Revolution Right Now: The Ends are the Means

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There’s been a lot of talk about revolution here at SQUABBLER – lots of wild ideas about total systemic overhaul – and you might be wondering: what the hell can I do? Maybe Thatcher was right, you might be thinking, maybe there really is no alternative.

But there is. The revolution isn’t a distant idea. It is already happening.

War All the Time

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The important thing to understand is that revolution is not utopianism. It is not about imagining some perfect society and then striving towards that. Revolution is a constant process of change, of adaptation. The old anarchist motto says it all: “live as though you were already free.” The means are the ends. Revolution is a daily activity.

It begins by knowing your enemy. Who is it that is preventing you from living the life you want to live? Is it a cruel landlord? A petty manager? Or is it the government which has failed to provide its citizens affordable housing and the economic system that drives us into jobs we’d rather not have simply to make money? Is it mediated images of white supremacist hetero-normative patriarchy through Hollywood films and television or is it the performative resistance to this and a false alliance to progressive ideals by companies who profit off of systems of inequality? Is it the cops? Is it the supermarkets? Is it the entire state which exists only through the assertion of force, the theft of land and the sustaining rewards of racism?

It is all of these.

Revolution is not simply fought in the streets. It is not necessarily destructive, though destruction may help. As Mikhail Bakunin says, “the destructive act is also a creative passion.” This may have worked in an industrial society, against a state apparatus of discipline and punish. But today, in our interconnected surveillance society, beneath the eyes of money-powered Control, revolution is best fought with your wallet.

I’m not talking about “shopping locally,” or “buying organic.” These are middle-class responses. Most people can’t afford to do this. I’m talking about food-security education: learning how to grow your own food, access community gardens, how to take over otherwise disused green spaces in your neighborhood and begin to understand how to manage your own food supply.

More importantly, I’m talking of how not to buy. If we have learned the many names of our enemy and seen how they all answer to the supreme name of Capitalism, then we must agree that the replication of capital through buying and selling is an action in service to the adversary.

Simply put, the most revolutionary act you can do is to stop spending money on absolutely anything you don’t need to. Steal music, go to a library, shoplift if you feel like it and accept the risk. These are truly revolutionary acts that present a direct challenge to the concepts of exchange and property that underpin capitalism.

Challenge yourself.

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Mainstream media reinforces the status quo which legitimizes capitalist hegemony. Mainstream narratives either are encoded with bigoted thought or perform our resistance for us by paying lip service to anti-capitalist ideas whilst tightening the grip of very regime they decry. Films, television, and popular music are all equally guilty of this. Better to seek out the bizarre, the formally experimental, the challenging. Especially difficult works produced by people marginalized by the current system. Read from small presses, discover music on Bandcamp or Soundcloud. Better yet, make something yourself.

Creation is Resistance.

Stasis is the enemy. Comfort is complacency. Capitalism would have us stalled in every motion that is not directly related to production and consumption. That’s a nice hobby, says Aunt Thea, but what do you do? Creation is not necessarily production. L’art pour l’art is a direct challenge to the capitalist notions of entertainment and economic service that artists have long been shackled to. Make something and give it away. Write a book to pull the pillars down. Make a beat, write a song. Never sit still and always be exactly who you want to be. This is revolution.

The political is personal. We are holding ourselves back and others less fortunate than us every time we participate in the economy. The market is responsible for global warming, the market is responsible for wide-spread inequality. The market means you are not free. Revolution exists wherever capitalism is resisted. Capitalism exists wherever capital is self-replicated.

Ask yourself: do I want a better world or a better phone?

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Take-out: Food Insecurity and Resistance

photo by john cameron from unsplash

“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen.”

These lines, from Woody Guthrie’s classic paean to the outlaw life, Pretty Boy Floyd, demonstrate the two kinds of thieves in this world: the capitalists who have stolen from the common stock for profit and those who have been driven by the cruelty of economic inequality to steal it back.

