LYNN DOESN’T TRUST HIM. Yes, he seems to be a big component of the mystery. Is he? Yes. Well, here’s his key contribution (and the first setup chapter plus the final giveaway chapter. Don’t read them if you think he’s something other than a con-man, which all the legitimate scholars do…). Does he have the final lowdown on Punk City? Absolutely not. Not if you’re half educated anyway.
A Philadelphia Story
2. Assembling the Pieces
The most efficient way to solve a mystery is to find its roots and trace from them the twists and turns of its growth. The root of the perplexing events and circumstances surrounding the Cream King Trove is the vanished punk writers of South Street. If we can figure out what happened to them, we might also learn why they are still important to someone in a position of power and why secrecy is still important to that person or persons.
I do not have direct access to the Cream King Trove. Therefore I cannot read from the materials they left behind what might have been underway on South Street at the time of their mysterious vanishing. I am left with the public record and all the bits and pieces I have been able to uncover about what has happened in the years since.
There is no point in pretending that I am completely objective about this story. My own experience convinces me that—notwithstanding the glossy denials of Philly PD—the punk writers of South Street did exist. This perspective is not available to many of the researchers, and so they cannot hope to see the most interesting of all angles on the punk mystery, which is surely this: How does an entire community manage to disappear so completely that there is objective reason to doubt it existed in the first place? This is an accomplishment that corresponds, quite literally, to escaping into a hole and then pulling the hole in after you.
There are only two possible ways of effecting such a result. First and most obviously, there may be a party (or parties) who sees to it that your existence is terminated and then engages in an exhaustive effort to eliminate all traces of both the existence and the termination.
Second and far more improbably, there may be parties who have invented a heretofore unknown way of pulling the hole in after them.
Let’s consider the obvious way first. Who on earth has the power to make people disappear as if they had never existed? Well, if it can be done, only the federal government of the United States has such power. And it’s no stretch of the imagination to say that federal fingerprints are all over the history of the Cream King Trove. I cannot prove that the research effort is federally funded, but I have not been able to find, in any public documentation, a private source for the financing of whatever is going on in Agley Hall, including Eberhard College, which won’t admit that there is any ongoing research. I cannot prove that there is anything odd about the deaths of William Glass and Eliot Naughton, but both died—without a hint of official suspicion—as they approached the threshold of sharing their knowledge about the South Street punks. Who has the ruthless know-how to remove inconvenient people without raising a hue and cry of murder? Even if we feel obliged to whisper the answer, we all know it’s the feds. And who would think to employ the tactic of publishing a serious book about a serious subject in order to prevent the public from taking the subject seriously? Private individuals don’t have the means or the experience to engage in systematic disinformation campaigns, but (again in a whisper) the feds do. What, though, could the feds have to gain from either the research or the coverup?
As it happens, I stumbled onto a possible answer to this question by accident. I had been trying, in the spring of 1994, to obtain information about the content of punk manuscripts from inside sources who wanted to make it a kind of game. If I asked the right question, they would give me a helpful answer. I was on the phone with such a contact on May 13, 1995, when the television in my apartment began to fill with images of the MOVE incident which had shocked Philadelphia and the nation exactly ten years before. On a hunch I asked my contact if there was a punk manuscript that highlighted the date of May 13, 1985.
He paused, and then he said, “Yes. There is. Or there was. A verse fragment called Fadeaway. When we got it, we had the title and a subhead—that date—but now it’s a fragment without an end or a beginning. How did you know to ask that? Is it a significant date?”
Yes. It was a significant date. While the whole city watched on television, the Philadelphia Police Department attempted to evict the community which called itself MOVE from the garbage- and rat-filled house they occupied in West Philadelphia. As the situation escalated, the members of MOVE demonstrated that they were well armed and determined to resist even a frontal SWAT team assault. The mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode, ordered use of a device that was supposed to incapacitate the gunmen without causing serious injury. The device did not perform as advertised but rather as an incendiary bomb that burned down an entire residential block and killed numerous people, including MOVE members and innocent civilians. A big event.
