FOLLOW ME TO CERTAIN DEATH

Listening to Sabbath changed my fucking life for the VERY VERY GOOD. Realizing that both Good and Evil are simply concepts by which Man tells stories that appeal to the different emotional sides of him, I have been taking a pretty credible stab at becoming Middle America's worst nightmare. It's fairly interesting gauging the reactions of those who would think evil of you as you move forward with ever more intense ways of proving your essential love of humankind.

Here is the deal. What kind of idiot would ASSUME that there's life after death? I mean, certainly, we all know that there MAY be a heaven and hell and an afterlife, and we've all gotten a premonition that we return to some great universal consciousness in the sky. But to make your everyday decisions based on the ASSUMPTION that death is just a gateway into another world has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. That's the kind of logic that makes Republicans think they're helping people by starving them. You know? If you believe in an afterlife, doesn't that make you a little less troubled by the destruction of THIS life?

Everybody knows that Christianity was essential to the subjugation of peasants throughout the Dark Ages. Christianity was your ultimate joy-postponing religion; the aristocracy (which gave birth, in many ways, to Capitalism)

My ideology is pretty damn simple. If someone has a good idea, steal it. That isn't to say "pliaigarize whenever you're stuck", even though, hell, I use slogans that I've heard in Replacements songs and I don't even give a fuck if you want to quote me at length and claim it as your own. Whatever. The point is that I simply believe in the power unleashed whenever ideas hit people, and that's really all I need as far as visualizing a better world.

My goal with Unamerican is to use the Internet to shape a marginally better world. What I see around me is a generation of people who are truly sick of the shit that's passed around as conventional American culture these days. If that shit is conventional, there are a whole bunch of misfits in this society, that's what I say - either that or this is not a democracy at all, but rather a Pig Empire, voted for by squealing idiots who think Jerry Seinfeld is president or whatever. I want the People of Flavor to rise up and start taking control of this democracy and creating a new dawn for the new millenium. I want YOU to get involved.

Take a good, honest look at the typical American way of life, and you'll see a nation of "extreme individualists" who in reality fit snugly into marketable niches that move as if in a flock. Groups are great, okay? People should join groups and enjoy being in groups and being social and all that. And it's okay for these groups to share commercial interests in common, and to have those interests capitalized upon by smart people who understand how to make products that appeal to these groups. There is nothing wrong with any of that.

But is this all there is? Are we merely creatures of demographic, or beneath the veneer of our self-labelling (nothing wrong with that either; we are creatures of our society), does a human heart still beat? Do human souls still sing sweetly to you at night, or do you go to bed alone (or, worse yet, together but still lonely)? I'm talking about LOVE, about ART, about INSPIRATION and about JOY - do we still have the capacity for these higher contacts with the divine while we're being overwhelmed with BUY BUY BUY messages? If your world is composed of nine hours of work, three hours of TV, as much sleep as you can get and precious little else, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

We are a nation of individualists who sees no public interest but their own. We tend to make individualistic (and therefore rash) decisions with our money and time, and slowly this wears us down until as adults all we want is comfort and safety (and fun scares us). FUCK! Is it so impossible to imagine growing old without decay? Is it inevitable that our minds must follow our bodies towards stagnation - or can we see ourselves dancing nude on beaches in our 70's? We simply can't even imagine this when every single burden in our lives falls squarely on US and US ALONE.

That said, I believe that one thing is true about American individualism - it is the most advanced, technologically savvy, and highly developed strain of egotism ever invented. As such, AMERICANS ARE THE ULTIMATE INDIVIDUALS. More than any other country, we raise our kids to be islands. This is the country that INVENTED the term "nuclear family". We shower our heroes with attention and wealth, and we outsource our interpersonal emotions to Hallmark. But since we are these totally individualistic people, we have learned how to act alone with great autonomy and intelligence.

