#13 - 1986 "Freud had insisted that all civilization was built on repression, but American society in the fortys and fifties was far more repressive than the common good required. Freud had made a similar point about the late Victorians, but, as Herbert Marcuse was fond of pointing out, advanced industrial society had perfected methods of manipulation and control -- what Marcuse called 'surplus-repression'-- undreamt of by our straitlaced grandfathers. Marcuse's favorite example was the mass media, especially the electronic media, which had been honed by the Nazis into a unique instrument of propaganda and totalitarian domination, and which (according to Marcuse) served as a subtle weapon of conformity even in the democratic countries, making a hollow shell of our formal liberties and representative institutions." (from THE GATES OF EDEN by Morris Dickstein, pp. 67-8) ADVENTURES OF AN ANARCHO*SURREAL VANDAL: Every surrealist work is a Rorschach. The creative projection with which an ambiguous work of art is perceived is material with which you could survey and probe the popular psyche -- if you want to find out what others are thinking. If you don't care what others think and do not think, then you are probably nearing enlightenment and may wish to perform miracles instead of art -- making sure not to compromise your vandalistic standing. Let's take the example of a SubGenius miracle that illustrates a rule beginners should keep in mind, to wit: a half-assed miracle is better than no miracle at all. I learned this as a rainmaker in 1978 in California, when four years of drought ended in a flash flood that sewpt corpses out of the Tujunga hillside cemetery. Now this was not exactly a resurrection of the dead. We got them out of their graves, all right. But we didn't know how to bring them back to life. So we settled for a few grizzly, rotting corpses in people's yards and in the streets. To anyone raised in the millenial and messianic expectation of Judeo-Christianity this stunt must have looked pretty cheap. Maybe they even thought it was in poor taste, for that was the opinion expressed by Krupp Komics. It is like Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst said, though: "Everywhere you got people who gripe. I say to hell with them." Subgenius miracles are like olives. You have to develop a taste for them. Rev. J. Sump, Minister of the Miraculous KULTCHA Revolutionary Surrealist Vandal Party (R.S.V.P.) "A mighty farce for revolution." THE ABOVE RAIN seemed then to prove techniques in L.T. Culling's SEX MAGICK. That you could believe. I'm told it was in fact a Jesuit trick* imitating a CIA-KGB weather control conspiracy. That you won't believe. Blindness is slavery. PIX AT LEFT: Sabatabby, graffiti mascot of Industrial Workers of the World vandals. R. S. V. P. *Or, if not Jesuit, somebody else -- a conspiracy, though.