As I pondered the new, secret significance of the date, a terrible thought came to me. What if some contingent of feds—black operatives or whatever they call themselves—had seized on, or even planned, the MOVE showdown as a cover for an even more shocking event: the extermination of an entire subversive community which, unlike MOVE, had excellent skills for defending itself from attack.
Everything I’d been able to learn about the South Street punks suggested that they were as well organized, disciplined, and skilled as a formal military unit. At their peak they may have had as many as 1500 or 2000 combat-trained fighters. What would it have taken in the way of manpower and weapons to kill them all without attracting attention?
It would have taken a small army of the intelligence agencies’ best covert assassins, fully equipped with automatic weapons and silencers, and the advantage of surprise.
Even the thought of an operation like this scared me and I poked at it hesitantly, from the greatest distance and cover I could contrive. I knew a crime journalist who had been granted interviews inside the federal witness protection program, and I met with him pretending to be accumulating information for a crime novel. I asked him if records would be kept about the amassing, at a given moment in time, of an undercover army of assassins. He said yes, and asked if I had anything specific in mind.
I told him I’d been doing research with a Philly drug dealer from the days of the Pagans and Salvatore Testa and that he had alluded to the presence of a federal “army” in Philly during the MOVE affair. I told him I was playing with the idea of retelling the MOVE story with a sinister federal involvement, but I didn’t want to do it if there was any real truth to it.
He accused me of being chickenshit and said he’d tried to confirm a negative. But then he called me back a month later and asked if I was still playing with the MOVE idea. I said I was.
“Don’t,” he told me. “And remember, you didn’t hear it from me. Don’t ever call me again.”
Why am I telling this now? Because I am living under surveillance now, and something will happen to me or it won’t, and my chances may be better if I dare to report some of the possible reasons.
Back then, though, the call frightened me plenty. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about what motive the feds could have had for such a bold and risky step. There seemed to be only two possibilities. First, that the punks knew more about certain federal activities than the feds would want made public in the foreseeable future. Second, that the punks had something the feds wanted and were preventing them from getting it.
Superficially, the first possibility seemed more plausible. The intelligence outfits are relatively well known for forming alliances with dubious characters and allowing them to continue all sorts of unsavory activities in exchange for information. But, the fact that this is known to some extent about the feds reduces the chance that it would catalyze a mass murder. Who succeeds in accusing the government of crimes? No one. The public believes or disbelieves, shakes its head, and forgets about the fact we all prefer not to see, that our government can do pretty much whatever it wants in this free country of ours. So what if some disreputable ex-punk should one day claim that federal intelligence agencies were bankrolling and profiting from illegal drug sales in Philadelphia? His credibility would be vaporized in the mass media within twenty-four hours of his first interview. Who needs assassins when the networks and print press will do the job for you without bloodshed?
That left me with the second possibility, which—the more I thought about it—seemed to be bending back in a circle toward my second, highly improbable explanation of the punks’ disappearance.
What if—and I know how crazy this sounds—the punks had something, something that wasn’t drugs or money, which the feds wanted desperately? Wanted desperately enough to kill everyone involved.
What could that be?
It would have to be something that related to national security. That’s where the government pulls out all the stops and automatically gets away with everything, no questions asked. Who hasn’t seen the video footage of Area 51 and the perimeter signs that say, “Use of Deadly Force Authorized,” while the government blandly denies that the base exists. What’s the big secret at Area 51? Discounting captured alien spaceships, the answer is still in the same category. Technology.
I remembered a term whispered by one of my Cream King Trove contacts. It hadn’t meant much to me at the time. But it clearly impressed him. I had asked him what the big problem was about deciphering the punk computer disks. He told me I wouldn’t understand. I said, “Try me.”
