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His Philosophy

George: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.
Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened, man. Hey, we can't even get into like, a second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we're gonna cut their throat or something, man. They're scared.
George: Oh, they're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.
Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them is somebody that needs a haircut.
George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about!
George: Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are.… They’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
Billy:Well, that don't make 'em runnin' scared.
George: No. It makes 'em dangerous.

- from the movie, Easy Rider (1969)

We just took another step towards the American Dream in el casa de Sloov when I ripped the antenna from our television and disassembled it for parts. Parts for what? I don’t know. Maybe it’ll come in handy if I decide to make a pirate radio station or something. The FCC recently made a rule that all receiving signals on all televisions must be Digital by 2007, doing away with cable and broadcast. When all you suckers are out there spending your paychecks on new TVs that Big Brother can monitor like the FBI monitors the internet, I’ll be delving into the poetic Genius of Milton and Blake and Dante and the schizophrenic that wrote Revelations, and getting smarter and wilder and crazier by the day, until I’m one of those wild John the Baptist fuckers you see less and less of on the streets these days, prophesizing some weird shit and freaking out typical jerks everywhere.

You: Ummmm. Okay?

We haven’t had cable since we moved into our one bedroom apartment in North Oakland (Pittsburgh) in 1999. And we’ve been straining our eyes to watch fuzzy Simpsons and Seinfeld episodes in our three uncabled households ever since. Now, the only channel we get is PBS. The short cable that hooks the TV to the VCR acts as an antenna, and it only picks up PBS because the affiliate broadcasts only a mile away at UNC-Chapel Hill. You get two extremes with PBS, interesting/informative/enlightening or Boring as Hell. We don’t get stuck in those “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “King of Queens” funks anymore – shows that only have enough comedy or hot actresses or funny old guys to keep you watching, but no redeeming value whatsoever, making you a drooling post-shock treatment zombie, or worse, a typical jerk-off. Now we sit and put on the radio or play a CD or read or talk to each other. It feels like real life. Time for some relaxation and active leisure. One step closer to independence.

We don’t have the internet at home anymore either. I’m glad about that too. Something’s wrong with the modem in that $2000 pile of electrical junk they call a PC. We still have a DVD player and a scanner and some cool little programs and games and the Photoshop I pirated from the copy they have at work. And I get enough internet when I’m supposed to be working. I’m also canceling AOL. I don’t like those people. They annoy me. I tried to cancel once and the guy gave me two free months, like the bastard that keeps buying you drinks when you’re trying to sober up (like never). Then I forget about it and the bill shows up. So I paid for a few months, then tried to cancel again. This time they hit below the belt and sicked some cute-sounding girl on me. She gave me another free month. Well I’m fucking canceling it this time AOL! (Maybe if I keep protesting they’ll send a skilled fellatress over to the house). They are one of these companies that willingly gives shit on you to the FBI. Well they’re probably required to by law to do that now, compliments of the Patriot Act.

But kicking the habit - be it of TV, internet, alcohol, cigarettes - these things are all within the realm of individual choice. In this country you can choose whether or not to be free. Most Americans choose to be tied down. It’s a fucking way of life in this country, especially for the middle class, to be tied down. Most people don’t subscribe to the philosophies of those crazed idealist radicals who founded this country because that’s not the philosophy they were raised on. “Give me liberty or give me death!” Hell yeah. What a motherfucker of a statement. That’s the true wild spirit of America right there. Not “shop till you drop” – or the latest outcry “let’s do our American duty and stimulating the economy by spending hours on end at the mall buying total shit on our credit cards”.

Did you ever see those posters with the American flag with shopping bag handles growing out of the top of it? “America: Open for Business” the caption did run. Hey guy who invented that: Fuck you. That poster is the avertisement for the Sale on the American Soul.

But it’ll only sell if you buy into it. Despite all the laws being enacted by the power-junkies in Washington, we’re still free to choose whether or not we want to buy into it. No matter how much Ashcroft wants to wipe his psychotic asscroft with the Constitution, there’s still those of us that know what it stands for, and still those of us wild American motherfuckers who’ll raise hell to defend it.

