In this episode of John Penley Anarcho-Yippie, John compares and contrasts his experiences with the Yippies with his days in Zucotti Park and being involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. John also talks a little bit about more his archive of 30,000 images in the Tamimnet Library at NYU. As he does he reminisces about his days as photojournalist documenting the Squatters movement of NYC’s Lower East Side.
In this episode of John Penley Anarcho-Yippie, John talks about how he first came to New York and his experiences with the Yippies in New York. He talks about meeting Abbie Hoffman, Bob Fass, Wavy Gravy, Dhourba Bin Wahad, and Judith Molina of The Living Theater and many others. He also talks about how the Yippies taught him to manipulate the media to bring attention to the protests that he organizes. John also speaks about his recent occupations starting in Zucotti Park with Occupy Wall Street up to his present occupation in front of the NYU library that holds his archive of 30,000 photos from his days as a photojournalist in New York. John was protesting against NYU and their rapid gentrification of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. John also recounts his experiences with law enforcement from his day with the Yippies to his days as a photojournalist and to his recent encounters with police during his recent occupations.
By the way… Today is John’s birthday so be sure to wish him a Happy Personal New Year’s Day… HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN AND MANY MANY MORE!!!
you still have time
to lay down your greed
and raise your hands
to surrender
and assume the position
of the guilty
consider this
your last warning
your final notice
you were duly warned
when we marched and screamed
no justice without peace
but you believe too much
in your hubris
and now slogans
must become threats
and threats
must become promises
that fill the nostrils
with gasoline and smoke
to be laid out
like victory wreaths
on the smoldering ruins
of the foundations
where your excess once stood
The Mayans predicted 2012 would be the end of the world. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is the end of the world. Not in a global catastrophic natural disaster kind of way or a nuclear war armageddon kind of way… but in another way…
The African Spring (Algeria, Egypt) followed by the Arab Spring, followed by the unrest of the European Summer to the occupations of the American Fall of 2011, are the preview trailers for the upcoming feature…. All of these resistance movements are realizing that the cozy bedfellows that politrixters and banksters make, leaves little room on the bed for anyone else. And so the rest of us are left out in the cold occupying a space on the floor to sleep… Where we dream of improvising the world into a new existence…
Maybe the world of capitalism is falling like the Berlin wall fell in ’89. Maybe ’12 is when the wall on Wall Street comes down. Maybe it’s the end of the world as capitalism knows it… There isn’t much time left… Someone tell them, someone tell the capitalists that they might want to get their affairs in order and not to worry about writing a will, it was written somewhere that meek shall inherit the earth…
i’m not afraid of a world without capitalism… are you? It could be that these are the last daze… The final chapter and verse being written… Capitalism’s judgment day… And it could be that the apocalypse is just the screams of labor pains as the world gives birth to something new…
Well they blew the horns
And the walls came down
They’d all been warned
And the walls came down
They just stood there laughing
They’re not laughing anymore
The walls came down
Sanctuary fades
Congregation splits
Nightly military raids
The congregation splits
It’s a song of assassins
Ringin’ in your ears
We got terrorist thinking
Playing on fears
Well they blew the horns
And the walls came down
They’d all been warned
But the walls came down
I don’t think there are any Russians
And there ain’t no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin’ with tanks
– The Walls Came Down by The Call
The image at the top of this piece is a remix of Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton holding a shotgun and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask… The text on the design – FCKTHSYSTM is a discreet way of saying FUCK THE SYSTEM…
You can get a T-shirt or 5 pack of 1″ buttons (to share with friends) of the artwork above from my design company Audio Visual Terrorism And as always, much thanx for the support, until we find another way out of capitalism i’m forced to exploit my art in this way… Trust me when i say i’d feel better if i could just give it all away…
“Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” – Mao Zedong
It’s (s)election season again in the United States Of America… Every four years when it comes time for the US to choose a president i’m reminded of Malcolm X infamous speech The Ballot Or The Bullet. The speech is a recognized as being the the 7th best American speech given in the 20th century. The power of that speech comes from it’s analysis of the modern American political system and in a way it’s a kind of bench mark in terms of how much progress (if any) has been made in American politics. But there never seems to be any real meaningful forward progress in American politics… and Malcolm’s speech made in Cleveland Ohio on April 3rd of 1964 is a reminder of just how much American politics hasn’t really changed.
