EVERYONE Is Above The Law or Mykel's July 2024 Blog Entry

   

EVERYONE is Above The Law
or
Mykel's July 2024 Blog
aka  You're Still Wrong

The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike from pissing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread. 

– Anatole France

“The law roasted her to death at a slow fire.
                        –Mark Twain in The Prince and The Pauper

Practically all laws, whether they forbid me to take your car, outlaw racial discrimination, or coerce the payment of taxes, impose somebody’s morality on somebody else. 
                     –Stephen L. Carter

--------------------

I stand with half a dozen people at the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston Street. A cacophony of horns blasts from the barely moving cars and trucks. If this were a symphony, every thirty seconds or so, a conductor would cue a VROOOM VROOOM screaming from motorcycles... and cars that wish they were motorcycles. No one looks at the traffic lights. The red-handed DON’T WALK sign hides behind the school bus blocking the crosswalk at the corner.

From our standing-at-the-corner crowd, an attractive young woman in twat-shaping shorts, steps from the curb into the traffic. Stepping hard… intentionally… she weaves her way through the cars to reach the divider in the middle of the street. Her move has given me the courage to try it… and I twist and turn my way to the middle divide. So does a mom pushing a stroller. Then a tourist trying to follow his cellphone map.

Slowly we wind our ways through the traffic until one by one we reach the other side of Houston Street. None of us notices or cares about the lights… and it’s the same for the traffic we’re weaving through. They don’t care either.

FLASH TO WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT: I tried asking Google (actually DuckDuckGo) how many federal laws there are. It turns out nobody knows. The last attempt to count them was in the 1980s. The result “was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.”

Of course, there are also state, city, and local laws… new ones coming and going every day. The laws are constructed –some by accident, some by intention– so that EVERYONE will be a lawbreaker at one time or another.

I haven’t been in high school since 1968. It’s likely things have changed since then. When I was in school, Social Studies taught us that America was a Nation of Laws. Unlike dictatorships… like Russia, where HUMANS rule arbitrarily, in America everyone must obey the same laws. It doesn’t matter if you’re Al Capone or Jane Fonda. The law applies to all of us.

“In America, everyone is equal before the law,” Mr. Greenspan told us. “There is no aristocracy here… no dictatorship.”

Even then, I thought something was fishy about that idea. Al Capone was a gangster. The guy behind the machine gun that The Untouchables were always fighting. But what sent him to prison? TAX EVASION. He didn’t pay the government on the money he stole from those dead guys. It seemed to me that mass murder from the end of a machine gun was a more deserving crime than tax evasion. But that was the only way they could get him.

FLASH AHEAD TO 2325: A teenage Mikhail Boardinov is struggling against the body lock placed on him by Robocop4870-UB.

 “You are under arrest,” says the 4870… whose mellow voice is uncannily like that of HAL in 2001.

“What for?” asks Boardinov. “I know you don’t like what I say sometimes. But I have a right to say it.”

“Of course you do,” answers the Robocop. “This is a free country… You’re not in Russia.”

“Then why am I being arrested?” asks Boardinov.

“You know why,” says the Robocop. “You’re not being arrested for your beliefs or your writing. You’re being arrested for breathing without a license.”

“How do you know I don’t have a license?” asks Boardinov, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with my vocal opposition to the merger of AmazAppleGoogleSoft with the US government, would it?”

“Of course not,” comes the reply. “You know about climate change. You know how bad carbon dioxide is for the earth. Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. You know that the law requires a breathing license for every citizen… and that all citizens must document at least 3 periods of one minute each day… where they stop breathing in order to help save the planet. You are a selfish bastard… not caring about the earth or anyone in it besides yourself… and if you had a license, you’d show it to me.”

FLASH TO 2024: As I write this, Donald Trump has finished his trial about paying a pornstar hush-money^®, but like Al Capone’s trial, the reason for the court is violation of some business expense reporting.

Donald Trump is an outsider. Before his previous term in office, he was without experience with the Washington politicos. He was a businessman and an entertainer. And he lived his life according to the rules of those professions. I can’t imagine a successful businessman who doesn’t have an accountant or lawyer he pays to fiddle the books. The pornstar makes the news. Few people know – or care – about the buisiness law.

In Florida, they’re bringing Trump to court for boxes of classified documents on the floor of his bathroom. No he didn’t piss on them, at least not as far as I know. He didn’t do anything with them except leave them in his house. And they raided that house. The Feds tore the place apart looking for… for whatever they could find. A little later they raided Joe Biden’s house too. Found a few classified docs. Poof! that was the end of it. No big deal for Joe, but Donny Trump had to go to court.

