http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:38:55 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/20/130535.php#comment-573715 Yippie: You just admited what Andrew and Ron explained in their book. The Yippie movement...WAS A JOKE!!! It was nothing more then an attempt to be as out there and as extreme as possible. The Yippie movement was less about changing anything and just about having fun. Tell me, how is smoking LSD, crashin conventions and coming up with joke campaigns to sponser pigs for president going to change anything about the system? The answer, it won't! The yippie movement was all about fun not about work, and that the problem. You can't expect that just having fun will change anything! People like Martin Luther King and civil rights activists organized change through negotiation and debate and hard work. He spent his days orating and holding marches, spreading his gospel of equality to the masses, going to Black and White communities and organizing branches of the movement everywhere. IT WAS HARD WORK! He did not sit around and defy the system of oppression by smoking dope and playing loud music to blot out the polic sirens. He worked with the law...to change the law! THATS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE BOOK! You can implement more change if you try to limit what advertisers and corporations can do. Heavier taxes on ads would decreases ads! Uniforms in schools would decrease the fashion race in school and force students to not dress in Nike and Adiba and Roots clothing. As for Gonzo: You're comparison with the founding Fathers is simplistic and an overused arguement. How many organizations have tried to use the founding fathers as their mouth piece to show themselves right and others wrong? You cannot see the difference between justifiable disobidence and just plain social deviance. Deviance is basically vandalism and a disregard for rules. If someone is to throw a brick through a window or decides to graffiti a building with an obscene gesture, does that mean he is standing up to an oppressive government? No he's just being a jerk. If you saw a police officer brutally beating up a woman and attempting to rape her and you took a gun out and shot him that would be justifiable disobedience. You defied a man of law who was so obviously going against the law. The founding fathers were like the latter example. They saw a government brutally taxing them without representation and treating them poorly and unfairly. They decided they did not want Tea anymore and threw it into the Boston River as an act of Civil disobidence towards what was in their minds an oppressive rule. Revolution should come when you see your government or members of it so obviously break the laws of civil liberties, not because you're ticked off at them for putting up billboards and trying to sell you new cars. It why the american Revolution was believed to have been caused by the Red Coats firing on a peaceful protest group, and some historians apparently dispute whether or not the protest was peaceful. Even then, what did the founding fathers do? Did they decide to lay around and take opium in hopes the British would go away? No. Did they decide that were gonna throw off their wigs and start letting their hair grow out while listening to music that was loud and contained rude sometime lurid comments like Breast and Humbugs? Did they get their women to flash their legs as a sign of their independence? No. They did not waste their time acting like drunken morons and hoping the problems would go away by acting out of the mainstream. They took charge, they tried negotiating with the British, tried to make them see reason. In the end it didn't work and they believed themselves forced to rebel against the British government. But they did not try and rebel by being "Different" and "Cool" and becoming "Wolves" in your term. If anything they Founding fathers could be seen as the other kinds of Sheep, the Black Sheep. The sheep who decided to stray from the herd and make their own rules, but nevertheless they were sheep following an ideal. While the British loyalists remained with the previous herd and got themselves ridiculed for it. I think most of the people who Criticise this book either miss the point of what its trying to say or they are blinded by their own bias interpretation of society. It all comes back to the first example cited in the book, Blackspot sneakers. If a magazine like Adbusters, so ferverently anti-corporation, decides to market its own brand of shoes (And yes that white spot is still a logo no matter what you say) then how can anyone possibly think that the mainstream and the alternative are sperate entities? 573715@blogcritics.org Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:38:55 EDT