jello biafra transcript

Complete transcript of my interview with Jello Biafra. The teenager lurking at the edges of my psyche is still doing handsprings. The more evolved element currently in fuller control of my faculties has a few shattered illusion problems, tho.

x: Inevitably, at protests, there's someone there holding up a 'Jello Biafra 2004' sign. We have one here in KC. I know you were nominated for the 2000 Green Party. What do you think it is about you that makes people want you to run the country?

jb: I guess it’s a magnet for someone who provides a public outlet for their feelings and articulates what they feel about what’s going on. Whether or not that automatically makes me the best possible Green nominee for 2004 is pretty debatable. If I had to make a decision right now, I wouldn’t run. I didn’t even run in 2000, I just got nominated, to my own surprise by people at the NY state green party and decided to leave my name on the ballot in the hopes of inspiring people who knew who I am and what I’m down with that’d never heard of Ralph Nader or the Greens to get off their butt and check out the Green site and register to vote and show up on election day and maybe parlay that into greater involvement in change and politics in the community.

[Another call comes in, it’s Harvey Sid Fisher]

If I had to make a decision now whether to run, I would probably decline. I think there’s better and better known people out there who are gonna toss their hat in the ring too. There’s talk of Nader running again, there’s some talk of the recently deposed Progressive congresswoman from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, and wouldn’t it be interesting if Michael Moore gave it a shot.

x: Did you catch him on the Oscars?

I thought it was wonderful. I never watch the Oscars, but the people I was staying with that night had it on. So, as always, the tube draws everyone into the room. There he was, I was going ‘c’mon Michael, don’t let us down’ and he didn’t. I also find it interesting that most of the boos were coming from way up in the balcony and other people were booing those booers. And another thing that’s been alleged is that when CNN was rebroadcasting it, they monkeyed with the sound and turned the boos up. In these days of so-called news journalists acting as nothing but stenographers and cheerleaders for the Pentagon, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.

x: There's an element of confusion, at least to me, of how cowed the reporting pool is these days. Everyone living in a kind of fear of the list and not being on it. Then they all complain, but no one seems to actually make a stand towards the Ron Ziegler tactics.

jb: Why is there any confusion in this day and age? This is exactly what happens when hostile takeover laws are de-regulated, clear back in the dark days of the Reagan monster and the same corporations that used to be policed by an independent mass media who acted as a 4th branch of government in a way, exposing their dirty deeds, those news outlets get bought up by those same corporations. And now, a really smelly example would be NBC. They’re now owned by GE, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and nuclear power people. This gives GE execs editorial control over NBC news. They were cheerleaders for the last Gulf War, right down to showcasing how wonderful and accurate the Patriot missles were—later proven untrue, of course—and whaddya know? GE helped make the guidance system for the Patriots. CNN recently ran a poll claiming that 2/3rds of Americans want anti-war protests banned. But who did they really poll? Anybody? This is the same news network that once claimed that overwhelming majorities of Americans wanted mandatory drug-testing in the workplace and it turned out all they polled were people working at a drug testing lab.

It’s gotten to the point where the big-time corporate media is as dumbed-down as Pravda was in the old Soviet Union. That was the only press allowed, which was 8 pages a day of all the government thought you should be allowed to know. We have more than 8 pages a day in this country but instead of keeping the public in the dark thru lack of information, we keep the public in the dark by snowing them with useless information and deliberately omitting relevant information from the news, which is the worst form of censorship going on today. Why talk about global warming when you can talk about new potions that’ll help you fight the ageing process. Or why worry about what’s really going wrong in the world when there’s such an important issue as human cloning. Human cloning doesn’t really bother me much, we’ve had that for generations. It’s called the public school system.