We’re taught to fear the masked criminals (though now that we are all masked, it is much harder to tell them apart), the hooded prowler out for your jewels, the mugger in the alleyway. Yet we pay rent and tax to those who’ve claimed a monopoly on the natural world: the landlords and CEOs who’ve ransomed our rights for an ever-increasing price.

photo by franki chamaki from unsplash

Everything in this world is already owned. The concept of property has created a free-market which stakes its claim on every natural resource, placing a price tag on that which should be held in common. As the mutualist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously reminds us, “la propriété, c'est le vol”

Long ago, when the earth was first carved up by early merchant capitalists, resources such as arable land and game rich forests were monopolized by force. Agrarian people were displaced and absorbed into the economy of cities, where they became increasingly alienated from one another, the products of their labor and their ability to rely upon themselves and their community to survive.

When people become disconnected from the knowledge and tools to produce their own food, they become dependent on the apparatus of supermarkets and restaurants. These institutions take food which, framed in Marxist terms, has an intrinsic ‘use value’(because we need it to live), and attaches the capitalist ‘exchange value’ wherein food becomes worth more because of the methods of production/cost of labor. To this a third value is attached, what Baudrillard has called the ‘sign value’ wherein certain food is perceived as more desirable because of its attachment to brand names, celebrities, and the social capital of eating what/where is “on trend.”

photo by maksym ivaschenko from unsplash

When a person cannot afford this now overvalued food, they may turn to the food bank industry and receive nutritionally negligible, preservative filled “non-perishable” items. Instead of access to quality ingredients and knowledge about cooking and growing techniques, the food bank provides what wealthier people didn’t want. This foments the culture of dependence, ensuring the population is beholden to the state and its allies. Where, now, is one left to turn?

“My stomach hurts so I’m looking for a purse to snatch;” Tupac Shakur explains how a society like this will never go through any meaningful Changes. According to a Food Insecurity Policy paper, 1.8 million Canadian houses are food-insecure, with nearly half unable to afford balanced meals. Many neighborhoods in Canada are considered “food deserts,” areas where residents have little or no access to healthy food. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor, and the population are driven into the waiting arms of the food bank profiteers.

Every capitalist who has claimed a monopoly on a food supply and withheld it from others at a price is a thief. This presents the starving person with a moral question: is it theft if you are stealing back that which is yours? Is it fair to demand that everyone have equal access to food? For the mother who cannot afford to feed her family, who has had everything kept from her by pen-pushing thieves, where else is there to turn than the six-gun?

And as Bertolt Brecht says in the Threepenny Opera: “food is the first thing, morals follow on.”

For information about food bank alternatives visit parkdalefoocentre.ca.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks far too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

“Donec id justo non metus auctor commodo ut quis enim. Mauris fringilla dolor vel condimentum imperdiet.”

— Jonathan L.

Defund, Dismantle, Abolish: Why Policing Must End

On July 24, 2016, right here in Ottawa, a thirty-seven-year-old Somali-Canadian man named Abdirahman Abdi was sent into fatal cardiac arrest after being severely beaten by two police officers. Abdi suffered from severe mental health issues and had been causing a disturbance at a nearby coffee shop, allegedly groping a female patron. Instead of the incident being de-escalated by a crisis management team of trained mental health professionals, the staff at the coffee shop did what we have all been conditioned to do when confronted with a social emergency: they dialed 911. In death, Abdi has, like countless Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), unfortunately become a symbol of a struggle against not only racist police practices, but also against the institution of the police itself.

In the year of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as so many others killed by the armed wing of state control, many have begun to question the need for police at all.

To understand police abolition, we must first understand the reasons the police exist.