He took a deep breath over the phone. I could tell that he had to confide the secret to someone. He was bursting with it. “These are the wildest computers anyone here has ever seen,” he said at last in a rush of words. “There are some ordinary chips in some of the boxes, but it’s as if they’re just a front end, a kind of translator for a new type of central processor which contains no chips, no circuit boards. It seems to have a biological basis. The main memory—if we’ve got the architecture doped out right—consists of tanks filled with some sort of organic blue jell. Unheard of. You can watch it processing data, which appears as patterns of light. And the patterns are bizarre. The top guy here is one of those Cal Tech super-brains, and he’s convinced that what we’ve got are quantum computers. A bunch of them. And if they are, then every other computer in the world is junk. Or—“ He stopped.
“Or what?”
“Never mind. It’s too farfetched.”
“Or what?” I knew he wanted to tell me.
“Or everything else in the world is junk, and you can forget about ever knowing what reality is again.”
And that’s all he would say. I had tabled his portentous hint in the way most of us table ideas we don’t know enough to understand or evaluate. I had a brief comforting rationalization that he was talking about advanced virtual reality games that would allow us to take Caribbean vacations without leaving our apartments, and I stopped thinking about it. I wanted to know what was on the disks, not the technology that was used to put it there.
Yet as I imagined the specter of federal kill squads trooping down South Street under the cover of MOVE and national security, I was compelled to reopen the subject. I went to the library and looked up the term ‘quantum computing,’ about which some academic scientist had written an article in Scientific American magazine.
The principle behind quantum computing seems to be that while an ordinary computer uses a stored algorithm (problem solving formula) to do its computations and other work, the quantum computer would use some of the deepest and weirdest principles in physics to execute all possible algorithms simultaneously.
This didn’t mean much to me. So I checked out some books on quantum physics looking for the deeply weird principles of physics that would drive such a computer. It turns out that quantum physics is, as well as anyone can figure out, a kind of scientific magic. It says that the world doesn’t work the way we think it does. For example, the little solar system model of the atom we all learned in school—the one where the electron orbits the nucleus like the earth orbits the sun—is a lie. The electron isn’t really there at all. What is there instead is a cloud made up of all the probabilities that the electron will be somewhere in particular if we look for it, and it won’t really be anywhere until we do look for it. Which is to say that it will come into existence only when we look for it—suggesting that maybe we create it in the first place by consciously focusing attention on it.
Well, okay, I thought. Maybe that’s how the math is, and maybe that’s how the physicists want to represent it, but it doesn’t have anything to do with reality. That is, my reality, the reality of the solid physical world. And then I read that this is also wrong. When a person—you or me or anybody—knocks on the hard surface of a table, the thing that stops our knuckles from passing all the way through it is not the parts of the atom that are really there, like the neutrons and protons of the nucleus, but the part that isn’t there. What makes matter solid, say the quantum physicists, is that cloud of probable electrons, the ones that aren’t there until we look for one of them in particular.
I don’t pretend that I understood it all. What struck me, though, was all this talk about being there and not being there, and what difference it makes if you look for it or don’t. And then there was the idea of executing all possible algorithms at once, and I started feeling echoes of all the mysterious elements of the punk writer phenomenon.
The word had always been that they had a history but you couldn’t really know what it was because there were so many contradictory versions of it. And you couldn’t ever really get back to the events themselves because the punks were gone and nobody knew if they even existed, and yet here were all these people in Eberhard, Pennsylvania, looking for them like maniacs without even fully believing that they existed.
And so I thought, what if the punks did have quantum computers, and what if quantum computers—with all those simultaneous algorithms—somehow do have the power to change the fabric of reality, even the nature of reality, so that the punks exist and they don’t exist; they have no history and they have every possible history; they disappeared completely and they never left at all. While we argue over irrelevant and obsolete things called facts, they are hovering around South Street in a probability cloud that will come into existence only when we figure out how to look for them.
