Interview for Blandine Rinkel of Gonzai Magazine (France) with Rick Harsch, S. Foster and Ben Ehrenreich

for http://gonzai.com/kiosque/

1. 1.   In a interview you gave to Global Graffiti Magazine, you said: « My writing would be better if I was less busy in my spirit and my mind. If I wasn’t distracted by wars and riots and traffic, with the music turned up full blast, my books would be easier to read and make more sense. ». Do you think that « too many people, too much life » is always dangerous, at some point, for the particular quality of a writer’s work? Can a writer be excellent although he might be eager to live  life at its full, even if he is « careless »?

A writer can be excellent even if confused, or perfectly confused, like Louis Ferdinand Celine, because of it. In order to understand this confused human consciousness better, I have asked two North American novelists, Rick Harsch and Ben Ehrenreich, to help me answer these questions. Rick (author of Billy Verité and Le Bal des inertes in French, and Arjun and the Good Snake and other books in English) and Ben (author of Ether and The Suitors) will answer these questions with me, and it’s up to the reader to decide which of us delivers the best answer.

For example, in answer to your question:

Those Global Graffiti guys got it all wrong. I was talking about fish soup. I spilled half a bowl on my laptop and three of the characters in the novel I’ve been working on turned into stalks of fennel. In some chapters their love interest is a halibut and by the end she’s four cloves of garlic. Talk about careless.

 

No writer is excellent. The act of writing, by the way, is one of the least dangerous pursuits on the planet. No danger whatsoever is involved. Unfortunately, even a moderate degree of success delivers authors to interviewers, and sometimes we must say the kinds of things I said to Global Graffiti. The truth of it is, sometimes I have nothing to write, so I visit the spirit/obscene war world.

That’s it, just like that.

1. 2.   Behind this, I would like to know if you analyse the distinction between the world and the self, society and the individual, or if  on the contrary through your  writing,  you are  trying to solve the eternal conflict between « the we and the i »?

I never analyse anything; that’s what’s great about fiction–you never have to.

Between the world and the individual, between the self and society are 3 writers—let them answer. One can flee in the most romantic longing, one can drink and dance the fandango, one can take the brunt.

From what I understand that conflict was resolved in a little-known addendum to the gang truce negotiated between rival sets of Crips in L.A.’s Nickerson Gardens projects in 1992, one day before the riots. That was the real reason that Bush Senior sent the Marines to South-Central—it had nothing to do with the whole Rodney King thing, looting, any of that. The politicians never cared about all those diapers and steaks and neighborhoods burning—when did they ever?—but the we/I truce really freaked them out. If it caught on they knew it would put them out of business for good. So they made sure the truce didn’t make the papers, even less than the gang peace had, and the LAPD and the FBI and Interpol and the CIA have been doing their best ever since to guarantee that nobody ever thinks of resolving that one again. As far as I’m concerned, though, that war is over, signed on the dotted line.

3. David Foster Wallace told that « you were in the story what Hunter Thompson was to journalism, a super vitamined punk who could not care less about reality  » Precisely, what is your relationship with informations/news and journalism in general? and with Gonzo journalism in particular?

I’m still mad at Hunter Thompson for what he did to Oscar Zeta Acosta, turning the best Chicano revolutionary novelist of the day into a clownish ether-stoned Samoan named Dr. Gonzo. They were friends, Thompson and Acosta, or at least Thompson said they were and seemed to mean it—Acosta never cared to weigh in—but the vicious old redneck drunk sold out his friend for book sales and a particularly stupid variety of celebrity. After that he descended for decades into a cartoon-worthy vortex of alcoholism and self-hate, from which he emerged years later with a bang and a terrible mess. My sources tell me Acosta still lives, haunting the borderlands, sneaking up on racist vigilantes, tying their shoelaces to their lawn chairs and scaring them awake with his laughter. I saw him once in an almond orchard outside Modesto, eating nuts from the trees, teaching the moths and the hummingbirds how to drop mini-Molotovs on police cruisers and realtors.

Gonzo journalism was Hunter Thompson and only Hunter Thompson.

I am a victim of the news media, I love its fictive narratives, I sit with my coffee and waste hours reading the New York Times, the New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Facebook articles and rantings, it makes my nose run and my teeth fall out. It gives me gum disease. I love the news and its phony stories, it makes me feel as if I were there. I was never there.

4. In France, there are only a few people involved in the field of highly subjective writing of Gonzo, what about in the US? Who are the survivors (or precursors) of Gonzo?

