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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
How do you personally define patriotism?
"Patriotism" has become a word that brings up fear, and a word that brings up tightness and narrowness. There's only one way to be a patriot: "My country, do or die," as they used to say. Whereas, as far as I can recall, the Fourth of July was supposed to commemorate a revolution from an oppressive overlord. It seems obvious to me that the way to celebrate the Fourth of July is to remember that change is the only constant. You can't kill all the people you disagree with; therefore you've got to think of a better way. To say that I aid terrorists when I question the government -- you're walking away from the meaning of July 4 there, buddy.
Let's get back to remembering our roots, which is all about questioning and no one having the final answer. You can't set the whole thing up in cement and expect it not to break.
How do you feel about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security?
It's sort of a hype, a window dressing. Who cares if there's a new goddamn department? Please tell the people in the NSA and the CIA and the FBI -- they've been doing all this stuff all along. It's just a shuffling and maybe an adding of places and people. But I don't like what the word "homeland" does for it -- it seems backwards, reminiscent of "fatherland," like the Nazis called Germany. It has a ring of Über Alles.
Does it bother you that the Department of Homeland Security may be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act?
I think one of the main problems right now that is not meeting up with enough righteous indignation and opposition is the building of walls between what this democracy is doing and the press. That freedom of the press, the First Amendment, is not just, "Oh, in case anyone wants to find anything out, we'll let you, and no one should oppress you for writing something." No: It's an institution that is dependent upon a democracy to keep it free.
We've already been getting strongly attacked by corporatization, and the gradual eroding of all those rules from the FCC that said you weren't supposed to own more than one venue in a single market. Because much of the money in America has, over the last 10 to 15 years, been invested in new methods of communication, all the rules keeping it a public reality have been shrunk out from underneath us. Now we've got a guy like Rumsfeld who hates the press: When someone asks him about civilian casualties in Afghanistan this June, he says, "Obviously, you never ran a war!" Belittling the guy: "What's wrong with you, wimp! Screw on your dick, you'll understand."
It's so demeaning and so dangerous, because people sort of take the press for granted and it's more and more become a money-making proposition, and it should be a civic institution because if we don't have it ... I'm a postman and you're a secretary and he's a sculptor, and we don't have fucking time to watch everything these people are doing. We need the journalists, and if they are prohibited from doing their job because they're "helping the enemy"... Here we have it: The Nazis were sledgehammering presses. If you don't get it, look at history.
I recently started talking about the Freedom of Information Act onstage, and it's more like the Freedom of the Magic Marker Act. You've seen people's files: There's no substance -- it's all been excised. Not to mention, what about the schmuck, Bush, when he decided to exempt presidential papers? He says, "No president starting from me ..." in order to protect Reagan's papers? Uck!
What was your reaction to the 9th Circuit Court's decision about the Pledge of Allegiance?
I've always thought that. Why do we say "under God" and why not "under the dollar bill"? It says: In God We Trust. It should say: In Merrill Lynch We Trust! One nation under God -- that's bullshit! Why bring God into it? Leave that at home, or in church. It's just bringing in strife and ugliness; it's irrelevant. But obviously for some people, it's not irrelevant. And they are the ones trying to shove their ideas down someone else's throat. And the ones that say it should be there, like every bastard in the Senate, are just sucking up to their electorate. The ones who aren't sucking up are only saving their asses.
