Tag: Antifa

As Is — Woke, Woke, Woke, WOKE! Whatever…

As Is — Woke, Woke, Woke, WOKE! Whatever…

Lead Belly

You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons. — from Blazing Saddles, written by Andrew Bergman, Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger, and Richard Pryor.

There are only two types of people who use and believe in the right-wing concept of “woke” — Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. America’s most obnoxious bigot) and those who think DeSantis is right. None of them seem to agree on the actual meaning of the term, but they know that, generally, it means “anything that makes life uncomfortable for white American bigots.”

Of course, these fools also believe that Black Lives Matter and AntiFa are real organizations that issue orders to their troops, that communism and fascism are the same thing, and that Donald J. Trump is Jesus H. Christ resurrected. Continue reading “As Is — Woke, Woke, Woke, WOKE! Whatever…”

Brainiac On Banjo #108: The Purple Zombie! – Women’s History Month

Brainiac On Banjo #108: The Purple Zombie! – Women’s History Month

Thanks to several decades of following Trina Robbins’ research, I’ve been a Tarpé Mills fan since… well, probably since dinosaurs started making oil.

Mills is best known as the creator/writer/artist of the costumed newspaper comic strip hero Miss Fury (1941 – 1949), which, for the record, debuted six months before Wonder Woman. But prior to that, she worked for a variety of neophyte comic book publishers, creating such features as Diana Deane / White Goddess (1936), Devil’s Dust, The Cat Man, Daredevil Barry Finn (1939), and The Purple Zombie (1940). It is this latter creation that now brings my fingers to the keyboard.

In addition to my affection for Mills’ work, I have a serious thing for stories that are insanely weird and bizarre. The Purple Zombie was so weird it makes Herbie The Fat Fury look like Mark Trail.

Here’s the short version: a pair of scientists come up with a way to create zombies, but one is an evil scientist and the other wants it to be used for the betterment of humanity. Zombies For Peace! Right on! The bad guy does not kill the good guy, although he does try. He gets killed in the process and P.Z. divines the good guy as his master. So, the good guy drafts P.Z. into joining the 1940 anti-fascist movement which, at the time, was pretty much limited to fighting Nazis and the Spanish civil war. By the way, in Spain the American antifa was called “The Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #108: The Purple Zombie! – Women’s History Month”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind  #103: The Fire This Time

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #103: The Fire This Time

Self-destroyer, wreck your health / Destroy friends, destroy yourself / The time device of self-destruction / Light the fuse and start eruption / Paranoia, the destroyer / And it goes like this. — Paranoia, written by Ray Davies, 1981

Over my life-span I’ve been to Kenosha, Wisconsin dozens of times. It’s not quite the bucolic little anti-urban town President Tang’s choir members have been saying it is, as in “That’s the real America, and they won’t stand for these uppity communist terrorists.” Not true. It is a nice, previously pleasant, city that has the honor of being in two overlapping, blue-voting metropolitan areas. You can catch a commuter train that will take you straight to downtown Chicago, you can catch a bus that will take you to downtown Milwaukee.

Or you can take a long gun, put it in a car, drive 30 minutes from Antioch, Illinois and start shooting “antifa,” just like Überfuhrer Tang asks you to do. You could do this even if you’re 17 years old. You may be too young to vote, but you’ll get pardoned well in time to participate in Tang’s third presidential election. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #103: The Fire This Time”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind  #091: “He’s Out For Blood Tonight!”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #091: “He’s Out For Blood Tonight!”

Well I’m about to get upset / From watchin’ my TV / Checkin’ out the news / Until my eyeballs fail to see / I mean to say that every day / Is just another rotten mess / And when it’s gonna change, my friend / Is anybody’s guess

It is said, by whomever it is that says these things, that art is that which stands the test of time. That works for me. The lyrics I’ve scattered though today’s column were written by Frank Zappa fifty-five years ago after watching the Watts Rebellion on his TV. This song was the reason record producer Tom Wilson signed Zappa and the Mothers to their first record deal.

The song, “Trouble Every Day”, could have been released this very week. It is all about today. And tomorrow.

