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Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach at tippicanoe's used clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with a number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that reads "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it.
I was in a band back then, I played quite a few shows in it. But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late '90s, I didn't wear it out much. Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe's to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny woman, not much over five feet tall who looked me up and down and then smiled and said, "I like your shirt."
I've never really called myself an anarchist, I'm not even sure what that would mean. Anarchy was the only political-ish thought system that's had any appeal to me. But even its appeal is pretty weak. I have read most of the notable political anarchists, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman and others, as well as the more figurative writers one might call anarchists like Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau and tk
While I sympathized with, for example, Focker's notion that political institutions -- possibly the biggest problem humanity faces -- grow out of an irrational belief in a higher authority, particularly the singular authority of sun-god religions like Christianity or Islam, at the end of the day I am not an anarcho-syndicalist. I have no interest in the political aims of anarchy.
I am occasionally drawn to a more P.O.S-style anarchism, the kind that's "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign", which is not to pigeon hole P.O.S, just that he's good at defining the appeal of that space. And it has appeal. Having looked at something as massive as an earthmover with a bag of sugar in hand... it has appeal is all I will say about that. It's ineffectual, but then relatively speaking almost everything is, that's the world.
There might be dark nights and sugared gas tanks in my past, but that's not the anarchy I embraced. If I were to expose a form of anarchy it would be what I like to call "magical anarchism".
Magical anarchism is the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of tk, the anarchy of girt economies, the anarchy of completely re-arranging experience with psychotropic chemicals, the anarchy of
There’s more than one way to skin schodenger’s cat.
teeth bared and fists clenched
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