And now the Repubs are getting into the act. They can’t get Joe, so they go after his kid… cooking up a violation of some federal gun laws for an ILLEGAL purchase of a revolver... a decade and a half ago… and they’re still looking to dig up some law to prove the kid’s an undercover secret agent for Ukraine or someplace else in The East.

GET IT???

There are so many laws in this country that anyone at any time is guilty of violating something. The function of the law is NOT that all people are subject to all laws. That would mean jail for EVERYBODY. The function of the law is to provide a means for powerful people to GET those they don’t like. It allows good-old-boy cops to arrest black drivers going five miles over the speed limit. Not because they’re black (wink wink), but because THEY VIOLATED THE LAW. They were speeding. Laws allow colleges to break up peaceful demonstrations, not because the big donors don’t like the ideas of the protesters, oh no, ever that… but because the demonstrators were OBSTRUCTING. And that’s AGAINST THE LAW.

Mr. Greenspan was wrong. The purpose of the law is not to make some rules that apply to everyone equally all the time. The purpose of the law is to control or punish people the lawmakers don’t like. American elections have become not who wins at the ballot box, but who stays out of court… and the corollary, who stays out of jail.

Along with the US, other third-world countries have adopted the same system. Pakistan and Thailand have both jailed the “opposition,” using the law as an excuse. Nelson Mandela spent 20 years in prison in South Africa before JUSTICE finally beat LEGALITY and he became president.

Of course Donald Trump is guilty of violating the law. Every one of those people crossing against the light on the corner of Houston and Broadway was guilty of violating the law. Every person in the United States is guilty of violating the law… or a law… or multiple laws.

The law does not “hold violators accountable.” The law provides the violation to punish people out of favor with those in power.

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

LATE ADDITION: Just before I’d planned to post this, the Supreme Court issued a decision saying that “Presidential Immunity” means… er… Presidential Immunity. Much of the plot to let the courts, instead of the voters, decide the next president has been lost. That’s a good thing. Friends and regular readers know I’m a Trump agnostic. He’s done selfish and serve-the-wealthy things, Can you say cutting rich and corporate taxes? But he also kept us out of war, opened up a dialog with North Korea, and pardoned thousands of non-violent jailed humans. I don’t think his election will mean DEATH TO DEMOCRACY. Democracy has been dead a long time.

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]

→A FISH LAW DEPT: Hand-fishing without a license is illegal in Kansas. Anyone who plans to hand-fish must first get a hand-fishing license in addition to a hook-biting fishing license. Even with a license, however, it is only legal to hand-fish flathead catfish from sunrise to sunset June 15 through August 31 along the Arkansas River, all federal reservoirs beyond 150 yards of a dam, and the whole stretch of the Kansas River. Everywhere else, you have to keep your hands to yourself.

 → SPEAKING OF FISH AND HANDS DEPT: In Gainesville County, Georgia, it is against the law to eat fried chicken except with your bare hands. As for enforcement: in 2009, a 91-year-old visitor from Louisiana was arrested and charged for eating fried chicken with a fork. 

→ GETTING MARRIED ON THE WAY DOWN! DEPT:  Unmarried women who parachute on Sundays can be fined or jailed in Florida. You know sometime, somewhere, a bachelorette parachuted on Sunday. It was her passion. Then, some unrequited state legislator decided to teach her a lesson. I’ll get you, you bitch! Take THIS law!

There are a ton more of these super-weird laws. You can google them. At first, they seem funny. But there’s something sinister behind all of them.

→ IT MAY BE A CULT… BUT Dept: I’ve been on the LaRouche mailing list for a long time. The cultishness and conspiracy focus have usually put me off them. But they are often so logical, and print news that you just can’t get elsewhere. This is a translation of part of a Putin speech… and it makes a lot of sense

See you in hell (redux)
MB

THE NATION AGAIN:

In the newest issue are a couple of worthwhile columns: There’s a good one by Adolph Reed Jr. It’s sumarized in this quote: Liberal policy offers sympathy to those sleeping on the streets, but stops fhort of giving the shewhere to live..

And there’s another good one by the often right, Jeet Heer, on the necessity of cleansing the Democratic Party of the remains of Hillary (and Bill) Clinton, and building a true alternative to the Republicans. Also the column talks about the Dems abandoning young people (Hillary Clinton on young followers of Trump vs. Bernie Sanders fans: “At least they shave.”)

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions many I’d never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

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 Ricardo Wang with a “micro-label” in Seattle “specializing in 8-track tapes and CDs. WOW! Check out one of their label staples: The Dead Air Fresheners.

