have known Germans, and even worked for them: the lowest conceivable level of humanity. A German produces on average twice the feces of a Frenchman. Hyperactivity of the bowel at the expense of the brain, which demonstrates their physiological inferiority. During times of barbarian invasion, the Germanic hordes strewed their route with great masses of fecal material. In recent centuries, French travelers knew immediately when they had crossed the Alsace frontier by the abnormal size of the turds left lying along the roads. As if that were not enough, the typical German suffers from bromhidrosis—foul-smelling sweat—and it’s been shown that the urine of a German contains twenty percent nitrogen, while that of other races has only fifteen.

The German lives in a state of perpetual intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of beer and the pork sausages on which he gorges himself. They fill their mouths with their Geist, which means spirit, but it’s the spirit of the ale, which stultifies them from their youth and explains why, beyond the Rhine, nothing interesting has ever been produced in art, except for a few paintings of repugnant faces and poems of deadly tedium.

Their abuse of beer makes them incapable of having the slightest notion of their vulgarity, and the height of this vulgarity is that they feel no shame at being German. They took a gluttonous and lecherous monk like Luther seriously (can you really marry a nun?) only because he ruined the Bible by translating it into their own language.

When someone wants the entire thing torn down, from the Federal Reserve to the Capitalist system, to Wall Street, to
Obamacare, to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberger Group, I think that puts them in the radical category.
When someone advocates a boycott of the electoral system, a change in the political system, a move to direct democracy, etc.
then I'm probably farther to the left than even the radicals in the 60's.
I'm comfortable with that now.

okay, any befuddlement about the "left/right" labels, because the whole notion of "left" and "right" is at once a fossilized and outmoded, and relatively new, formulation—based solely, and in the original, upon where delegates to the French National Assembly seated themselves in 1789: supporters of the king sat to the right, supporters of what would become known as the French Revolution to the left. That's where it came from. "Left." And "right."

That such a division is of no contemporary relevance can be seen in the amusing, and to me frankly disgusting, reverence with which some of those who identify as "left," then and now, regard the racist authoritarian monarch FDR. Who arrogated to himself in foreign policy powers unmatched by any president before or since—the Lend-Lease Bill of spring 1941 "enabled him to designate as a beneficiary any country in the world; to manufacture and procure whatever munitions he wanted; to sell, transfer, exchange, lease and lend any articles of defence he liked; to repair and recondition the articles of defence of the designated governments; to communicate to these governments any defence information he considered necessary; and to determine the terms and conditions of receipt and payment"—and in domestic policy deliberately crafted his New White Deal to benefit white men only, refusing even to support federal law that would put an end to the actual physical lynching of black people, as "I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save [white male] America. The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the antilynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep [white male] America from collapsing."

This man was a cold-blooded racist murdering war pig. He was not "left" . . . except as it might be understood by those who, in the French Assembly in 1789, sat on the "left," but were, a few years later, degraded by the power—because power always degrades—they had meanwhile seized from the "rightist" king, so as to start dragging off to the scaffold whomsoever might have once pissed them off.

In my opinion, the essential division comes down to this: "it looks more and more to me like the only really important idea is to say yes to anything that brings life and no to anything that brings death."

To wit, if you claim to be all left because you're against US wars and shit, and yet you would support "armed struggle" by, say, the people of Donbass, or the Palestinians, you're just another Dick Cheney. The only difference is in whom you determine it is right and meet, to kill.

As for the cited avatars of the supposedly once "radical left": Jerry Rubin went to work on Wall Street; Abbie Hoffman peddled always himself; the SDS were wanking white-people motormouths who, in Grace Slick's apt phrase, "didn't mean shit to a tree"; and the Weathermen—more wanking white people, who succeeded mainly in blowing themselves up.

In my opinion, the true "radical left" of that period were people who stayed all the fuck way away from "politics."

To wit, Ken Kesey:

The acid test was breaking out into an area in which it had no specific goals. It was just discovering what there was out there if you continued to move away from the norm.

It was a test. And there were people that passed, and there were people that didn’t pass.

When we did the show up in Portland—to give you an idea of someone who passed—some businessman, just walkin’ around on the street, came in; we charged a buck, and for a buck you got to see us make all our noise, and the Dead make all their noise, and anything else that happened.

This guy was in a suit, and he had an umbrella. He got the customary cup of stuff. And about midnight, you could see him really get ripped. Somebody who’d probably never been anything but drunk on beer. But he looked around, and he saw all these strange people, and he looked down, and the spotlight was showing down on him, and he saw his shadow.

And he stands up straight, puts that umbrella over his shoulder, and he says:

“The king walks.”

And:

“The king turns around.”

And:

“Now the king will dance.”

To wit, Jerry Garcia:

They just brought in all this political, heavy-handed, East Coast, hard-edge shit, and painted it on Haight Street, where none of it was happening. Everybody had already been through being disillusioned. It represented a step backward. I thought, "Aw man, not this shit again." I thought we had already gone through it, and now we're into the psychedelic era. There was a whole new consciousness starting to happen, and it was really working nice, but then the flood came, and that was it.

The information we’re plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It’s built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there’s a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That’s the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it’s only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we’re all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that’s really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it’s only a tiny little glint, but it’s already over. The change has already happened, and it’s a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We’re living after the fact. It’s a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it’s very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.

To wit, Stanley Kubrick:

And here man undergoes a transformation as important as when he became a tool-user. He becomes a natural being again, having used his tools for hundreds of thousands of years to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Now, he no longer needs them. He has transcended his own nature, as that original ape did, and now he is no longer a “man.”

Instead, having grown old and died, he is reborn as a child of the universe. As a solemn, wide-eyed infant who slowly looks over the stars and the Earth, and then turns his eyes on the audience.

These last 20 seconds, as the child of man looks down on his ancestral parents, are the most important in the film. We in the audience are men, and here is the liberated, natural being, Kubrick believes we will someday become.

But when Kubrick’s space infant looked at the audience the other night, half of the audience was already on its feet, in a hurry to get out. A good third of the audience, must not have seen the space infant at all.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXS8P0HksQo]