It turns out that this is not a fantasy interpretation of quantum physics as I initially supposed it must be. The co-existence of mutually exclusive states of being is real enough (if the word still means anything in this discussion) to have a name. It’s called a superposition of states. And there’s a famous paradox that illustrates it called Schroedinger’s Cat. The cat is in this box in a physics laboratory, and it is simultaneously dead and alive. Nobody really likes Schroedinger’s Cat very much, but they’re obsessed with it. Some physicist or other writes a new book about this cat just about every year. Some say he’s really dead. Some say he’s really alive. Some say he’s just a trick. Some say, let’s face facts: he’s dead and alive, just like quantum physics says he is. And if we went to that laboratory and actually opened up the box, my bet is there’d be a note inside saying he’s hanging out with the punks of South Street—Be Back Later.
Would the feds want a technology like that? You bet your ass they would. And maybe you are betting your ass, if you think about it.
I also predict that no answers will come easily in the punk mystery. The computer disks will continue to baffle the experts, and it will slowly become known that the existing manuscripts in the Cream King Trove are as baffling as punk technology. Because if the punks are occupying a superposition of reality, they may still be changing and developing in response to the people who are trying to study them. Therefore, I’m convinced that we’ll see no definitive endings in the Cream King Trove; more likely there will be a proliferation of beginnings, with both middles and endings in dismaying profusion to be uncovered in additional troves that are still concealed (to be concealed?) under South Street.
If and when the disks are decoded, the current confusion may be amplified by the discovery that there are multiple conflicting versions of the very same writings—remember, the punks used their computers in their writing and quantum computers simultaneously generate all possible solutions.
In short, I believe that punk writing will become decipherable only as individual readers and researchers choose to participate in the “measuring” or “watching” event that causes quantum events to declare themselves one way or the other. Each of us has to open the box in which Shroedinger’s cat is alive or dead and see (decide?) for ourselves what the state of the cat may be.
If all this seems too fantastic to consider, I suggest that this may be the punk writers’ real purpose. Their biggest story is their own story, and if they choose to call attention to that story by generating clouds of doubt about their relation to reality as you and I think we know it, perhaps what they are really asking us to do is reexamine our convictions about reality.
As I have continued to pursue the punk phenomenon over the years, people have asked me repeatedly about the nature of my interest. Why should I care about a bunch of street barbarians who thought they could write better fiction than the contributors to The New Yorker? And what were they so angry about anyway? What good does anger do?
I have read and reread The Boomer Bible over the years, and as I search for the real foundation of punk rage against the Baby Boom generation and the cultural heritage of the twentieth century, I think it can be distilled to the question of reality—reality and its relation to truth.
Underneath all the vainglory of modern science, there seems to be a new proposition that scientists have been smuggling into the public awareness, a proposition that runs counter to the consensus of all human history before it. The proposition is that—contrary to the teachings of the great religions—there is not truth, but there is reality, which is good enough to take the place of truth.
Reality, in this sense, consists of the models and schemes and accepted theories of science, which agree on the general premise that absolutely everything is at base a manifestation of very physical phenomena. The Big Bang postulated by cosmologists didn’t just blow up a speck of super-condensed matter; it blew up everything we used to conceive in terms of meaning, morality, and purpose. The Big Bang declares—without removing its loincloth to display all its implications—that we are simply the current chemical by-products of an ongoing chemical reaction that got started a few billion years ago. This is the reality we are taught. We are not taught—not expressly anyway—that such a reality is mutually exclusive with the spiritual and moral cosmology represented by religion.
Science in this respect has usurped religion without acknowledging or addressing the responsibilities of religion. The great religions tell us a story of who we are and where we came from and what our identity and origin say about how we should live our lives. Science also tells us a story about who we are and where we come from, but it says nothing about how we should live our lives. The missing part of the message is the part we might call truth. Religions tell us that the story of who we are and where we come from matters, that the content of this story tells us everything important about how we should interpret the events in our lives and how we should make decisions in response to, or anticipation of, those events.