See above.

I repeat: gonzo journalism was Hunter Thompson and only Hunter Thompson. Perhaps in France there are journalists engaged in Foie d’ blaise journalism or something like that.

The precursors or survivors of Gonzo included E. Hemingway, Jack London, J. Kerouac, George Orwell, L. F. Celine, Isabelle Eberhardt, Hernan Cortez, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Thor Heyerdahl, Jose Lopez-Feliu, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Kathy Acker, Osamu Dazai, Juan Goytisolo, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Oscar Zeta Acosta and Charles Baudelaire, among others. There are lots of others but their books get lost in corners or under sofas.

1. 5.   In relation to this, in Atomik Aztex, your writing is wonderfully unbridled, the novel presents itself as a real “mixed casserole”, a « pot-au-fou »; do you think you are crazy like that everyday or is it that the writing  allows you to reach a climax of madness that is prohibited in “real life”? In that could you eat the wolf or dance the Bamba slaughtering pigs, for example?

 

I have eaten things I could have been arrested for, that’s all I will say about that. Otherwise, madness as I seem to think you understand it, is a intrinsic to the post-Ramapithecans.

Do you really think anything is prohibited in “real life”? Slaughter is a local specialty in these parts, has been since at least the 1600s. We built a whole legal system to protect it and a vast international bureaucracy to safeguard its export. I understand it has been immensely popular, even more so than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, except in a few scattered rebellious parts of the globe where they don’t have internet yet and haven’t learned how to shut up and be cool. Which wolf are you referring to? 

Once I broke my leg in a river 40 miles from my car in the North Cascades by the Canada border; once I walked around Southern Mexico and ate mushrooms floating in lake scum and explored caves with burning pine sticks; I have traveled through war-time Managua hanging off the outside of over-crowded teetering buses and planted trees on volcanoes; I have landed via helicopter to fight great forest fires in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming; I punched out factory windows with my bare hands when I was 12 years old till my hands were shredded, bleeding—but I still can’t dance, I can’t dance la Bamba.

6. How do you correct your texts? Your style at least is similar to a freshly painted wall; it IS shinY, it’s new, it’s exciting, but we feel that it is fragile, that all the layers are not yet “toughened “… It is far from the logic of the test or a study of the workings of the detective novel. Do you rework every sentence, every word, despite the impression of “letting go” in writing?

“I” am not even writing this. See answer to question 2, above.

My methods of composition include collage, collaborative experiments like this “interview,” borrowing and plagiarism, sampling and expurgation, so that passages should sound like dialogue overheard, perhaps imperfectly overheard or recorded (with errors), and corresponding to the fitful lacunae of ordinary activities, where we are regularly interrupted by others. Sometimes there is an explosion of

I have never corrected anything in my life, much less my ‘writing’. Sometimes I have made changes, but any changes I have made have likely been for the worse. And I never let go. That would be a tremendous mistake, akin, if you don’t mind my putting it this way, to squeezing out quietly a long suppressed fart.

7. At the end, is logic an asshole for you? What sort of writing bores you? What are you against, if not at war? What are you wrestling with?

Music makes me feel grandiose like a hairy mammoth. I never feel extinct when I am dreaming and arguing with the universe. The universe says, “Poet, kill this chicken.” I kill the chicken. You insert the chicken into a traffic cone upsidedown, head down, feet in the air. You cut its throat after it looks at you with yellow eyes of trust. I eat chicken feeling I am Poet of the Universe. It’s not a bad job, many are worse. I have come this far with greasy fingers. If you come over my house I will barbecue for you.

 

 

Logic is a friend who won’t leave when it is time for me to sleep. I just leave him with his beer on the balcony and go to sleep. I am at war with everything in the world destructive to the human. I am often bored by books that are too logical in their display of battles against things destructive to the human. I wrestle with anything/anyone who wants to wrestle with me. I guess you could say I was a born wrestler.

Logic is like one of those magician’s boxes with a false bottom. It’s not a problem for anyone but the most gullible kids in the audience. I’m basically a man of peace, but I still struggle with potholes, foxtails, standardized testing, kale, the overzealous policing and regulation of urban airspace, insufficiently seasoned broth, the fungus that grows over everything, the mildew that grows on the fungus, the mold that grows on the mildew.

8. You taught at the Jack Kerouac Summer School. There is no school of its kind in France and the principle intrigues us very much… What did you teach exactly, there? Do you have a writing technique – precise – narrative? Was is something completely different? Was is a different matter? 

