(MRR 344) Mykel Board explains Steve Jobs is better dead than Maumar Qadaffi is

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You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
Column for MRR 344
January 2012

by Mykel Board

aka  Mykel explains why he's happier that Steve Jobs kicked the bucket, than he is that Moumar Qadaffi did.

“Nobody reads anymore” --Steve Jobs

I write these columns a long time before you read them. Today is October 24^th, 2011. For Jews, it's 5773. Yom Kippur... the day of atonement... no food or water for 24 hours... a concentrated Jewish Ramadan... has just passed.

As I write this, a few of the most exciting weeks in history have also just past. Occupy Wall Street started and spread around the world. Steve Jobs died of liver cancer. Muammar Gaddafi (the name with a thousand spellings) died at the hands of US aided Libyans. Can I put all this in one column? Do I have anything to say about it that hasn't been said before?

You bet I can. You bet I do.

PART 1: Considering what's been going on in Israel for the past 40+ years, I never thought I'd be supporting an occupation. But this WALL STREET stuff is inspiring. And it's more inspiring because so many people JUST DON'T GET IT.

I visit the site for an Occupy Wall Street Yom Kippur service. I've arrived early to check out the other occupiers. The park is a punkhouse turned inside-out. Paths with free food (I avoid it because FOOD NOT BOMBS, whose nauseating fare has converted thousands of vegetarians to carnivorism, has probably provided the food), free clothes (I avoid them because of the bedbug scare), free sex (yeah, right). Key point: people GIVE AWAY stuff. They don't sell it. Posters, silk-screened t-shirts... give it away. Free.

On the propaganda front, there are leaflets and signs... stuff about Israel, the mid-East wars, the bank bailouts, and human consciousness... as many anti-Obama as anti-anything else. (After all, it WAS Obama who bailed out the banks.) Everything is permitted.

An old bearded fat guy sits on a wall. He looks familiar.

“Aron?” I ask.

He nods.

“Mykel Board,” I say re-introducing myself.

“I remember you,” he sprays into my face.

It is indeed Aron Kay, the famous 70s pie-thrower and Yippie who hit Andy Warhol, G. Gordon Liddy, and Phyllis Schlafly among others. Once a folk hero, now he's almost forgotten. Not by me.

There's more to see... to report... too much for this column.

Besides, I have to get back across Broadway in time for Yom Kippur services. 

And through the magic of print... BANG! I'm there.

Someone hands me a prayer book. Free.

I see that the books have been donated by Congregation Beth Simchas Torah... the homogogue I usually go to for this holiday. We pass them around to new comers.

There are about 1000 of us Jews here. Makes and models range from men with curly sideburns to men in dresses. Ages 6 to 80 or older... mohawks to white shirts to Aron Kay. Our purpose? Support the occupiers... of Wall Street, not Palestine... and celebrate Judaism's holiest day.

Electric amplification is prohibited in the occupied territories. It would give the cops a chance to bust us. The rabbi speaks loudly.

He starts the service. “We start with the blessing on page 32,” he says.

“WE START WITH THE BLESSING ON PAGE 32,” shouts the crowd closest to him... human amplifiers who pass the word on to the rest.

As the rabbi continues, the crowd repeats the prayers and chants... making a human PA system. It lasts the full two hours of the service.

As I wrote in the beginning of this column, Yom Kippur is a “Day of Atonement.” Jews ask forgiveness for all the bad stuff we've done during the year. Here, the rabbi asks us to volunteer a promise of something we're sorry for and we resolve not to do the next year. He starts.

“I will take all my money out of the Bank of America,” he says.

Someone else stands up, “I won't continue to let Jews blindly defend Israel until there's really a Palestine.”

Another person, “I will visit my friends in the hospital, even if it's inconvenient for me.”

There are dozens: Political, personal, humorous, serious, and dumb,(“I will not drink orange juice right after brushing my teeth.”)... just like the signs and leaflets across the street at the occupation.