Sir John A MacDonald founded the RCMP when the Prime Minister was inspired to create a Canadian equivalent to the Royal Irish Constabulary, a British paramilitary force used to quash dissent in Ireland. Instead of suppressing the Irish people’s freedom, MacDonald wanted his own armed guard to control Canada’s Indigenous population. The RCMP was founded to solely separate people from their ancestral land and to violently enforce colonial rule, something they continue to do to this day as witnessed by the recent aggressive engagements in Wet’suwe’ten and Land Back Lane 1492 in Caledonia, ON.

In the United States, one of the first police forces was the paramilitary Watch and Guard of Charleston city. An armed outfit of white mercenaries, the Watch and Guard was charged with the duty of catching runaway slaves and violently stamping out any hints of Black rebellion. The current police force of the city of Charleston is the direct descendant of the Watch and Guard.

Policing protects property, whether that property be stolen land or human bodies. Two-thirds of all crimes are property related. The police, and the violence they represent, are the state’s way of reminding us that, in a capitalist system, your lives are worth less than a few store windows. Anyone who suffers from the unequal distribution of property in our society is likely to have repeated encounters with the police.

The police represent the state’s capacity of violence, and nothing else. They are the threat of physical harm that awaits anyone who dares to break the laws. Try to continually refuse even the most routine demand from a police officer long enough and you will surely feel this violence in some form.

Why, then, do we continually call the police? Does the situation require violent intervention? And especially where BIPOC are concerned, is it worth the risk of sentencing someone to a brutal death?

Ejaz Choudry, Chantal Moore, Regis Korchinsky-Paquet. All murdered in Canada in 2020 by police on “wellness checks,” mental health crises which, for some unfathomable reason, necessitate intervention by the purveyors of state violence. Where was the specialized team of crisis intervention workers, trained in conflict de-escalation and community support? Why did Abdirahman Abdi face brass-knuckled thugs instead of empathetic outreach responders?

The police reinforce the inequality and inherent racism of our colonial, carceral-capitalist environment. It is not something that can be reformed. Not something that body cams, or even a reduction in budget spending can fix. When Wet’suwe’ten activists blocked the rails in solidarity earlier this year, the hashtag #shutdowncanada was trending (meaning something very different in those pre-COVID times). To achieve true, meaningful reconciliation with this country’s horrific past, we must dismantle the current system entirely. Canada isn’t a matter of fact. It is a country operating under the shared assumption of validity, enshrined by laws and treaties which are enforced by violent policing of its citizens. If we want to see a society of compassion, of empathy, sharing and equality we must envision a world without the need for a single cop.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Universal Basic Income: A Weight Lifted

When the shadow of COVID-19 fell across Canada, as with much of the world, it immediately revealed the many fault lines running through our current mode of social organization. With some qualifying for the now-rescinded Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and others not, some being declared essential and thrust to the front-lines while others were able to shelter at home, the chasm between privilege and disadvantage was thrown into terrible relief.

Economic stimulus cheques sent a muddy message to the public: if $2000 a month is considered the minimum amount a person needs to remain alive during a pandemic, why, for so long, have so many been forced to live on so much less?

Governments are like parents – the majority of the people they rule over didn’t ask for their custody, they were merely born into it. Like parents, a government has a responsibility to provide care for the people they are in charge. Ostensibly, this is the whole point of government.

If we are born into living in a world where everything has a price, then it should be the government’s duty to ensure that every citizen has money to spend. If our human rights – our access to water, shelter, and food – are slapped with a price tag, it is a human rights violation to make these things inaccessible.

Utopia Now

“No penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it is their only way of getting food. It would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood so that nobody is under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief, then a corpse.”

— Thomas More

These lines are from More’s classic work of theory fiction published in 1516, Utopia. More’s close friend, the humanist scholar Johannes Ludovicus Vives went further in envisioning a means of delivering subsistence to every citizen, regardless of their economic background. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine saw the need for a basic income given to the people by the state as repayment for the theft of landed property, the brilliant socialist Charles Fourier thought so too. The history of a universal basic income is the history of the struggle for egalitarianism within a stratified capitalist system.