Malcolm’s speech was delivered a year after the famous 1963 march on Washington DC in which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. That was a high water mark for the Civil Rights movement and yet with all it’s hope and promise of change, with all it’s generational upheaval and force of will very little had changed a year later in 1964 for Black people in America. In much the same way that Barak Hussein Obama was elected president in 2008 with all it’s hope and promise of change, with all it’s generational upheaval and force of will, not much has changed for Black people or for anyone else in 2014. And so Malcolm’s speech of 1964 has a haunting and prophetic relevance because the politics of America doesn’t change.
If you listen to Malcolm’s speech and replace the reference of Black people with the 99% you’ll see that the keen empirical and analytical analysis Malcolm makes of the American political system in 1964 is completely applicable in 2014. Why? Because the American political system is not designed to change in a way that benefits those who need it to change most. It’s not designed to respond to the demands of the people who are clamoring for it. History has born this out… from the abolition of slavery, to the suffrage movement, to labor rights, to the civil rights to gay rights and immigration reform, change has been achingly slow in this country. Change may be inevitable but in this country it’s not about stopping change as much as it is about slowing it down to a glacial pace.
Please don’t mistake this as some anti-Obama rhetoric, this goes beyond Obama… Obama is one man within a system… A system that was designed for self preservation no matter who was the president and what kind of change they might want to bring… Obama inherited an abysmal situation, but it’s a situation that’s been politically designed to be nothing else but a tragedy… The global financial collapse of 2007 – 2008 was created by the American political system. The so-called “rescue” of that financial system, on the part of that very same American political system, was only concerned with the financial institutions that the political class has always been beholden to in contrast to the people who elect them.
There has been recent pressure brought to bear on this American political system for a more rapid and radical change in the form of the occupy movements which by and large are rejecting these outmoded forms of political representation. That message though, seems to have fallen on ears that refuse to hear, eyes that refuse to see, minds that refuse to reason, and hearts that refuse to feel when in comes to the two major political parties. The occupy movement seems to have awoken people to the idea that the two major parties are dictating what the issues are from a top down position as opposed to a bottom up approach. This may be the reason why the two major parties have stayed away from the occupy movement, the threat of real democracy looms large within the occupy movement.
What Malcolm was trying to get at in The Ballot Or The Bullet, was that if we can’t get what we want by the ballot then we’ll have to get it by the bullet. If the political system that claims to represent you fails to do so then the only option left is revolution… The Ballot in Malcolm’s speech is of course, the status quo, the Bullet is the revolution. Revolutions are bloody as Malcolm points out but he closes his speech by saying that America has an opportunity to create a bloodless revolution… That bloodless revolution can only happen when the paradigm shifts and those at the bottom dictates the direction and speed of the change that need to happen. The form that our “Bullet” may take in this revolution may take on a less literal form in order to create this bloodless revolution, but make no mistake, whatever form it takes it must be in the end as affective as a bullet…
centuries end (for the artist responsible for the work on sw 57 and 9 and mohamed bouazizi)
hakim bey said the end of the 20th century
occurred when the wall came down in ’89
and who can argue with hakim bey?
it’s common knowledge that capitalism fell in ’07
and everything since then is just voodoo economics
making zombie capitalism in a way only george romero prophesied
they say trickle down economics
is gonna make it rain prosperity but it smells like piss
as it bounces off the tops of our heads
i say the beginning of the 21st century
began with the self-immolation of mohamed bouazizi in tunisia
setting fire to the african winter of ’11
everything in-between ’89 and ’11
was side line gestation and formulation
out of the binary and into the dialectic
the writing and the pictures were on the wall
on the sw corner of 57th and 9th in new york shitty
but no one bothered to look
but once felt these ideas spread like a virus across walls and into streets
and it’s easier to serve up the messengers head to madness
than decipher the coda of a centuries end
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
– Edward Abbey
On February 1st, of 1968 Associated Press photojournalist Eddie Adams took a disturbing photo of an execution in the streets of Saigon, that would go on to become an iconic image of the horrors of the Vietnam War. It’s a photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon. When i was thinking about trying to create an image about the dynamics of Capitalism this photo came to mind.
