WOID XVII-40. Ass Warfare!

Saturday, September 8, 2007 10:28 am

A populist logorrhea’s taken over the political discourse. Yesterday in Australia a couple dozen protesters bared their outbacks at the Bush. Today, I hear, the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo has declared Vaffanculoday, the day in which the Italian political class will be told to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Sober anal-ysis suggests there’s not much to digest in either case. The flip side of Vaffanculoday’s a cockamamie plan to reform a government – the Italian – that’s past reforming. The poop from Australia is, it was a half-ass event. The most telling part of the video of the Australian demonstration happens when the camera cuts briefly to some tactical porker with his gun. I flashed back briefly to that scene in Zola’s Germinal where, from the midst of a group of striking French miners, a woman steps forward and rolls her rear end at the Government troops – and gets a butt full of buckshot for her pains.

Somewhere, though, some scholar’s spreading his Bakhtin to tell us these demonstrations suggest a growing sense – not a cogent critique of the State, but a sense that there’s an entity – the State – to be critiqued. In the end the butt-barers may have moved a step further than your average liberal democrat or green or Leninist endlessly scheming to change the State through mere change of personnel. The Italians and Australians are turning their backs on half-answers.

In the years leading up to May '68 in Paris, political protests were as viciously put down as in Bloomberg’s New York today. The old pagan traditions were tolerated, though, like the yearly monôme in which French students paraded, singing defiant slogans like O-E-E-O-E-O, the alternation of vowels in the declension of the Greek verb luein. Sometimes the students even mooned the cops. Sometimes the monôme merged into revolution, when every day was Vaffanculoday: the kind of things De Gaulle dismissed as chienlit, shit-in-bed, except it was his own bed.

Vaffanculoday: it’s the flip side of the Dick-tatorship of the Proletariat.

- Trotsky the Horse