the blackout. And not the passive-aggressive “market” blackout which is imposed on almost all artists. This is just a cowardly disguise for the ideological proscriptions of the ruling class. They demur to making explicit condemnations. We dare them to declare their objections, biases, and official censure of the contents of our records, paintings, films, and essays, instead of passively-aggressively ignoring them, shunning them, relegating them to the waste bin of penniless purgatory. Art is in a lost state now. It’s a mess, without any idea of why it exists, where it’s going, who it’s for, and where it comes from. Censorship would immediately grant it a compass, a meaning, a purpose, a direction, give it its power back. An artist who is “anticensorship” is essentially waving a white flag; declaring their work to be inconsequential; a smudge, a scribble, a doodle, or polka dot.
The music on the radio—pop, rock, rap, and country songs which promote class war and celebrate idiocy, sociopathy, immoral wealth accumulation, discrimination, and stultifying social roles—is the thrown voice of Wall Street. All of the broker’s values are exemplified in this music. Regardless of whatever charm the pop star stand-ins may have, they are on the radio only because they reify the debased values of the sadist power structure. The elite seek to program, dupe, hypnotize, control you—who they regard as their property, their “bitch”—through these proxy singers. Censor them!! Don’t let them talk to you that way.
Let them crawl collectively into whatever stink-hole they came from. They can perform in secret for the Walmart buyers’ convention or whatever loathsome cabal of slime-pimps elected them to be the incessant, vacuous voice of mind control. But they must be barred from the airwaves, the record stores, the Internet, and public consumption. Censorship for the radio!!
The video games and films that the “entertainment industry” create must be censored. They are a virus unleashed into the minds of a nation; designed to cause violent, masturbatory passivity and to create absolutely obedient death machines. The liberal response to any contention that the stream of ultraviolence flowing from screen to eye to brain might be destructive is the following reductive equation:
“Shakespeare is good. Shakespeare’s plays featured barbaric violence. Depictions of violence and barbarity of the most gratuitous sort are therefore not only edifying, but intrinsic to truly powerful art and part of a wonderful lineage which dates back to Shakespeare and the cradle of Western culture, the Greeks.”
Or alternately: “Oedipus Rex was a disturbed individual who murdered his father, slept with his mother, and then blinded himself. Why is the Call of Duty video game, which trains its adolescent users to murder efficiently and indiscriminately, any different than a venerated Greek drama?”
Hacks in Hollywood, lacking the cleverness to write a decent story with poignant characters, churn out hyperbolic violence because of its sedative effect on the brain. The blood spills, the explosions explode, there is no gratuity left behind in the race to manufacture the vilest images and situations imaginable. The producers collude with representatives from the army, the navy, the DIA, the CIA; in short, the scum of the Earth.
They collect millions . . . and millions . . . from these tax-robbing institutions to tell their stories for them. Censor Hollywood. Keep their filth from the screens and their sad gigolos from the red carpet. They can engage in whatever pathetic rituals they choose; coital casting homages to Louis Mayer or bitchy e-mail exchanges in tribute to archdude Judd Apatow. But they must be censored until they learn to make a film with compelling content instead of relying on a mixtape of old songs to trigger an emotional response. Censor film and video now. Censorship until reeducation!!
Censor the news. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, and other media liberties have become a grotesque and deadly parody of their promise, with the “free market” ideology and financial interests determining their slant, their reporting, their “first draft” record of history. They explain the brutality of their insane system with a rationalized framework which at a distance would be revealed as absurd. But we haven’t any distance. We are inundated, immersed, immolated day and night by the detritus that their free speech monopoly throws at us. A monopoly of power enjoyed by the most selfish, the most rich, and, therefore, the most grotesque and least compassionate. They have no restraints. They’ve gone mad. Censor them.
When the “newspaper of record” publishes a fantasy rationalization which explains the invasion of Iraq, an insane genocide, it goes unpunished. The press is “free” after all, free to spout lies and create war for its parent corporations and the ideological systems it serves. The seemingly inevitable events then unfold, while the journalists look on ruefully, faux-naïf, never acknowledging their central role in propagating mass murder.
When TV, radio, press, and Internet news are clogged with financial manipulation, reaction, and bile, can we believe in freedom of any of these forms? No. We must create moral restrictions on what is allowed. Censor the press. Censor free speech. Censorship now.
Censor the politicians. Elected officials, who are completely corrupt and sold out to the most putrid business concerns, are in need of a muzzle. Censor them before they churn out some more condescending, kitsch homilies to the “working families” and the “folks” who put them there. All they care about are the developer cronies and the whore-purchasing lobbyists whose asses they smother with love. Censor them and throw them all in prison.
Censor the technology. Technological “innovations” determine much of what becomes art, media, communication, and therefore life. We must manacle these mediums for the sake of expression itself. Why is industry allowed to pollute the world with whatever they decide to make paradigmatic through their control of the market? Why aren’t there limits on these transformative technologies when so many degrade the Earth and our experience of it? Flat-screen television transforms every room and space into an outhouse, with sports matches and beer ads pummeling the passerby. Music, once a communal experience which bonded the listeners in a sublime and extraordinary way, has—through the introduction of “earbuds”—become a pornographic mind-control experiment, with tiny speakers transmitting awful boasts of sociopathy like a scumbag Iago, in order to promulgate a world where the most selfish act is compulsory, the most deranged attitudes encouraged. The sentiments expressed would cause consternation if they were played aloud. Let the truth ring out; censor the earbuds—now!!
Censor the Internet. The Internet is an out-of-control chimera. A pervasive, sicko addiction—worse than meth or smack or crack—which has rendered the entire population passive, fascist, and absolutely brain-dead. We need Internet rehabilitation for the entire world. Censor the Internet now!
These ideas are controversial, not chic, and even, perhaps, upsetting to hear.
After all, the modern Westerner lives a philosophically carefree existence. Largely “apolitical,” he has few qualms about state violence and its use as a repressive force.
He ho-hums state sponsorship of terror, torture, air war, invasion, mass incarceration, and eco-S&M. Penetrations into time and space, as well as cosmic, cross-dimensional calamity are of no interest. Back-room deals by a syphilitic elite who sodomize the globe to quench their kinks are met with a shrug. What, me worry? would be their hue and cry if only they were literate enough to read MAD magazine.
Socially, topics like those above are in poor taste. Off-limits both for discussion and private contemplation. Such esoterica is irrelevant to a life of Uber-ing to a Tinder date to share gelato with a prospective sex partner. Such metrosexual tomfoolery is never interrupted by political engagement except of the varieties which find play on social media: either outrage over the racist gaffes of political celebrities or semiotic delight on the implications of a hot cable miniseries.
This outrage, usually expressed online with an itchy index finger, is really a concern about social comportment. Designed to shame the vulgar or the gauche, its analysis doesn’t extend
