by T-Two the bipolar-natured, anti-sycophant, anti-violence, axe-wielding poetician/reject/dreamer/fabricant/hedonistic boheme/partial-faker/truth-seeker
14-1-03
I was in the Perth Court of Petty Sessions today, to be sentenced for damaging the PROPERTY of some Bourgeois money-fucker/shitter. I am at liberty not to reveal any more details of my actions leading up to my arrest and subsequent raping by the FASCIST Aborigine-beating boys-in-blue of this redneck city I call home. So I shan�t elaborate much. However, I am willing to reveal that my �criminal� actions were politically motivated and aimed at challenging one conformist tool�s view of the �good life�. Or at least that is what one would have oneself believe in an inebriated state. Regardless of actual outcome and effectiveness, I suppose the message I was trying to get across to the victim of my wicked ways is that a consumerist lifestyle is a bullshit lifestyle�an unnecessary and downright stupid lifestyle: �Work all your life, buy buy buy, but are you actually living at all�?!!!
Anyway, while waiting for the duty lawyer to interview a nightmarishly long lost of petty but �dangerous� criminals, I got extremely bored and decided to pull out an old PFW article, written by the legendary political journalist, Robert Fisk. It was about the war on Iraq, Tony Blair, dead bodies and flies. Riveting stuff and a great deal easier to read than the Sartre book (�Age of Reason�) I had begun reading earlier, only to lose concentration due to numerous sources of noise pollution in the background (including the voices of two easily excited cricket commentators and what appeared to me to be meaningless banter emanating from the mouths of my fellow lowlifes). Now to the point. Reading the Fisk article gave me a brilliant idea: what if I was to try to distribute PFW propaganda to people with other more pressing concerns, but plenty of time on their hands (the wait would be long).
I decided to strategically place sets of three different PFW articles on the seats opposite the entrance of the courtroom (good old court 37), in which my destiny awaited. Besides the Fisk article, I had at my disposal an article about Indonesian anti-sweatshop activist Dita Sari and her refusal to accept a human rights award from Reebok and the accompanying prize money, and also an article about three evil bastards (with Uncle Sam playing a prominent role). Articles were also placed in the information pamphlet shelves located in the area where criminal thugs sit to wait to see the duty lawyer. At this stage, I wasn�t expecting many people, if any at all, to pick up the articles and have a read of them. For the fear of not conforming to the norm still dictates people�s actions, quite sadly so.
As anticipated, not a single person even hazarded a glance at the lovely articles I had so kindly left for them. What was wrong here? Were these people so addicted to their life(/death)styles and their electronic drugs? It seemed as if watching a bunch of overpaid and unfit men hitting a leather ball with a piece of wood was more interesting than learning about the dark side of our world and the horrible shit that power elites get away with unscathed. Perhaps I was being a bit harsh on these people. Perhaps they were more concerned about their impending forced surrender of hard earned exchange-units to the state�s coffers. Or more likely, apathy reigns supreme and these people were nothing but a pack of narrow-minded, self-loathing drones.
At this stage, I was feeling a tad jaded. Why in the world did I even bother? It all seemed like a futile exercise. But then, I noticed someone who appeared to me as if he was still savable from the comfortably numb bliss of ignorance. This dude brandished a red headband (much like those worn, by members of a certain radical Australia-wide organisation, at protests), was dressed quite casually, and had some interesting looking literature with him (one book was entitled �Unholy Wars�). Besides yours truly, Mr. weird looking hippie/boheme was the only other person to bring along reading material to the court. I was quite confident that I was on to a winner. So anyhow, I approached the freak and handed him some a copy of each of the three articles I had at my disposal, and he accepted them with open arms and open synaptic firing sequences. He asked me why I had chosen to distribute my propaganda to him in particular and I replied, �because you look like a pretty open-minded guy by the looks of what you have been reading�. The red headband wearing maniac then thanked me and made some comment about how we all have the right to �freedom of disinformation�. I could not have agreed with him more. Propaganda has been shown, by the lessons of history, to be an effective means of inducing obedience in the masses. Shortly after receiving my gift, Mr. red headband told his mate that has was off and left down an elevator. It turns out that he was only there to provide moral support to his law-breaker of a friend.
Overall, not a completely unsuccessful mission then, I suppose. But it only got better. The court had be adjourned for an hour at around 1pm so that those people, still waiting for their cases to be heard, could go get some lunch (I assume the magistrate was hungry too). After I had grabbed a little bite to eat and hastened the onset of lung cancer some more, I returned back to level three of the courthouse to check out how my article drop was going. I wasn�t expecting any of the articles to have moved from where I had left them. However, as I walked past the duty lawyer waiting area, my cynically-wired eyes caught sight of a fairly conservative looking womyn reading one of the PFW articles. This could not have been happening. I must have been hallucinating as a result of a week-long mania-induced bout of sleep deprivation. But after a thorough reality check, I was able to ascertain that the events unfolding before me actually did belong to the realm accurate perception. The lady was indeed reading PFW propaganda! It put a half smile onto my tired face and left me with a sense of satisfaction and contentedness. Just the boost I needed before the magistrate read me my stars. Destiny would soon become another moment in time.