In this context, the position of scientists with regard to religion is criminal. They say, on the one hand, the story on which your whole religion is based is idiotic, untrue, mere superstition. Then they say, on the other hand, we have no quarrel with the philosophical lessons embedded in the story told by your religion, and we see no inconsistency between our story and your religious philosophy (sans story). This is pernicious nonsense.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, art and literature began to grapple with the real (irony intended) implications of reality as a substitute for truth. The result was existentialism, which tried to straddle the paradox of scientific reality and a civilization whose consensus morality was rooted in a false story. God would not be coming to the rescue of the virtuous. The deciding factor in the human drama was not divine justice, however conceived, but the actuarial tables of the insurance industry. There was no meaning in any absolute sense; there was only—paltry substitute—the chance of appreciation by others similarly disposed, the opportunity for dignity, which is to say a self satisfaction consistent with the standards one has arbitrarily adopted for one’s own conduct. In this cosmology, morality is not a truth of any kind; it is a faintly absurd act of individual heroism.
All this is a game played out in a hall of mirrors. The inevitable result, seen first in art and literature, and then in the culture as a whole, is increasing solipsism, alienation, despair, self-indulgence, and ultimately, flight toward the relief of reduced consciousness.
The literary exercise can be seen quite transparently in the writings of Hemingway, who writes more and more pompously about ‘writing,’ about his ‘one true sentence,’ about the ‘it’ he is seeking in Death in the Afternoon. But truth is not what he is after; his ‘it’ is an entirely subjective choice, blessed only by his sense of its rightness, which is, after all, the sense of Hemingway. But Hemingway, lest we forget, is a combination of household chemicals, including a gene set that may carry its own biochemical predispositions about ‘it’, and a set of early environmental conditioning experiences that half a dozen eminent scientists would be willing to explain “the sense of Hemingway” in terms of, none of which contain any shred of something we would call meaning. And Hemingway knows this—knows it as he strands Robert Jordan in a hopeless situation in a doomed cause for which he must sacrifice everything because he told himself he would, despite the fact that God isn’t watching.
The loss of truth has been obscured to a degree because the more we mean ‘reality,’ the more we talk about ‘truth,’ and the more we mean ‘factual,’ the more we say ‘true.’ These confusions are errors; we cannot freely switch words that are not synonyms. Truth carries with it the requirement of meaning. Reality merely is. And the word ‘factual’ is usually a lie.
Would Picasso have maundered on about one true painting in the way Hemingway does about his one true sentence? Probably not. It’s much harder to conceal what Picasso is doing with art because you can see it; you don’t even have to interpret it. He is taking art apart—now that there is no meaning in the representational symphony of subject and materials and brushstrokes, there’s nothing to stop the painter from copying the cosmologists. If they can take it all down to atoms and quarks, then he can reduce the image to shapes, to angles, to dazzling, funny decorations. And the ‘artists’ who follow can reduce art to a joke or to nothing.
Like car-jackings and school shootings, the annihilation of cultural forms is a twentieth-century invention. The artist of genius breaks old rules—always his privilege—but sets precedents that are uniquely exploitable by empty mediocrities. Picasso transcends representationalism, Eliot dispenses with versification, Joyce disdains comprehensibility, and Hemingway guns down imagination. When the masters die, the fakers move into the vacuum and carpet-bomb the field. Picasso did not intend to destroy art, any more than Eliot intended to destroy poetry or Joyce to destroy fiction.
But Hemingway was more ambitious. He wanted disciples, or he wouldn’t have worked so hard to make writing into a religion. When he teaches a generation (and, as it turns out, every successor generation to date) that what they write must be ‘true,’ he is abusing language and he is preparing the way for the demolition of literature. If the writer must be only an accurate reporter, then he is automatically excused—if not prohibited—from imagining illumination. For as soon as he goes beyond the—dare we say it?—reality of experience as he knows it, he is probably guilty of the ‘cheating’ that Hemingway talks about so endlessly without ever actually defining.
