this blog, as i conceive it, is a representation of my mind, and the random, completely disparate thoughts i have about culture, politics, and other miscellaneous trivia. i do not portend to know all, or to have any official opinion in any weighty semantics of the term - but i do suggest that my opinion is a) my own, b) indicative of who i am -in all my resplendent glory-, and c) something that allows me to aptly vent my frustrations in a world where, despite my best intentions, i have consistently felt like an outsider. (totally emo, i know) but the fact remains that self-expression is key to understanding self, and understanding self is the only way to let it go. without any further ado, here we go . . .
a manifesto. what is it? who the fuck cares? why so many damn questions before i even get started??
a manifesto: my personal proclivities on a plethora of things that people take either way too seriously or not nearly serious enough.
i. as marx, one of my heroes, said "the only thing we have to lose is our chains ..." and i concur - on multiple levels of semantic haberdashery. the world, and the majority of the people in it, are too chained to their lives - and their own insignificance - thus refusing to see themselves as part of the overall picture: the history of humanity - the sum progress of the intelligent ape - as a part of the lineage of species. homo sapiens - why we refuse to see the commonality of species among the diversity of life is beyond me (your humble narrator). we are chained to greed. we are chained to guilt. we are chained to the ego. we are chained to monetary systems of explotation. we are chained to religion. we are chained to the lies and barbarisms of history. we are chained to outdated models of thinking. we are chained to primitive notions of understanding. we are chained to animal instincts. we are chained to hatred and war. we. are. chained. so when marx put it to all of us that "we have nothing to lose but our chains," he -of course- explicitly meant the chains of class struggle, of the explotation of the many for the benefit of the few, but implied within this subtle, yet iconoclastic statement is that all of humanity is chained by what it is not willing to see - what it accepts on faith or common sense. we are constantly chained within our minds, the truth prometheus, picking apart our inards in the unending cycle of life to punish ourselves for having rebel against our superstitious myths in the first place. yet. yet, we can bring fire to our minds - we can spark the dawn of a new civilization, a new life - but we choose not to. not because we, as inherently flawed being since our fall from grace, as the wretched of the earth, as sum total of humanity's failures, have inscribed in our DNA -our genes, biochemistry- a sense of self-destruction, of failure, of greed, of selfishness, of survival, but because we choose not to; we act through inaction, through denial, through cynicism, though convincing ourselves that things are "not that bad" or that it "doesn't affect me." but our DNA - our very life blood is only what we are, not who we are. it is not what we are that limits us from becoming, from taking the step forward to stand up for equality, for all -- it is who we are that fails throughout the course of history. history tells us who we have been and DNA tells us what we are - but our minds (albeit chained to the hegemonic order) are what tell us and define who we are. "what we are never changes, but who we are never stops changing" -- history is the who to our genetic what. we redefine ourselves constantly as disparate, lonely individuals - but we now need to redefine ourselves collectively, as a species of similar beings living together with similar aims, and redefine who we are as homo sapiens not as whites, blacks, hispanics, americans, chinese, iraqis. who is humanity? let's ponder that, in a very ponderous sort of way, and see what the pipe smokes, eh? we are not doomed to repeat our same failures - any study of history will quickly show you that who we are has changed drastically since our nascent phases, and even since the beginning of the 20th century. who we are must change, it must be unchained from the limitations and hinderances of past selves and evolve into the new man, woman, child. we must become. we must unburden ourselves of what doesn't matter [the ipods, macbooks, the hummers, the prada, the latest hollywood blockbuster] and stand up for each other - for the one inalienable constant of our historical psychology: to change who we are and assert ourselves with and for each other rather than against each other.
