Outlands Community USA

LLAM:  I was wondering why you chose the title of a book by John Ruskin for today's entry.

ROY:  I feel a lot of affinity with him.  He was interested in everything and had an opinion on everything.

LLAM:  Sounds like you!

ROY:  Yeah, well.  As he got older his ability to make a prolonged narrative weakened, until his later works were little more than rants and tirades covering dozens of subjects - although they were well-written.

LLAM:  You tend to wander sometimes, but I don't see that as being pathological.  Yet! (smiles)

ROY:  Actually, the older I get the more I wonder why I should stick with prolonged continuity.  We are by nature not given to paying attention to long threads of discourse; any drawing with hundreds of people in it usually gets a cursory glance and a comment about how complex it is.

LLAM:  Like those "Where's Waldo?" Pictures.

ROY:  Yeah.  What I want is to divest with this idea of prolonged narrative or continuity.  I just want to yak.

LLAM:  So yak!

ROY:  Thank you!  Do you know who Gen P. Orridge is?

LLAM:  He was the fellow who invented Industrial Music, umm, that band Throbbing Gristle.  Then he had Psychic TV.

ROY:  All revolutionary ideas when they appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.  He's still going strong but has made even more radical shifts.  He and his partner have had gender modifications.  They're hemaphroditic.

LLAM:  What a charming idea!

ROY:  I think so!  It's about as in-your-face as you can get in challenging some of Western culture's most cherished prejudices.

LLAM:  Such as those against same-sex relationships, or multiple-partner-relationships.

ROY:  Yup.

LLAM:  It's only since I've been with all of you that I've even begun to understand some of those things.  Even so the best that I can do is acknowledge that they exist and have caused untold misery in the world.  Unnecessary untold misery.

ROY:  Here is a law that we'll never see in any Western nation's law-books: all males must live for one year as females; all females must live one year as males.  Minus the surgical procedures and hormone therapy.

LLAM:  It would be a step in the right direction.  A kind of equalizer.  If men knew what havoc they visited upon women, but learned it first-hand from other men, there would be a massive shift in perceptions about gender and gender-roles.  At the same time women would learn as many lessons from other women.  I don't think that all of these "lessons" would be negative, though.

ROY:  Umm, like what?

LLAM:  Men could learn to be tender.  As it is, most men fear being tender.  They equate it with vulnerability.

ROY:  Oh!  Good one, Llam!  Well, guys (looks off page to readers) being tender may make you vulnerable and it may not.

 LLAM:  He ought to know!  Behind that gruff facade is one tender guy!

ROY:  Why does everyone think I'm gruff?

LLAM:  Because you look like a bear.

ROY:  Excuse me, I was swatting a fish out of the stream, what was that?

LLAM:  I rest my case.  You're smiling!  What?

ROY:  Oh, just that I thought I would use this blog entry to drop a half-dozen or so revolutionary ideas on the public!

LLAM:  Go for it!

ROY:  Legalize a lot of illegal drugs.  LSD, MDMA and THC for starters.  Completely, so you could buy them in a supermarket.  This will never happen, but it's a thought.  Misuse of any of these three would occur in a very small minority of people using them; they would tend to exclude such idiots from the gene pool.  If that sounds elitist, too bad.  We don't need to have ignorant fools belieing superstitions telling us how to live.  For the rest of us, creative potentials could be greatly expanded, emotional problems that have been insoluble could approach solution and pain could decrease dramatically.

LLAM:  Good start!  What next?

ROY:  Dissolve all large centralized governments so that there would be something like 1500 small nations in the world.  We'd become a lot more interdependent.  Money would have to become real, I mean, value for product and labor, which is gone missing today.

LLAM:  Judging by the way the American banking system ran amok and ruined the world's financial markets, it sounds like a great alternative.  Seriously, where were the watchdogs when this was going on?  Sleeping?  If you mortals think things are getting bad now, the implications of what the American banks did will only really become apparent in the next nine months or so as people lose everything.  Of course, the people with little or nothing stand to gain the most here.

ROY:  You read my mind!  You must be psychic! (laughs) (Llam grins)  In America especially, institute a sexual education program that Wilhelm Reich would have approved and get it going in all schools.  This means, let young people be educated about what a sexual life is really like.  It is no better now than when I was a kid, except there is a lot more porn around.  Learning about sex from porn is like learning peace from war movies.  And this segues into -

LLAM:  Yes?

ROY: Get the born-again Christians out of politics!  They have lobbying power, they have media power all out of proportion to their numbers.  Get religion out of government altogether!  Start in America!  Keep the Pope marginalized so that his influence on his followers is minimal.  As it is, he's a menace and his words fall right into the hands of his fundamentalist Christian allies.

LLAM:  That's five ideas.  What's the sixth?

ROY:  Give everyone an inexpensive, really inexpensive access to computers and the Internet.  This one is actually underway from a dozen different places.  I think it will help iimplement the other five!

There are 0 Comments for 01 06 09 Unto This Last

Add A Comment

Name:

Email:

URL:

Message:

Performing Spam Check