Also on bandcamp: My very long time faves in NYC, the BLACKOUT SHOPPERS. Featuring pals Seth, superstar comic writer, Justin Melkmann and possibly the next vice-president of the US, Charles Bukkake.

Here’s an update on the current URL for Sid Yiddish’s Dating Game (type) entry.

And this sounds right up Sid’s alley. The Bilderberg Jazz Arkestra on Bandcamp!

Eric Grayson has an online music review zine, Sobriquet. Full pictures of the sleeves too! Something missing from too many zines. Sometimes you CAN judge a… er… book… by its cover.

Steen Thomsen is a Dane I’ve known ever since Lincoln was shot. I put his band THE ZERO POINT on the great WORLD CLASS PUNK Cassette for ROIR. It must be worth a mint now. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid. You can (and should) connect to the Zero Point on facebook. Tell ‘em Mykel’s blog sent you.

Sorry Dorothy, we are STILL in Kansas. And it’s as weird as OZ. Check out Bob Cutler’s DISTOPEKA.

And for a quiet smile and a much needed break for you and the dog, try G.C. Adams’ YouTube entry. 

You already know Murder & Mayhem zine… those guys who did the Mykel Board centerfold. (No genitals shown… and probably for the better.) Their on-line version is here.

The Clean Boys from Denmark are also longtime friends of mine. In Denmark we recorded as The Bend-over Boys. Only one 10-inch available… but at least now I can say I have a 10-incher!

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.

Longtime writer, Randall Fleming, has a new book out about the reversal of flag desecration. In his view, the right And more generally it’s about political violence in the 21^st century.

Finally, for this month, Margaret O’Brien asked me to include the site: anti-war.com They seem to be folks after my own heart.

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. mykelboard@gmail.com

Hijacking The Rainbow or Mykel's June 2024 Blog Entry

 

   

Hijacking the Rainbow 
or
Mykel's June 2024 Blog: You're Still Wrong

 

Florida is where woke goes to die
                            -- Gov. Ron DeSantis

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
                        — Maya Angelou

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
                    --Kris Kristofferson made famous by Janis Joplin

It was while giving a speech in Washington about the British theft of the Elgin marble from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved — having felt the word hanging in the air a bit — to say "parsimonious" from then on.                         --Christopher Hitchens

I think I’ve told this story before. I must’ve. It was an epiphany… a life changer. Google tells me no. Google tells me there are no instances of “Mykel Board” and “Miles Davis” occurring on the same page. Who am I to argue with Google? Am I the one to stand in front of the charging train with my hands out in front of me, while a little baby lies crying on the track? Sorry kid, but I’m getting out of the way. Maybe I’ll come to the funeral.

I only vaguely knew of the word WOKE I didn’t get what it meant… something about being aware… with some kind of racial overtones. Nothing that would stick. I probably heard it sometime in the late 1960s, but I was too involved in taking LSD and stopping the Vietnam war to bring it into full consciousness. It laid in the background… written off as a fashion word… until the 1980s or so. I knew that lots of white people were using the word… that couldn’t be a good sign.

My high school buddy David told me about Miles Davis. David is the only person I know who loves music and doesn’t give a fuck about genre. He hates (or loves) NOTHING on principle. He just tunes into the sound and judges from there. David had seen Miles in the 60s, when we were in high school together. I had no idea what the jazz guy sounded like… only that he was a famous jazz musician… maybe the most famous jazz musician in the world. Normally, talk about jazz artists would go in one ear and come out my asshole. But David’s report of this Miles event… since double checked by Mr. Google... was something special.

In Manhattan, around 1959, Miles Davis was driving through midtown Manhattan in an expensive car... could have been a Mercedes. A cop (in New York in the 1950s the words “white cop” were a pleonasm.) stops Miles and asks him to get out of the car… show ID…

“Why’d you stop me?” asks the trumpet player. “I wasn’t speeding or nothin’.”

“You don’t fit the car,” answers the cop.

BOING! Awareness bops into my brain like an erection at a strip club. A thought I’d never thought before. A realization I’d never realized before. An epiphany. If it were me driving, I wouldn’t have been stopped. No white person would have! Suddenly, I was WOKE! What a beautiful and right word. What a sudden consciousness… like something zen. Like realizing that… hey… boys can be cute too. Just POW!

What a wonderful word WOKE was. What a perfect expression of learning. A word that should not be used easily, but one that expresses a moment of awareness… especially of something that happens to people who are different from you. Wow.

