You're Still Wrong: Mykel's July Blog... That's Horrible... No Wait!
You’re STILL Wrong
To answer brutality with brutality is to admit to one’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy. --Gandhi
You walk down St. Marks Place… the plan: meet some friends… a drink at the Grass Roots… talk about old times... when St. Marks Place was PUNK ROCK. Barely registering… a city bus pulls over to the curb behind you. You hear it but only as part of the city noise. Then, the running footsteps... behind you… getting closer. You turn. A massive guy… running toward you… eyes filled with hate… like the cuckolded man… on a TV crime-show… running after the man he found boffing his wife.
He gets closer. You put up your hands… show you have no weapon… “let’s talk!” you want to say. No chance...
PFAAACK!
the
crunch of his tight white knuckles into your jaw… a
loud CRACK! The
rest is pain… then nothing… blackness.
Here’s real scene: Seattle 2021. A white guy… mid-30s… balding, minor beard, slightly on the plump side… stands on a street corner. He wears a black leather jacket. Another guy, about a foot taller, same age, all in white… except for a black backpack. The bigger guy approaches the smaller one… Shouts… it’s hard to hear what he says… The guy in the leather jacket turns… look of fear... puts up his hands.
“Wait! Let’s talk,” say
those hands.
The
big guy moves closer. Cocks his right arm. KERPOW! Punches through
the smaller
guy’s
raised hands. Fist-to-chin… no comments... no
questions. BLAM! The smaller guy is down… slammed to the sidewalk…
nose first … knocked out... possible concussion… broken nose. The
big guy chuckles, sniffs… walks away.
The YouTube video makes it to facebook in a day. The reaction:
“Wow, that’s great!”
“I could watch that over and over again… just terrific.”
“Wonderful, just wonderful.”
At least a dozen more of the same tenor... All cheering the aggressor, booing the guy who puts his arms up and just wants to talk.
Oh yeah, the guy in the leather jacket… the one knocked out... was wearing a red armband with a swastika on it.
Did you switch? Were you horrified at the brutality of the aggressor, then turned into his supporter?
You don’t need to be in AntiFa to cheer this kind of hypocrisy… but it helps. The youtube clip claims there was some SMSing. Somebody said that somebody said that somebody said. No one said anyone was attacked… no one was hit… no one claims brutality. This guy is floored on a rumor that someone read while riding the bus.
FLASH to 1980s New York:
A pair of femmy young men walk down Greenwich Avenue from Sixth Avenue toward Christopher Street. They laugh… gesture limp-wristedly... stop and kiss each other in a gay parody of a Gone With The Wind poster.
Comes a voice from behind them. “Hey you faggots!”
Behind them are a gang of New Jersey boys... in town for a little fag bashing. They dive at the legs of the young men as if they’e going to bite them.
FOP! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
From behind the Jersey boys comes a crew with baseball bats. SLAM to the ribs. A Jersey Boy in shorts and a gray hoodie screams and sinks down. SLAM to the knees… a tough jock falls to the sidewalk, wincing in pain.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
The bats keep going until the Jerseyites crawl away... back to the Path Train.
When I read about this I think:
“Wow! That’s great!”
“Wonderful,
just wonderful!”
The baseball bat group is SMASH,
Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals.
Their Modus Operandi is
to send out a weak-looking, femmy,
pair as bait… and when the pair is
attacked… they strike
back... harder.
So what’s the difference? How can I defend SMASH but condemn AntiFa? Glad you asked and the answer is easy.
SMASH attacked in defense of others who were physically attacked. The bad guys bashed in real life…. Not supporters… not rumors… not history… not refusing to talk… but right there… watching the attack like you might watch a neighbor beat his dog… and do something to stop it. The anti-fa bashee? He just wanted to talk.
Sid Vicious wore a swastika on the cover of the My Way single. If that were this century, those Anti-Fas would’ve been all over him… probably with a baseball bat.