But why would one seek illumination anyway? Illumination also implies meaning, in human terms, which anchors us to the false stories exposed by science. Hence the increasing dreariness of what has come to be called serious fiction. Serious? Hardly. It’s become a joke, perhaps the longest decadent phase in the history of literature, empty of content and obsessed with the phantom virtue called transparency of style. We’re not supposed to know that a writer wrote it—as if books should seem self-written (and babies should have no navels). It aspires to nothing but personal catharsis for the writer who wrote it. It refuses to illuminate. It affects ever finer and prettier language to tell the same nonstory, which is such old news that even plot has been banned from the most celebrated literary fiction, and it seeks to persuade us that a clever enough retelling of its one routine about the combination of luck, personality, and the good old grapple with relativism is enough—consolation enough to know that others are in the same boat.
Even the writers who hate Hemingway and spit on his memory are his disciples; he is to modern fiction what Freud is to psychologists. He made up the terrain of their whole endeavor, and if they are ungrateful and myopic enough to think they are rebelling against his legacy, so be it. They are still obeying his commandments: they feel no obligation to make us think about anything loftier than politics. They do not aim us at any destination grander than coping with the reality of modern life and its tiresome quandaries of social and political etiquette.
So why should the punk writers be angry? In the world they’ve been born into, the consensus among sophisticates is that God is an embarrassingly patriarchal archaism, the salvation offered by Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection is but a metaphoric parable of the need to be nice to others, and the only (real? true?) mission in life is to get through it with as few hardships, pains, and hurtful screwups as possible, for as l-o-o-o-o-o-ng as possible. Art is a hobby, literature is a luxury for people who have time to read, philosophy is a singularly unpromising college major, history is a show on cable TV, justice is a matter decided by litigation, and freedom is a word we say a lot and never think about. This is the wisdom to which reality as a substitute for truth has brought us.
Now, as I obsess on the punks of South Street and their uneasy (non)existence on the line between (un)reality and (un)reality, I find myself contemplating the possibility that what they are proposing is a total reversal of the twentieth century’s grand proposition. Maybe they are proposing instead that reality is not, but truth is.
Reality is not? Is this tenable? A curious phenomenon of our mass media age is that it has become possible for millions upon millions of people to focus on a single event or situation, which is laid out on a microscope slide for all to examine in excruciating detail, and the more we examine it, the more we disagree on what happened.
What historical event has been more closely studied than the assassination of JFK? And yet there is still no single ‘story’ on which everyone can agree. Rather, the opposite is the case. With each passing year there are new and persuasive theories, fundamentally at odds with others. The story may eventually come to an end when we agree enough on one version of the story to stop examining it further, but there is no evidence that there is such a thing as enough information to decide the matter.
Is this ambivalence of ‘reality’ confined to big events? Or is it rather that a big enough event exposes the degree to which we are all simply agreeing on some set of ‘facts’ (assumptions) that we can call reality. If we studied the most recent social gathering we attended the way we’ve studied the Kennedy assassination, would we ever be able to pin down the absolute ‘reality’ of what happened? Or would we discover that everyone is and was experiencing a different reality, many of them mutually exclusive and none of them definitive? Would we discover that the event itself seemed to be changing as we continued to look at it, that what we were thinking and seeking in the present had some reciprocal power to remold the ‘facts’ we believed to be locked in the past?
For if reality is not as simple and preemptive as the scientists of the twentieth century would have it, then we might very well have to fall back on the possibility that what binds us together in human experience is not reality, but truth.