The only way to discuss my teaching properly would be for you to track down my students and ask them. but I will say that the last thing I do is try to teach them to be anything like me. I may forget sometimes, but I should tell them all to read Moby Dick.

 

I taught “Writing as Intervention in Place” based on ideas of Gary Snyder and William Carlos Williams, but it’s not like the old days anyway, when Andrei Codrescu had naked girls running in and out of his room, jumping into the swimming pool, when Diane diPrima was in a bad mood because her writing was no fun so she threw all the furniture off the balcony, and everybody was running around with ugly breath, sniggling marijuana giggles. Nowadays they have a sign on the fence that says, “No Nudity Please” and the workshops are full of wan academics. It’s like the Tassajara Zen Center, where on the gate of the swimming pool they have a sign, “No Children Allowed.” The Buddhists can’t allow kids in the pool while the old folks lay about naked alongside the rushing stream, till they turn the color of Weimaraners? Kids can’t squeak and shout while self-absorbed geezers try to massage their epiphanies?

It’s actually quite rigorous. Due to the unorthodox nature of the program, we are not yet able to award degrees, but we encourage our graduates to call themselves “doctor,” “president,” or “pope.” The first year is mainly animal husbandry with electives available in geology, horticulture, and elementary principles of aviation. The last year is all quantum mechanics and knife skills. Due to the violent neoliberal restructuring conducted over the last three decades, an increasing number of our graduates are having a hard time finding employment in their chosen fields of study, so we’re working on a cosmetology minor.

9. Warning, this is a little awkward question, but I have to put it: you talk a lot about Germany, Russia, the Aztecs of America… but not so much about France. Do you read  past or present French authors? If so, who and why? If not, who won’t you you read and why?

What exactly do you mean by “French”?

If you feel awkward you should attend to your breathing, then get into a crouch, spread your legs to shoulder width, bend your knees, and then ask at will. That said, my unkind response would be whether or not you asked, for instance, Juan Carlos Onetti why he didn’t write a novel about France, or including French people. Of course I read and have read numerous French authors and I have to ask you why, though there are so many great French poets and novelists, the best is still Rabelais?

All French practitioners of the prose poem are important to me, as are the Dadaists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, the Detroitists (I am not in love with Oulipo which is the great rage nowadays in the U.S.A.—I will read them but their mathematics is not interesting—it reminds me of static pictures like graphics in graphic novels and comic books), Cendrars, Duras, Celine, Michaux, Delbo, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Mandel, Edmond Jabes, Paul Poissel, Aimé Césaire, Fifa Fafu, Julio Cortazar, Annie Ernaux, and I wish I read more French, but New York oppresses me.

10. To finish with, in Gonzai magazine the slogan is “only the detail counts”: something to say about a detail that you recently noted (today, for example)? What detail did you notice recently which could inspire you a story?

Great and timely question. Just today I was watching the film Miller’s Crossing and a character said, meaning it metaphorically, that another had a wart on his fanny. I realized then that some discomfort I had been feeling but only really noting in the back of my mind was caused by a wart on my fanny. Of course the theme of synchronicity, the real versus the metaphorical, the metaphorical real as metaphorical, the detail as universe, the universe as negligible, the tried and true, the bumpkin and the lawyer, the maid and her skirts, the mother of pearl ear-rings, the sportsmanship crisis, the little predator drone that couldn’t, these and many many other things immediately came to mind, and I have taken time out to answer these question and ask that you look for the product of this topic in one to two years. Thank you.

One detail that I noticed were the faces advancing and retreating into vast space and distance between us all, like they used to do in my nightmares when I was eight years old, the faces would approach intensely and many would would pull back as if on a line, as if being retrieved by some mechanism, in a kind of pulsating rhythm, they would approach with great speed as if in attack (in the Sea of Cortez a female sea lion once approached my face as instantaneously across twelve meters of distance in a couple of seconds, so fast she stuck her nose toward my snorkeling mask to peer directly into my eyes that I of course flinched and jerked back, startling her so that she too flinched, jerked back and swam away) and all the faces are tremulous with outrage and despair, but I can’t communicate with any of them. So I turn to the nearest and ask them how they are today.

