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:: ::  :: :: :: :: Signatories
:: :: :: :: of the Disumbrationist League . 1998 .
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Directive of theDISUMBRATIONIST LEAGUE
The presidency of the United States, the world's most powerful and
bad-tempered nuclear superpower, ambushed by rumors of an unfaithful
hummer: Only one of the most recent blurry photos of a world speeding
drunk through the underpass being chased relentlessly by us, the
Disumbrationist League.
In this time of slow, grinding terror, when the man-made world seems
increasingly designed as a Bosch-like simulation of the underworld and
the natural world more and more resembles a museum exhibit, the
worried question on the lips of authorities and voyeurs alike is:
"What is Luther Blissett going to do about
it?"
Perhaps when the world was threatened by tyrants and cults of
personality it seemed sensible to fight fire with fire, following a
Ché or a Washington in the revolution. But as William Burroughs
pointed out:
We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The tyrant today is the machine - not in the sense of an army of goose-stepping robots or the sci-fi dystopia of an omniscient central computer - but dogma made flesh, human beings obeying algorithms, interacting mechanisms of addictive efficiency, imposing mechanical rule on the organic world. We know that the new enemies of freedom are not evil people but unconscious programs - not arbitrary rulers but 'impartial' rulebooks - not the batons of police but the dramatic conceit of the legal process. The body politic cannot be destroyed by a bigger, badder body. Any organization capable of destroying it will only succeed in replacing it. Anyone who supports an Ism in the quest for revolution only works to grease the wheels of an evolutionary process that brings us crueler mechanisms of control. Small bands of Disumbrationist survivors are working independently of an organization or program. The parasitic infection of culture cannot be mowed down one cane toad at a time, it cannot be unabombed into submission, but in pockets it can be buffooned into shruggery. These pockets of Disumbrationists and liberated human minds will be the seeds that bloom into meritocracies of nobility where the machine is dismantled and we again must rely on people. We must pay close attention to where the machine already shows signs of weakness and decay, to where it fails to establish mechanical order (a.k.a. death) on the grave of chaos (a.k.a. life), and to where chaos reasserts its power (as it must, in a machine so complex). We support the Greenhouse Effect because we delight in El Niño. We know that tomorrow's revolutionary is more likely to have been nurtured in the straightforward prison of the Provo Canyon Tough Love Challenge School for Troubled Youth than in the anesthetising, PTA-nourished Martin Luther King Junior Junior High. So we delight whenever a rebellious teenager is 'disappeared' to an off-shore behavior modification camp. We emulate, simulate, stimulate and accelerate the worst excesses of the machine - we are the autoimmune disorder of the body politic, provoking the borg into digesting itself. No root cracks a sidewalk without our encouragement. Every murder is an assassination. And we simultaneously nurture in ourselves a baroque, excessive and showy nobility - flaunting our loyalty to human friends and family (and our disregard for institutions that would make obsolete any loyalty not directed at themselves) - ensuring that a Disumbrationist vanguard is the only plausable savior in a world where the machines of order have finally lost their credibility. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||