Capitalism is ubiquitous. It can’t be escaped, everyone is forced to participate. There’s not a single aspect of our life that goes untouched. It affects the fundamental aspects of survival, where we live, what we eat, access to medical care, the ability to educate ourselves. It affects our relationships with family, friends, life partners. It limits our ability, constrains our creativity and dictates our potential. It’s inescapable, if you don’t cooperate with it you die. Capitalism is a gun to the head. The dollars coming out of the gun of the executor are multiplied as they come out of the head executed. Killing or dying it’s all profit for capitalism.
The fact that this photo came from the Vietnam era was also something that fit perfectly into what I was trying to do. The Vietnam War was framed as an ideological battle between democracy (dressed as capitalism) and communism. (As a side note communism is actually a democracy, but i digress.) The idea was to frame this gruesome image into an advertisement for Capitalism.
Advertising is the creation of seduction for the purposes of profit. Seduction is the emotional mortar that hold the building blocks of possibility in place long enough to promise some kind of fulfillment. So i flipped the dynamics of advertisement to soften the mortar to bring down the structure of a promise that can never be kept.
Coca-Cola is an avatar for Capitalism. Using the Coca-Cola typeface to advertise Capitalism made sense since everywhere you go in the world you can find Coca-Cola. Since the only rule in Capitalism is profit at any cost… mixing that up with the phrase “By Any Means Necessary” made infamous by Malcolm X completed my visual critique of Capitalism.
If you like this image and want to spread this critique of Capitalism around check out Audio Visual Terrorism… i designed it as a t-shirt and as a 1″ button… And no that doesn’t make me a capitalist… The definition of capitalism is here… i’m still the same struggling artist i always was and like everyone else i’m stuck in the shitstem of capitalism… Until capitalism is gone i’ll be forced to use capitalism against itself…
“Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you – how do you think I feel to have to tell you, ‘We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights – and you’ve got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.’ What did we do, who preceded you ? I’ll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don’t you make the same mistake we made….” – Malcolm X
The question isn’t what we want – the question is what are willing to do to get it. Capitalism must go and in an effort to be clear let’s define exactly what capitalism is. Capitalism is the exploitation of people and planet at any cost for financial profit. Slavery, genocide, poverty, disease, war… if it brings in a financial profit then it’s all good for capitalism. The only rule in capitalism is financial profit. That needs to end. We won’t accurately be able to chart a course for a world without it, until it’s gone. It’s difficult to imagine what a world without capitalism because our whole lives are completely polluted by it. We won’t really know how to proceed until we’re rid of it. And that’s ok… We have what it takes to improvise a new world into being… The faith in our imagination is growing and spreading like anti-bodies fighting a virus.
The process we saw in the popular uprisings in the streets during the African Spring that spread into the Arab Spring and into resistance movements across Europe in the summer, that finally jumped across the Atlantic into the American Fall weren’t concerned with what political apparatus was going to replace the current systems of oppression, as they were concerned with just doing away with the systems of oppression altogether. This is a matter of renewed faith in imagination and a collective rebirth of humanity. The old arguments between Marxism or Leninism or Libertarianism or Anarchism didn’t go away they were just set aside while we went about the business of getting rid of the common enemy. No matter what the differences of direction to take in the future, the common enemy had to be dealt with in the present.
The first question that needs to be asked is what we are we fighting for? Reform or revolution? If it’s reform then let’s not bother. Reform for a system as twisted as this would be like that line from Apocalypse Now – “We cut ’em in half with a machine gun and give ’em a Band-Aid.” If we’re in it for the long haul, if we’re in it for revolution, if we’re fighting to turn an upside down world right side up then let’s answer the difficult questions that naturally would come from deciding that. For those of us struggling in the US the next question is what measures are we willing to take to achieve that revolution?