Cathy Park Hong’s “A Proposition: Stand Up”

 

Cathy Park Hong’s

A Proposition: Stand Up

@ the New Museum

with responses by

Ariana Reines, Catherine Wagner,

Ronaldo V Wilson & Mores McWreath

Embracing at Functions, Shaking the Left Hand

I am like you, obese diabetic working man totally defeated by ordinary days, because I too am beaten down by my days, a consumer of charred sizzly popping meats, I too am a consumer of anything and everything sugary with that glittering mystery, of tissue wrappers with sacred names crumpled on them, of endless fake spiritual epiphanies and spiritual roadbumps of phenomenology

I think you are just like me, sore disgruntled loser medicating himself with endless whining complaints, pushing himself along in his raggedy cares, or the bitter woman standing behind all the rest pouting, folding her arms over the accumulated belly of swallowed humiliations she has heaped on herself for not conforming to her own reflection in shiny machinery of the airport or cigarette machines of waiting rooms on hellish avenues, I shall stick out my lower lip of disapproval of the fucked up existence of this world,

I know you, self-obsessed teenager relentlessly plucking at any ragged tuft of hair or bit of yourself that sticks out to be noticed, I too am endlessly worrying about my own concerns at every moment so that I cannot even hear clearly what all these people are saying to me, everyone is saying something about something (I just can’t tell what their point is, I know that’s how it goes for you, it’s all a buzzing static), over and over

I feel you, young racist white youths who veered at me in the pickup truck and flipped me off yelling something with scrunchy faces, so what if I follow you to the intersection and jump out of my vehicle but cannot chase on foot because you run the red light peeling away in exhaust clouds of burning rubber, I am playing your game— I too glory in wild absurd emotive concussions at the end of nerves

I forgive you picky bastard, for holding yourself separate from everyone, for thinking none of this has anything to do with you, you don’t want their oily skin secretions touching your educated fingertips of your sensibilities and goggly eyeballs, you don’t want none of that sticky shit and hair clippings and ethnic spices to get on your person, to deteriorate the porous calcified foundations of your lifestyle, I know I myself have turned away endlessly from people, just like you

I’m with you little kid, wiggling in your chair, can’t sit still in the restaurant while the rest of the family and your father’s friends are eating Lebanese buffet, you gotta jump down out of your curly headed chair and make origami out of the napkin, jumping with dancy leaps throwing it up in the air, pointy napkin tumbling through the air like the flying star of your delight, you are catching it or half-catching it, half-knocking over your water, making commotions, your father jumps out of his chair after chiding and scolding you repeatedly slaps you hard on the back of the head (it was all I could do kid not to jump out of my own chair at that point, sorry I thought it would go harder for you if I did), he grabs your arm and jerks you back to your chair hard, jerks you into sitting position in your chair and snarls in your face “Sit in the goddamn chair and don’t move!” while his guests look discomfited, and you sit there stunned, your delight isn’t even a memory, instantly it’s a numb pain so you don’t even cry, just sit in shock—I lift my insipid ice water and drink to you kid

You are my kind, you ineffective nerdomatic intellectuals submerged in joys of wordage and verbiage, expostulating or correlating, cross-referencing and coagulating texts and notions, sentiments and works, concepts and price lists, all because that’s the peaceful thing to do while the world is at war—fuck ‘em, they want to kill each other—I’ll go read and write poems

Line texted on 60 freeway -

the triumph of capitalism is capitulation to any random circumstance result of bad luck when instead so much is learned from crows, crows

Your message was successfully delivered to an answering machine or voicemail at 323 333 3333 Thanks for using Text to Landline

Your message was successfully delivered to an answering machine or voicemail at 323 333 3333 Thanks for using Text to Landline

Your message was successfully delivered to an answering machine or voicemail at 626 888 8888 Thanks for using Text to Landline

The customer you are trying to text is out of service. Msg 2132

The customer you are trying to text is out of service. Msg 2132

The close up view of earth, twin macro lenses opened up to maximum aperture, these fat earthworms in a ball all crusted with dry dirt

Don’t trust those crows. They’ll do anything for a buck

Hey I learned from  a Japanese woman that crows can talk like parrots!

 

What do the crows say?

 

 

mother’s day late at night

SOMEWHERE IN THERE the streets I know end in vagueness, generalities. Somewhere in there, the streets of the city and the streets of night end in a spicy, smoky smell of girl sweat, like bread fresh from the oven. Somewhere in there, our decades together, decades we’ve known each other. As if those decades still exist; in fact they do not. Phone messages erased from numbers that never existed in this century, messages she wished I would have received, once upon a time. However many times she saved my life, two or three at least, her unspoken fears or disgust with me, must exist somewhere in there, like shadows at night. Shadows on the other side of shrubbery, under the dim glare of a semi-distant streetlamp. Darkness, unknowing, on the far side of walls, the other side of eyes. I walk the night streets and avenues in sleep, in dreams. I drive them, talking to her. Everything that was done, and undone, even if it’s gone now. Years vanished as if they never were, but her smell rises in my memory, volatile as gasoline, the dense female fragrance I kiss at the base of her spine. It rises behind the daylight, like mole rubbed between two fingertips, like a big river coming around a bend in the dark.

