Wake Up and Smell the Noise by Jello Biafra
The corporate lords, their loyal opposition, and that vast majority known as "the rest of us" all agree on one thing: America has gone to hell. The whole world seems damn near ruined. We might have been a great country once, but we sure as hell ain't anymore. Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. Everyone asks, "What for?" Hospitals close cause there ain't no money. Playgrounds close cause there ain't no money. Schools can't teach cause there ain't no money. Roads and bridges fall apart cause there ain't no money. People sleeping in the street cause there ain't no money. And every time it's the same old story, "gotta make due without cause there ain't no money." There ain't no money cause we've run out of money. Where did that money go? The money ain't gone, it's just been stolen. By the kind of people who already have so much money, they can't think of anything better to do than plot and scheme ways to make even more money. If that means screwing everyone else, so much the better. At least that way someone wins. If you ask me, that kind of greed is the most dangerous drug on earth. What really does more damage to the earth: drug addiction or wealth addiction? As Noam Chomsky said recently, Just open up Fortune magazine, who reports, corporate profits dazzling last year, even more splendid this year. Profits will keep booming til the end of the century, right? Read down their list of the Fortune 500. That's who stole the money. Wake up and smell the noise. As the Japanese radical group in the sixties once said, "We are being farmed." We thought we'd be so much further along into the dazzling, limitless future, like those snazzy ads from the old magazines at the dawn of the atomic age, where appliances reigned like magic from heaven as we flew through the air in our bubble-topped cars. Bigger, better technology is the magic key to more fun, more leisure time, less degrading busy work. Why, with more and more work in the hands of technology, we might not have to work anymore at all. There will be plenty for everyone and enough time to buy it. Instead, the people that stole the money have aimed technology in a different direction, investing that stolen money in the development of ever-nastier ways and ever-nastier tools for treating the rest of us like slaves. Survey after buried survey shows people everywhere are less happy, working harder, getting less, more frightened, and less able to take care of themselves. 2001: a space odyssey? It's looking more and more like a one-way ticket to Rwanda. Wake up and smell the noise.

The brave new world is a cyber plantation where, thanks to so-called free trade, under the NAFTA and GATT treaties and the upcoming MAI, it is now officially sealed in writing that global corporations can act as their own sovereign nations. Laws don't apply to them anymore, and every human being on every country on earth must now compete against each other for who will work for the lowest wage. According to Jeremy Rifkin in his book "The End of Work", three-quarters of all the jobs in America, that's 90 million of 124 million existing jobs, are slowly being made extinct by technology. A lot of people who've reviewed that book say Jeremy Rifkin is exaggerating. So let's cut that figure in half. Cut it by two-thirds. That's still 30 million more people unemployed cause of computers, downsizing and the NAFTA-GATT swindle. Aren't at least some of them going to be a little upset? The Wall Street robber barons are so caught up in their dirty little game to suck up and control more and more and more and more money, they forgot one thing: who's gonna buy all their snazzy new techno-toys when no one has a job anymore? And when meaningful work is gone and there ain't no future, and the soon-to-be-former middle class kids are dropping out and shoe-gazing, while the poor people who know it and feel it are ready to kill, where does Wall Street expect all these people to go? What are we all supposed to do? Die? There's no way this can last. There's no way this can last. On a lot of smashed horizons, the future is gone, and people are already getting desperate enough to do something stupid.

Oklahoma City's only happened once cause we're damn lucky, that's all. As the veneer of democracy fades away, as the world's downsized until it explodes, as the shantytowns piled behind the mall become visible, as the savages on the other side of the wall break through, and everybody from gun-crazy militias to gangsta rappers to community activists to working families just struggling to put food on the table all mad at the same thing, you'd think there'd be a widespread united opposition, right? Instead, America is on the verge of civil war. No. It's already here. Unspoken, unacknowledged and mostly, on the surface, bloodless civil war. A class war marketed as a race war of sensationalized sound bites and tabloid images, where people who used to say "nigger" now get away with saying "welfare cheats." Where someone used to say "spic" they can now say "illegal immigrants." And it's become downright trendy to bash black single mothers, at a time when most teenage mothers in America are white. While over half the mothers in a low crime paradise like Sweden are not married. It's almost as though the message between the lines here is: we don't want their kind to reproduce. I first saw welfare cheat used as the code word for nigger when Ku Klux Klan wizard David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana and got the Republican nomination. Next I saw it move on over to Jesse Helmes's 1990 Senate campaign, where the new nigger word for affirmative action was "quotas." "Preferences." From there it spread like a virus, finding its way into the venomous fang-dripping mouth of George Bush, followed eagerly by Clinton and Gore promising to end welfare as we know it, multiplied by a hundred by the "Contract On America" thugs, made respectable by magazine cover story hype of white supremacist-funded research, sold in book form as "The Bell Curve." And now, Californians egged on by that grumpy little Marine, Pete Wilson, once again come out of the closet and reveal themselves as Mickey Mouses with a white hood on and vote to ban affirmative action and ready themselves to ban bilingual education.