FAST FORWARD: Later in the week, I read that professional liberal, Susan Sarandon, visited the Wall Street site and complained that the participants “lack focus.” Others have said the occupiers have “no issue”... “no clear-cut plan.” “They're just a bunch of dreamers.”

I say, YEAH! All that!

When Aron Kay... and I... were in the Yippies, we had three demands. 1. An end to the war in Vietnam. 2. No more pay toilets in New York City. 3. Mass ecstasy.

The Wall Street Occupation is like that. Anyone can join. Your dream is their demand. Focus shmocus. The sky's the limit. It's your chance to show what you really want. Fuck possibility. Fuck practicality. That stuff is for politicians, not dreamers. Occupiers ARE dreamers... and that's a great thing.

How 'bout: 1. Pull out the troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else. 2. Re-regulate the banks. 3. End capitalism

Sound good? At least for starters. What's your dream?

PART 2: Why I'm happier about a dead Steve Jobs than I am about a dead Muammar Kadafi.

STEVE JOBS, glad he's dead:

1. He was a corporate shmuck just like any other corporate shmuck. Yet, somehow, he could trick a generation of anti-corporaters into loving him.

2. He helped kill real human interaction. Go out with anyone today and you're lucky if you can get two words in between the texting, cellphone answering, facebooking, app-hell created by the iPhone.

It used to be, when you left home or left work, you left that shit behind. Now it's with you all the time. Being with someone is never BEING WITH someone. It's being with someone and their i-connections to other people who are ignoring their live mates to check their i-tweets.

3. He helped wreck independent music. Felix Havoc's columns have been a great introduction to how Apple strangled independent music. Records, covers, vinyl, even CDs... They're all dead. If you don't distribute through iTunes, you won't be heard. Related to that is...

4. He wrecked music quality. The sampling rate for anything you get over the internet is much lower than the CD sampling rate, and much worse than analog vinyl quality. Subtleties are lost. Quality and LIVE sound is lost in the urge for “convenience.” People listen to iPods/iPhones for the same reason they eat at McDonalds. It's really easy. Shitty, but easy.

5. He blocked the city sidewalks. You can't walk down the street without rear-ending some idiot talking/texting/map-reading on an iPhone.

6. He made consumers out of producers. How many people still have blogs, or personal webpages? No one creates content anymore... except professional content creators. You don't need to make it. There's an APP for that. PLUS Apple killed porn apps, with censorship much worse than government censorship. With the government, you know it's there and you work around it. With i-Censor, you don't even know it's there.

7. He killed bar bets. You can't bet your friends that Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan. They can just look it up on their iPhones. The thrill of “finding out,” “looking up,” “discovery,” is gone. Now you just push a few icons. Why KNOW anything at all? You can find out with your iPhone.

8. He killed diversity. Go to an internet café and you'll see a sea of soft white apples blazing out of collective computers. It's a monopoly. A mind monopoly of anyone under 30. I said “mind,” but anyone with an APPLE anything is a zombie. Forget about mind.

MUAMMAR QADDAFI, sad he's dead:

1. Now the Obamites are gonna have to find someone else to go after. Another day, another target. It could be YOU! The Obama administration said it has the right to kill American citizens... without trial... if “they present a danger.” Details here. 

2.TIME MAGAZINE, in its May 16, 2006 issue, had a feature story “Why Khadafy's Now a Good Guy.” In that article, Khadaffi talks about entering the league of nations and negotiating rather than destroying.

3. He was a leader in the African Unity movement against American, Chinese and Russian imperialism. In 2001, he hosted the inaugural meeting of the new African Union.

4.Women lived better under Khadaffi than in the Shiekdoms of America's friends the Saudis. Gadhafi was one of the few secular leaders in the Arab world. He did not believe in Islamic fundamentalism. In Libya, women have been able to go to school, join the army, and walk around with their faces hanging out.

5. Khadaffi was a natty dresser. Vanity Fair gave his clothes the thumbs up for innovative dressing. Sometimes he wore medallion military chic... dictator black. Sometimes, it was almost drag. He just didn't give a shit about Western fashion tastes. In other words, he was punkrock.

