Neanderpundit

Over at Mr Venlet’s place, he links to the meanderings of an anarchist. My response, learned from Mark Alger, is, I feel, quite appropriate. After all, as our moms all told us, try to say something nice.

Because she repeats all the typical Anarchist canards. We don’t need no government, we can band together to protect ourselves (Whoa, isn’t that like- you know- government?) we should have the freedom to yadda yadda yadda.

I get it. No, I mean, I really, really do. I understand that people want to be free. it’s like people with Ron Paul bumperstickers; they are my brethren despite their silliness, because their hearts are firmly in the right place; they desire an increase of Freedom. Shit, this nation was founded by people who wanted to be free, and for the most part, it has worked pretty damned well, actually. Try speaking your mind or owning weapons or private property in other areas of the planet, and tell me how that goes.

No, it’s admirable and decent and well, right, to want the maximum daily requirement of Freedom, and then maybe a little bit more.

buuuut, here’s the thing.

No matter what system of government you can describe (And yes, Anarchy is a system of government, no matter how many lies you tell yourself to the contrary) there will be people willing, ready, and able to grab ahold of your rights and jam them right up your ass, because they can. it has happened to OUR government. And now I have to ask the question I always ask:

if you have some magic for preventing powerful people from corrupting your brave new world, why aren’t you using it now?

So far, no answers to that one. No meaningful answers, I should say.

Human civilization is defined by the Rule of Law. The Rule of law and real Anarchy are incompatible. The problem is, tolerance creep in the rule of law.

Tolerance creep can be fixed. So can the kind of innocence that leads one to believe that Anarchy is a solution; it is merely the egg out of which a much, much larger problem hatches.

So to Ms Rose: Nice tits. You seem to be very nice and I would not wish harm to a hair on your head. Your obliviousness to the brutal realities of life glow with the brightness of ten thousand suns, and I hope the lessons you need to learn are learned without too much discomfort.

MTV is what, thirty two years old this August? And it’s turned into a punk.

I LOVED mtv. I would leave it on 24/7, as often as not. I never got tired of watching, even the lameass early MTV which had the Buggles, four or five lipsynched Stones videos, and some other shit stolen from one variety show or another. Oh, and John Cougar’s little ditty about jack & dianne, which would never have been heard outside of Indiana if not for MTV.

it wasn’t very long until, like goldfish, the talent expanded to fill the available space- really amazing videos started to come down the pike, like ZZ Top’s ‘Rough Boy’, Billy Gibbons mournful guitar licks making it a great song even before they filled the video with what for the time were amazing SFX and leggy broads, or pieces thereof. Tom Petty’s ‘Don’t come around here no more” was another that I enjoyed immensely. Much later in the game Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” was a video that was visually amusing and earwormy too. And Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of choice”- well, any video in which Chris Walken flies has my vote.

There are hundreds of them that I enjoyed, and for the most part, they are relegated to the backalleys of Youtube these days.

I worked for a design firm once whose principal told me he couldn’t watch MTV because the movie in his head was better than what they put on the screen. I understand that, because I’m that way about movies, sometimes, but the truth really is, watching some of the better videos on MTV was being able to see the song through someone else’s mind’s eye, to experience their imagination. I mean, I’ve seen flowers, but when Van Gough painted them, his imagination allowed me to see something else about flowers that I had never seen before.

I want my MTV. Don’t look like I’m gonna get it anytime soon. Amazing that in the span of 32 years you could create, saturate, and destroy an entire art form.