Sometimes when you look at this, it's very revealing to trace back who's been mentally networking with whom. As usual, the real conflict is not what they say it is. It's not the left versus the right, but the top versus the bottom, a class war marketed as a race war. That we are being manipulated and programmed to fight, to keep us all from turning our most potent weapons -- our time, our energy and our souls -- against the real enemy and taking back what is rightfully ours. We are living in the new dark ages. Only if we let ourselves. I repeat, there's no way this can last. It never does. That's the best, and most dangerous, part. Throughout history, seemingly invincible dictatorial death regimes in Germany, Russia, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, Chile all had one thing in common. They all failed. They all collapsed. They all destroyed themselves. The question isn't will there be an uprising, but, what form will it take? Will it be violent? Will it be peaceful? Will it be humane enough to work? Will people fight long and intelligently enough to make it work? Wake up and smell the noise. Out of nowhere, when we least expect it, the piñata is finally smashed to bits and out of its guts sprays all that power that's held us down for so long. What happens when that door does open? Will we all be too scared to go in? Will we all sit on our butts and wait for somebody else to do the work for us, until something more horrible than what we've got now beats us to it? Newt Gingrich, eyes gouged out, hanging from a tree, corpse pelted with rocks and bottles. The crowd dances with glee. But in the long run what will that solve in daily life for you and me? Most important of all is after the fall. That's when we must be ready. Who would have guessed that the white apartheid regime in South Africa would go as relatively peacefully as they did, and all hell didn't break loose right afterwards? Someone was ready. Who would have guessed that a playwright, best known for being thrown in jail for his beliefs, would wind up becoming president of Czechoslovakia? A brutal communist dictatorship replaced by an elected Parliament with rock musicians in it. And filmmakers, actors, and long-time front line anti-government activists. Someone was ready. Like any government, the Czech Republic turned out far from perfect, but what's now called the Velvet Revolution is still, to me, inspiring. It took a painfully long time, but in the long run, all the Russian tanks in Prague couldn't stop the will of the people, so fed up with being screwed, they brought 'em down by word of mouth.

Ever thought about what you would do if that went down here? Really thought about what would I do if I suddenly found myself in the position to start taking the bull by the horns and fixing what was wrong? What would I do if I found myself in charge cause the pigs in charge weren't there anymore? Where would I wanna be? What would I wanna do first? What would I wanna do second if I was in charge? Would I just wanna kick butt? It's easy to stop and complain about what's wrong, but how would you make it right? We go on and on about the big takeover. What will you do if you do take over? Is my American-size ego run amok yet again, when I ask myself, from time to time, what I would do if I was in the President's shoes right now? Not necessarily. Today's mind expansion can be tomorrow's key to survival, if not salvation. To think for yourself, what would I do if I was mayor of this town right now? What would I do if I had the power to clean up a violent, corrupt police department? What would I do if I was in the place of the boss I hate so much at work? Or school board? School teacher? Doctor, lawyer, union representative, machinist, farmer, mother, father, idea man in some situation I hear about right now. If I put myself in their place what would I do? What am I good at? What can I do best? What would I most wanna do that's different from the rest? What hole can I fill with what I know how to do? It's an ongoing thing that takes years of bouncing stuff like this around in your head when you feel like it, putting it back on the shelf when you don't, just so long as you use it. Develop it. Keep getting better at it. Cause like in any contact sport, in crisis-mode brain wrestling, practice makes perfect. The more I delve into this myself, the more I know how much I don't know. And that's half the fun. If someone does have to step in from the anti-government community, I hope to hell it ain't me. But it never hurts to start gettin' ready. Just in case it is you. Which would you rather burn: a flag or a bank? It's not that easy!

We're all gonna need each other, if we do have to run things someday. No problem that affects a lot of people is simple to solve. Not everyone who feels the same pain agrees on where it comes from or what to do about it. There's always someone who wants to change it all back, afraid of the future cause they're just trying to survive. Most people don't hate the rich people screwin' 'em, half as much as they wish they were one of them. How do you reach them?