Eventually I want to be disciplined as to not buy into it at all. I mean literally, in an economic sense, to buy from independent stores, farmers, restaurants, beer distributors, and whatnot and so forth. In my fridge, most if not all of the vegetables come from local, independent sustainable farmers. I’m just trying to do my part to keep people out of these slave labor dictatorships of big business and commercial farming and major label recording. Contributing to the Independence of my country.

Americans have so much choice that freedom, which must be acquired by a mixture of discipline, action, and contemplation takes a back seat to easy, lazy, comfy conformity. Most people choose to be secure, to shop at Wal Mart, to acquire the most amount of money they can within their ability, to dress, drive and listen to music in accordance with the status quo. Most people’s brains are scrambled by unnessesary business and unhealthy occupations they have to participate in to pay for their secure position in the status quo. That’s why in the polls people are always choosing security over freedom. No surprise there. They’ve been doing that for years.

And as more and more people settle into this sameness, the more worried I get. Freedom becomes a “buzzword” or a commodity. Rather than a contemplative subject, rather than a release or the Eternal Ahhh, rather than working for yourself to experience your own transformation of it - Freedom has been transformed into a commercial used to play with your emotions to get you to buy their useless crap. They use stars and stripes and drumming through the revolutionary war and all those images of America we got in the history books from childhood. But you aren’t getting it! Freedom is REAL and it’s abstract and it’s infinite and it’s heaven and enlightenment.

Something I saw on PBS about these monks who go into the desert by themselves for 40 days: They are isolated and independent. They experience loneliness of course, but what is so sacred to them in this experience is the unbridled, infinite Freedom they experience through the independence.

Freedom was more sacred than life itself to radical dissident idealist Founding Fathers who went up against the biggest death machine in the world at that time (Great Britain then, the US govt. is now), and won. Not just a fucking commodity. Not just a piece of square cloth to be waived about and sold. Are you following me here?

“Well I broke down in East St Louis.
On the Kansas City line
And I drunk up all my money
That I borrowed every time
And I fell down at the derby
and now the night's black as a crow
It was a train that took me away from here
But a train can’t bring me home….

What made my dreams so hollow
I was standing at the depot
With a steeple full of swallows
That could never ring the bell
I’ve come ten thousand miles away
And I aint got one thing to show
Musta been a train took me away from here
But a train can’t bring me home”

-Tom Waits, “Train Song”

I just have this vision of Old Uncle Sam as a wandering vagrant, looking for freedom in the 21st century. Down by the railroad tracks looking for his home, and he can’t even jump a train anymore without getting fined, and he can’t even find a train without getting jumped, up in the mountains looking for mountain men, down in the cities looking for strangers, walking on the riverbanks looking for steamboats or raftsman or Huckleberry Finn, out on the highways looking for old diners and beautiful women and dark country nights on dirt roads with no traffic lights so he can look up at the stars before he sleeps, looking for a lost lost blood brother in freedom who he gets harder to find, but the harder he is to find, the harder Uncle Sam looks. The man doesn’t want money, even though he may not eat supper tonight, but if you pay him some time, he got a hell of a lot of good stories to tell.

