Occupy Karma

Apolitical Who Cares Activism

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dada Venduza
Dada Venduza – Jay Schwartz

Manisfesto: Apolitical ‘Who Cares Activism’ in support of apathy and passive anarchy.

With liberty and apathy for all! Stand united to support the right to get lost, do your own thing and not give a shit!

Human Dignity vs. Free Speech:

Free Speech is NOT a right or a privilege that needs to be granted by an authority. What are you stupid? People have mouths; they will talk anyway. We all have our opinions, so shut the fuck up. You have the right to remain silent.

The Pursuit of Happiness:

Life goes on anyway, so get on with it. Don’t confuse anarchy with tyranny. Don’t confuse civility with nationalism. Don’t confuse democracy with liberty. Nationalism and anarchy are not two sides of the same coin. Historically speaking, without ‘anarchy’ there would be no USA – and by the same token without ‘nationalism’ there would have been no Nazi Germany. Happiness does not come in a can. #Winning

Equality For All:

Stand united to champion individual differences. No grandstanding allowed. Yes, there may be no ‘I” in ‘we’, but there also ain’t no ‘us’ in it, either.

Apolitical Preamble:

Political elections have become little more than media circuses promoting ‘groupthink’ and featuring lots of people screaming and grandstanding using the excuse of ‘competition’ to win at all costs. This phenomenon also defines ‘civil war’.

The hallmark of good leaders is the ability to be responsible for and accountable to more than just their own constituents. Any preoccupation with defining political ‘free speech’ is just an excuse for sanctioning brainwashing, censorship and fascism. As such, most candidates for political office will fail in this respect since they don’t know when and how to keep their mouths shut.

Membership:

Power-mongers not welcome. Fear-mongers not welcome. Hypocrites not welcome. Politicians not welcome. Parrots not welcome. Lobbyists not welcome. Conformists not welcome. Dadaists must present identification. Loiterers ARE welcome!

Battle Cry & Mission Statement:

Take your politics and stick them up your ass. Leave us the fuck alone! Occupy nothing. Civil disobedience is both the poison and cure for social ills. Only you can abstain from hypocrisy.

Disclaimer:

This apolitical message approved by Jay Schwartz & Dada Bloq. Do not consult your physician, healthcare provider or a member of clergy. The disestablishment of the establishment will not be televised. Watch Dada Venduza; your freedom may depend on it!

Dada Gothic: Accommodating Commodes

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Occupy Karma, Poetry & Prose , , , ,

Dada GothicAccommodating Commodes

Oh Accommodating Commodes…
My, how you have reconciled your fate.
Conditioned to forgive and forget
so that you may be visited again by bum dignitaries
and crowned with their indignities.

Where is your individuality?
– long ago flushed out and smothered
with the loose vowels of holy rhetoric
by those up on high …

Do you take heart in knowing that at the tail end of your existence
you will have dutifully served your function …
without cracking under the excretion of your karma?

What is this righteousness you feel
in extending a policy of laissez-faire to the derrière?
Perhaps you fancy yourself a grand pedal-stool of sorts …
a throne in the company of the elite …
… a noble, yet humble, reflecting pool to moonbeams?

Oh accommodating commodes …
Alas, there is no virtue in self-repression.
And in the end, … I must confess …
you are just full of crap.

Ask A Stupid Question

Jay Leonard Schwartz Defying Expectations, Occupy Karma , , , ,
DunceSarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
– Bruce Lee

 

The bewildered always have questions ‘after the fact’. Such questions usually offer profound testimony to these folks’ ignorance and lack of forethought, as well as to their inattention to ‘time’. Regret is expressed for the consequences, but responsibility is rarely taken for the circumstances leading up to an event. Blame may be apportioned in some cases … but lessons are rarely learned. Life goes on … and so does denial.

Does anyone really know what time it is? Many speak of the ‘investments in time’ they make or of their skills of time management … as if time were a commodity. To these aims, clocks were invented to keep track of time. Time keeping instruments are even worn on wrists … analogous to dog collars. Clinically speaking, regardless of the number of nanoseconds there are in a moment, each minute is seen as either being “too early” or “too late”.

Our movements are synchronized to our own creations. Yes, we are slaves to time. We relinquished our ‘freedom’ to our perception of time long ago. What’s worse is that for all our attention to time, we still have no clue about it.

“What time is it?”, you ask. “You’re asking the wrong question”, I say.

Continue reading →

Ho Ho No: Sleigh Riding Through Dystopia

Jay Leonard Schwartz Occupy Karma , , , , , , , ,
Dadamas by Jay SchwartzThe founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. 
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Reason’s Greetings! Let Freedom Ring! Well, sort of …

The festive season may be upon us, but be careful who you wish Happy Holidays to … especially if you live in the United States of the National Security Agency (USNSA) … or most likely anywhere else in the developed world. But let’s not confuse liberty with the freedoms of privacy or free speech, especially since Santa won’t be filling anyone’s stockings with either anytime soon.