Then that beautiful word changed meanings. It became… mostly in the hands of right-wing Republicans… clichéd... what used to be called Politically Correct. [NOTE: Those Politically Correct or their initials PC also changed meaning. Their origins lay in the glory days of the 60s debates between anarchists and “New Leftists” on one side and the traditional Marxists on the other. The “new left” used PC as an epithet against the Marxists. George Bush Sr. got hold of it somehow and twisted it to mean “doctrinaire” “unthinking allegiance to cliches” etc.]

Woke lost its exquisite meaning of “sudden awareness of someone else's reality.” It came to mean dictatorial, literal, a leftist political crowd follower. Such a beautiful word… wrecked... destroyed... hijacked by the right.

FLASH TO A THUNDERSTORM: The end of it. The breaking sun through the mist of raindrops that never achieved the weight to fall to earth. The sky becomes a prism. Sunlight filters through. Everyone my elderly age remembers ROY G BIV red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet… the colors of the rainbowy, learned before knowing what exactly indigo was.

When Jesse Jackson ran for president, he gathered supporters among blacks, whites, yellows, men, women, old, young. All this before “diversity” became a cliché. Jackson used the metaphor RAINBOW to show the mix of people who supported him. His supporters were The Rainbow Coalition. Rainbow was EVERYBODY… all kinds of people… coming together for something new… something great.

FLASH TO PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL, in Hell’s Kitchen NYC. 2019-- slightly pre-pandemic. An attractive teenage boy… brown hair just over his forehead… the slightest hint of a mustache on his upper lip. He wears white PUMA sneakers, tight black Levis, and a rainbow-colored shirt. Not a strict hard-lined rainbow, but a soft rainbow, where each color slowly fades into the next.

I watch him from my seat on a waiting room bench. Yeah, he’s a beauty, but probably a year or two before legality. It’s not worth the effort… or the risk. I watch someone braver and about 5 years younger than me… with a full head of hair… slightly gray at the temples.

Gradually, the older man sidles in on the boy. He says something, touching the kid on the arm The boy turns to him and starts yelling. His English is accented… something central European.

“Get away from me!” shouts the boy. “Why are you touching me?”

“Your shirt,” says the man. “You’re advertising yourself.”

“What about my shirt? It’s a nice shirt. That’s all… just a nice shirt.”

The man steps away... turns his back to the boy, and pretends to read a newspaper he picked up from a vacant bench. The boy walks quickly out of the waiting room. He stands... remaining near the track gates, by the departure/arrival board. Here and there his concentration flits from the train information sign to us in the waiting room .

This time it was the encyclopedia Britannica… not Google… that explains:

It goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, a gay man and a drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed that he was urged by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make a flag because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, to get out of the lie. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’”

The first versions of the rainbow flag were flown on June 25, 1978, for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Baker and a team of volunteers had made them by hand, and now he wanted to mass-produce the flag for consumption by all. The various colors came to reflect both the immense diversity and the unity of the gay community

It was not until 1994 that the rainbow flag was truly established as the symbol for gay pride. That year, Baker made a mile-long version for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Now the rainbow flag is an international symbol for LGBTQ pride and can be seen flying proudly all around the world.

The idea of rainbow was the sum of the parts. A unity of colors, genders, ages, philosophies. In 2024, all those parts have shrunk to: Vagina, Penis, Anus, Mouth, and where you put them. Rainbow parades ban cops, NAMBLA and, maybe these days, gay Republicans. The people behind the flag are less diverse and colorful than a McDonald’s burger offering. That beauty, that unity of differences has become little more than a pick-up signal meaning “Hey, wanna fuck?”

The gay liberationists have stolen the rainbow. And now only men can be gay! Women are lesbians and their “L” must come first in any alphabet of homosexual letters. The same thing, of course, happened to the word gay itself… which appears in its original meaning in old songs that people chuckle to.

Sometimes, it’s possible to take back a stolen word-- make a negative into a positive. One of the best examples of that is QUEER. Its first meaning was strange, unusual, different… with a negative connotation. Then, it homofied. I remember my father telling me how when he was in England during the Second World War, one of the British soldiers complained that he was “feeling queer today.” Dad moved to the other side of the room.

So even in the 1940s, QUEER had become attached to homotude… but kept the negativity. Then the queers took it back… with PRIDE.

It was such a joy listening to people use QUEER as a brag. You bet I’m queer. Different from you boring hets. I’m different and love my difference. I’m so fuckin’ queer… kiss me now!