The powers of the state here in the US have perverted the notions of non-violent protest so that they are so narrowly reduced and defined that they become ineffectual. The problem isn’t that the state is defining and sanctioning certain forms of resistance to be ineffectual, but that most progressive resistance movements in the US have accepted those terms. And in the same breath that the state is defining what protest is and isn’t, it’s using brutal force at will and without rhyme or reason, as a shock and awe tactic, to be a constant reminder to those who protest that they better stick to the state sanctioned program of ineffectual protest or else suffer the consequences…
A decades long conversation has been taking place between the state and US progressive resistance movements. That conversation goes something like this… When US protest movements come before the state in an effort to negotiate the change they want to see, they essentially come saying we will do whatever it takes within the parameters the state sets. This is essentially allowing those who are doing the oppression to dictate how you can alleviate that oppression – which has become the greatest form of oppression. After decades of such negotiations the US protest movements refuse to see that the only way to achieve their goals is to step outside of these state sanctioned parameters of protest. Instead of defiantly stepping outside those state sanctioned forms the US protest movements have acquiesced to the degree of strengthening the state to even further narrow protest in the US.
After decades of the state defining resistance to create ineffectual protest, US protest movements have succumbed to a kind of Stockholm syndrome where the needs of the oppressor are placed above the desires of the oppressed. It’s a form of self-induced censorship. What we need to do is to step outside of these state sanctioned rules of engagement that bankrupt current protest movement tactics, while giving the state a blank check to run rough shod over any resistance it finds. US resistance movements need to redefine what it means to effective and need to redefine the tactics it’ll use to achieve those goals in a way that works for them, instead of letting the enemy completely dictate the terms of battle.
If the terms of protest can be opened up and redefined by those to whom that protest serves, then we’ll be free to decide how we will deal with the oppression we face. That freedom will begin a process that will invariably lead to the question of sacrifice. Do we really want to fail at making the impossible a reality for the next generation? Do we want the inheritance of the next generation to be the continuation of this struggle? Or do we want to be the generation that ushers in a new era of equality that will be unrivaled by any other era before it?
Can we decide right here, right now that this battle ends with us? Can we say to the corporations and the politicians that we’re willing and ready and able to do whatever it takes this time, to bring into being what was once considered impossible? Can we say to the system of oppression that the tear gas and the batons and the riot shields and the rubber bullets and the beatings and the arrests and the court dates and the prison terms will not stop us from giving birth to the impossible? Can we say with some certainty that we’ll die to make the world a better place if we have to? Can we say that nothing will keep us from finally having a hand in remaking the world in our own image? Can we sacrifice our time, our education, our career, our family, our friends, our future to see something better? Can we risk everything NOW so that the next generation can be without the burden we were forced to inherit? Can we become the generation of sacrifice? Can we be the ones to say it ends with us?
i had my doubts like any other man or woman
but i couldn’t let my apathy make me so durable
that i could idly stand aside and watch
the hungry go without fish and bread
the blind continue to stumble
the lame carry the burden
i had my fears like any other man or woman
but i couldn’t let my self preservation
allow me the comfort of cowardice
when they stoned that woman
when they changed money in the temple
when they dared me to heal the withered hand on the sabbath
i had my struggles like any other man or woman
and i resolved them in these waking dreams as i spoke to the crowds
keeping my faith in the humble quiet power of love
unsure of the path as i stumbled in the darkness
tripping into the faintest of light ahead
working out the dream of a new possibility as i spoke with you
and like any other man or woman i want a long life
but not standing by in the acquiescence of selfish longevity
while power is concentrated in the hands of the few
at the expense of the many
while greed nourishes and feeds a garden of oppression
while blood lubricates the machinations of war
and so like any other revolutionary man or woman
i didn’t come to bring peace but came with a machete
to prune the oppression from minds
both yours and my own
to cleave the hatred from hearts
both yours and my own
to hack off the hands of these demons clutching spirit
both yours and my own
and like any other guerrilla fighter man or woman
i paid the price for dreaming such dreams of anarchy
loosed upon the world
crowned with thorns and forced to carry my own cross up a hill
littered with the skulls of the guerrillas that came before me
and hung with nails as an example to the rest of you
sitting passively on the sidelines
and like any other guerrilla christ prophet man or woman
before me and after me i rise again and again and again
and each time the politicians and the merchants
and the high priests conspire
to abort this dream of anarchy that paves the road to equality
while massaging pliable illusions
that condemn these rebellions as failure
and like any other revolution filed and labeled and defined as failure
it will go on and on until we collectively recognize
the guerrilla christ in each of us
to form an army that will liberate the dream of anarchy
upon a center that will not hold
leveling the playing field horizontal
and burying this oppression beneath it
while the meek dance over it bringing heaven down to earth
as their rightful inheritance
#nothingtobegainedhere 