a reduction in purchasing power. The only difference is a reduction via austerity is upfront while inflation is a stealth reduction, obfuscated by “official” distortions and Federal Reserve mumbo-jumbo.

Consider $1,200 in wages, unemployment, stimulus, Social Security payment, etc. If this payment gets cut by 10%–$120–as a result of austerity, pay cut, reduction in hours worked, etc., recipients scream bloody murder.

But if inflation reduces the purchasing power of the $1,200 by 10%, nobody does anything but grumble that “prices keep rising while my income stays the same.” This is the classic boiled frog syndrome: inflation is like the heat being turned up so gradually that the poor frog doesn’t realize he’s about to expire.

Inflation is stealthy because the loss of purchasing power is difficult to monitor. Your $1,200 only buys what $1,080 bought in the recent past; 10% inflation reduced your income exactly the same as if austerity had subtracted the $120 upfront.

Governments and central banks love inflation because the theft goes unnoticed. The public tolerates inflation because it’s easy to passively accept this erosion in their standard of living and difficult to generate the political heat that an outright cut would spark.

Though it’s being openly engineered by the Federal Reserve, inflation appears to be a force nobody controls–unlike austerity which is so clearly a political decision. If Inflation robbed 10% of everyone’s income overnight, people might be roused from their passivity to protest.

But since the theft occurs slowly–what’s 1% a month?–and unevenly across a spectrum of goods and services, this theft doesn’t rouse the same political storm as upfront austerity.

Inflation is a form of sacrifice that few recognize as sacrifice. It seems like everyone’s income is eroded equally, but this isn’t true: the wealthy closest to the Fed’s money spigots are earning multiples of inflation from asset inflation, stock buybacks, etc. Inflation is a pinprick to the wealthy and a stilletto in the kidneys of the bottom 95%.

To the political Aristocracy, inflation is wonderful because they don’t need to ask anyone to sacrifice 10% of their income as they do with austerity; they just steal the 10% a dribble at a time and throw up their hands as if inflation is some mystery force completely beyond their control.

Ironically, austerity–an honest, upfront political decision and sacrifice–is decried, while the dishonest, stealth cut of inflation is passively accepted, even as the Federal Reserve has made a cloaked political decision to reduce the purchasing power of everyone’s income except for the New Nobility (the top 0.1%) that the Fed slavishly serves.

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power, a Fed policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Here is the Chapwood Index of inflation, which carefully measures “apples to apples” costs of essential goods and services in each city:

As inflation erodes purchasing power, workers’ share of the economy has declined dramatically– a double-whammy of declining purchasing power and standard of living.

 

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange

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By Timothy Erik Strom and John Pilger

Source: CounterPunch

John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena, Australia:

Q:  Having watched Julian Assange’s trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy—look closely at the photo and you’ll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidal’s—a judge gave him an outrageous 50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julian’s intellect had gone from ‘in the superior, or more likely very superior range’ to ‘significantly below’ this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and ‘perform in the low average range’.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls ‘psychological torture’, the result of a gang-like ‘mobbing’ by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the world’s leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from ‘suicidal preoccupations’ and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis QC, America’s British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as ‘malingering’. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge— a Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is known—and the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defence’s examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public gallery. He noted that in China the judge’s decision would already have been made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery, the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.

The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.

There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murray’s personal blog, Binoy Kampmark on CounterPunch, Joe Lauria’s live reporting on Consortium News and the World Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztola’s blog, Shadowproof, funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US press and TV, including CNN, combined.

In Australia, Assange’s homeland, the ‘coverage’ follows a familiar formula set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika Bourke, wrote this recently:

The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.

There were no ‘rape and sexual assault charges’ in Sweden. Bourke’s lazy falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should ask: who is next?

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as ‘investigations editor’ and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian ‘scoop’ that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange—written behind their subject’s back—disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took ‘extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants’.

Q: What are the implications of this trial’s verdict for journalism more broadly—is it an omen of things to come?

The ‘Assange effect’ is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesn’t matter where you are. For Washington, other people’s nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists’ computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange ‘must face the music’. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

‘Evil’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil’.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of what’s at stake with Assange’s trial?

I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the ‘mainstream’ but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the world’s imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societies—think of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the ‘war on terror’—most of it behind a façade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrors—that’s why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judge’s decision will be known on the 4th of January.