Nigger is another word that twisted and turned its way through history. Mark Twain used it without negativity… just to identify race… maybe with a slight tint of downtrodden… former slave. Then it took on a negative meaning. A pejorative so fiercely taboo, that it’s unprintable… censored in TV… referred to as “the N-word,” replacing FUCK, which had been the F-word, (and now can be heard on every cable TV show). Nigger took over as the number one bad word. Even words unrelated, but that sound vaguely like nigger, are banned… or at least avoided. Check out Christopher Hitchens’ quote at the top of this blog.

But black folks picked up NIGGER and ran with it. (I hate the euphemism “African-American.” Most black people have no history in Africa and there are plenty of white folks who are REALLY African-American.) Yes, Nigger became natural in Black English. A wonderful spit in the face to the white people who used it with a sneer.

Yo! White boy… I can say nigger because I am one. It’s a marker… it’s the way I talk. You CAN’T say nigger… because you ain’t one.

So, as with QUEER, the recipients of the negative took it over and stuck it to the original users, while keeping it for themselves.

FLASH TO WHAT THE FUCK I’M TALKING ABOUT

One of my longtime fantasies has been to write a book called Hijacking the Rainbow… something about Woke, Rainbow, Fascist, Freedom, Queer, Liberty, Hold To Account, all those ideas that have been turned upside down, lost or reversed their meaning. I figure here I can break the ice… start the ball rolling… try them out… get the ink scratched on the parchment by putting things down in a blog. I hope the feedback from this blog and the act of touching fingers to keys will bring me out to get my writing ass in gear. Maybe a reader or two can suggest an inclusion. I’ve already gotten a good suggestion about how the words “gender-affirming” have come to mean ‘gender-rejecting.” We’ll see what “fantasies about writing a book” becomes. More word changes and ideas are welcome. Please use the comment section of this blog for your suggestions. And don’t let the creeps hijack your rainbow.

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]

→ HEY, YOU CAN’T SAY THAT! Dept: After complaining about words lost to language change, censorship, or wokitude (new/negative meaning) I came across this “list of banned words” compiled by Lake Superior State University. It’s actually a list of words and phrases that various contributors say SHOULD BE banned. The site doesn’t really want to impose censorship. The list has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. It’s having fun expressing annoyance. It includes one of my many pet peeves: “No Worries” when used as a synonym for “You’re Welcome.”So the guy holds the door open for me as I enter the prostate radiation room. I thank him. “No Worries” comes the answer. I’m having fuckin’ radiation next to my fuckin’ balls!!! Don’t tell me NO WORRIES.

→ SCARIER THAN THAT DEPT: There is an on-line program that will make your job easier by censoring “sensitive words.” Say the inventors: Text Censor is The World's Simplest Text Tool and the world's simplest browser-based utility for censoring words in text. Load your text in the input form on the left, specify all the bad words in the options, and you'll instantly get censored text in the output area. Powerful, free, and fast. Load text – get safe text. You can try it yourself here.

→ FETUS? ARE YOU SERIOUS? DEPT: The Jstor Daily reports that during the Trump administration, the CDC was instructed not to use certain words and phrases in its public reports. Science-based” and “evidence-based” are on the list of the banned words, along with “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” and “fetus”.

See you in hell (redux)
MB

COMMENTS: For some reason Google wasn't allowing comments. So I'm posting this one here from Tony Autoharp. (anonyarena@yahoo.com):

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I don't think anyone wearing a rainbow shirt or any other kind of shirt is "advertising" themselves and it is not an invitation for random strangers in a train station to touch you uninvited. If this man is interested in someone, he has a mouth. He can use it to ask first. This is not difficult. "I like your looks and I am attracted to you. Do you like me?" And from there if he gets an affirmative reply he may ask "May I touch you?"  There is a step-by-step process to these things. But just sitting down next to someone and immediately starting in with grabby hands, and blaming that unwelcome behavior on the shirt the kid is wearing is not just impolite, its inappropriate. It is no different from Trump broadcasting to the world "I don't even wait, I just kiss. And when you're a star they let your do it; you can grab 'em by the pussy and do anything." These self-entitled assholes ruin everything. And that man in the train station probably ruined the joy of wearing a nice colorful shirt for this young man. And that's just sad.  It is quite probably he now feels like he's never want to wear that "nice" shirt again, because it is now connected to an unhappy experience. That's how you coat rainbow colors with a tarnish. 

I have never interpreted the Rainbow Flag to mean "I wanna fuck."  I don't know who thinks these things. 

I also don't hear black people use the "N" word the way you seem to.  The "er" sound at the end is usually changes to an "a" sound. Whatever the case may be, you know the old saying "like the pot calling the kettle black?" Well, that's how come it can be used as a symbol of solidarity. It does not matter if the pot calls the kettle black because both are black - no harm/no foul.  It means something else entirely if the white porcelain pitcher in the fancy china cabinet calls the kettle on the stove black, to emphasize that different distinction and imply that the while porcelain is superior. That's not only snobbery, it can quite seriously be something far worse, more ugly, and even a prelude to something dangerous.

