Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 11/07/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday July 11, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down]
One of the most terrible paradoxes of our time is that human reason, our distinctive tool of survival, is committing suicide. Human reason devises equisite technologies which it then deploys to kill itself. Modern pop culture is a case in point, where sophisticated electronic instruments & amplification equipment are used to create dissonant, ugly cacophonies which batter the brain into a state of catatonia. Yes, catatonia, defined in my dictionary as "a form of schizophrenia characterised by stupor, with outbreaks of excitement."
During my recent stint in the United States, on a web site called newcriterion.com, I read about a New York Times review of a concert by a hard-rock band called Slipknot, described by the reviewer, Neil Strauss, as "one of the most exciting & enigmatic of rock's current crop of new bands." Mr Strauss recounts how the group drove its fans into a frenzy with some preliminary "ferocious screaming." "Two teenagers had already been treated for injuries before Slipknot had even finished thrashing, banging & raging through its first song about exploding angst," he writes. "Teenage angst demands its anti-heroes, & in the absence of any other popular music uprising since grunge these acts have made it exciting again to grow up a rock fan."
Now what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with individual liberty? Am I implying that musical atrocities like Slipknot should be banned? Quite the contrary - I believe everybody should be free to pursue his own tastes, even if they are too abysmal to be called "tastes." But it's important to realise that not only governments can threaten freedom - freedom is also threatened by a culture of grunge, angst & anti-heroes. Freedom is inseparably linked to reason - & reason, in the service of life, concerns itself with beauty, life-affirmation & heroism. Only so much coexistence is possible between these conflicting sets of values - or rather, these values & anti-values - before one of them breaks down.
Mr Strauss quotes Slipknot's drummer as saying, "A guy at Sony told us, 'If this is the future of music, I don't want to be alive.' I just thought, if that's what he thinks, then we are doing something right." Seldom is the snide nihilism of our times expressed so candidly. And just as this snide nihilism revels in death & destruction, so too it has no qualms about dictatorship.
Ladies & gentlemen, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance - & the anti-liberty state of our culture has never merited more vigilance than right now.
Politically Incorrect Show, upholding reason & romanticism ... 309 3099.
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