If the government already owns every piece of land, every natural resource and has barred us from the ability to eke out a free living ourselves, a guaranteed wage is only the start of what we are owed.

Dignity for All

If everyone had a guaranteed minimum income, we would be free to realize our potential in whatever way we see fit. People would be less likely to remain in dangerous living situations for economic reasons, would be less likely to take jobs that pose risk to their mental and physical health. As the late, great David Graeber theorizes in his indispensable book Bullshit Jobs, a guaranteed income may expose just how many jobs are being performed in our society for no good reason at all. Automation can help. We are well passed the point where robotics and AI are advanced enough to make redundant every thankless job.

Either blessed or cursed with the gift of reason, we humans are meant for more than drudgery. For too long have we held ourselves back.

The Times They are a-Changing

There have been many UBI pilot projects all over the world, all with startlingly positive results. One of these is in the fight against climate change.

UBI can reduce the emissions caused by the current 50 hour work week, as well as slow the unsustainable cycle of consumption and production in which we have trapped ourselves and the natural world. A guaranteed cash payment to every citizen could ease the transition away from a fossil fuel economy into green energy that would otherwise leave millions jobless. In Indonesia, a guaranteed income project reduced deforestation in the region it was implemented by 30%.

UBI is a weight lifted; not only off our own burdened backs, but from off the planet, too.

Universal basic income can make extreme poverty extinct. It smashes the need for a welfare state and empowers every individual to realize their full potential. It is a way of making capitalism work for everyone, not just the wealthy. It is a way of taking back from the resource monopolists a small share of what is ours.

To learn more and become involved visit ubiworks.ca.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The F-word: The Soft Face of Fascism

image from pixabay

The F-word is once again haunting the public discourse. For a while it seemed like the word was doomed to be thoughtlessly hurled at stingy parents and customer service representatives, its true relevance long banished from the western world.

But we aren’t seeing a resurgence in fascism – it never really left.

Fascism is less a political ideology than a way of life. It need not be strictly authoritarian – but it is always sadistic. It may not be outwardly racist, but it is often preoccupied with race. It may not be an iron fist it rules with but a green dollar. Fascism is all around us, ever has been - in some form or other it ever will be. We must learn to recognize its many faces.

For the Love of Country

Merriam Webster defines fascism as a philosophy, regime or movement which exalts the nation above the individual. There is the implication of autocratic control though this need not be necessarily a dictatorial rule. It may be rule by a wealthy elite (plutocracy), a corporation (corporatocracy) or, even the market itself (what some ludicrously call “anarcho-capitalism,” but what we’ll call market-fascism). It often romanticizes a mythic past. It rarely looks forward.

Fascism ultimately positions human rights (universal access to food, shelter, and freedom from harm) as subordinate to the glory of the nation in all its racial, geopolitical and economic forms.

In a fascist state, it is a crime to burn the flag but not to doom someone to homelessness through eviction. Racist police do not face legal repercussions for murder in a fascist state, but those who speak out against injustice do. In a fascist state the nation eats before your family does. There is much for sale in a fascist state, but little of it you need. There is much rhetoric and little truth.

Pay-per-rule

image from pixabay

The United States, now firmly in the world’s eye, with the f-word on many lips, has long been a consumer fascist state (and increasingly, so are we). Trump is merely the lump which belies the tumor. His failure to gain a second presidential term does not banish fascism from America, it merely drives its ugliest form back into the shadows.

Consumer fascism, or soft fascism, positions corporations’ ability to make money and monopolize resources in the name of a national economy as paramount to all else. You may not have access to the abilities of producing your own means of survival, but Amazon does. Loblaws does. Corporations lobby the state and private policy initiatives, they trade data with governments. Increasingly, the line between state interest and that of the market becomes irrelevant.

image from pixabay

People struggling to make ends meet continue to pay corporations for access to food, clothing, or diversion (from the fact that we are not free). We willingly relinquish our lives to be ruled, for the glory of the economy. For the good of the nation.