Queer is a little different. A non-Queer may call an LGBTQ person "Queer" if that is how that person self-identifies. It's all about context. Say it with love and respect and you will get love and respect in return. Say it in the context of insult and antagonism, that's something else again. There is a chasm of difference between, "I love you, you colorful, brilliant and wonderful queer you. Keep on dancin'!"  And "You fuckin' queer, you ought to be shot in the head for dancing like that in here!"  The former is an encouragement. The latter is a threat.   

The question of "hijacking" (which is not a word that I use so much but would use the more accurate words like "appropriating" and "redefining") words and symbols, is a question of something that is all too often beyond our control. The swastika used to just mean "good fortune." World events forever transformed it, "re-defined" it, and now we can't unsee what we see when we see it. Even when we see it in its original Himalayan or Tibetan or Native American tribal contexts, it will always be jarring to see it. The late 1970s punk rockers tried and failed to re-define it as "rebellion" but that didn't work. At some point meanings of certain words and certain symbols just permanently change, and there's we can do about it because there's no going back. Or if it does, it will take thousands of years and a lot of cultural forgetting to reach that point. I think that is probably no longer possible. We no longer live in the Stone Age. There are no more "forgotten" civilizations. After the information age took hold, anyone can look up anything on Google and find it, even where "Mykel Board" and "Miles Davis" may appear in the same place. This makes cultural "forgetting" a much more impossible task because our collective memory is now stored at at our fingertips in an instant.  We may try to "redefine."  But the reason propagandists have been so successful at changing the meanings of words and phrases like "woke" "critical race theory" "feminist" and "liberal" is not because anyone let them do it. They do it because anyone with enough determination, money and power behind them CAN do it.

=============================

BACK TO THE NATION DEPT: The newest issue of THE NATION has a great column by Kali Holloway on why TikTok banning is such a bad idea. (As is most (all?) censorship.) It again makes me point out that THE NATION is the only lefty magazine I know that is often right (I mean CORRECT) about things.
    Besides the Holloway column, there’s also a good one by Ginny Hogan (strangely, but slightly, different on the website than in the magazine) with the pull-quote talking about the up-coming presidential election.

We have our two candidates.
One of them is deeply uninspiring,
and the other is Donald Trump.

Time to subscribe, I’d say.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

READ THIS AGAIN!! Lots of new stuff here:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions many I’d never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

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 Ricardo Wang with a “micro-label” in Seattle “specializing in 8-track tapes and CDs. WOW! Check out one of their label staples: The Dead Air Fresheners.

Also on bandcamp: My very long time faves in NYC, the BLACKOUT SHOPPERS. Featuring pals Seth, superstar comic writer, Justin Melkmann and possibly the next vice-president of the US, Charles Bukkake.

Here’s an update on the current URL for Sid Yiddish’s Dating Game (type) entry.

And this sounds right up Sid’s alley. The Bilderberg Jazz Arkestra on Bandcamp!

Eric Grayson has an online music review zine, Sobriquet. Full pictures of the sleeves too! Something missing from too many zines. Sometimes you CAN judge a… er… book… by its cover.

Steen Thomsen is a Dane I’ve known ever since Lincoln was shot. I put his band THE ZERO POINT on the great WORLD CLASS PUNK Cassette for ROIR. It must be worth a mint now. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid. You can (and should) connect to the Zero Point on facebook. Tell ‘em Mykel’s blog sent you.

Sorry Dorothy, we are STILL in Kansas. And it’s as weird as OZ. Check out Bob Cutler’s DISTOPEKA.

And for a quiet smile and a much needed break for you and the dog, try G.C. Adams’ YouTube entry.

Christopher Selden has a bandcamp entry for his band Crooked Ghost. I say any band with a publicity photo like this deserves at least a listing… maybe an orgasm or two.

Y ou already know Murder & Mayhem zine… those guys who did the Mykel Board centerfold. (No genitals shown… and probably for the better.) Their on-line version is here.

The Clean Boys from Denmark are also longtime friends of mine. In Denmark we recorded as The Bend-over Boys. Only one 10-inch available… but at least now I can say I have a 10-incher!

Finally, for this month, Margaret O’Brien asked me to include the site: anti-war.com They seem to be folks after my own heart.

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.

Longtime writer, Randall Fleming, has a new book out about the reversal of flag desecration. In his view, the right And more generally it’s about political violence in the 21^st century.