Another major form of media control is making everything so celebrity-driven. You’re supposed to really be far more passionate about what’s up with this movie star or that music star than what’s going on in your own community and how you’re getting burned right left and center by your own boss.

x: But that's not the end all, be all of media. I assume you're pretty tapped into the alternative media underground out there, yeah?

jb: There’s a lot of them both in print and on the net. Periodicals like Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Covert Action Quarterly, Multinational Monitor and many many more. On the net you can go to any of their sites. Indymedia.org, the master site for all these grass roots media centers that have sprung up all over the country and across the world now. It started under that name in Seattle, and now there’s even an Independent Media Center in Palestine and you can read what they’re putting up there. Another good one is the Guardian, where if you want the real perspective of people across the Atlantic about what they really think about Bush and the War on Terror, Inc. Go there, don’t listen to Fox News. There’s even an American reporter for the Guardian named Greg Palast who no one will publish over here because the stuff he digs up is too explosive, apparently. He got more interesting things on the Florida Election Scam than anybody just by reading the documents and he’s got his own site and a book, the Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Plus, another major part of the internet revolution is more and more people can just take the attitude that I’ve been putting into words since Gulf War I. Don’t hate the media, become the media. Now it’s not just people starting their own imc or sharing information among themselves on the net but in this day and age one of the most important parts of becoming the media is just going to people one on one at home, school, work and family. The best way to get across to people that this war is not only wrong but needs to be opposed in any way possible until the plug is pulled is to point out to people, even ones with flags on their cars, that ‘look, the war on terrorism was supposed to make us safer, right? How are we accomplishing that by blowing up Iraq? Everytime we blow anybody up in the Middle East, all we’re doing is planting the seeds for more Osama Bin Ladens, more Al-Quaidas, more suicide bombers, more terrorism, thus making our country and our own lives less and less safe. It’s not to talk down to people or make it an anti-Bush trip, tempting tho that may be, but come from the standpoint of pro-peace and pro-safety.

x: What do you say to the notion that the crisis going on in the world, be it the war or the protests or the economy, is actually a good thing? That it helps to draw attention to viewpoints like your own and draw people into following alternate media and digging beyond the nightly news?

jb: Taking that attitude is as horrible as the attitude of someone like Donald Rumsfeld. That if thousands of people get killed in someone else’s country that it’s automatically good for us because more people protest the killing. I don’t want to fall into that.

x: Your turnout these days-- what's the make up like? Is it DK fans, fans of your spoken word or a healthy mix?

jb: It used to be when I was mostly doing colleges in college towns it was maybe 1/3 DK fans who actually read the words, 1/3 civil liberties activists who knew about the Frankenchrist obscenity trial and all and 1/3 people who had nothing else to do that night and thus were in most need of creative mindfucking. And now it seems like it’s become a little more preaching to the choir than it was on the surface, but at the same what I do is add a lot more detail and information and fuel to that fire and hopefully thus provide some more stimulus and inspiration for people to go out and fight the power, so to speak. Plus, I think especially in a place like Topeka, KS, I think it means a lot to people to show up and find that many more people in the same room in the same town that hate the Bush agenda as much as they do. We’re not as alone as we think we are. It’s hard to tell now how many of those people come thru knowing DK and how many come thru knowing me thru spoken word and the activist side of the legacy and, again, how many people are looking for anybody with a big mouth to give them some energy to keep on fighting against this stupid war.

x: What's more effective in getting your message across? Your music or your spoken word?

jb: Each reaches different people. If you’re going to do it with music, it helps if it’s good music which I think I’ve done pretty well with over the years. Be it DK or Lard or some of the other projects with DOA or nomeansno or Mojo Nixon or Tumor Circus, No WTO Combo or the new one with the Melvins or whatever. On the other hand, with the spoken word, I can go into much more detail on the same point and penetrate people on a deeper level. It doesn’t have the cathartic energy of course. On the other hand, you don’t get the show poisoned with weekend Mohicans who are so conservative, they only want to hear 20 year old punk rock songs and can’t bear to be confronted with anything new.

x: Do you get that a lot?

jb: Not so much at spoken word shows, but I’ve noticed a growing problem with that and the punk scene in general of people who are only into cartoon retro to the point where any old band reforming sometimes for the worst possible reasons is automatically good but anything new and good, even in their own town, gets ignored because they’re not an old band cashing in on their name. I wouldn’t mind it so much except for the attitude that somebody new who’s working really hard doesn’t deserve the same support. That’s so conservative, that’s so sheeplike, it’s the exact opposite of what punk always meant to me.

x: And what do you think about all the recent government snowflakes talking about how the war is, for all intents and purposes, won?

jb: What a lie that is. The hardest part of this war is going to be establishing peace. You haven’t won a war until you’ve won the peace. Look what happened to us in Afghanistan when we abandoned the country to the point where the Taliban looked good and were allowed to seize control. We didn’t win that war, we abandoned a whole nation of people and it came back to haunt us. This is where Iraq may turn out to be as bad or worse than Vietnam. The bush mob is talking about occupying Iraq for 10-15 years. How do the Iraqi people feel about that? They haven’t exactly welcomed us with open arms so far. Look what happened when we tried to occupy Lebanon under Reagan. All it took was one suicide bomber blowing a hotel where marines were and we fled with our tail between our legs. And of course the stakes here are much higher. It’s a much bigger country, plus the people running the war are so oil-soaked and drunk on their own greed and fascist ideology that we’re not gonna run off as easily.