It wasn’t racism that elected Trump, though it helped. It wasn’t misogyny, though it was readily employed. It was by appealing to the concept of nation and attaching to it the corporate brand he carried. His supporters are quick to praise his positive affect on the stock market as, perhaps the only, sign that he has been an effective leader.

Fascism exists in the subservience of the human animal to the nation and it’s here in Canada too.

The Canadian military was recently found to be engaging in propaganda tactics to influence public opinion. These tactics, which included forged letters warning of wolves in Nova Scotia, are publicity stunts clearly inspired by corporate advertising strategies. This is the military trying to go viral.

What can we do?

The most direct way is to stop empowering corporations. Stop buying their products. Stop enabling their destruction of communities, their monopolies on natural resources. We all know Amazon is evil, but so is Loblaws, and Apple. There is nothing these corporations provide that a combination of lifestyle reconfiguration and local shopping can’t provide.

We can empower the individual by supporting universal basic income initiatives. With a guaranteed income, we are less vulnerable to corporate exploitation.

Trump may be on his way out of office, but he is not taking fascism with him. It surrounds us, everywhere. Beckons to us behind every waving flag, every corporate overreach, every piece of data mined. So long as there is patriotism without criticism, corporate welfare over social welfare, there is fascism.

Consumerism leads to fascism by elevating the national market above the human being. So as long as we continue to buy, we are all complicit in its rise.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Have We Forgotten How to Dream of the Future?

With the extraordinary availability of television programming, running hours and hours of content, with millions of songs at your fingertips, streamed and forgotten on a whim, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our cultural climate was teeming with originality. It isn’t.

One World. One Mind.

Photo by michael steinberg from pexels

Perhaps it began with the neo-liberalism of the early nineties, the political force that sought to unify the entire earth beneath a single umbrella of trade and corporate control. A homogenization of culture was necessary if we were all to sing with one voice in Coca Cola’s utopia (Fruitopia?). Technology became affordable, global communication became easier than ever. Perhaps some of us felt free.

This was the solidification of the Deleuzian “society of control” that we now find ourselves in. Where freedom takes on the appearance of a free flow of information and a seemingly border-less world. But the price of this freedom is the data harvested by every tech company and every airline which in turn is readily shared with governments for purposes of social control. We stopped dreaming of the future because, so we were told by our leaders, the future was already here.

The End of History

Photo by lucas pezeta by pexels

Another remake. Another Carpenter-esque synth-laden retro futurist soundtrack. 32-bit graphics, butterfly clips, yet another remake. Same story, different spandex. It was once thought that the 2000s would see flying cars and automation replacing drudgery creating a society of leisure. Instead we got seven different Spider Man films.

The new millennium began with revival: garage revival, post-punk revival. Artists like Amy Winehouse, the Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey have built careers on being living musical remakes, monuments to the past. Corporate entertainment continues to feed the pap of childhood to us well into our adult life so that we remain forever infantilized, forever dependent. All potential forever neutralized.

If you are looking backwards, you will never move forward. What are “Ready Player One”, “Stranger Things”, “Blade Runner 2049” and the undying popularity of “Star Wars” but a kind of MAGA sublimated into aesthetic. A desire to return to an inaccessible past, using the language of genres that have historically pointed forward.

No Future for You

Mark Fisher, the great theorist of all lost futures, firmly demonstrated the link between late capitalism and corporate nostalgia (what Simon Reynolds calls “retromania”) when he wrote that:

 “neo-liberal capitalism has…systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new…as public service broadcasting became “marketized,” there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful.” (Ghosts of My Life, p. 15)

As corporations gradually colonize every aspect of our lives, as control becomes de-spatialized and we carry the office, the school, the prison around with us, there becomes less and less room for the new. We are sold the past and so the past is what we come to expect. We are taught to fear the strange, the unsettling and take comfort in the bosom of familiarity.

