TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY BY DEFAULT

 The last time I was in San Francisco. . .  How's that for a start?  

In August, 2001, I landed in Oakland just as an Oakland A's baseball game crowd was hitting BART.  Quite a greeting.  To watch the young boys posture, all tough and stuff, as some of the office workers returning to SF blithely scowled and then grinned over it, was to see an untypical San Francisco of my imagination.  What is that SF of the imagination?  How real is that?  We go right under the Bay, and into the unexpected, right?  That excursion through a tunnel had me almost holding my breath: to ponder the BART rail train streaking under untold tons of seawater. . .  

I'd always been a little amused that many in San Francisco call their home SF.  As a clerk in the public library, I'd think "San Francisco" at times when shelving the science fiction--or SF, our abbreviation for the genre.  It was likely no coincidence that the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner, a long-standing science fiction fan, had been so impressed by the 1969 moon landing that he decided to write a "science fiction symphony" that became his first solo recording, "Blows Against The Empire".  It's a favorite of mine.  As is "Sunfighter", a duo with his then-wife Grace Slick.  

We hear about San Franciso quite a bit these days, not by those who extol its "hippie-dippie" past so much as by those denizens of the libertarian fruitcake brigade who like to masquerade as "conservatives" while whacking at anyone and everyone they decide is disagreeable.  Like the "Leftists" who somehow "control California" with wicked commie ways.  

Or something.  Who knows what those bozos think?  I get the strong impression they don't think nearly as much as they want the entire world--from Shanghai to Sheboygan--to think they think.  Reason?  More like appetite.  They should publish "Reason" under that as a new title. 

Once in the city proper, I made my way to the world-famous YMCA, the very location reputed to have been the inspiration for the famed Village People song.  That was interesting.  The room I shared with some guy who apparently decided to room with friends in the city was smaller than the walk-in closet at my apartment here in Dallas.  But the window at the hallway's end offered a great view of Telegraph Avenue.  

The next morning is when the revolutionary fireworks began.  I was there for a NASNA conference--North American Street Newspaper Association--a worldwide annual event with editors from homelessness advocacy newspapers from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland and Australia.  Quite a bunch.  

At the New School, on Mission, we had a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee and then broke into interest groups.  I chose "street poetry".  Only a few years before, I'd won a spot on the Dallas slam team that was to go to nationals.  I had some real "cred".  And after the instruction and input from the various gathered poets, Tiny Grey, the editor of a nationally-known street newspaper, asked us if we wanted to read a poem for a recording the paper was going to issue.  I raised my hand. . . 

. . . and shook the room with a thunderous rendition of a slam piece, Armchair Revolutionary (Don't Forget Your Remote Control).  I'd learned to shout.  I'd learned to read it really fast.  But, unlike many slam poets, I chose all kinds of surreal and absurd images: street warfare as a "giant morphine worm crawls up from the bottom of the world. . . ".  Fun, eh?  Sure.  Tiny stood impressed.  

Soon word got out about my poetry chops, and this is when the San Francisco Media Alliance invited me to read at a poetry reading devoted to homeless poets.  With chalupas (or something nifty like chalupas) as dinner, we listened as local SF poet after another gave performances. The room of around 300 people seemed pretty happy with everything--so I opted for a sort of comedy piece the local poetry community in Dallas seemed to enjoy a great deal: a monologue about a boy (me?) abusing a Ken doll by pulling off and then putting on his head, over and over again.  Yeah, the crowd laughed.  Others seemed lost in thought. 

That's when a sort of hippie woman with longish grey hair and granny glasses approached me to say, That is SO TRUE...."     

What?

She then gave me a little spiel about how men are forced into constraining social roles by commercial society: the John Wayne, the Big Daddy-O, the superb businessman, the competent take-over guy, the soldier, the sporty drinker, blah, blah, blah.  I agreed with her.  Even if that was only a minor facet of what I'd intended.  Mainly, I'd wanted to simply goof off on the page.  

Suddenly, I was a revolutionary by default. 

This is what happens when you've been going through life relatively unconscious, only to slip into a role all-too-naturally.  I've always been rebellious.  I've always spoken truth to power.  I've always enjoyed tormenting bullies and "alpha males" for being such bullet-heads.  

The alpha male.  That's a bit of social Darwinist bowdlerization.  Apparently, because wolf packs mythically sport an "alpha wolf" that dominates all the other wolves, these numbskulls who like to dominate others and throw their weight around like Rambo or Clint Eastwood or Han Solo or Dede Ramone have copped the moniker to bestow it on themselves.  As if it's "meaningful".  It isn't. 