Your actions give others permission to do the same things. If it’s all right for you to punch someone who thinks differently from you… someone who’s done nothing to you… why not the same for someone who is a different religion from you? Or a different race? Or… the list goes on, but you get it.
Punching someone who has done no evil that you’ve seen says it’s okay to punch someone who’s done no evil that you’ve seen. My advice to the Antifa lovers?
Watch your back.
You’re building an audience who, when it happens to you, will be saying:
“Wow! That’s great!”
“Wonderful, just wonderful!”
When someone catches you sneaking a burger at McD’s… you know, Meat is Murder… you’ll get what you deserve. When someone texts that you put your hand on some girl’s leg when she was crowd-surfing at the punk show… It’ll be more than a hand on YOUR leg. I’ll be tuning in to YouTube to watch the video.
See you in hell,
Mykel Board
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
–>Even
The Governor Dept: Because
New York State
has reached a 70% vaccine rate, the governor has stopped
all recommendations for sidewalk masks and
relaxed
almost all mask mandates
in
other places.
Despite
this, almost half of New Yorkers still mask themselves on the street.
Stores and restaurants still ask people to mask up before
they go in.
And the post office is so confused, they have conflicting signs right next to one another. Why don’t the CDC-loving mask-wearers follow the CDC when they say fuggedaboud those masks?
–>Who
knew dept: Maybe
COVID has turned everything upside down – even the real estate
market. The Huffington Post
reports
on
a
Colorado house listed as being “a little slice of hell” with
“human and animal feces left in the living room to greet you as you
walk in.” It sold quickly for more than half a million dollars. I
wonder if you have to wear a mask to go look at it.
–>Sudden
realization dept:
I wish I had the reference. Maybe it was on Al Jazeera, the only TV
news I trust. Some professor is
talking about race and how what we see on TV and in the news forms
our images. She talks
about the dead people we see on
TV.
Bodies of George Floyd and Eric Garner... bodies
of war dead. They’re usually black. Remember that guy in Atlanta
who killed the Asian sex-workers? How many bodies did you see? Yeah,
that’s what I thought. If the victim is white… they show a high
school yearbook picture. Asian…
no pictures at all.
And
hungry people, starving bubble-bellied babies? What color are they?
Save the Children? What color children? We know anyone can be hungry…
and anyone can be killed, but what we see… what we’re used to…
are dead and hungry black and brown people. That’s
got to affect the way we think about those people.
Wow!
Never thought about that before.
–> Honest Cop Dept: NPR reports The police chief in Sperry, Okla. wrote himself a speeding ticket after a traffic camera caught him speeding. He says he's going to pay the more than $300 ticket he wrote himself. Evidently, he was doing 80mph in a school zone. That’s setting an example. if more cops wrote themselves tickets, you could have police forces that pay for themselves. Defund, shmefund.
–> Just deserts dept: My long-time pal Sid Yiddish found this interesting tidbit. You know how vegans really hate vegetables and are always looking for ways to trick bad-tasting food into tasting like meat? Mock duck, veggie burgers, almond milk. Funnily enough, a veggie company is recalling it’s fake eggs. Why? Because they were contaminated. With what? REAL EGGS, of course. Oh, the horror!
→ Special Thanks dept: And call-out to Josh C. and Grue S. who put me up, and put up with me… during my visit to Philadelphia. Both of the couple are friendly, smart, and large… in the physical and personal sense of the word. I’ve already written about my taste for fat people, their self-confidence and (often) musical ability. When we say someone is BIG-hearted, s/he often is a big person.
One of the weird things I don’t get is… self-image. Do fat people look in the mirror and think I’m ugly?” Do some fat people think… I wouldn’t be ugly if I weren’t fat? Grue is a spectacular AND beautiful woman! AND that fat is… er… a huge chunk of the reason!
See you in hell, redux,
MB
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.
And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Here are a couple video links.
This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.
Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.
Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
