Life is inherently political. You cannot escape being a political being unless you are comatose or living alone on an island. Even in the act of trying to withdraw politically you are making a political statement and yet people try to escape this supposed burden of politics by protesting: "I am not political.", "I don't get into that, or even lamenting, "Why do people keep talking about politics? Don't bother me!" Ignorant gits.
A nice example of these people are artists who create art for "arts sake". Yes, arts sake. Does art speak? Does it have free will? Do we care about 'art' when it falls and skins its knee? So please don't blow smoke up my ass. What larifari bullshit for fucks sake. These spineless assholes sit around navel gazing into their own regurgitate repeating this silly mantra while they commit atrocities of the mind by cementing, supporting, and affirming orthodoxy, reactionism, and the status quo. And yet they want to be considered as independents. "All I want to do is be an artists because art is beautiful", oh please, blow me what kind of crap is that, eh? Art is beautiful? So is Paris Hilton, but if art does not move, does not attempt to change, influence, does not say anything then it is just a gilded wrapper covering up the ugliness of repressive, shackling systems. Art becomes artifice and you might as well shove it into an orifice where the sun doesn't shine. It is bad enough that you lie to others, but lying to yourself that what you create is not political is just sad.
Fortunately we find the opposite, artists who not only are political, but mix their art and politics so tightly that their politics becomes an engine of their art, and their art becomes a vehicle for their beliefs. I present Percy Bysshe Shelley who really needs no introduction from the likes of me, suffice it to say that in his time he was disdained, scorned, and mocked by the ruling system of his time because of his politics and his art, that in itself makes him a groovy dude. He was an atheist, seemingly an anarchist, and a vegetarian in a time where these things were taboo.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Nice stuff, eh? Fucking monarchy. That's the problem with autocrats, they think they go on forever or that somebody gives a shit. How are autocrats like bloggers? They believe they are important, they believe their own hype, they believe somebody gives a rats ass, and they think that they can't be beat up in a dark alley with a nice stout Olive club.
So not only does he comment on the passing of kings and governments, he also skewers assholes who usurp democracy like Napoleon Bonaparte:
Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte
I hated thee, fallen Tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, should dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer
A frail and bloody pomp, which Time has swept
In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,
For this, I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith, and foulest birth of Time.
God how delicious is that?
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith, and foulest birth of Time.
Maybe he is a prophet and saw George W. Bush in the future?
A Street Poem by Nicholas J. Thompson