6. Khadaffi did not tax his citizens. Their housing, education, healthcare were all FREE. The leader built a huge water pipe across the desert to ensure water was in supply for all of his major cities, as well as irrigating the desert to give them food security. Free.

7. Under Khadaffi, Libya had the highest living standard in Africa. According to the Human Development Index, it ranked in the top third out of 172 countries in the world-- before NATO and Rebel interference

8. Ron Paul (wrong on everything domestic, right on (almost) everything foreign) wrote:

     Momar Khaddafi was not the evil rogue portrayed by Western propaganda.

    In fact, he was a hero. Qadhafi’s Gold Dinar Plan and Libya’s Public Central Bank would have changed the monetary system and freed all of Africa from the Private Central Bank System. Ultimately, it might possibly have freed the NATO host nations from their own parasites – Vampire Private Central Banks. 

Qathafi’s courage and pioneering efforts in trying to restore national sovereignty and making the government responsible to the people instead of to the Global Banking Elites is the reason why he was targeted and killed.

     NATO terrorist attacks will not get the Western nations out of debt – only an honest Public Central Bank – like the attempted Bank of Libya – would.

    But guess what? With Gaddafi now out-of-the-way, the IMF and The World Bank have moved in to Libya, and have reestablished their control and dominance there. And (black man) Obama was the ringleader in the effort to reassert the impoverishment of Africa.

    There will be no independence, and there will be no freedom. The only way for a Country to be Sovereign is to have sovereign control of its money.

9. All those ways to spell his name! Ah, that fun will be lost.

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column.]

-->Occupy this dept: According the the Washington Post, the top-earning 0.1 percent of Americans (average income $5.6 million a year) saw a 385% raise in their income since 1975. The bottom 90%... we lost ground.

-->Separation of mouth and brain dept: Speaker of the House, John Boehner, keeps saying the country is “broke” so Americans United for Separation of Church and State asks why he is determined to funnel $20 million in tax dollars to religious schools in Washington, D.C.
      Boehner is attempting to railroad the re-authorization of a nasty school voucher “experiment” through the House.
     Speaker Boehner says we’re broke and have to slash federal spending,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Yet, he’s willing to throw $20 million at religious and other private schools.”

-->Great ideas dept: I'm waiting for the first all girl Lebanese punk band. I've been saving this name for you for the past few years. You're welcome to it. Just give me credit: LEZBOLLAH.

-->Speaking of punk rock dept: I've seen so many bands during the last month... hell, the last week... it's making my head spin. Tons of oldster still making punk... or doing it again. Former MRRers, FLY and JENNIFER BLOWDRYER, played on the same bill as COJOBA for Girls night at Otto's. Not long before that, I saw NOFX (thanks for the guestlist Mike!) with ANTIFLAG and cowpunkers OLD MAN MARKLEY. Wow!
    And now, I'm still feeling the hangover (thanks Kenny) from last night's MEATMEN, BLACK FAG (check out the YouTube video if you don't know them.... Homo versions of B.F. songs), RUNNY and BEER AND CABLE... two bands you never heard of, both whose members are... er... not young... both among the best things to wreck my ears in MONTHS. Oh yeah, thanks Tesco for the great TOUCH AND GO book and the admission!

-->How 'bout some equality dept: The Oakland police force has shot into and seriously injured Occupiers in that city. One former Iraqi vet has brain damage from the attack. So we've got the government attacking its own people. Well, Mr Obama, how 'bout a NO-FLY zone over the East Bay? Or even better, send in the drones!

-->It's already working dept: As of today, you can already see the effects of Occupy Wall Street. Obama has publicly criticized the Bank of America for its ATM card fee AND (except for several thousand “advisers,”) announced the end of the war in Iraq. Newspapers may give other reasons, but don't ever doubt WE DID IT.

-end-

Mykel's not-quite-functioning homepage is at: www.mykelboard.com