It’s so exciting to find you were wrong!
When I was younger I didn’t let myself get homologated, and many times, traveling on the roller coaster of Rock and Roll, I had realized that there is a hidden meaning, something you have to work hard at to dig up.
Well, after all I am not unhappy to be a seeker again, and when I will finally get what I’m after, I hope to live on again for many many more years.
Today I’m having dinner with Flynn and Kevin. Our years in college were great, and then our careers went different directions, they are now brilliant unconventional professors, I am an analyst, and if I could, I wouldn’t do that again. But I cannot live without Rock and Roll, and I feel myself somehow joined to a big tide, extorted and vilified, that shall have to change the world one day. Nonetheless, sometimes I think what can I do so that my class-consciousness can go beyond my poor hungry intellect?
The spot is quite friendly, and the food is delicious. The music’s not too loud, reviving in me times that are gone and long behind us. The Police have just sent their SOS, a bottle with a message they hope someone will find washed up on a shore, and soon after Jack is on the run but the mourners catch him at the border, and he’s very lucky that day the hangman is not hanging. Kevin is peering at the wine chart, and in the meanwhile hums, but he doesn’t remember the lyrics, so he comes out with rambling words.
When Flynn stops croaking over Kevin’s inconsequent singing, he yells, “Yo guys! Did you read about that last essay by Reginald?”
Hell, no! I would rather talk about soccer or Rock music tonight; still my friends are persistent, like death and taxes. Damn! Just don’t feel like working anymore today.
“Spare me please! Can’t listen to it anymore Man! These guys look as if they have been mass-produced. You read one, and you’ve read them all!” Kevin interjects.
Then, Flynn pipes up, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that the cold war was a clash between the capitalist world and the communist bloc. It takes a lot of courage to call communism what was an immense system of exploitation to the benefit of state capital accumulation”
“Yeah. Not a single drop of socialism has ever been dripping anywhere in this world. Much less the palest attempt to inaugurate a communist society”, I utter back with absolute firm belief.
“It was nothing but the clash between two imperialist superpowers. In my bedroom I have a green wall and a blue wall. Well, scrape off the paint, and you find bricks, mortar, and cement. The two blocs were just the two sides of the same coin”, Kevin rationalizes and then concludes, “Lot of nonsense you hear from around the world. Even from the academic world…”
Flynn pipes in again “Yeah. Do you remember old professor Yelvington? “So, why are there countries which can live off of finance and commerce?” “Because those countries produce goods from exploiting people”, answered Jones”, and we all burst out laughing. Yeah Man! Good times!!
“Not that there are no reasons to split one’s sides when you read Murray”, Kevin incites.
“Gees! I don’t know whom I would kill first. One from the left, or the other from the right, they just don’t realize they are headed in the same direction”, Flynn declares.
“No later than a couple of weeks ago, I found them spitefully arguing in the staff room at the faculty. I had to tell them, “Hey, hey, do you want all those old fogeys here to call you wild and hotheads? Damn! No need to get heated uo. Everybody knows that industry and finance fight each other about which of them is entitled to get the most part of the loot, it doesn’t pay to be an economist!” Kevin tells, and we all burst out laughing again.
“Gee! Some days ago I was taking a stroll through Holland Park, and there was Rave in his usual mood for haranguing” Flynn said.
“Who? The raving poet? That guy is sick! I think he really rocks! I intervene.
“Huh…Rave the street poet??, that guy is more sensible than all of our colleagues from all the universities we have been studying and teaching at, you bet!” Kevin replies.
“Yeah. Him and his stooge, Butch. They’re a traveling company, and a good one! Well, there were some guys confabulating around an e-tablet, he approaches them and starts, “We, the consumer are grateful to you the industrialist for giving us your product. You are rich, and you deserve it! You, the workers, are under their thumb. Don’t you know that you have an appointment with your job today too? Aren’t you thinking of extinguishing the sacred fire of accumulation? You can have human or inhuman needs. Why do you call them natural or artificial? Those guys have knowledge enough to make your needs inexhaustible. There are vital necessities of valorization that must be satisfied, yes indeed! What’re you studying? Under the influence of money science is a tool to give a price to all, from Nature to dreams. You should take care of yourselves!!” And he and his pal walked away” Flynn remembers.
“Guys, we laugh, but things are really twisted like a screw. Is there any possibility to be free from the econometric reality?” Kevin gravely asks.
“The bourgeois legality draws a line, and no one can move it back. Everyday life is under a totalitarian social relationship, no way out”, Flynn observes, and his eyes aren’t laughing anymore.
“You see that there is still so much ado about which measures to take to stop this or that social alarm. It looks like we are invaded by crime but instead of abolishing causes we’re increasing control and criminal laws. From where I come, y’ know, people were considered the most degraded, the despicable. Some old people over there said that we were good as long as we reeked of factory, and waste when we reeked too much of jail”, Kevin presses, and his comment reminds me of an old man from the East End, who once told me, “My old poor bones stink so much of jail, that in the shack we live in, my wife put bars on the windows. In the end, that’s giving me a good feeling”. Well, you cannot regulate a system whose capacity of transforming is absolutely higher than any other good intention of revamping it. You can only remove it. And, who better than the most degraded know the weight? They are the tide that can extinguish the fire of the most heinous injustice.
My divagations are interrupted by Flynn who resumes, “You may find great consolation to blame people for what they do. But in most cases they cannot but do that. It is not a law of nature; it is the brutal social game we are all forced to play. And when you punish the trespasser, thinking that it is all you have to do, you are avoiding to understand what has caused them to offend in the first place”
“Yes, I often ask myself whether you can humanly control your actions, being immersed in such an inhuman reality. The last thing you have to do is ask yourself whether this is logical. As natural beings we’ve existed for a very long time, but as humans we must still find ourselves. I think that someone, very wisely, once said, that totality can be worth, and makes sense, only if the individual is fully free. But the bourgeois society has atomized and destroyed the person, to make a desperate individual, lost and alone in state institutions, adequately protected by bourgeois laws, sufficiently dehumanized into being a good citizen, a good worker, a good subject, and for a fact, be a robot; anything but a man. Kill the classes, and you will get a human community” Kevin interjects, and that sounds very sensible.
“The highest illusion lies in the con of that marketplace that are democratic elections. When you go to vote you are but a sacrificial victim. The holders of the power send along their puppets, choosing between this and that political party. All the responsibility is upon you. They give you the power to taste your vendetta, but in reality you are not less the puppets than the politicians they send along” Flynn resolutely rivets.
“There was a time where people complained about the fact that there was an unjust distribution of rights. They had then been pleased, somewhat. Rights are equal, no way! Can you see what they are? The tool used by power to make the ruler control everybody and everything. Do you know what is politically correct of the western democracies? The means, by which the bourgeois