Why It is Likelier that the U.S. Government Had Alexei Navalny Poisoned

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

The poisoning of Alexei Navalny has created intensified support by pro-U.S., and especially pro-NATO, officials in the European Union, to block the nearly completed NordStream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and to import into the EU, instead, far costlier U.S. LNG, liquefied natural gas. A very real possibility thus now exists that the poisoning of Navalny will turn out to have been worth many billions of dollars to U.S. frackers, by causing the nearly-completed NordStream 2 to be turned to waste so that fracked U.S. LNG will sell in Europe. The present article will explore the relative likelihood that the poisoning of Navalny isn’t merely coincidentally perfectly timed in order to achieve that objective for the benefit of America’s gas-industry, but that it probably was actually planned and perpetrated in order to achieve this.

The idea that the Russian Government poisoned Alexei Navalny presumes such astounding stupidity on the part of Russia’s Government as to be exceedingly dubious, at best. Navalny, though he actually is favorably viewed by only around 2% of Russians (as indicated in polls there), is widely publicized in U.S.-and-allied media as having instead the highest support by the Russian people of anyone who might challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership. It’s a lie, and always has been. Other politicians have far higher polled support in Russia. For example, whereas in the latest poll, published on September 5th, Navalny was one of four individuals who had 2%, Zhirinovsky had 5% and Zhirinovsky was the only person who had more than 2%, other than Putin, who had 56%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. The idea that Putin would need to kill anyone in order to be leading Russia is so stupid and uninformed (and mis-informed) that it is beyond belief, though it is widely publicized in The West as being instead the reality. But what is true is that Navalny has been an immense propaganda-asset to the U.S. Government, and he now is especially so.

Even America’s CNN let slip, in a news-report on September 18th, regarding Navalny, that “his list of enemies is as long as it is powerful,” but they said nothing about whom those “enemies” might be. No one questions that Navalny claims to be an anti-corruption campaigner, and that this would generate enemies regardless of whether his accusations are truthful. The article on “Alexei Navalny” at Wikipedia, which is CIA-edited and written, and which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, indicates that Navalny has accused numerous individuals of corruption, but not that any of those individuals is corrupt — and this is at a site (Wikipedia) which can reasonably be expected to link to documentation of any damning evidence that Navalny has come up with. But the article doesn’t link to any. The article does make clear that Navalny has been hoping to use these accusations in order to rise in Russian politics. It would be a dangerous way to rise in any nation’s politics, regardless of whether those accusations are true. The idea that Putin was behind this is insane. Is Putin so stupid as to poison the U.S. regime’s most-heavily propaganda-favored Russian precisely at the time when the EU is about to grant final approval to Russia’s vast (and virtually completed) NordStream 2 pipeline?

England’s Financial Times headlined on September 16, “Germany offered €1bn for gas terminals in exchange for US lifting NS2 sanctions,” and sub-headed “Deal, detailed in a letter by Olaf Scholz to Steven Mnuchin, predates the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.” They reported that “In the August 7 letter seen by the Financial Times, Mr Scholz said Germany would increase its financial support for LNG infrastructure and import capacities ‘by up to €1bn’ in exchange for the US ‘allow[ing] for the unhindered construction and operation of Nord Stream 2’,” and reported that:

The US has long opposed Nord Stream 2 and in December imposed sanctions against companies involved in its construction. That move prompted Swiss pipe-layer Allseas to suspend its work with just 6 per cent left to install. A group of US senators from across the political divide are pushing to extend those sanctions.

Criticism of the project has grown in Europe too, with opponents saying it will increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy exports at a time of rising tensions with Moscow. In her State of the Union address on Wednesday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said: “To those that advocate closer ties with Russia, I say that the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with an advanced chemical agent is not a one-off. This pattern is not changing — and no pipeline will change that.

The U.S. regime’s agent, von der Leyen, is doing her utmost to serve U.S. LNG marketers. Many other U.S.-regime agents also are.

On September 17th, America’s neoconservative (or pro-U.S.-empire) Newsweek bannered “Opinion: Open Letter: For the Sake of Transatlantic Security, Stop Nord Stream 2,” with 114 signatories of NATO-related U.S. and European officials, and published their argument that, “Over the past decade, the Government of the Russian Federation has engaged in a litany of malign activities aimed at upending liberal democratic norms across Europe and North America. The shocking poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by a variant of the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok shows that Moscow has not been deterred by Western actions and statements and refuses to reverse its destabilizing political adventurism at home and abroad.”

How blatant and scummy can a marketing campaign get?

