Would You Shoplift “Days of War, Nights of Love” ?
by Butch Lee
“What ‘insurance’ could you buy that would keep you safer than living
in a world where people actually cared for each other?”
(page 260)
Get the uzi!
Some
MAN i'd never met before handed this book to me at a meeting, and mumbled
something about reviewing it. Lucky wimmin get to review six course dinners
or new CDs, but i get to review a fucking polish sausage. Which is to say
i'd rather be talking about women's armed struggle against men & their
insane and inane cultures. But there it is. And then again, i'm something
of a maoista.
Let’s get to the point. There’s bitching about this book, but no airline
ticket is good for all times and all places. There is no all-day sucker,
only suckers. The subtitle on this book is “Crimethink for Beginners” and
that’s just what it is. So if you know someone young trapped in the suburban
box, this is pages that might get them to see life from a different doorway.
If you know someone young and suburban who has heard the word “anarchism”
but knows nothing else about anything, lay this on them. “Days of Blah,
Nights of Barf” is for beginners. An introduction that’s not too heavy and
might be a gust of fresh air. Maybe they’ll get a subversive laugh, a hint
of rebellious spirit, maybe a seed planted in their mind.
And “Days” is real easy to slide into, since it’s not really a long book.
It’s like fifteen short essays on breaking with boring, regimented capitalist
life. There’s tons of pictures, funny sarcastic cartoons, little boxed examples
of this or that from what some rebels actually did. And you don’t even have
to take it that reverentially (it isn’t as though the authors were doing
something real, like fixing the brakes on your truck). Start reading it anywhere,
skip pages, go backwards, don’t worry, it’s all the same. The CrimetInc
people who put this together really designed a clever “book”, that’s a contrast
to the usual thick books loaded with information that we’re supposed to
learn from. Here there’s almost nothing to learn, which is so liberating.
To me, the thing I like best about “Days” is that it brings out how barren
the life of the spectator is. It challenges the spectatorism, the viewerism
of passive virtual life in middle class capitalism. With its passive anti-sports
(ten chemical-saturated dicks play, ten million overweight dicks sit and
watch) and video game “challenges” and televised “relationships”. At its
best, “Days” is provocative and thought-provoking, happily starting trouble
for straight, middle class goal-seeking suburban youth.
“Whatever each [of] us may be looking for, we all tend to pursue our desires
by purchasing images: symbols of the things we desire. We buy leather jackets
when we want rebellion and danger. ..When we want to live in a different
world, we buy political pamphlets and bumper stickers. Somehow we assume
that having all the right accessories will get us the perfect lives. And
as we construct our lives, we tend to do it according to an image, a pattern
that has been laid out for us...At our jobs, we exchange our time, energy,
and creativity for the ability to buy these symbols...Rather than satisfying
our needs, these products multiply them: for to get them, we must sell our
lives away.”
What I dislike most about the book is that as a woman, as a trans-person,
there’s no ability in it to fight back against being obliterated. It’s as
though they’re saying that if you just switch your little mind to a different
mental station then you can be free and running. That’s just bullshit. In
fact, that’s just the empty pursuit of symbols and images that they put down.
You can’t be free in a world that isn’t free, and we have the fucking scars
from the mine fields to prove it. Though they don’t say it, these aren’t
new ideas in their book. Mined out of seventy year old dada and surrealism,
but could dada defeat the nazis? Here’s some free advice: Let someone else
test that--don’t you bet your life on it.
You can see what I mean by checking out their heavy advocacy of shoplifting.
“Days” really blasts off on this: “...shoplifting makes me feel liberated
and empowered”. Or “Everything changes when I shoplift.” Or “Shoplifting
says NO to all the objectionable features that have come to characterize
the modern corporation.” And on and on. Dumpster diving is also a big deal
in the CrimethInc ideology. I think only superprivileged people talk this
phony way, folks sitting on top of the rest of the human race but playing
at being someone else.
Hey, we should entertain the really revolutionary far-out daring novel idea
of...shoplifting? Hel-lo! Earth to CrimethInc! Wake up! Any of you ever
worked for a living at a store? Oh, I forgot, working is giving in to the
corporations. Well, then, let me tell you the news that in real life millions
and millions of Americans of every class, age, race and genders are shoplifting
like mad weasels. It’s the fucking national sport. My roomate once had a
richass white grandmother stuff a baby carriage with a baby in it full of
shit and race full speed out the store shouting, “If you try and stop us
and my baby granddaughter is injured we’ll sue you!” Hostage shoplifting.
And you think the oppressed should shoplift what they need? Oh, they’ll
really appreciate your teaching them, kemosabi. Hey, ever been in an inner
city corner store with its bulletproof plexiglass inner walls, where you
point out the canned soup or soap you want and the clerk hands it out to
you through the revolving tray--after you slide your money in? The oppressed
have been shoplifting and stealing and ripping since long before any of
you were conceived of. And guess what, they aren’t “liberated” or “empowered”
yet.
Talk of subverting the system is cheap, but other people are being run over
by the reality of it. The families who literally live their entire lives
in the giant garbage dumps in the Philippines, living off of sifting for
the scraps of cloth, metal, bottles or food, they’re the pros at dumpster
diving and the white people here who do it are just posers at worst and amateurs
at best. But those Filipino families aren’t “subverting the system” at all,
they’re just struggling to survive. Life isn’t a spectator game for most
wimmin in the world. It’s all too real--AIDS, malaria, rape, being really
sick and still having to labor twelve hours a day on your feet. Dying young
knowing that no one is going to take care of your kids. Sometimes this book
is itself a spectator sport, privileged folks having the thrill of playing
at life. As that possum said, “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
Butch Lee is a revolutionary Amazon theorist,
the author of Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial
Terrain, Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet
Tubman, and The Military Strategy of Women and Children. Many
of her writings are available online on this site, and
all of her books can be ordered through Kersplebedeb - for more information
se my list of Texts by Butch Lee.