I heard a guy with an English accent Use the word “pissed” in the American sense. No one else noticed.
He was talking to Americans And Americans certainly know What it means to be pissed.
A prominent example of an American being pissed. Note the red hat.
We are pissed. We all are. So much of the time And for every imaginable reason.
Over there on the other side Of the big drink,”pissed” means “drunk.” Being pissed is something you do to yourself.
But what are Americans drinking That makes us so angry? I answer that question all the time.
We swim in righteous dudgeon. We ride a high horse as we wade through the river. We vote our values.
Apparently, one of those values is revenge. Another is the fear of being wrong. But the greatest value is property.
You can own all the things If you buy them in installments. The things you own also own you.
Don’t piss it all away, some say. If piss has no value, Does that mean it’s free?
Like life in the USA is free? Or bought with borrowed money? Or rented, like beer and coffee?
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My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists.
I was raised in Southern Baptist churches. Every moment of my young life I felt like an outsider. The Baptists helped with that. Inside me was the hard truth that every day, I secretly wished I was a girl. I heard over and over again from the churchy people in my family, who insisted (without knowing what was true of me, because I kept that secret buried deep inside) that people with sin in their hearts were bound for Hell, and that femininity in a male was a sickness and a sin.
I was presented with a choice. And my choice was to embrace my whole self: to be a good person, and to let the idea that I was inherently evil go, instead of internalizing the self-hatred I had been raised to. Every positive step I’ve taken since then has led to a larger worldview and a stronger sense of myself in the larger context.
My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists. This is not to say that I have not been a little shit at times in my life. I have. I acknowledge that I have made mistakes, as everyone does, and I continue to try to move forward and choose to take good action for myself and those I love as best I can.
But the Southern Baptist Council, the governing body of the churches I attended as a child, continues to dehumanize and marginalize people, and continues to believe that its views should rule this country and hold dominion over this world. At the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention, attendees voted to actively oppose Obergefeld, to exclude from membership any church with a female pastor, and to keep the SBC’s financials from being made public, thereby confirming their ideology as toxic.
Of course, they also have this effed up resolution, dated June 1st, 2014, that permanently separates me from the ideology of much of my family: On Transgender Identity, which is contradictory and hateful on a profound level. They claim that “we love our transgender neighbors” and in the same document resolve to “oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity,” rendering the whole document nonsensical and branding themselves once again as hypocrites.
And that’s at the heart of my exit from that religion and from the positive regard of much of my family.
not my family, not my church
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If, if Reagan played disco He’d shoot it to shit. You can’t disco in jack boots.
High upon a white horse He’d sing lame lyrics To try to reach the working man. –The Minutemen, 1982
That’s the entire lyrics to If Reagan Played Disco by southern California punk band the Minutemen, released as one of five songs on a seven inch vinyl record entitled “bean-spill e. p.”
Here’s my copy: Sorry, I will only be posting the non-obscene label here…
This cultural artifact from 43 years ago shows that the issues that seem so immediate and emergent right now have been with us for decades. The Republican conservative project has been the same for all this time. The Democratic response has been just that – a weak, ineffectual response. The Democrats initiate nothing. All they seem to do is talk in the least effective/offensive way about vaguely lefty ideas they never enact, while governing like diet Republicans.
The real response to what’s happening in the world now comes from outside the corporate infrastructure, in places like the LAVA Center, citizen political groups, spaces that hold independent artists, writers, musicians and other creatives, who exist outside that structure. We are purified in our intentions because we exist outside the mainstream.
The mission of mainstream cultural money and power is to blind us to what’s real, to create an artificially rarified sense of what qualifies as legitimate cultural contribution so that anything real – anything you’d recognize as coming from someone’s real life and intention is seen as substandard — grubby and grimy, faulty, unwashed and obscene.
Because the truth is obscene. We see the IDF shooting Palestinian children in the head, carpet bombing and starving an entire people out of existence. And in the Palestinian people we should see ourselves. The big money, the power of industry, and world leadership supplies the bullets to, as our president says, “finish the job.”
“The job” is to diminish working people, out of existence if necessary. Their mission is to fill us with artificial hopes and synthetic mass-manufactured bullshit dreams, all the while eroding all of the real value – the compassion and care, the pride, the willingness to work to better each other and ourselves together, the simple beauty of the world around us – and turn it all into a zero-sum game, a race to gobble up that which has more value if left alone, those things that will grow if nurtured but can only wither if exploited.
Our job is that nurturing, and we’re doing it now: sharing our hearts, hearing each other. It’s the same job the Minutemen were doing decades ago. “If Reagan Played Disco.” In those words, there is a dream. It’s the same dream that had that lone student standing in front of a line of tanks in Beijing not so long after this record was made.
Some say that student’s name was Wang Weilin. The Chinese government says there was no such person. It’s said he was 19 years old when he stood in front of those tanks. It’s said he was arrested for “political hooliganism,” whatever that means. Now, nobody can prove he existed or if he exists still, in some gulag somewhere. But we know who he is, because of what he did – what we all saw him do, even though his country’s government denies it ever happened.
D. Boon, the guitarist and singer of the Minutemen died in the band van when it rolled while they were on tour, three years after this record was released. These grooves are part of his corpse. After he died, his fellow band members George Hurley and Mike Watt continued on.
Years later, they recorded a drop-dead gorgeous instrumental called “Tien An Men Dream Again” as fIREHOSE, with guitarist Ed fROMOHIO.
In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.
It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.
I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.
When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.
In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.
Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.
That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.
Broadcast From the Brain Radio 
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