Sometimes you wonder if it’s too late. When you see all the good fuckers old and sad and hating what their country has become. All the passenger trains are gone. Baseball is sold out to money and greed. Booze is overpriced. Diners are replaced by McDonald’s. Small stores and shop owners that used to say hi to you are replaced by job-hating Wal Mart employees that fake smile at you and give you coupons for shit you don’t need. The cars in their lots tail old ladies trying to get to their daughters’ cars in walkers and the car keeps inching up and up and up behind her, and all she knows how to do is be polite and rush faster than she should be because some impatient fuckface needs to find a space in the front so he can buy cheap, bland furniture and a GQ magazine in as little time as possible. Old boxy houses that were all different are replaced by bland, beige gated community clone houses. They had Mohammad Ali; we got Mike Tyson. New York City is slowly becoming Disneyland East. Barbers don’t put that hot wax shit around your ears anymore. People are too afraid to dance at shows because they have a preconceived notion of “hip” or some bullshit; performers have to work through walls of insecurity. My dad idolized tough guys like John Wayne or classy guys like Frank Sinatra. Kids today look up to wimpy little fake ass punks like Eminem and Fred Durst. My gramma told me she used to go out and see live orchestras and dance until 5 am, then work at 6:30. You can’t even drag people out to see their favorite band on a work night anymore. High school kids used to know who the first president was. Now kids are plopped down in front of videos of Barney which shortens their attention span so when they go to school, on top of being fatigued from eating too much McDonald’s shit, the undereducated, underpaid teacher can’t deal with them and sends the poor stupid brat to the child psychologist who then drugs him up on riddalin. Old people don’t die at home anymore. They die in 10x15’ dorm rooms we throw them in so we don’t have to deal with them.

How come we left behind all the good shit? It makes me sad.

Ah shit. There’s still some good shit here. You just gotta find it now. You have to really look for America in this country. We got our legendary sports stars like Tiger Woods and Tony Hawk. There’s a thousand great rock n roll bands, all independent and destitute of course. There’s still some great little diners. And I just talked to Cliff for the first time. He’s the owner of Cliff’s Meat Market on my street in Carrboro, NC. No it’s not a singles bar. He bought the space next to him and he’s expanding, and one of the things he is installing in his new space is a cooler for beer. He asked me and Joann what kind of beer he should get. Cliff hadn’t had a drink since he was 21. He’s said he just never bought any beer because he was saving money. He was explaining the renovations he’s doing. “It’ll make Carrboro look nicer.” We never met the guy before. He wasn’t trying to sell us anything. Just trying to be a neighbor. Do you know any of your neighbors? I sound like Mr. Rogers.

The pursuit of freedom is an active pursuit, and as long as we are protected under the Constitution, freedom is an individual choice. But you can’t be lazy (You: Practice what you preach, asswipe). Sure most of us are trapped by debt and bad jobs and whatnot. Shit, tell me about it. But it’s nothing you can’t get out of. I think it’s time more people flushed their preconceptions down the toilet and start to actively pursue independence. Mistrust of government and CEOs is running rampant, and the time is ripe to get to know your neighborhood mom n pop shop. Are we really an independent nation? Our dependence on foreign oil and the wars it’s evidence that we are not. But that’s only by choice.

Poor old Elvis, dead 25 years. Elvis Presley WAS American freedom. He took a white lightning bolt and raw blue energy and shook, and shook, and shook down all the walls between people. For a brief moment there in rock n roll, black kids danced next to white kids, teenagers started fucking in record numbers, and America let loose and became truly free. Of course there was opposition. Yeah you had the Bible chimps saying it was devil music, and you also had people that were just embarrassed by the sexuality and goofiness of it and laughed and called it all foolish.

“They’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.”

They couldn’t legislate out Elvis, but they did buy him out. Just like American Freedom, Elvis Presley was bought and sold in the marketplace, got old, got fat, and passed on. Now Elvis, just like the American flag, is sold on everything from nail clippers to decorative plates to coffee mugs to shoe horns. But while some people talk about freedom and joke about Elvis while scratching their asses with an American flag ass-scratcher they bought with their American flag credit card, there’s still some of us that found what Elvis found, somewhere in the center of the music, and it makes us want to dance like half-crazed buffoons, and invite everyone else in for the party. And iat about that time is when we hear a tap-tap-tapping at our front door, and we find old Uncle Sam leaning on the screen, tired and poor and yearning to breathe free. So we invite him in out of the cold for supper, turn on some rock n roll, and make sure Freedom gets a full belly and a warm place to crash tonight, and does he need any help tomorrow, when he lights out in the morning to sew his seeds in the countryside?