Slow To Speak : Elektion Propaganda
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It's been four years since the eclipse of reason visited us last---two years if you count the more recent congressional race---and once again the American people have lost track of reality (did we ever have it in our grasp?). Like the monoliths of Soviet and Western expansion, we've been told that Obama/Romney is the most essential dialectic of our time, that this dichotomy is a pure reduction of a complex web of social and political battlefields, and that our very moral compasses will be set to the visions of one of these two great men. And so, with a quick and convenient sweep of the rhetorical rug, the real, stinking carcass of our present age of austerity and empire has been cleared from our conscience. Thank goodness, it could not have come sooner! For a while there those creeping monsters of the impending and imminent collapse had haunted our dreams, our nightmares, haunted them so fiercely that we began to see their shadows every waking minute, chilled and sent yearning once more for a time when we could only just ignore our hardships in peace. All out war waged on the international working-class, an increasingly bleak forecast for our military engagement in that old death nest of empires, and a very real environmental catastrophe made all the more apparent this last week. The most terrifying realization from all of this is also the most simple: we have no real control over our lives, our futures, our world. And right on cue, these two horsemen of a quiet apocalypse have come galloping in to offer us their impossible choice. Care within our parameters, or be told over and over again that you just don't care at all. Pick your poison, literally.

Of course, beyond this beautiful and brilliant lie, beyond all the uncomfortable discussions over dinner and the occasionally flaring tempers of our narrow ideological posturing, there lies the vast, cold reality of daily life for most of us in the "1st world": the constant production of psuedo-necessity, total disconnection from economic reality, absolute social isolation, endless reaffirmation of the ever-present end of history. It's been called many things: capital, wage-labor, forced survival, spectacular class society. It really doesn't matter what name you put on it as long as you can see it, something that the dominant social relation of our time does its best to make as foggy and indecipherable as possible, all while standing 6 inches from your face, spitting in your eye and raising a shiny dagger to the next unfortunate "3rd world" innocent. Yes, there are real differences between quasi-fascism and center-right pragmatism. Yes, many of us---people of color, women, immigrants, homosexuals---have been brutally excluded and left out in the cold. But to be told that today's ritual selection between a proven mass-murderer and his eager substitute is the peak of our participatory and communal life is nefarious, a truly wicked lie that many of us have accepted without a fight. An old jewish proverb says, “When faced with a choice between two difficult paths, always choose the third." But if there is a limit of choice, if I must set up an eternal dichotomy of good and evil, I posit a much harsher, more vital choice: total refusal or complete acceptance. Whether or who you vote for has little impact on this more grave dilemma. It is something much deeper and far-reaching, something brooding under every gesture, every action, every infinitesimally small exercise of will, waiting to break its cover, obliterate these minutia in search of a true and final settling of scores. After this special holiday of supreme civic duty, after the constant banter of good and evil, democrat and republican, more or less government, just remember this one truly consequential decision that will continue to haunt you for the rest of your life.

"But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.” -Mark Twain

1. Basic Channel - Phylyps Base [Basic Channel]
2. The Weathermen - Flanagan Deleted [SDS]
3. The Rotating Assembly - Orchestra Hall [Sound Signature]
4. F.911 - Missing Senate [MM]
5. Eddie Gale - Rain [Water]
6. Spirit - Ice [Sundazed]
7. Gil Scott-Heron - Winter In America [Castle Comm.]
8. Universal Tongues - What Do You See? [Natural Resource]
9. Terry Callier - A.D's Lament [Mr. Bongo]
10. Pharoah Sanders - Village Of The Pharoah's [Impulse!]
11. Moodymann - Stairway2 Heaven [KDJ]
12. Kanye West - Jesus Walks [Roc-A-Fella]
13. Celestial Choir - Stand On The Word [White]
14. Theo Parrish - Major Moments Of Instant Insanity [Sound Signature]
15. Monolake - Tetris [Imbalance]
16. Undisputed Truth - Smiling Faces Sometimes [Whitfield]
17. Kool & The Gang - Here After [De-Lite]
18. David Gilbert - F*ck Brinks [Prison]
19. Eddie Kendricks - My People...Hold On [Motown]
20. Bernardine Dohrn - Rebellion Is Continous [She's So Funky]

Guerilla Musik & Elektion Propaganda by Francis Englehardt & Paul Nickerson. Dreamt, Morphed, Melted & Manipulated in Brooklyn, NY on November 1st 2004, the eve of returned darkness.