I don’t think this is totally about oil, either. Supposedly the oil we actually use that comes from the Persian Gulf is only 5% of our total gluttonous consumption. In that case why the hell have we put up multiple military bases in Kuwait, still more in Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Bahrain and even Jhbooti across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. We’re putting them up in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, we’re already in Turkey and we intend to occupy Iraq and put up more. Why? I think this traces back to what I call the Curse of the Wolfman. A report written up under the direction of King George I, our current president’s daddy.after his Gulf War. It was written by Paul Wolfowitz and Louis Libby, who goes by the name of ‘Scooter,’ two more chickenhawks who’ve never served in the military, just like most of the Bush regime. They concluded in this phone-book sized document that because there was no more Cold War and Communist Evil Empire to fight, the world was a much worse and less safe place because now we needed to treat all our allies as “potential competitors” who had to be prevented from “aspiring to a greater regional or global role” than we had in mind for them. This report also said that the US Military intervention in other people’s countries should be “a regular feature of global affairs.” Even King George I dismissed this whole premise as nuts, but other people didn’t. And now what’s happened, the Wolfman is now number 2 to Rumsfeld at the Defense Dept. and is widely considered to be the architect and prime mover of the current ill-advised war and Scooter is Cheney’s chief of staff. And even way back after this report came out in the early 90’s, who went to Congress as a cheerleader for it but Colin Powell, telling a House committee, “I want to be the bully on the block.” So what this means is, if we occupy Iraq and take it over as our new colony with more to come if those guys have our way we can basically say to France, Germany and maybe even China or Japan “Look, you aspire to a greater regional or global role for yourself, we’ve got you by the nuts. We don’t really need to worry about our own oil supply, but we can sure as hell cut off yours, so knuckle under, okay?” That is the purpose of this war is enacting the Curse of the Wolfman and this means some of the more wreckless chickenhawks in and out of the Bush administration including the recently-fired Richard Perle. Right before he was fired, he told a roomful of Arab journalists no less in London, that as soon as we have regime change in Iraq, we expect regime change in Libya, Syria and Iran.

Another scary part of all this is not only are we inflaming our most committed of all enemies, violent Islamic fundamentalists but killing in our name our violent fundamentalist Christians. What happens if one of these people gets it in Bush’s pea brain that "You’re never gonna be able to play golf with Jesus or take him around the Crawford ranch if he doesn’t come back and he ain’t gonna come back til we have the rapture and for that, King George, we need Armageddon. C’mon George, push all those other buttons and fire our own WMD. Hey, in Heaven, maybe you can finally be commissioner of baseball."

The fact that these people are fully aware of how much we’re inflaming hatred against us in the Middle East and other parts of the world and are so cocky they’re openly talking about invading other countries anyway, what are people in the Middle East thinking about us right now? Even the Europeans. March 4 USA TODAY had a cover story on the hostilities towards American tourists in Europe now and people are getting confronted in the street over how horrible our government is. So their solution was to provide a sidebar article entitled “Tips for Blending In.” This is the kind of world we’re allowing the Bush mob to create. And this is where protests could help curtail this, even if it doesn’t stop the whole war. Daniel Ellsberg pointed out that he was absolutely crushed after a huge organized protest against the Vietnam War in 1969, called the Moratorium, which I even remember as a kid, he thought that was gonna end the war right then and there because there was so much of a groundswell of public anger against the war. It didn’t happen. But then, years later, documents obtained under the FOI act that he found showed that those protests sent such a strong message to the Nixon white house that Nixon abandoned any thought of dropping a nuclear bomb on N. Vietnam. So, yes, those protests did some good.

x: And what's your role in the protests been?