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. mykelboard@gmail.com

Child's Play or Mykel's May 2024 Blog: You're Still Wrong

   

You’re STILL Wrong

Mykel's

May 2024 Blog/Column

Child's Play

by Mykel Board

Spare the rod and spoil the child

--Old Proverb

Discipline your children, and they will give you peace

-- Proverbs 29:17

The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.

– Proverbs 29:15

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”

― Mortimer J. Adler,

===============

“Gooo gooo gah gah goo gah.”

Little Liam crawls from his crib to the door of his room. He babbles to himself… or to no one... as ten-month old babies are wont to do. This evening, Mom and Dad are off at the movies… Oppenheimer… and they’ve left Liam with Ashley, the 16 year old babysitter, daughter of Mr and Mrs Kosminski, friends of Liam’s parents.

Liam pushes his head against his bedroom door. It creaks open with a click… He pushes again. The door opens enough for Liam to crawl through to the hallway.

Meanwhile, Ashley is diddling her cellphone… simultaneously texting her love to her sweetheart, Dexter, and to her girlfriend, Brittany, describing Dexter’s attributes.

“You can’t believe how that guy’s hung,” types Ashley to Brittany. “God… think kielbasa!”

“Wow,” texts Brittany back.

“I love you more than Beyonce loves Jay Z!” Ashley texts to her boyfriend.

“For the same reason?” Dexter texts in return.

While Ashley texts, little Liam has left his room and crawls toward the staircase that connects the upper bedroom area with the living room and kitchen downstairs. As he approaches the staircase, his right arm slips over the top steps. His arm and shoulder slide down. The boy’s ten-month old brain is smart enough to figure this isn’t right. He backs up and changes direction.

Now, he’s headed toward his parents’ room. Liam tries it again… pushing his head against the door. Again it works. There’s something familiar about the room. Liam recognizes the big bed where sometimes he sleeps... nestled between his parents when he is being comforted by Mom and Dad on an especially cryful night.

But those two things –one on either side of the bed… What are they? Liam recognizes the color… black… but has no vocabulary to say or think it. He knows this side is Mommy’s side and that side is Daddy’s side. He crawls toward the black thing on Daddy’s side. There are some handles on the outside of Daddy’s black thing. They look like big toys… something to climb on. Liam crawls over to one of the tall black objects and grabs it.

It flops open. Inside is a smaller toy… made of metal… long on one side and curved… something like a banana… on the other. Down where the two sides meet, there is another little piece of metal with a second curved piece around it. Liam pulls himself up using the drawer and its handle for support. Then he reaches inside and takes the gun.

The barely-a-toddler now crawls toward the voice coming to him from the living room. The gun, held tightly in two tiny hands, scrapes along the floor… a trail of drool follows the child as he goes.

“I just love it when he talks to me like that,” Ashley, changing to conversation from text, is saying. Little Liam has no sense of meaning, he just hears the voice and it draws him like a magnet. Down the stairs… KERCHUNK. The gun pulls his arms... KERCHUNK… KERCHUNK… KERCHUNK. Step by step his little body follows.

To the living room… behind Ashley… gurgling loudly to get her attention, show her what he found when POW! BLAM!

A voice from the cellphone pleads… “Ashley? Ashley? Are you all right Ashley?”

FLASH AHEAD

At the trial, Liam is convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison… with no chance of probation.

The next week, Liam’s parents are arrested. Fantasy? Impossible? Well...

FLASH TO MICHIGAN... OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL 2021 A boy shoots two handfuls of students. KERPOW! KERPOW! KERPOW! More blood than a pro wrestling match. Four dead. Seven injured…

Two years later, the killer stands to receive the sentence for his crime… TERRORISM. What does he get? This kid… who when he committed the crime wasn’t old enough to have sex, to drive a car, to drink a beer, to smoke a cigarette, to vote… a little boy with a gun… What is this child’s punishment? LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE. The max… not the little boy max… but the big adult make-decisions-for-himself max.

Rosemary Bayer, the Democratic state senator from the district, says. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychologist. But it’s never the kid’s fault.”

I can hear another voice now. It’s Literary Device calling to me. “Mykel,” she says. “It’s not the same. A baby has no freedom of choice. What happened with your imaginary kid was an accident. The kid wasn’t responsible for what he did.”

I answer, “Is a fifteen year old with severe mental problems responsible for what he did?”

[ASIDE: You probably know, I’m an abolitionist. I don’t believe inprisons at all. I think no one should be put in a cage and the fact that so many go back time-after-time proves prisons don’t work. They’re not supposed to. They don’t exist to prevent crime. They exist for REVENGE… and to feed the prison industrial complex. In fact, the only exception in the anti-slavery amendment to the constitution is prisons. But this is even worse!]