Utopian Dreams

It is up to us to demand the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncomfortable. We deserve a future, not the eternal prison of the past. If we’re ever to emerge from the suffocation of control, if we’re ever to breathe a breath that hasn’t come at a price, we need to remember how strange the future can seem and forget its false familiarity.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The Other Side Breaks on Through to Here: Poltergeist Phenomena as Capitalist Resistance

Zhupel of the revolution (1905) by boris kustodiev

“The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

Get Out of My House

Floorboards creaking while everyone is asleep. Cupboards swing open before your eyes. The iPad levitated for thirteen seconds before slamming to the ground. The poltergeist behaves like a neglected child, upsetting order to grab attention. It moves unseen through the corridors of the newly renovated town house, starting the Vitamix well before you’re ready to make your maca smoothie. When the front door opens and the family pours in, arms filled with shopping bags, the poltergeist is there, petulant, hurtling a Fitbit against the wall.

image from pixabay

And even in moments of silence, when you do not know you have a ghost in your house – it is there. It’s in the simmering uncertainty held down by another Netflix binge. It’s the cold sweat of what have I done? I don’t want to be a policy analyst. It’s in the silence as you drive the family to the water park. It’s the noise beneath the placid surface of the capitalist dream. The incorporeal shade haunting the hallowed homes of a material world.

“The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way.”

— Walter Benjamin

Bring the Noise

Poltergeist, from the German “poltern” (a sonic disturbance) and “geist” (spirit), might be translated as “knocking ghost”, or “noisy spirit”. However one renders it in English, the meaning is plain: it is loud and restless. Indeed, poltergeist phenomena are always associated with sounds. From the spectral Drummer of Tedworth beating out an unseen cacophony in 1682 , through to the disembodied voices and wall pounding of the notorious Enfield poltergeist which tormented a single mother in England in 1977; the hauntings are uniformly a sonic barrage described as a “disturbance.”

image from pixabay

And what, exactly, is being disturbed? What is the purpose of all this noise? Writing of harsh noise in music, Csaba Toth defines noise as that which “disrupts both the performer and listener’s normal relations to the symbolic order by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order.” Pleasure is easily commodified and the vectors for pleasure (art, alcohol, drugs, sex) are monopolized by both government and corporation as a means of social control.

But noise resists commodification: it does not appeal to the pleasure principle, experience of it is not mediated by any centralized authority. The poltergeist is then not so different from transgressive sound artists like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. Noise as a form of social disruption. Discomfort to short circuit the forces of control.

The Ghost in the Gadget

“But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere… Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads.”

— Walter Benjamin

The poltergeist unleashes a sonic assault on everything we have been taught to believe is sacred about a domesticated, capitalist life. It is important to note how, aside from a few spectacular tales, accounts of poltergeist activity involve only damage to property. In fact, much of the violence inherent in these manifestations is directed against physical objects best representing the private domicile: doors, beds, cupboards, and tables.

Like a protest that turns to smashing the windows of a Starbucks, the poltergeist expresses the rage of an anarchic soul confined by capitalism. It may even possess the symbols of capitalism itself: I am become the floating smartphone, destroyer of stability. In the 1960 case of the Baltimore poltergeist, the spirit exploded Coca-Cola bottles from within.

The poltergeist operates spontaneously, it is unpredictable, capricious, and angry – it is ungovernability itself and, by insinuating itself directly into the home and freely using objects therein, it attacks the very concept of private ownership that lies at the heart of capitalism.

A Spectre is Haunting

“No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”

— Walter Benjamin

Skeptics will say that poltergeist phenomena, often emanating from a human “focal point,” usually in the form of a teenage or pre-teen child, is simply either conscious or unconscious mischief. The child, lacking attention, projects a fantasy spirit to achieve power over the household and assault the hierarchy of the family unit, within which they’ve been rendered powerless. To this I say, where does the projection end and the haunting begin?

image from pixabay

The only thing more ungovernable than the poltergeist is the willful child, to whom property is confusing and rules made only to be broken. Like the youth led innovations of punk, hip-hop and industrial noise, which obliterated capitalist notions of class, race, gender with explosions of sound, both child and poltergeist raise the volume to make themselves heard over the willful silence of the status quo.

