...it is truly the end of days....

www.jesus-action-figure.com

"Déclassé War:

Dropouts Cutting Class"

Harbinger, Crimethinc

Exiting the Economy as a Strategy for Reclaiming Your Life and
Saving the World

“If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available.
I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I
will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.” —Article 3, U.S. Military Code of Conduct

Déclassé: (adj. or n.) having lost class or status in society

De-class: (v.) to reject one’s social and economic role

The Occupation

Occupation. The word brings to mind images of Russian tanks rolling
through the streets of Eastern Europe, or U.S. soldiers nervously
patrolling hostile neighborhoods in Baghdad.

But occupation is not always so obvious; sometimes occupations go on
so long that the tanks are unnecessary. They can be rolled back into
storage, as long as the conquered remember they can return at any
time—or behave as if the tanks were still there, forgetting why they
do so.

NOT BORED! writes:

"When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease"

What's being sold here [in the Budweiser radio commercials that use the music of Squeeze and the Dave Edmunds Band] is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer's language — made of incipient cliches that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliche and extends language — is now reified into a single cliche hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will have completed — in fact, realized — the performer's career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliche — to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing — which is what the record will have been.

Greil Marcus has changed his mind since he wrote these words, back in 1987, when his "Real Life Top Ten" column was published in The Village Voice. He now says, "I think all songs should go up on this block [...] It's a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontectualization dissolves them" (see "Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections," in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, published in 2000).