What A Party Of Parties Means

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

Yeah, yeah.  We were trails at the end of the overly, ridiculously vaunted Reagan Revolution.  Sure.  We were involuntary ride-alongs.  

Some nights, one best friend and I sat up all night, drinking cheap beer while listening to community radio, the station practically nonexistent and located on an East Dallas sidestreet, Saturday nights devoted to new music, music that apparently had been forbidden by all the commercial rock stations in the entire DFW Metroplex.  

Why banned?  Perhaps because no one, no band, no performer, no commercial hire, none were willing to write anthems to the loony "liberties" the movie star president offered up like one of those strangers on a street-corner who shows you "the new rule book" for sale for only a few dollars with the promise of the best kiss anyone ever had.  Apparently, people banding together to defend their dignity at workplace and at home had become verboten anyway.  Why not dump an air traffic controllers union?  Why not admire The Iron Lady across the Atlantic who found it expedient to overturn British miners already in financial distress.  

There is no such thing as society, Margaret Thatcher declared.  As if she knew that, no, people only act as individuals, and that "collectives" cannot act in the "one mind" cited by the U.S.'s founding fathers.  

Nice to know, Maggie.  Got any other stultifying declarations for the peons to chew on?  

My buddy and I, up drinking cheap beer all Saturday night.  What for?  We leaned against a former kitchen sink on the second floor of a reconditioned quadraplex situated on Worth Street, near Junius, a street possibly named after Marcus Junius Brutus, assassin of Julius Caesar.  

Not that either of us knew that in 1983, 1984, '85, '86, '87....

Ramones--"The KKK Stole My Baby".  Black Flag.  The Clash.  Dead Kennedys.  Misfits.  Bad Religion.  Social Distortion.  The Cramps.  The Hugh Beaumont Experience.  Sex Pistols.  Butthole Surfers.  

Why not get the message, journalists of America?  Doubtless, the local daily, The Dallas Morning News, needed high security for the typical excuse: Our youth.  All borders, no future beyond employment.  

Classic rock like Vlasic Pickles.  Power to the pickles!  No battle cry necessary.  

Everybody drink.

The common and uncommonly commercialized message to America's youth was easy to see:  Once you become an adult, you leave behind the childish things we, commercializers, have deigned childish, and thus cut the cord to childhood, join a firm, and then, and then...

Die inside.  Become colorless.  Docile.  Willing to produce like hens in a galvanized steel warehouse somewhere way way out.  

My friend was, and still is, an artist.  I was, and still am, a poet and a prose writer.  Not good enough due to commercial uselessness.  Wanna get used?  Become a team player.  

This human-as-means-to-an-end echoes Kant's warning that no man should ever be treated merely as a means.  The height of both injustice and dehumanization.  Even if culture in DFW at the time was practically under the thrall of an armed guard.  For what reason?  

No humanity allowed unless it is instrumentalized to make the culturally disinterested lots of money.  Then we see, years later, Homer Simpson hollering "Doh!" every single time he makes a mistake.  

Buy a Doh-nut!"  Honestly.  What else must be lost to the uncultured mind that claims all culture as an instrument unto itself?  

Reagan offered us so so much.  Fewer regulations, lower taxes, less government.  How to translate this into a culture?  Easy.  "Let's do some crimes!", "Let's ride the public interest without payin'!", "Let's replace a horizontal organizing principle with status for ourselves!"  

Who knows, who cares, why bother?  

Everybody drink.  

My buddy and I, a little drunk, a little stoned.  Cultural wasteland.  Wants.  To.  Waste.  Blossoming culture.  

Why?  Who the fuck knows?  

Between the lines set down by the commercializers of everything that moves, at least we had some fun.  Like the big party in 1987, Ray's house in Oak Cliff.  After all, when the noose gets too tight for anyone practicing freedom to breathe--why not break some rules in response to a newly-unleashed vaudeville act for money and more power?  

I also remember how depressed I was.  I thought at the time that I had loved and lost.  Now I know the grief I felt that Saturday afternoon was all about Bipolar and nothing really about a rejection.  Well, OK.  After experiencing way more rejection than is necessary to "get the message across"--incomplete mothering, neglect, forced relocation to a hellish place called Texas, dysfunctional domestic "experiences", suicide father, rejection, rejection, rejection.  

Where was I that Saturday?  Premiering my third tape of my imaginary band, Big Fat High Tech.  Almost no music on that one, cassette that began with some AM radio preacher telling us all about the unknown and that the only protection from the unknown is--of course!!--Instrumentalized Jesus, Inc.!