jb: I haven’t been able to do much with them because I’ve been on the road so much. The only one I’ve actually spoken at so far was a spontaneous one in Champagne, IL that I was able to get to before I had to hop on the plane and go to OKC. Amazingly, even in that little rah-rah college town, there were 1200 people against the war on less than a day’s notice. One thing to remember is, even tho it seems like it’s cries in the wilderness right now, the numbers and level of organization of these anti-war protests is already as big or larger than the anti-Vietnam protests. I’m hoping this will grow into a much larger version of the anti-corporate movement that people have dubbed ‘the spirit of Seattle.’ If we can treat all the other people who show up at these protests respectfully and learn from them and learn how to work with other kinds of people, we have a much better chance of slowly but surely eating away at the corporate coup that’s slowly but surely eating away at our constitutional rights and has been for 20-30 years. My hope is that people will see that there is very much a need for protests against corporate rule. Let’s call it what it is, it’s not runaway-unregulated-capitalism anymore, we’re talking feudalism here. Y’know, the barons and lords in high castles complete with moats now are people like Shell, Exxon, MS, AOL-TW and Walmart, you name it. Everytime we buy any of those people’s products or buy anything from their chain stores or chain restaurants, we are their serfs. And nobody can separate themselves all the way from that, but the more we try to do that as individuals, the more effective we are at fighting corporate feudalism. You don’t have to go to a protest or attend a bunch of crabby meetings to fight corporate power. All you have to do as an individual, and It’s so easy, is put your money where your mouth is and put it into independent businesses that keep the money in the community and not support the chains. It starts with the individual and it’s the easiest thing to turn other people onto too is that first step when people think ‘oh, there’s so much wrong, what can I as some little ant do to fight this?’ You fight it with your money, pure and simple. And don’t waste so damn many things either.

x: What's the next step, though? How do you keep people involved, especially after the war is 'over' and there's the perception that there's nothing left to fight?

jb: I’m sure there’s going to be many people at these protests passing out literature and even zines and all, talking about other important issues that connect here. Y’know, the War on Terrorism, Inc. is very much a human rights issue here at home. Now, floating around in Congress, is the Patriot 2 act which is going to allow secret arrests of American citizens as well as supposed terrorist middle-eastern immigrants. And there’s even a provision in there that calls for expelling people who are connected with organizations the government doesn’t like and stripping Americans of their citizenship for opposing the Bushcroft agenda. That’s potentially more dangerous than anything Sadaam Hussein could hope to do to his country.

x: And your shows? What are you looking for people to get out of it?

jb: Hopefully get some sort of brainfood and inspiration to get off their ass or get further off their ass and, “fight the power” and it doesn’t mean fighting in the street 24 hours a day or dropping out of college or whatnot. There’s all kinds of ways people can do it, and if they find ways to do it in their own lives without compromising who they are then people are more likely to stick with it long term. To kind of re-answer an earlier question, I hope all the protesters and likeminded people against this war will not make the same mistake that so many people did when the Vietnam war ended. Thinking, okay, we don’t really need to be fighting anymore or protesting anything, ‘hey dad can I get a loan to start a business downtown?’ A lot of the people who put energy into the anti-vietnam war movement turned around and became the most noxious species of yuppies that plague us today. They forgot to keep fighting, that there were all these other unfinished issues in regards to all the different civil rights and cleaning up the environment more and, most importantly, beating back with pitchforks the runaway power of corrupt corporations. We haven’t gained ground since then, we’ve lost ground because we didn’t keep fighting. That energy needs to be maintained and turned loose on other things besides the war. Right now the most important issue is the overall War on Terrorism scam, which is doing almost nothing to fight terrorists. It’s a scam to throw the constitution on the backyard barbeque at home while implementing the Curse of the Wolfman across the globe. That’s issue number one. And all the human rights and civil rights and environmental issues falls under that. You can’t fight on these other things if you’re not allowed to fight at all anymore or you’ll lose your citizenship and get expelled to who knows where. Keep in mind that Canada got bullied into passing a law in the mid-70s that they won’t give amnesty to people who won’t go to war anymore up there.