 

 

Fellowship Hostel Postcard

Henry Suenaga (reading newspaper) from Manzanar, and Ben Nishiyama from Poston, relaxing in a section of one of the men’s dormitories at Evergreen Hostel, Los Angeles. Both are looking for homes. Ben first went to Minneapolis from Poston, and Henry to Mississippi from Manzanar. They enjoy the comfortable dormitory and good meals at low cost at the Evergreen Hostel. Conditions in Los Angeles are good, and there are jobs though not as many as the east–but finding a home is a tough proposition, the young men say. That goes for anyone, any race. — Photographer: Mace, Charles E. — Los Angeles, California. 6/1/45

Ken Ehrlich and I walked around Evergreen Cemetery and 5 Puntos and found two nice lodgers who let us into the Fellowship House, still standing on Evergreen where Aunti Fu and Uncle John met after returning from internment after World War 2, down the street from where Manuel’s is now in East L.A., before they married. The place appears more rundown than it seems in the video, but you get the idea. People living in small single and double dorm rooms, with camp-like concrete showers under the stairs, and communal areas where they could meet and eat. A couple older guys are living in the place now, but it’s mostly empty, with a few scattered childrens’ toys and a faded basketball making it seem emptier. Mexican music coming from some odd corner of the building, down the darkened hall. The fountain in the central courtyard stained and dry, pigeons living in the eves. In the words of the caption from 1945 old photo: “Luncheon at the Evergreen Hostel, 506 N. Evergreen Street, Los Angeles. Three meals a day and dormitory accommodations are provided at only $1 per person per day for the first week, and $1.50 from then on. The meals are prepared in a clean kitchen by fellow guests, who all partake of the housekeeping duties in the operation of the hostel. The Evergreen Hostel cares for 80 to 90 guests at one time. It is three stories high, and has an attractive patio. It is located in the Boyle Heights district on the eastern side of the Los Angeles River. The surroundings are quiet and pleasant, and streetcars provide good transportation to downtown Los Angeles. — Photographer: Mace, Charles E. — Los Angeles, California. 6/1/45″

These rooming houses were from days before motel chains, when you could get a cheap room at the YMCA across the street from the Greyhound station in Santa Barbara if you were passing through town, or on the outs with your people. Who looks out to shelter poor people on the move these days? After World War 2 apparently the Quakers and other L.A. churches like Union Church (now the East West Theater) helped the Issei and Nisei return to town and find a place to live after they had been forcibly evacuated.

Mr. George Yanase, his wife Ann, their little girl Robbie Jeane (age 19 months), and Rev. S. Kowta, all from Poston, in the patio of Evergreen Hostel, Los Angeles. Mr. and Mrs. George Yanase left Poston a year and a half ago to move to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where he does garage work. Before the war, they lived at Anaheim, California. They plan to return to Pagosa Springs, and their three other children at Poston will join them. Meantime at Evergreen Hostel, Mr. and Mrs. Yanase and Robbie Jeane are comfortably housed and fed. Rev. Kowta is one of the two managers of the Evergreen Hostel. — Photographer: Mace, Charles E. — Los Angeles, California. 6/1/45

James Shimokawa, his wife Jennie and their little son Gary, age 3, shown living at the Evergreen Hostel, Los Angeles. They left Manzanar in 1943 to go to Idaho, then moved to Denver, and on June 1, stepped out of a taxi in front of the hostel, where they were welcomed by Rev. S. Kowta. The Evergreen Hostel is a quiet part of Los Angeles on the east side, and occupies the building used before the war as a Presbyterian Church School for Japanese children. Rev. S. Kowta, Presbyterian Minister, and Esther Rhoades manage the hostel, under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church and the American Friends. Eighty to ninety people–men, women, and children–are accommodated at one time at the hostel. Room and meals are only $1 a day to start, and $1.50 after the first week. — Photographer: Mace, Charles E. — Los Angeles, California. 6/1/45

A Reader Asks, “I love Wanda Coleman. But will someone please explain why each of these events are always on a weeknight?”

•  I love Wanda Coleman. But will someone please explain why each of these events are always on a weeknight?