Wolfpacks are families.  The father, supposedly the "alpha male", allows his boys to do the killing as he sits back.  The "alpha male" is a myth tailor-made for little boys with big egos.

Oh yeah.  The warrior.  The enforcer.  Ever been in a social circle where "the enforcer" is in charge?  Always has to be in charge.  It's hilarious to watch.

Being in charge is quite important to commercialized mentalities.  After all, capitalism, by and large, is amplified by patriarchal idiocy: the Daddy taking care of all the little children, while the ladies do "women's work".  One Big Daddy game is to make other males to "the women's work".  It makes the Big Daddy feel big.  

Hence, when people like feminists or "wokeists" challenge those myths, capitalists go bonkers.  Their BS is being undermined.  Feminism is seen by many frauds who call themselves "conservatives" as "revolutionaries" and even "socialists".  

What did the feminists do?  

The feminists dissented against the underpinnings of a power structure that is overly dependent on the status quo, that's what. 

If you dissent against those Monkey Men, you're automatically "socialistic".  While that's simple scapegoating, part of a fictional reality that is the summen bonum of reactionaryism, it's one of those totalitarian, either--or go-to positions: Either you're totally one of us--or you're totally a commie!

Like, totally, dude.  

That's extremism.  See?  There are only two (2) extremes from which to choose: "the good guys" or "the socialist masses".  

Revolutionary by default.  

The only way I can figure any of this as even close to being anything more than a mere rationalization is like this: 

The threatened bourgeoisie (the business community) has been forced to conduct a sort of retrograde neo-colonialism against those of us who happen to like, say, democracy more than we like capitalism.  Hence, we are "the native peoples" who must be "civilized" into the bourgeois mentality in one grand "civilizing mission" to bring us out of "the heart of darkness".  

Those goofs.  Paranoid to the core.  Like the mythical "alpha wolf", these guys can't stand up all by themselves without someone somewhere with which to compare themselves.  

Watch them.  Rather than revolutionaries by default, they're The Grand Comedians Of Unconsciousness.  

Way back at the dawn of some real darkness called the Reagan era, I had an encounter with some of the neo-Nazis, as we called them, at a local daily newspaper.  Someone at the paper had let it out that I was a member of an anti-nuclear group called the Comanche Peak Life Force.  I didn't like nuclear waste.  But the paranoids at the newspaper, bigwigs all, decided I could be a commie--or a Liberal.  Which is commie, only spelled with an L.  

I was brought into a demure (boring) cafeteria--where the grandees and high muckety mucks came to "visit" me.  All kinds of questions.  What do I think of socialism?  What did I think of the Sixties antiwar movement?  Are you protesting the United States government's nuclear power?  On and on.  

Tiresome.  Paranoia is tiresome.  I mean, what if I was all these things?  What kind of damage could I do?  Whatever, as I served as a book reviewer (I was 25), the paper gave me books about John Reed of "Reds" movie fame.  Or Abbie Hoffman, Sixties antiwar activist.  I did get a little paranoid.  I guess they wanted me to "recant" in print.  

The Abbie Hoffman review I wrote was utterly redone by the books editor--who had me "say" that Abbie Hoffman was second-hand news.  Actually, I'd liked the book.  I was sympathetic to Hoffman's refusal to accept obliviousness as the solution to the world's problems.  

Yes.  I again was a revolutionary by default.  

Sooner or later, simply because you're an individual who likes to be upfront and honest with people, you finally "fall into line" and become what "they" want you to be: a revolutionary.  Look.  I'm just a sort of "recovering hippie", a little like Lebowski of movie fame.  There's a school of thought that "Lebowski" was an allusion to Charles Bukowski--and there might be meat on that bone.  

Whatever.  Those of us who are simply living authentically and without pretense sometimes fall into miasmas of "conservative" freak shows where the word paranoia seems to rhyme with ideological jihad.

Yes, we are all under the gun of libertarian jihad.  They like pretending to be conservatives who "honor tradition".  The problem is that the tradition they honor either never existed or happens to be called Feudalism.  

They're the real subversives.  They think democracy is oppressive and in the way.  In the way?  Of what?  

Their need to surround themselves with more money.

These subversives are, you guessed it, revolutionaries by default.  The dummies are always so so noble. . .