This is where becoming the media and actively fighting this stuff is important. And yes, congress creatures do read letters. They don’t necessarily read them all personally but they have people employed to tabulate how many letters are coming in yea or nay on any certain issue. So it’s time to start the flood now against this kind of legislation, especially if it gets folded into Patriot 2, which you’ll notice the CNNS and Foxes and MSNBCs and Dan Rathers are not mentioning at all. Their owners don’t even want us to know they exist.

x: Inevitably, at protests, there's someone there holding up a 'Jello Biafra 2004' sign. We have one here in KC. I know you were nominated for the 2000 Green Party. What do you think it is about you that makes people want you to run the country?

jb: I guess it’s a magnet for someone who provides a public outlet for their feelings and articulates what they feel about what’s going on. Whether or not that automatically makes me the best possible Green nominee for 2004 is pretty debatable. If I had to make a decision right now, I wouldn’t run. I didn’t even run in 2000, I just got nominated, to my own surprise by people at the NY state green party and decided to leave my name on the ballot in the hopes of inspiring people who knew who I am and what I’m down with that’d never heard of Ralph Nader or the Greens to get off their butt and check out the Green site and register to vote and show up on election day and maybe parlay that into greater involvement in change and politics in the community.

[Another call comes in, it’s Harvey Sid Fisher]

If I had to make a decision now whether to run, I would probably decline. I think there’s better and better known people out there who are gonna toss their hat in the ring too. There’s talk of Nader running again, there’s some talk of the recently deposed Progressive congresswoman from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, and wouldn’t it be interesting if Michael Moore gave it a shot.

x: Did you catch him on the Oscars?

I thought it was wonderful. I never watch the Oscars, but the people I was staying with that night had it on. So, as always, the tube draws everyone into the room. There he was, I was going ‘c’mon Michael, don’t let us down’ and he didn’t. I also find it interesting that most of the boos were coming from way up in the balcony and other people were booing those booers. And another thing that’s been alleged is that when CNN was rebroadcasting it, they monkeyed with the sound and turned the boos up. In these days of so-called news journalists acting as nothing but stenographers and cheerleaders for the Pentagon, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.

x: There's an element of confusion, at least to me, of how cowed the reporting pool is these days. Everyone living in a kind of fear of the list and not being on it. Then they all complain, but no one seems to actually make a stand towards the Ron Ziegler tactics.

jb: Why is there any confusion in this day and age? This is exactly what happens when hostile takeover laws are de-regulated, clear back in the dark days of the Reagan monster and the same corporations that used to be policed by an independent mass media who acted as a 4th branch of government in a way, exposing their dirty deeds, those news outlets get bought up by those same corporations. And now, a really smelly example would be NBC. They’re now owned by GE, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and nuclear power people. This gives GE execs editorial control over NBC news. They were cheerleaders for the last Gulf War, right down to showcasing how wonderful and accurate the Patriot missles were—later proven untrue, of course—and whaddya know? GE helped make the guidance system for the Patriots. CNN recently ran a poll claiming that 2/3rds of Americans want anti-war protests banned. But who did they really poll? Anybody? This is the same news network that once claimed that overwhelming majorities of Americans wanted mandatory drug-testing in the workplace and it turned out all they polled were people working at a drug testing lab.

It’s gotten to the point where the big-time corporate media is as dumbed-down as Pravda was in the old Soviet Union. That was the only press allowed, which was 8 pages a day of all the government thought you should be allowed to know. We have more than 8 pages a day in this country but instead of keeping the public in the dark thru lack of information, we keep the public in the dark by snowing them with useless information and deliberately omitting relevant information from the news, which is the worst form of censorship going on today. Why talk about global warming when you can talk about new potions that’ll help you fight the ageing process. Or why worry about what’s really going wrong in the world when there’s such an important issue as human cloning. Human cloning doesn’t really bother me much, we’ve had that for generations. It’s called the public school system.

Another major form of media control is making everything so celebrity-driven. You’re supposed to really be far more passionate about what’s up with this movie star or that music star than what’s going on in your own community and how you’re getting burned right left and center by your own boss.

x: But that's not the end all, be all of media. I assume you're pretty tapped into the alternative media underground out there, yeah?