• because night time is the right time
• because a pecan thinks like a walnut might
• because one night is as good as two lost years
• because you can roll it and smoke it in that pipe mister
• because you gotta limber up and reach out to your brothers and sisters
•  because out behind the bus depot they have a dance for people like yourself
• because in a jiggle and a whiff things can change
• because it’s not all peanut butter and asphalt
• because the wieners and dogs at pinks la brea are dreaming and steaming till late
• because some airplanes go overhead and then for a long while that’s all there was
•  because this is not poland 1939 and you can afford to live a little
• because it could approach the key hour, the crucial one, the most important one, that one
• because of the portable hand drill, the mounted cross bar, the steel flanged plaform, and the overlook glasses
• because of the grief, the bobbing joy, the overlooked grief, the still bobbing joy, the streaming desire
• because of the murky swells glistening and shining underneath the dissipating fog

  

Personal Interest Questions

1. Where did this new idea come from?

Where did this fresh carrot come from?

Where did this wild space come from?

4. Where did this kidney come from?

4a. Where did this clean underwear come from?

5. Where did these offers come from?

6. Where did the girl come from?

7. From where did this dense rich smell arise and surround us?

must

freedom is the recognition of necessity

—engels, anti-duhring

the palm trees of the san gabriel valley must always look stern and stoic and a little sad like foreigners doing their duty far from home

the cardboard box must be set out at the curb, festooned with a bit of colored paper on top

citizens must wave at each other, wash their cars, or drive away

the pleasant elderly woman in the vietnamese restaurant with a face wrinkled by pleasure must answer her cell phone and say,

“how are you? i am here with my friends, we are eating. we are very well, we stayed at your house last night.

you’ll be home tomorrow? yes, i am leaving today…”

the other parties in the vietnamese restaurant must look so endearing—

the woman closes out her phone call, “yes, thank you. i love you too.”

i must look at these people to muse about them and a woman must watch me as i rise to leave

outside the san gabriel mission two small girls must run back and forth at the fountain

the woman must lie on the grass watching them, earplugs in, tapping her ipod

she must yawn

she must have that look on her face

the football team must do a poor job washing my vehicle at their carwash fundraiser

the teens must be fooling around, slacking off and not half of them doing their jobs

the assistant big roly-poly coach must not even pay attention, instead spend his time jibing his young charges,

saying things such as, “I could be at a UCLA spring training game today,” and, “You are a homosexual.

That means you like members of the same sex.” he must say this—

—i had to give them $10—

brilliance of sunshine must pour down like joycean literary figurative snow on all the living and dead

in a half an hour i must drive down valley blvd to attend the memorial for cesar who died a week and a half ago

(colon cancer, he did die as we must)

over all, the sky must pour implacably, brilliance

Letter, April 25

yes i agree with marina’s assessment that changes are underway, and have been for some time, that can’t be fixed in the short run.

ronald reagan become president when marina was born, and he represented the politics (and economic policies) that have ruled for the past 30 years; certainly we and others of our generation have resisted these politics and policies for our whole adult lives to try and give you a better world than the shit they are handing you—endless wars, money for killing via unmanned drones but not for schools or kids or art or trains or bridges, fewer civil rights instead of more, fewer chances of a good life instead of more, closures of libraries state parks schools university programs and possibilities for a better more positive life for millions. instead the u.s. has the most people in prison of any country in the world and a steadily declining quality of life.

but we and our friends protested against all these policies year after year and against all the wars that spent all the money that could have gone to make the world better. we organized organizations, traveled to war zones, marched in the streets, wrote editorials and letters to the editor and poems and graffitti, spoke on campuses and elsewhere, made money and posters and gave money to causes and groups, got arrested and got harassed and got burnt out  and we did all these things personally, for you—otherwise the goddamn situation would be even worse, sorry to say.

the right wing movement worked for 3 decades to achieve these crimes, disasters, assassinations and messes: massive corruption of the financial system, economic devastation and stagnation for your generation, a future messed up, corrupted, ruined for many many millions of people. it won’t get better until your whole generation realizes they have to do something about it. it’s worldwide—there’s nowhere to run and hide (rick went to slovenia, and he said the same thing is happening there; and he’s unemployed with 2 young kids to raise).

if it took decades long for them to make this mess, it’ll take a long time for others to fix, so no rush. but something needs to be done, obviously. that’s life—that’s what being part of history means, that history affects your life, and you become part of the history that you make.

that’s why it matters if you live your life to make a difference, (love),