A primary mission of this site is to network these fine American individualist minds at long last. Imagine America as a moshpit. The Internet certainly resembles one. In a moshpit, there are certain rules; you probably can intuit what I'm saying here... that Americans need to learn how to respect each other and cover for each other, to build friendships that extend one's whole life, to turn our crazy counterculture into a patchwork of families and to not leave ANYONE out of our revolution.

A lot of you people out there are sort of elitist without really thinking about it. It's not that you go out and bash people because of your race, but you certainly look down at each others' music. Hell, I play that game too (a new sticker I just made sez DESTROY LIMP BIZKIT) but we have got to learn how to look past our cultural differences, which are merely a product of the same kind of big-C Capitalism that forces abortions on women in Saipan. My god, can't we see that they've made our greatest enemy EACH OTHER?

This website knows who the enemy is. The enemy, conveniently this year, has a name. It has a face, a mascot, a symbol.

When I was at Stanford, I lived for two years in a commune. I was an anti-hippie punk rocker whoWhat would constitute REAL CHANGE in this society? What does change look like? How far can a website go in terms of generating such change?

Unamerican Activities is a project I started five years ago to answer these questions (and many others). I think real change looks like a COMMUNITY of INTELLIGENT DISSENT, and my goal has always been to create a website that would spawn such a community.

I had a vision of an American public expressing themselves radically through the medium of vinyl stickers. What can I say? I just love stickers, and I love democratic expression, and I wanted to change the world. Five years later, that much hasn't changed one iota. But the world has changed so much. This is increasingly a world of puppets strung out on television, economic "growth" and false religion. Are Americans so bloody complacent with their entertainment-industrial complex that they've forgotten that to a full quarter of the world, we represent the ENEMY?

To me, REAL CHANGE would mean Americans understanding the world with their own eyes rather than those of the news cameras, acting with autonomy in order to save their precious resources, organizing against the monopolism of chain-based commerce and wage-slavery, and realizing their own power as diverse and fascinating people who each has the potential to make a real difference.

I've had it with despair; I made this site in order to tell you how much YOU are needed in order to bring this change about. We're more deluded than we've ever been before. But I have one hope - the KIDS. Hear me now - this generation of kids is the TOUGHEST EVER. Yes, they're sometimes at each other's throats; but they're FIERCE, HONEST and CONNECTED in ways that I can't even imagine. And it's the kids - as well as those adults who remain connected with the spirit of youth - that have kept me doing what I've been doing all these years.

God bless the kids of America and the world; they're going to inherit this mess, after all, and I feel the need to help. Unamerican Activities hopes to give these kids the tools they need to RESIST THE SYSTEM. I understand that the whole concept of "the System" might sound trite to jaded ears, but it's still the most potent metaphor to explain the increasingly diminished power of the individual in our country. And the best way to explain the power of the individual, in my opinion, is to BE an individual. I write this site from the heart, and I hope that you see fit to respond to it with that kind of powerful feeling.

To me, THE SYSTEM IS EVERYTHING THAT HOLDS YOU BACK. Every check on your individual power, every technique to brainwash you into pursuing PRODUCTS instead of freedom, every time a black man is harrassed unfairly by a policeman or a Denny's manager - it's all part of a systematic effort to keep us broken and to destroy our joy. Because the cop and the Denny's manager probably buy each other drinks after work, and the entertainment industry is teaching you how and what to act, buy, and BELIEVE.

I've heard it all before about how "trivial" stickers are; cynics have emailed me a mountain of pessimism over the years, all about how "selling things makes you a capitalist" and "stickers never change anything". But I'm still standing here, behind my humble table here on the Web, ready to talk to you about how you really feel about this country and your life. If that isn't significant to you, perhaps we don't have much to offer you, and apologies for wasting your time. But for everyone out there who sees and understands this site and what I'm really up to, I salute you. Please, understand that I'm just one guy with a vision of independence and a cool set of ideas and a bunch of really neat ways of expressing them. Thank you for your support, and I will continue to carry forth the struggle.