jb: There’s a lot of them both in print and on the net. Periodicals like Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Covert Action Quarterly, Multinational Monitor and many many more. On the net you can go to any of their sites. Indymedia.org, the master site for all these grass roots media centers that have sprung up all over the country and across the world now. It started under that name in Seattle, and now there’s even an Independent Media Center in Palestine and you can read what they’re putting up there. Another good one is the Guardian, where if you want the real perspective of people across the Atlantic about what they really think about Bush and the War on Terror, Inc. Go there, don’t listen to Fox News. There’s even an American reporter for the Guardian named Greg Palast who no one will publish over here because the stuff he digs up is too explosive, apparently. He got more interesting things on the Florida Election Scam than anybody just by reading the documents and he’s got his own site and a book, the Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Plus, another major part of the internet revolution is more and more people can just take the attitude that I’ve been putting into words since Gulf War I. Don’t hate the media, become the media. Now it’s not just people starting their own imc or sharing information among themselves on the net but in this day and age one of the most important parts of becoming the media is just going to people one on one at home, school, work and family. The best way to get across to people that this war is not only wrong but needs to be opposed in any way possible until the plug is pulled is to point out to people, even ones with flags on their cars, that ‘look, the war on terrorism was supposed to make us safer, right? How are we accomplishing that by blowing up Iraq? Everytime we blow anybody up in the Middle East, all we’re doing is planting the seeds for more Osama Bin Ladens, more Al-Quaidas, more suicide bombers, more terrorism, thus making our country and our own lives less and less safe. It’s not to talk down to people or make it an anti-Bush trip, tempting tho that may be, but come from the standpoint of pro-peace and pro-safety.

x: What do you say to the notion that the crisis going on in the world, be it the war or the protests or the economy, is actually a good thing? That it helps to draw attention to viewpoints like your own and draw people into following alternate media and digging beyond the nightly news?

jb: Taking that attitude is as horrible as the attitude of someone like Donald Rumsfeld. That if thousands of people get killed in someone else’s country that it’s automatically good for us because more people protest the killing. I don’t want to fall into that.

x: Your turnout these days-- what's the make up like? Is it DK fans, fans of your spoken word or a healthy mix?

jb: It used to be when I was mostly doing colleges in college towns it was maybe 1/3 DK fans who actually read the words, 1/3 civil liberties activists who knew about the Frankenchrist obscenity trial and all and 1/3 people who had nothing else to do that night and thus were in most need of creative mindfucking. And now it seems like it’s become a little more preaching to the choir than it was on the surface, but at the same what I do is add a lot more detail and information and fuel to that fire and hopefully thus provide some more stimulus and inspiration for people to go out and fight the power, so to speak. Plus, I think especially in a place like Topeka, KS, I think it means a lot to people to show up and find that many more people in the same room in the same town that hate the Bush agenda as much as they do. We’re not as alone as we think we are. It’s hard to tell now how many of those people come thru knowing DK and how many come thru knowing me thru spoken word and the activist side of the legacy and, again, how many people are looking for anybody with a big mouth to give them some energy to keep on fighting against this stupid war.

x: What's more effective in getting your message across? Your music or your spoken word?

jb: Each reaches different people. If you’re going to do it with music, it helps if it’s good music which I think I’ve done pretty well with over the years. Be it DK or Lard or some of the other projects with DOA or nomeansno or Mojo Nixon or Tumor Circus, No WTO Combo or the new one with the Melvins or whatever. On the other hand, with the spoken word, I can go into much more detail on the same point and penetrate people on a deeper level. It doesn’t have the cathartic energy of course. On the other hand, you don’t get the show poisoned with weekend Mohicans who are so conservative, they only want to hear 20 year old punk rock songs and can’t bear to be confronted with anything new.

x: Do you get that a lot?

jb: Not so much at spoken word shows, but I’ve noticed a growing problem with that and the punk scene in general of people who are only into cartoon retro to the point where any old band reforming sometimes for the worst possible reasons is automatically good but anything new and good, even in their own town, gets ignored because they’re not an old band cashing in on their name. I wouldn’t mind it so much except for the attitude that somebody new who’s working really hard doesn’t deserve the same support. That’s so conservative, that’s so sheeplike, it’s the exact opposite of what punk always meant to me.

x: And what do you think about all the recent government snowflakes talking about how the war is, for all intents and purposes, won?

jb: What a lie that is. The hardest part of this war is going to be establishing peace. You haven’t won a war until you’ve won the peace. Look what happened to us in Afghanistan when we abandoned the country to the point where the Taliban looked good and were allowed to seize control. We didn’t win that war, we abandoned a whole nation of people and it came back to haunt us. This is where Iraq may turn out to be as bad or worse than Vietnam. The bush mob is talking about occupying Iraq for 10-15 years. How do the Iraqi people feel about that? They haven’t exactly welcomed us with open arms so far. Look what happened when we tried to occupy Lebanon under Reagan. All it took was one suicide bomber blowing a hotel where marines were and we fled with our tail between our legs. And of course the stakes here are much higher. It’s a much bigger country, plus the people running the war are so oil-soaked and drunk on their own greed and fascist ideology that we’re not gonna run off as easily.