Some things change slowly, some things never do, and as I've said before, nothing's ever going to change until we who want the change understand why different kinds of people want what they want and think the way they do. When they wake up and smell the noise but hear it differently, do we hear them too? There's nothing cops and corporations love more than to sit back and watch us turn off everyone we think we're trying to help by splitting into nitpicky, backbiting, power-hungry factions and tearing each other apart. "I wanna be leader." "No, I wanna be leader." "No, I wanna be leader." "No, I wanna be leader." Bla, bla, backstab, backstab. If you don't agree with me on everything than you must be against me. That's poison. Anyone who's not a vegetarian is automatically evil. All hip-hop is bad because some gangstas are sexist. If you don't believe every word of the Bible, you're a devil worshipper. If you're not gay, you must be homophobic. Look at me wrong, you're racist. Criticize Israel, oh, you hate Jews. Wear lipstick, you can't be a feminist. Divide, divide, divide. Let the powerful few keep the quarreling majority from sharing in what is rightfully everyone's. And speaking of divide, most pathetic of all: "The only important thing in the whole world is the punk rock scene." And you're a sell-out traitor to the whole punk rock scene if you so much as disagree with me in any way, listen to music I don't like, dress funny, dress normal, laugh without permission, or even so much as speak to any artist who made a dime off their years of hard work, without at least beating them up first. Wake up and smell the noise. In these days we can't afford to get caught up in blind fundamentalism of any kind. There's too many different kinds of people in this world, in this country, in this building, to hide behind one-issue isolationist chickenshit anymore.

Here we are in the richest country in the world and it's getting as horrible now as it was in the Great Depression of the 1930's. It rips me up inside seeing broken men and women on street corners in the rain, holding up signs saying, "Homeless: Will work for food." Hard as it may be for some crybabies to believe, people in that situation couldn't care less if Green Day and The Offspring sold out when they signed to major labels. Other things and other truths are more important. The cutthroats that run things cheat and kill to get where they are. We got nothing but our hearts, our souls, and our energy. But look what that's done, as a simple spark starting fires throughout history all over the world. Even in America. We stopped the Vietnam War. We got rid of the first Nixon. The whole Berkeley free speech movement wasn't planned, it just happened. When the cops were trying to drag a protester away from campus in a police car, first one protester stood in front of the car, Chinese style, then another one, then another, then by the dozen, then by the hundreds they surrounded that cop car and wouldn't let it leave for 32 hours. That got on TV and the whole world was watching, and a movement, or two, was born. Half a million people block a dam in India. A dam gets canceled in Tasmania because the people just wouldn't stop chaining themselves to construction equipment. March 25th, 1995, 10,000 people walked outta school and marched on city hall in New York City. Not just students, but teachers and principals and parents, all united against Republican budget cuts. No surprise that got blacked out of the national news. Education benefits slashed by right-wingers in Italy, even five year old kids walked out on strike. Schools and universities in Rome stayed virtually empty until budget cuts were restored. When the French government tried American-style budget cuts, the workers didn't sit there and grumble about it like a bunch of Americans. They went on strike and shut the whole country down for a month. And, in Mexico, kidnapping millionaires has become what the business world likes to refer to as "a growth industry." One more thing the corporate media doesn't dare tell you is that a few thousand rebels, if that, in Chiapas in Mexico, have uncorked such a nationwide outpouring of rage that people by the thousands are demonstrating against the government, inequality and corruption somewhere in Mexico every damn day. Will Mexico dare allow its people genuine, peaceful change? Will the people there be ready, or will it be the other kind? Wake up and smell the noise. The unified, wealthy, powerful few are only as strong as their weakest link. A well thought-out surgical strike is all it can take to cut off the tail that's wagging the dog. Then it will be our turn to deal with the dog. Or, should I say, porcupine. If we each grab a quill, we'll be strong enough to drive. No more lifetimes preparing for death. No more "give me lithium or give me meth". No more "can't fix nothing cause everything's ruined already. Why try?" No more being a spectator in our own lives. Even thinking about this stuff can't help but make you smarter, help break out of "no I can't" to "yes I can" to "now I must." We're not equal til we're equal. We're not free until we're free. I'd rather work for something I want and not get it than work or vote for something I don't want and get it. And what we got now, I repeat, there's no way this can last. Wake up and smell the noise. Corporate dictatorship is headed for a train wreck. And that train wreck will happen in our lifetime. Not right away, but in our lifetime, and if we aren't ready to cut the crap, and know how to work with each other, to zero in and focus on what's really important, and have an idea of what we each have got to do to be ready to do it right, we will get fooled again.

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