The USA on the brink of civil war

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In this article, the author seeks to draw our attention to a fact that is difficult for Westerners to conceive of: the American people are experiencing a crisis of civilization. They are so deeply divided that the presidential election is not just about electing a leader, but about determining what the country (empire or nation?) should be. Neither side is capable of accepting to lose, so much so that each could resort to violence to impose its point of view.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the country is divided into two camps that suspect each other of preparing a coup d’état. On one side are the Democrats and the non-party Republicans, and on the other are the Jacksonians, who have become the majority in the Republican Party without sharing its ideology.

Remember, already in November 2016, a media manipulation company headed by the master of Agit-Prop, David Brock, raised more than 100 million dollars to destroy the image of the President-elect before he was elected [1]. Since then, before he could do anything about it, the international press has portrayed the U.S. president as incapable and an enemy of the people. Some newspapers have even called for his assassination. For almost four years, his own administration has constantly denounced him as a traitor paid by Russia and the international press has violently criticized him.

Currently, another group, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), is planning scenarios to overthrow him in the 2020 election, whether he loses it or wins it. The case has become national in scope since TIP founder Professor Rosa Brooks leaked a lengthy article in the Washington Post to which she is a regular contributor [2].

The TIP organized four role-playing games last June. It simulated various results to anticipate the reactions of the two candidates. All the participants were Democrats and Republicans (ideologically speaking, not “Republicans” in the sense of party membership), none of them Jacksonian. Unsurprisingly, all of these personalities believe that “the Trump administration has consistently undermined basic standards of democracy and the rule of law. It has adopted many corrupt and authoritarian practices. They therefore concluded that President Trump would attempt a coup d’état and imagined that it was their duty to pre-emptively devise a “democratic” coup d’état [3].

It is a characteristic of contemporary political thought to stand up for democracy, but to reject decisions that run counter to the interests of the ruling class. Indeed, TIP members readily admit that the US electoral system they defend is profoundly “anti-democratic”. The constitution does not attribute the presidential election to citizens, but to an electoral college of 538 people appointed by the governors. The participation of citizens, which was not foreseen at independence, has gradually become the norm in practice, but only as a guide for governors. Thus, in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected, the Florida Supreme Court recalled that it did not have to know the wishes of the citizens of Florida, but only those of the 27 voters appointed by their Florida governor.

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, but only the sovereignty of governors. Moreover, the Electoral College designed by Thomas Jefferson has not functioned properly since 1992: the elected candidate no longer has the majority of the wishes of the citizens in the states that tilt the election [4].

The TIP has highlighted just about everything that could happen in the three months between the election and the nomination. It acknowledges that it will be very difficult to determine the results given the use of absentee voting in times of epidemic. The TIP deliberately did not explore the possibility that the Democratic Party would announce Joe Biden’s election despite an undercount and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would swear him in before Donald Trump could be declared the loser. In such a case, there would be two rival presidents, which would mark the beginning of a Second Civil War.

This eventuality encourages some to consider seceding, to unilaterally proclaim the independence of their state. This is particularly true on the West Coast. To prevent this process of disintegration, some advocate dividing California in order to give more members of the Electoral College to its population. However, this solution is already a stance in the national conflict because it favours popular representation at the expense of the power of the governors.

In addition, last March I mentioned the temptation of a putschist coup by some military personnel, [5] to which several high-ranking officers later referred [6].

These different points of view attest to the deep crisis that the United States is going through. The “American empire” should have disintegrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This did not happen. It should have reinvented itself with financial globalization. It did not. Each time, a conflict (the ethnic division of Yugoslavia, the attacks of September 11) came to rekindle the dying. It will no longer be possible to postpone the deadlines for much longer [7].

 

Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

[1] “The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Zero Hedge (USA) , Voltaire Network, 28 February 2017.

[2] “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis”, The Washington Post, September 3, 2020.

[3] Preventing a disrupted presidential election and transition, Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020.

[4] Presidential elections and majority rule, Edward B. Foley, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[5] “Putchists in the Shadow of the Coronavirus”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 31 March 2020.

[6] “The Pentagon against President Trump”, Voltaire Network, 12 June 2020. Do we risk a miltary coup?, by Colonel Richard H. Black, August 24, 2020.

[7] “United States – reformation or fracture?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 October 2016.

