The Conquest of the New York Stock Exchange

Two old school chums of Eldridge Cleaver turned up at the New York Stock Exchange, their pockets stuffed with one dollar bills. When the doorman tried to deny them entry, accusing them of being "hippies", they protested, in outrage, "We're not hippies, we're Jews!" and he didn't dare refuse them.

They walked out onto the balcony that overlooks the stock market itself, and began throwing bills over the railing to the stockbrokers below. The stockbrokers all dropped what they were doing and ran around pushing and leaping after the bills until the police came to drag the two "hippies" away. As a result of the interruption in their workday, the entire market crashed that day and all the stockbrokers and stockholders lost thousands of dollars. The whole thing was caught by television cameras, and that night families across the U.S. were treated to images of businessmen revealing their true natures of pathological, fetishist greed. A few weeks later, bullet-proof glass and a thick metal grate were installed between the viewer's balcony and the exchange floor, and the doormen were instructed not to permit Jews to enter.

Yeti

I made this. I stole and salvaged and scavenged and stitched together until this poor shambling monster came out.

"Because his ways have been wise" -High On Fire, The Yeti

Normal?

People from the (rapidly splintering) "mainstream" of society in Europe and the United States today, take a peculiar pleasure in considering themselves "normal” in comparison to legal offenders, political radicals, and other members of social outgroups. They treat this “normalcy” as if it is an indication of mental health and moral righteousness, regarding the “others” with a mixture of pity and disgust. But if we consult history we can see that the conditions and patterns of human life have changed so much in the past two centuries that it is impossible to speak of any lifestyle available to human beings today as being “normal" in the natural sense, as being a lifestyle for which we adapted over many generations. Of the lifestyles from which a young woman growing up in the West today can choose, none are anything like the ones for which her ancestors were prepared by centuries of natural selection and evolution. It is more likely that the “normalcy” that these people hold so dear is rather the feelings of normalcy that result from conformity to a standard. Being surrounded by others who behave the same way, who are conditioned to the same routines and expectations, is comforting because it reinforces the idea that one is pursuing the right course: if a great many people make the same decisions and live according to the same customs, then these decisions and customs must be the right ones. But the mere fact that a number of people live and act in a certain way does not make it any more likely that this way of living is the one that will bring them the most happiness. Besides, the lifestyles associated with the American and European “mainstream" (if such a thing truly exists) were not exactly consciously chosen as the best possible ones by those who pursue them; rather, they came to be suddenly as the results of technological and cultural upheavals. Once the peoples of Europe, the United States, and the world realize that there is nothing necessarily "normal"’ about their “normal life", they can begin to ask themselves the first and most important question of the new century:

Are there ways of thinking, acting and living that might be more satisfying and exciting than the ways we think, act and live today?

Tanz der Lemminge