Now I would like to digress somewhat and share my impressions of the people who I shared court 37 with. So, what types of human creatures wind in a court for stepping out line from the state�s dictates on appropriate behaviour, albeit in trivial and petty ways? Well, according to my anti-Bourgeois bias, I observed a fascinating mix (although the people themselves were quite dull) of down-and-out white trash, na�ve boys pretending to be men (e.g. two babies got charged with pissing in public), indigenous victims of a racist colonial society, tryhard new-punk worshippers, and downright stupid human creatures (there were many an imbecile who got busted and heavily fined for driving pissed-as-a-parrot, while under suspension/disqualification from driving). But they all appeared to have one thing in common. The one quality that struck me about these dropkicks was a deeply ingrained mindset of political apathy.
Things are travelling down quite a pessimistic path now, you might be thinking to yourself. However, this story/article/rant has a happy ending. (To relieve you from the doom and gloom of my otherwise dreary outlook on life). The positive note is that I realised the world needs more people like myself and my fellow journeymen in our PFW crew, to help put lost sheeple in their place. The masses need to be enlightened and awakened to the errors of their ways and by extension, the erroneous ways of a hypocritical and complacent society. It is a commonly upheld belief that we live in a free and egalitarian society. But this is a cruel lie, perpetuated in part by a cowardly and power-fellating media, owned by a small elite of overfed men (who defecate money from their constricted anuses three times a day). At least in countries overseen by a dictator, people know their place and who/what they are up against. Here, we live in a delusional state of comfortable lies and under the shadow of a technology/science-saves dogma. The masses need to be guided and educated on how they can break free from the shackles that a malevolent KKKapitalist society imposes upon them. This starts when they harness the POWER FROM WITHIN to think and choose for themselves. And once that step has been taken, perhaps some former sleepwalkers will decide to join in the CLASS WAR and fight their true enemies, rather than amongst one another (for jobs, partners, tax-breaks, etc).
This tale has not quite reached its author-imposed ending just yet. It would be pure folly of me to finish without mentioning something about the relationship between dissent and the power of the state (and its judicial and hired-thug arms) to crack down upon dissent. The clock turns back about ten months to a time when 20 million or so world citizens displayed their opposition to an imperialist war waged upon a weak and flawed, but sovereign nation, by an evil superpower and their equally ambitious allies (one of which was a former imperialist gargantuan, and the other, a racist, redneck, beer-guzzling wasteland). Around about this time, myself and a crew of peaceniks (some of whom were/still are close friends of mine; others of whom I knew only briefly) decided to redecorate the city of Perth with various anti-war slogans, armed with only our ideas and some cans of spray paint. Targets were many (which I shall refrain from mentioning due to legal reasons) and of course, when the establishment media stumbled upon our beautiful work, links were made to public security lapses and a heightened threat of terrorism here in Perth, of all places. We were portrayed as thugs and latent terrorists, which I find to be quite amusing.
On one occasion I became far too cocky and decided to do my art in broad daylight, within full view of apathetic passersby. Stupid? Perhaps, but it was well worth it for the exposure that was generated for our message in the media. As many people who watched the news that same night were made aware of, I was arrested and charged by the Fascist pigs for spraying up �no war� on the window of some building (I got interviewed for the idiot box news; yay for me). Here was our racist Prime Minister off helping the yanks to bomb the fuck out of a defenseless country and I was branded a �criminal� by the state. Now that�s justice in a �free� and �democratic� society for you. When I was taken down to the cop shop, I was strip-searched, fingerprinted and made to feel like some kind of murderer, all for expressing my opposition to an unjust war. Furthermore, they set bail conditions for my release from their custody, which prevented me from entering the CBD until the day of my hearing. And how conveniently for them: this meant that I would not be permitted to take part in the March 26 student rally (which turned out to be the most memorable rally in Perth of all time, due mainly to excessive police brutality). They had gotten their man: one of the �ringleaders� of the anti-war movement had been temporarily decapacitated. So I ended up have to sit out March 26, while my friends were getting the crap beaten out of them by the authorities. The stories were not pleasant. To move on�my hearing took place a few days after March 26 and I was fined $350 and given a criminal conviction for �damage�. This was in spite of the fact that the graffiti I had done was cleaned off straight away and the fact that I had never been in trouble with the law before. There was no doubt that the harsh sentence imposed upon me was politically motivated and aimed at deterring me from further dissent. It has not worked.
Now, to jump back to the present. On this particular day, I was fined only $200 for an act which caused far more damage to the property of the rich than the anti-war graffiti. Furthermore, the magistrate granted me my 2nd spent conviction (even though you are only supposed to only get it once; the same magistrate had previously given me a spent conviction for stealing and providing false details to the cops) out of sympathy for the well crafted, but true, sob story I fed her about my troubled childhood. So that�s a $350 fine and a criminal record for a bit of politically motivated graffiti and a $200 fine and no conviction for fucking up some Bourgeois fucker�s car (also a politically motivated act, but one of less significance than war). That�s the justice system for you. It just goes to highlight the arbitrary and anarchic nature of the legal system. A system in which, the destiny of society�s victims are placed in the hands of a magistrate/judge with an overbearing monopoly of power in the courtroom situation. In closing, I would like to state that I am glad I got off so lightly for my misguided actions and that there may still be hope yet for us stupid, over-stimulated, under-evolved human creatures.