We sat on a curb next to a garage, faced by a fence and a barking watchdog, all of us listening to what was essentially a tape of grief.  I know my friends that afternoon sat there listening out of respect, kindness and friendship.  Honestly, I was broken.  Badly broken.  The onslaught of Bipolar was, in a word, eating my lunch just like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would have done: 

Nice tornado sandwich, eh, "poet"???

After all, the commercializers do need to hack the wheat down to weeds.  It's all part of their game.  Resistance is futile.  Or so it seemed.  

Someone (I know who she is!) pinned up maybe 30 cartoons drawn by a talented friend, a friend who, while he thoroughly enjoyed drawing cartoons that broke many boundaries but were funny as hell;  friend who wanted to hide his avocation's products away out of fear that "the conventional life" might wish to forbid out of existence.  

There they were, many of his best cartoons, pinned up on the wall of the garage.  A statement.  A message to a man who'd refused a group show with Marion Henley, then a local cartoonist of her inimitable Maxine character: creative person with ridiculousness everywhere. And also with Dan Piraro, creator of "Bizarro" comics.  A big group show at The Mac.  They had begged and begged for my friend to participate.  

Why couldn't he?  

Isn't self-censorship just awesome and productive?  

Anyway, as we stoked the barbecue late in the afternoon--after my grief-fest--someone got the fantastic idea of playing stickball--batting a soccer ball around the backyard, with brooms, brooms on fire, courtesy of some oil-based lighter fluid.  

Actually, watching the swinging brooms lighting up the dusky lateness like tracer fire in the Vietnam war; that was pretty.  And fun.  Perhaps the neighbors were fearful of fire.  But who actually owns the fire hoses conveniently turned upon those who get too uppity in defense of actual culture?  

Sure.  Back in the Eighties, punk happened to be both an inflammatory subculture designed to "sell the subculture at the point of impact"--one buys, one examines, one may be changed--and as a commentary of so much damned moneymaking that it was weird the moneymakers wanted to cut off the NEA and NEH all for the wishy-washy nonsense of "sell yourselves!"  

As if artists need to get out and hunt the streets for something that pays and also exhausts them.  Gingrich?  The "leader" of the wolfpack that submarined both programs due to his jealous fears that someone somewhere was being an artist--whose job of course is the question the status quo.  

THOU SHALT NOT CHALLENGETH THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE OF STATUS

Then Gingrich began releasing pulp fiction he heralded as "the truth".  In other words: crass poseur destroys the real deal.  But one really does have to admit the little troll had plenty of energy.  

The party in the backyard continued.  After flaming stickball with a soccer ball, we began pumping out music.  Fine stereo system.  The two residents both were early IT programmers, both paid handsomely.  Both also expressed enthusiasm for those of us who were and are changing our own status quos in the name of a word bandied around here in 2025 as if it's KY jelly: 

F-R-E-E-D-O-M

Which requires independent voices.  Even if the Tories don't happen to like that cultural autonomy due to its unusually usual superiority over the product lines over at Walmart and elsewhere.  

Cultural autonomy?  Scary!  What's gonna happen if the culture gets out of "our hands" and begins its healthy critique of what it is we're trying to do to it?  

Always the same.  Autonomy for them, none for the rest of us--the means to their ends, and of course especially for the followers of their Great Big Ends.  

My crazy letters to Dallas Observer.  Pseudonyms:  Athena Stickseed, Otto Von Apparanin.  Critical of the commercialized hegemony waged by powerful conservatives frightened out of their wits "the mob" might catch them red-handed.  Best way to handle "the mob"?  Confine it.  Section it off.  Then raise the rent.  

The rent.  More than merely a price.  Think "wage gap".  Think "power gap".  Think "divided country".  

All night, we punks and lost humans played dumb things.  Like sneaking into the house's kitchen and opening up all the cabinet doors until one's ability to walk through the kitchen was all but impossible without closing the cupboards.

Appropriate?  No.  Cabinets with food must remain shut.  

Don't worry, paranoids.  We kept our commentary about you to ourselves.  Word has spread.  People talk.  People learn.  

After the outlaw cartoons were pinned on the wall of a garage, and after the burning soccer ball stickball game, even after the all cabinet open private demonstration, we drank.  A female and I found ourselves in a hallway closet with the stereo system.  Certainly liked that lady.  And drank.  Then, as the party began to wind-down, as was traditional with our band of recklessness, we slept on the floor; no one was allowed to drive home drunk.  

Which is more than I can say for "local witnesses of subcultural 'transgression' in the name of freedom".  Why not include them?  Because many of them are so goddamned drunk on dollar bills it's a wonder the entire country isn't guffawing at them.