I don’t think this is totally about oil, either. Supposedly the oil we actually use that comes from the Persian Gulf is only 5% of our total gluttonous consumption. In that case why the hell have we put up multiple military bases in Kuwait, still more in Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Bahrain and even Jhbooti across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. We’re putting them up in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, we’re already in Turkey and we intend to occupy Iraq and put up more. Why? I think this traces back to what I call the Curse of the Wolfman. A report written up under the direction of King George I, our current president’s daddy.after his Gulf War. It was written by Paul Wolfowitz and Louis Libby, who goes by the name of ‘Scooter,’ two more chickenhawks who’ve never served in the military, just like most of the Bush regime. They concluded in this phone-book sized document that because there was no more Cold War and Communist Evil Empire to fight, the world was a much worse and less safe place because now we needed to treat all our allies as “potential competitors” who had to be prevented from “aspiring to a greater regional or global role” than we had in mind for them. This report also said that the US Military intervention in other people’s countries should be “a regular feature of global affairs.” Even King George I dismissed this whole premise as nuts, but other people didn’t. And now what’s happened, the Wolfman is now number 2 to Rumsfeld at the Defense Dept. and is widely considered to be the architect and prime mover of the current ill-advised war and Scooter is Cheney’s chief of staff. And even way back after this report came out in the early 90’s, who went to Congress as a cheerleader for it but Colin Powell, telling a House committee, “I want to be the bully on the block.” So what this means is, if we occupy Iraq and take it over as our new colony with more to come if those guys have our way we can basically say to France, Germany and maybe even China or Japan “Look, you aspire to a greater regional or global role for yourself, we’ve got you by the nuts. We don’t really need to worry about our own oil supply, but we can sure as hell cut off yours, so knuckle under, okay?” That is the purpose of this war is enacting the Curse of the Wolfman and this means some of the more wreckless chickenhawks in and out of the Bush administration including the recently-fired Richard Perle. Right before he was fired, he told a roomful of Arab journalists no less in London, that as soon as we have regime change in Iraq, we expect regime change in Libya, Syria and Iran.

Another scary part of all this is not only are we inflaming our most committed of all enemies, violent Islamic fundamentalists but killing in our name our violent fundamentalist Christians. What happens if one of these people gets it in Bush’s pea brain that "You’re never gonna be able to play golf with Jesus or take him around the Crawford ranch if he doesn’t come back and he ain’t gonna come back til we have the rapture and for that, King George, we need Armageddon. C’mon George, push all those other buttons and fire our own WMD. Hey, in Heaven, maybe you can finally be commissioner of baseball."

The fact that these people are fully aware of how much we’re inflaming hatred against us in the Middle East and other parts of the world and are so cocky they’re openly talking about invading other countries anyway, what are people in the Middle East thinking about us right now? Even the Europeans. March 4 USA TODAY had a cover story on the hostilities towards American tourists in Europe now and people are getting confronted in the street over how horrible our government is. So their solution was to provide a sidebar article entitled “Tips for Blending In.” This is the kind of world we’re allowing the Bush mob to create. And this is where protests could help curtail this, even if it doesn’t stop the whole war. Daniel Ellsberg pointed out that he was absolutely crushed after a huge organized protest against the Vietnam War in 1969, called the Moratorium, which I even remember as a kid, he thought that was gonna end the war right then and there because there was so much of a groundswell of public anger against the war. It didn’t happen. But then, years later, documents obtained under the FOI act that he found showed that those protests sent such a strong message to the Nixon white house that Nixon abandoned any thought of dropping a nuclear bomb on N. Vietnam. So, yes, those protests did some good.

x: And what's your role in the protests been?