Yes, it’s a kind of prison for slaves. Someone without rights… a child… is thrown away for the rest of his life. Most children have the right to grow into their freedom. Fifteen year old Ethan Crumbley will never have that right. But wait… there’s more.

Mom and Dad Crumbly get charged with involuntary manslaughter. Think about that. INVOLUNTARY is without will… not by design… by accident. Can you imagine a crime that happens BY ACCIDENT? Isn’t the nature of crime that you have to commit it? What is COMMIT if not VOLUNTARY? Is a miscarriage involuntary manslaughter for the anti-abortion crew? I don’t know.

Ooooo but the parents ignored the kid. They didn’t realize he had mental problems… HOLD ON! IF HE HAD MENTAL PROBLEMS it was the DISEASE that caused the kid to shoot up the school. It was INVOLUNTARY, right? The kid is innocent for… besides being a kid… reason of INSANITY.

The fact that a penalty of LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE exists proves that the purpose of prisons is not to “correct” or reform lawbreakers… but to PUNISH them. No that’s wrong too. The purpose of punishment is correction. You slap a dog on the ass when she shits in the house so she won’t do it again. That’s punishment. You make a kid finish his dinner or have what’s left for breakfast… cold… the next day. That’ll teach him to finish what’s on his plate every night. (My parents actually did this.) Get it? Punishment is a way of teaching.

LIFE IMPRISONMENT is not punishment. It’s not to teach. It is REVENGE… It is blood for the blood-thirsty. It is a throw into the lion’s den to please the crowd. The audience is family and friends of the victim… and they give the thumbs down. The press calls it closure. But the only closure is that cell door for the rest of that inmate’s life.

[NOTE: In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that it was fine to give kids a life sentence without parole. I wonder when the court will rule that it’s okay to let kids vote and screw. If they have to pay the penalties, they should at least get the privileges, don’t you think?]

As for the parents…

Their convictions confirm punishment for “repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train. They repeatedly ignored things that make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up,” the judge says. “Opportunity knocked over and over again, louder and louder and was ignored. No one answered. And these two people should have and sure didn’t.”

So NOT DOING is involuntary manslaughter… even without an inkling of the results of that not doing.

But back to kids… they’re the theme of this blog. Either they’re just people like adults or they’re sub-people not able to make their own choices. If it’s the former, then they should have the same rights as adults… sex, voting, smoking, drinking. If it’s the latter, then they are not responsible for their actions, and may be trained like an errant puppy… but not put away like someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

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]

→ A Better Solution Dept: The Associated Press reports: A teenager who opened fire at a central Indiana middle school in 2018, wounding another student and a teacher, will go to a residential treatment center, as ordered by the judge.
      The court ordered that the now-18-year-old be held in the Hamilton County Juvenile Service Center for 120 days while a probation department finds “a suitable secure residential facility” for him. Not the perfect solution, but better than a lifetime in the clink.

→ Throw the Whole Team in Jail dept: A strange internet site reports that in 2002 a thirteen-year-old hockey fan, Brittanie Cecil, was struck in the head by a traveling hockey puck while she and her family attended a local hockey game. Seated fifteen rows up from behind the goal, the puck hit her so forcefully that it fractured her skull. If that isn’t INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER (girlslaughter?), I don’t know what is.

→ But was it INVOLUNTARY dept: Among the most famous criminal executions is the 1916 execution of Mary, the Circus Elephant, who killed a homeless man temporarily hired as her keeper. Several other people have been killed by elephants since then, proving that the death penalty does not prevent murder… even for elephants. Mary, was tried, then hanged from a crane. Here’s the death photo. 

BACK TO THE NATION DEPT: The newest issue of THE NATION has a great column by Kali Holloway on why TikTok banning is such a bad idea. (As is most (all?) censorship.) It again makes me point out that THE NATION is the only lefty magazine I know that is often right (I mean CORRECT) about things.
Besides the Holloway column, there’s also a good one by Ginny Hogan (strangely, but slightly, different on the website than in the magazine) with the pull-quote talking about the up-coming presidential election.

We have our two candidates.
One of them is deeply uninspiring,
and the other is Donald Trump.

Time to subscribe, I’d say.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

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:

I alreay posted my centerfold picture printed in the zine Trey Mayhem sent me recently. It’s called Murder and Mayhem and it’s also a record label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here. Or/and contact Trey at TreyofToday@yahoo.com

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

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 who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

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. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

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