If you believe the right-wing jackals who are braying “Oh, no. It’s not our happy little black people causing the problem. They’re being mind controlled by those far-left-wing anarchist Democratic outside agitators!” then you are part of the problem.

People assume a lot. Some assume the protesters are entirely or largely black. That is totally and completely untrue – look at a cross-section of media coverage, look for who’s focusing on black people, and note the source. Then compare those shots to the others. Trump says ANTIFA is an actual organization, and that all the so-called outside agitators are left-wing. According to the FBI, most of the identified “outsiders” are from known far-right-wing groups.

Looting is another matter. Such demonstrations, once they are so identified, vastly increase the opportunities for looting. Those people grabbing the boodle aren’t protestors, they are criminals exploiting these situations. Despite Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham’s most orgasmic wet dreams, the looters are parasites as formidable as the coronavirus, and they will leech onto whatever opportunity comes their way… and that goes back to the Year Gimmel.

As Joan Rivers used to say, “Grow up!”

You might respond “But I don’t hate [fill in the blank] people! I CAN’T POSSIBLY be racist! There isn’t a racist bone in my body!” That latter part might be true, but your brain is not a bone. If you don’t understand that it is far more difficult, and far more dangerous, to be black in America than it is to be white, then you are a big part of the problem. To quote another Frank Zappa lyric, “Better look around you before you say you don’t care.” In order to be part of the American Race — a mongrel race, to be sure, and I’m proud to be part of that — you have to pay at least as much attention to what’s really happening on the streets of our nation as you do to the football point spreads.

Does your life matter? How about that black person over there. Does that person’s life matter? Yes, you say? Then act like it! While you’re at it, make sure your police do, too. They are the ones killing people in your name.

And all that mass stupidity / That seems to grow more every day / Each time you hear some nitwit say / He wants to go and do you in / Cause the color of your skin / Just don’t appeal to him / No matter if it’s black or white / Because he’s out for blood tonight

On his ABC-TV show last Friday, Jimmy Kimmel said “I especially want to pose this question to older people who have seen this before in this country, who have lived this nightmare of race riots already, in the ’60s and ’70s, ’80s, now. Is this who you want leading us? A president who clearly and intentionally inflames violence in the middle of a riot to show how tough he is?” Kimmel added, “I don’t care what you are, right, left, Republican, Democrat, something else. Enough is enough. We’ve got to vote this guy out already.” That is truth to power.

Forbes Magazine, which never has been confused with The Daily Worker, tells us “since January 01, 2015, 4,728 people have died in police shootings and around half, 2,385, were white. 1,252 were black, 877 were Hispanic and 214 were from other racial groups. As a share of the population, however, things are very different. Black Americans account for less than 13% of the U.S. population but the rate at which they are shot and killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.”

The toll of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles: 34 people killed by the LAPD and the National Guard, 118 people suffered gunshot wounds. $40 million in damages, in 1965 dollars. Today, that would be over $325 million.

President Johnson did not use the riots as a reelection ploy, although at the time he certainly could have used one. He did not blame the whole thing on “outside agitators” — a term so pungent you can smell what the bull just had for dinner. He did not encourage white people to go out after those blacks who might or might not have been involved in demonstrations, let alone riots. He did not encourage the authorities to use savage dogs, water cannons, shoot-to-kill demonstrators, he did not call out the mayor of the affected city as a “very weak Radical Left Mayor” (who must) other words. After the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Lyndon B. Johnson did not do what Donald J. Trump has been doing the past several days: pouring jet fuel on every fire he could see on television.

Hey, Donnie! You wanna stop this violence that you hope and pray will give you a second term? Here’s one way to do it.

Get the cops to stop thinking it is their right to kill black people at will.

Stop this, or you’ll really see the fires burning.

Our country isn’t free / And the law refuse to see / If all that you can ever be / Is just a lousy janitor / Unless your uncle owns a store / You know that five in every four / Just won’t amount to nothin’ more / Gonna watch the rats go across the floor / And make up songs about being poor – lyrics throughout excerpted from “Trouble Every Day,” written by Frank Zappa, ©1965. Frank later the line “by whomever it is that says these things.”