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Name: You don't ask, I don't tell. Age: Eligible for the draft. Occupation: Serial student and full-time procrastinator. Location: Beautiful, sunny (!), northern California. |
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My Politics Anarchist. "Good government" is a lot like "western civilization." A nice idea in theory, but a utopian one in practice. Kill the state, free the man. With no state to favor them, we shall see if the capitalist class is truly a 'natural' consequence of human interaction, rather than a parasitic organism, sustained only through massive state intervention. |
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My Intellectual Interests History: The present may be our problem, but it is a product of the past. Disregarding or misrepesenting that past has consequences. Just ask our neo-conservative overlords who seem to be unconsciously mimicking, word for word, their British antecedents. History is not just about what happened, it's about what is still happening. |
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My Choice Topics The Middle East. Next to Congress, one of the world's most fractious and unstable regions. An astonishing intersection of local and global politics. You can't escape it. That's why it's my region of study. A more-than-Shakespearean drama. See also: Computers, American Politics, and Revolutions. |
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My Favorite Books The Monkeywrench Gang (Edward Abbey): Sabotaging progress is a tough job, but somebody's go to do it. Sticking it to civilization. See also: Lost Horizon (James Hilton), Hard Times (Charles Dickens), The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Karl Marx), Interesting Times (Erich Hobsbawm), 1984 (George Orwell) and The Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy (Douglas Adams). |
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My Favorite Music Dead Kennedys: "Kill the poor." "California Uber Alles." "Holiday in Cambodia." Need more be said? Unabashedly political meets wickedly funny. See also: Black Flag, Dropkick Murphys, They Might be Giants. In terms of classical music, works by Sergei Prokofiev, Georg Telemann and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tom Lehrer brings good cheer to all too. |
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My Favorite Movies The Matrix: dystopia on the big screen. The individual against the machine. Literally. See also: Monty Python's ridiculous Life of Bryan, the Marx Brothers' no less ridiculous Duck Soup, North by Northwest, and of a less ancient vintage (not to mention considerable contemporary applicability) V for Vendetta. |
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My Favorite Places The Pyrenees: southern France and northern Spain host Europe's second highest mountain range. Good food, great trails, and the sort of wildness not really present in the Alps. See also: California's Lassen and Sequoia national parks, as well as its central coast and the city of San Francisco. In Switzerland, the cantons of Graudbunden and Ticino and the city of Lausanne. |
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Footsteps to Follow The desert anarchist casts a long shadow. A man who lived his life as he pleased. A man with a cause. A man of contradictions. A man of considerable wit. A man whose contributions (literary and otherwise) have outlived him. "There never was a good war or a bad revolution." Amen to that. |