Ireland: Thoughts on Wildness and Domestication

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By Renzo Connors

Source: Anarchists Worldwide

“If I decide to break the chains of domestication, I can only do so because I feel the chains and suffer the effects of domestication on my own skin.” – Alfredo Bonanno

I

While out walking or cycling at night, foxes can always be seen roaming the housing estate. The glow of their eyes in darkness, appearing from dark alleyways suddenly visible under the street lights, they move around without a sound, hardly noticed. These lovely magnificent creatures are the embodiment of wildness. Leviathan towers all around but yet these wild beings live on freely from domestication. The foxes at times live off the scraps and waste that civilization throws away, but long after civilization crumbles these creatures will live on.

These wild beings will live on long after civilization kills itself because they are not dependent on civilization to provide the means of life. They remain wild and undomesticated, still equipped with the knowledge and skills to find food, build shelter, and survive independently for themselves.

The vast majority of humans on the other hand are totally domesticated and dependent on civilization and the vast majority would not be able to survive without shops and machines. Only a tiny percentage of humans that inhabit the earth still live wild, free, and living autonomously. The rest are imprisoned within the concrete and metal structures of techno-industrial society.

Domestication begins from birth, straight away an individual is given a birth certificate and social security number. These will be needed throughout life, to be recognised by whatever state an individual happens to be born into, to go to school, to work, to open a bank account and from there to get loans to buy shit, to get a passport, to register to vote, so the state knows who you are, what taxes you have paid or owe, your credit history: to be controlled and exploited. From birth, through childhood, into adulthood,an individual is moulded and taught how to behave, what is acceptable and what is not; through force and blackmail of collective and religious moralities created by the systems and institutions that make up civilization. The end result: a domesticated and a functional obedient citizen and wage slave.

Everything within the civilized culture is geared towards this. Education, children’s stories, TV shows, movies, books, games, and even songs are all exposure to the social norms and control of civilization. The soul purpose of the individual in civilization is to produce and reproduce the social structures, authoritarian institutions and daily subservience to civilized society. There is little room for escape from behind the computer screens and consumerism.

II

Tenalach
Irish – Used to describe a relationship one has with the land, air and water, a deep connection that one literally hears the Earth sing.

I’ve always felt an affinity and closeness with wild spaces. From childhood, playing in the fields and woodlands, fishing in the lake and swimming in the rivers that were close to the housing estate I grew up in. As a kid taking day trips to the Wicklow mountains seeing all the views, beauty of the trees and plants, rugged valleys, and at times what seems like inhospitable landscape of bog land and cliff drops.

Being in such spaces conjures up and stores feelings within me I wouldnt be able to adequately describe with words. Perhaps they could be described as something spiritual.

The landscape has been left scarred by civilization. Roads built long ago by the British colonists to flush out any hiding rebels, shells and ruins of buildings left over from the dawn of industrialism scattered across the landscape, electrical dams blocking up rivers, TV and radio transmitter masts, bog land robbed and left mutilated to feed industrial “progress”, forests cut down and replaced by animal agriculture and monocrop Sitka tree plantations poisoning the land, and the mass graves from pogroms and genocide of the religious and imperalist conquerers. There isn’t a place left on this island that civilization hasn’t left its mark.

******

In my early 20’s locked up in prison for taking part in the anti-imperialist struggle, I felt these feelings for the wild more intensely.

Not seeing any plants or trees, except the ones I could see from my cell window on the horizon. The urge to walk in grass and sand in my bare feet, wanting to roam in woodland to look up at the sky through the canopy.

For the years spent incarcerated I daydreamed about being in nature, being in the mountains, being by the sea.

After four years with eight months left I was granted temporary release for Christmas.

For the first time outside the concrete walls, iron bars and razor wire of prison there was only one thing I really wanted to do and that was to go to the ocean.

The beach was a short walk from where I was staying. To get there I’d first have to walk through a park. As I walked, even though it was winter there was still a lot of colour. A lot of the big tall trees in the park are evergreen trees so they still had their colour. Going through the park my head and eyes were darting around taking in the landscape, walking under the tall trees, their canopy blocking out the sky. It was an amazing feeling being hit in the face with so many different colours, different shades of green.

Sensory stimulation from the sounds of flowing water making its way down streams, birds chirping and singing, the wind blowing long grass and branches, colors of the landscape and the various shades of browns and greens of foliage was almost overwhelming to the senses.

When I reached the beach I walked for a little bit and then sat on a sand dune for about two hours looking out into the vast ocean of green, reflecting in my thoughts and finding some solace in my mind.

Are these feelings that rush around my mind and body urging me wildness, the inner primal anarchic instinct buried by years of domestication?

Or are they an individual desire and love within me for the wild?