Silence is violence but noise destroys.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Biden v. Trump 2020: The Circus of Infamy

1651 Frontispiece for Hobbes’ Leviathan by Abraham Bosse

There came a mount during the 2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden where, as the camera cut rapidly between the two septuagenarians, for a moment they appeared to blur together into one entity. I saw the similarities staring back at me: four empty eyes searching for approval in the camera’s lens, two sets of teeth bared, flaring into one nova of grin and grit. One moved rigid, puppet-like; face a taut mask pulled over nothing but rote snippets of policy while the other, gripped the podium and shambled above it in a familiar careless slouch, a narcotic posture of venality; lusting for the camera, recognizing it at his own mother. One represented a terrifying future in love with an unreal past, the other represented a very real past with terrifying consequences for the future. One actively slithered its heels across America’s already barely-functional democracy in order to turn the country into one big golf club: white, rich, and entirely synthetic. The other simply resembled that weakened democracy: skeletal, making empty gestures, representing no one other than people who look like him.

IMAGE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK

Following the debate, the major news sources were typically funereal. “The real loser is the American voter,” they said while the president’s slobbering goon squad of diet-Nazi thugs cheered in victory. And they were right to mourn; we all are. We have painted ourselves into a corner; economically, ecologically, and politically. America is simply the logical endpoint of representative democracy: where so few speak for so many that the politicians are drained of all traces of humanity to become the living embodiment of an ideal. They cease to be human and become ciphers; flashing signs which represent nothing but an appeal to the electorate.

Trump boasts and blusters, sneers and slurs, race-baits, and grabs for power because this is exactly what his supporters expect. He is merely a fulfillment of a wish that began with Reagan: the nativist, anarcho-capitalist’s dream of a tyrant entrepreneur who will replace democracy with a free-market Thunderdome; a wish filtered through the post-9/11 Islamophobia, wounded by failed neo-liberalism and dragged through the cesspools of 4Chan; a wish buffeted by the racist fears of a Black president which drifted in through the windows of Trump tower during a filming of “the Apprentice” and attached itself to the bloating frame of an ultra-famous faux-billionaire. Anyone can be president: the American dream.

And who has the left-wing produced to oppose this threat? To defend the pillars of the world’s oldest democracy? A lab assembled Kind but Firm Old White Man. The type of guy you can see wearing a checkered shirt, holding a beer at a backyard barbecue. Just as easily as you can see him cruising down the California coast, top down, shades on. Just as easily as you can see him mounting a horse or casting a line. Cut him open and he bleeds apple pie. He’s not racist, he’s got a Black friend, remember? He’ll give your hand a firm shake while waging war with the other. He is the reminder that you need government. You can’t do it on your own. Yes, you’re a pacifist but without a military how else can we defend your freedom to be a pacifist? Biden is saying the same thing with his smile, with his suit, as Trump is on his banners: vote for me and make America great again.

There was indeed no winner in the debate. There were only two sides to the same almighty coin for which America long ago sold all hope of true democracy.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

A Bone to Pick

We’re the fly in the ointment. The vinegar in the well. We’re in the corner of the party, arms crossed, unimpressed. Spoilsports, killjoys, pot-stirrers, poets, and dreamers. That sacred cow you keep milking? We’ve come creeping through the fields to tip it. Those embers smouldering in the streets? We’re down on our knees, fanning the glow into a full-fledged conflagration.

SQUABBLER is a place where we vent our bile, spew our spleen, howl from the rooftops to shake the pillars where they stand. Here you’ll find essays, rants, polemics, diatribes, and creative works designed to spark discussion, discordance, and dissent. Don’t dream about a better world, scream about one.