jb: I haven’t been able to do much with them because I’ve been on the road so much. The only one I’ve actually spoken at so far was a spontaneous one in Champagne, IL that I was able to get to before I had to hop on the plane and go to OKC. Amazingly, even in that little rah-rah college town, there were 1200 people against the war on less than a day’s notice. One thing to remember is, even tho it seems like it’s cries in the wilderness right now, the numbers and level of organization of these anti-war protests is already as big or larger than the anti-Vietnam protests. I’m hoping this will grow into a much larger version of the anti-corporate movement that people have dubbed ‘the spirit of Seattle.’ If we can treat all the other people who show up at these protests respectfully and learn from them and learn how to work with other kinds of people, we have a much better chance of slowly but surely eating away at the corporate coup that’s slowly but surely eating away at our constitutional rights and has been for 20-30 years. My hope is that people will see that there is very much a need for protests against corporate rule. Let’s call it what it is, it’s not runaway-unregulated-capitalism anymore, we’re talking feudalism here. Y’know, the barons and lords in high castles complete with moats now are people like Shell, Exxon, MS, AOL-TW and Walmart, you name it. Everytime we buy any of those people’s products or buy anything from their chain stores or chain restaurants, we are their serfs. And nobody can separate themselves all the way from that, but the more we try to do that as individuals, the more effective we are at fighting corporate feudalism. You don’t have to go to a protest or attend a bunch of crabby meetings to fight corporate power. All you have to do as an individual, and It’s so easy, is put your money where your mouth is and put it into independent businesses that keep the money in the community and not support the chains. It starts with the individual and it’s the easiest thing to turn other people onto too is that first step when people think ‘oh, there’s so much wrong, what can I as some little ant do to fight this?’ You fight it with your money, pure and simple. And don’t waste so damn many things either.

x: What's the next step, though? How do you keep people involved, especially after the war is 'over' and there's the perception that there's nothing left to fight?

jb: I’m sure there’s going to be many people at these protests passing out literature and even zines and all, talking about other important issues that connect here. Y’know, the War on Terrorism, Inc. is very much a human rights issue here at home. Now, floating around in Congress, is the Patriot 2 act which is going to allow secret arrests of American citizens as well as supposed terrorist middle-eastern immigrants. And there’s even a provision in there that calls for expelling people who are connected with organizations the government doesn’t like and stripping Americans of their citizenship for opposing the Bushcroft agenda. That’s potentially more dangerous than anything Sadaam Hussein could hope to do to his country.

x: And your shows? What are you looking for people to get out of it?

jb: Hopefully get some sort of brainfood and inspiration to get off their ass or get further off their ass and, “fight the power” and it doesn’t mean fighting in the street 24 hours a day or dropping out of college or whatnot. There’s all kinds of ways people can do it, and if they find ways to do it in their own lives without compromising who they are then people are more likely to stick with it long term. To kind of re-answer an earlier question, I hope all the protesters and likeminded people against this war will not make the same mistake that so many people did when the Vietnam war ended. Thinking, okay, we don’t really need to be fighting anymore or protesting anything, ‘hey dad can I get a loan to start a business downtown?’ A lot of the people who put energy into the anti-vietnam war movement turned around and became the most noxious species of yuppies that plague us today. They forgot to keep fighting, that there were all these other unfinished issues in regards to all the different civil rights and cleaning up the environment more and, most importantly, beating back with pitchforks the runaway power of corrupt corporations. We haven’t gained ground since then, we’ve lost ground because we didn’t keep fighting. That energy needs to be maintained and turned loose on other things besides the war. Right now the most important issue is the overall War on Terrorism scam, which is doing almost nothing to fight terrorists. It’s a scam to throw the constitution on the backyard barbeque at home while implementing the Curse of the Wolfman across the globe. That’s issue number one. And all the human rights and civil rights and environmental issues falls under that. You can’t fight on these other things if you’re not allowed to fight at all anymore or you’ll lose your citizenship and get expelled to who knows where. Keep in mind that Canada got bullied into passing a law in the mid-70s that they won’t give amnesty to people who won’t go to war anymore up there.

This is where becoming the media and actively fighting this stuff is important. And yes, congress creatures do read letters. They don’t necessarily read them all personally but they have people employed to tabulate how many letters are coming in yea or nay on any certain issue. So it’s time to start the flood now against this kind of legislation, especially if it gets folded into Patriot 2, which you’ll notice the CNNS and Foxes and MSNBCs and Dan Rathers are not mentioning at all. Their owners don’t even want us to know they exist.

Posted by xtop at April 12, 2003 11:37 PM