The dishonesty of scientists and of believers in reality as a substitute for truth lies in their refusal to acknowledge that reality is every bit as dependent on story as is truth. The story always comes first, the definition of reality second. The Big Bang is a story. In pursuit of the story, scientists dig up confirming facts. They believe they are observing strictly objective rules in doing so, but the rules set is determined by—what else?—the story. Science begins by saying that science must be concerned only with what can be measured and observed. When they reach the point of believing their own story, they insist that those things which cannot be measured or observed by science do not exist. The result? Their precious ‘reality’ is simply another story, but one which refuses to test its validity in terms of truth.
Truth is? Yes. We have two kinds of evidence that truth is. First, every human civilization is imbued at a very deep level with a sense of the sacred, that is, of ideas and principles and symbols which are surpassingly important, so much so that it is acceptable to individual human beings to give up their lives for them.
Science has repeatedly tried to explain away this deep human sensibility—either by lumping it into the general sickness that constitutes their definition of human personality or by finding a brain location in which it is possible to depict a trickster process that secretes a spurious feeling of meaning in the form of chemicals. But since scientists are mute on the state of affairs prior to the Big Bang—which is to say they don’t know what put the incredibly dense speck there in the first place, they are, in effect, postulating the absence of meaning (as required by a story from which the all-important beginning has been amputated) and then arguing backward from that postulate to discount the perceived experience of meaning as an accident of Evolution.
But does the experience of meaning necessitate the existence of meaning? Not in every case, certainly. One can experience hunger without being in need of eating, or else there would be no overweight people. One can experience fear without being in danger. Yet the matter cannot be explained away by such trivialities. The appropriate analogy to what science is arguing about the perception of meaning is at a more general level. It is like saying that the brain can experience hunger, but there is no such thing as food; that the brain is designed to experience fear, but there is no such thing as danger; the brain has faculties of seeing, hearing, and smelling, but there is no such thing as sight, sound, or odor. Common sense must be allowed in existential matters. If the human mind can perceive deep meaning, then there is such a thing as deep meaning to be perceived.
The second kind of evidence for truth consists of human experience. The twentieth century has—at least in its leadership ranks—accepted the story science tells of our origins and identity. During this century we have seen the end of all forms of high culture, the end of religion , the end of the professions as anything but economic clubs, the end of the family as an institution that guards the culture at large from organizational amorality, and the end of individual consciousness as it was created by Christianity two thousand years ago.
And though we refuse to see it, civilization itself has been done in by the reality story; it has been replaced by a technocratic system without human values. We call it humanistic but its compassions are only the self-interest of an efficient machine which avoids waste of resources to the extent possible. Neutral about such human concerns as freedom, contentment, and spiritual fulfillment, it zealously protects human bodies from harm and seeks to keep those bodies alive for the full span of their usefulness. If they expire shortly thereafter—from loneliness, despair, and boredom—then at least no human will perceive an effect of direct cruelty. And the ones who live on and on and on are the last possible human inspiration in a world without truth, for in a life without meaning or an afterlife, the only remaining aspiration is to live to extreme old age.
The reality story doesn’t work. As a culture, we are dying of it. This dying I speak of is not figurative, not metaphorical. It is there to see in the eyes of the vacant youngsters we call the X-generation. We have given them nothing to build their lives with. They are the final product of the twentieth century and its determination to live in reality, in denial of the existence of truth. And they are already dead at the starting gate.
The truth is, despite a full, largely wasted century of masturbating with ‘facts’ and reality,’ that it is and remains our duty to pursue the truth of an existence whose origin and meaning have still not been finally understood by anyone.
I think that’s the arena the punks of South Street were (and are) exploring. And I think they are laughing right now at the feebleness of the analytical powers that have been brought to bear thus far on their identity and import.
My own purpose in pursuing their story is to help them, to the extent I can, emerge alive from their superpositional box into our ‘reality,’ where we sorely need their passion, their conviction, and their willingness to fight for truth.
btw, if you political junkies don’t think any of this relates to the current political climate, you have my sincere condolences about the appalling degree of stupidity in which you live your day to day lives.
SALLY CAN DANCE 