For a society that grandstands for the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and even goes as far as proclaiming them as ‘the American way’, one would imagine that realizing only 1 out of 3 of said principles just doesn’t cut the mustard.

As for ‘life’, consider the following recent news item: Christmas will not come for the murdered 30-year old New Jersey resident, Dustin Friedland, who was shot in the head by carjackers as he opened the door for his wife. The deadly shooting occurred in the parking area of the mall at which the couple had just finished holiday shopping.

So perhaps a new twist on the ideology of ‘American Exceptionalism’ should apply: anything goes EXCEPT life and liberty. Don’t despair, however, because the ‘pursuit of happiness’ can always be found in the arena of consumerism.

Perhaps a new seasonal national anthem is in order to the tune of “Deck The Malls With Boughs Of Folly” (and something about Orwellian visions of ‘aspartame plums’ dancing in our heads). Yes Virgina, INGSOC lives, especially in Anytown, USNSA. Let’s take a sleigh ride through dystopia, shall we? Ho Ho NO …

Continue reading →

Dadaism: Defeating The Overlords of Information Overload

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , ,
'Dada Shutdown' by Jay Schwartz“Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?”
– Louis Aragon
 
 “Expert, texpert, choking smoker, don’t you hear the joker laugh at you?”
– John Lennon

 

Wherever you go, you find information. Of course, I do recognize that we are, after all, living in the ‘information age’, but I still can’t help but wonder where all this ‘information’ came from? Who discovered it? How did it begin to spread? Who continues to disseminate it and for what reason? I mean, today we are obviously all full it, so I think these are important considerations.

At some point in history, someone must have come along and said, “Hey there! You! Yes, you! I have some information for you.” Perhaps it was God or a visiting extraterrestrial tourist. Perhaps it was a squirrel. I have no clue. And that my friends is the point of today’s post: I have no clue. Yet, there is one thing I know for certain: there is simply too much information out there!

Continue reading →

The March Of The Immoral Compass

Jay Leonard Schwartz Occupy Karma, Poetry & Prose , , , ,

'Color War Rally' by Jay SchwartzThe March Of The Immoral Compass

Onward to the march she came to share solidarity,

eventually to be burned by another’s insincerity.

She fled, her brain inflamed;

the scene, it was insane.

Twas better for her to defy her moral compass, I confess,

than choke on the evening’s immoral and errant excess.

 

Oh, but what she saw and sensed …

Oh, what she beheld that made no sense:

Loons, full moons and fire …

… a city lead to mire:

Continue reading →

Down To Clown: Dadaism Meets Occupy Wall Street

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Defying Expectations, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , , , , ,
'Dada Manisfestation' by Jay Schwartz“Every word that is spoken and sung here (the Cabaret Voltaire) represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”
– Hugo Ball
 
“Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.”
– George Orwell

 

It’s just another day on planet Earth. The warmongers are rattling their sabers. The power-mongers are scheming. Political pundits, regardless of their place in the political void, are preaching to their own choirs, and pseudo-intellectuals everywhere are mentally masturbating over whether or not the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has faded away, even as its 2-year anniversary approaches.

Meanwhile, the rich (1%) are getting richer, the poor (99%) are getting poorer … and the ‘dadas’ are still creatively angst-ridden, at least this one is. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of existential angst, please note that I ‘might’ be facing deportation at sometime in the near future. Despite what my lawyer says, I reserve the right to be paranoid.

After all, having traded ‘standard of living’ for ‘quality of life’ about 18 years ago, I remain an American living in Greece, or so my pedigree and permanent resident papers claim, despite my personal non-conformity to either countries’ national norms.

Speaking of norms, I can’t help but draw a parallel between OWS and Dadaism, especially in regard to both movements’ anti-establishment stance on ‘the system’. In the faces of both personal and societal upheaval, both movements delight in rejecting the logic and reason of a fallacious zeitgeist that slavishly adheres to a system of personal slavery that’s been irrevocably broken for quite some time.

Of course, some people just don’t get it, claiming that it is human nature to bring order to what is perceived as chaos. Regardless of the fact that chaos may very well have its own brand of symmetry, hair-loss becomes rampant for some when presented with a square peg and a round hole.

Continue reading →

In A Dada Vita (Rethinking Kindergarten)

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , , ,
Dada Kindergarten by Jay Schwartz“Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is Dada. But the real dadas are against Dada.”
– Tristan Tzara
 
“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”
– Soren Kierkegaard

 

In his ‘Dada Manifesto’, Tristan Tzara questions how it’s possible for anyone, or any institution, to expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes the “infinite and shapeless variation” of ‘man’. He suggests that Dada was “born of a need for independence”, and of “a distrust toward unity”. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …

To me, the state of mankind has fallen from grace. Whose conception of grace I can’t say for sure, but I would suggest our own state of godliness, because at this stage of our evolution we should know better. Yet, the more we divide ourselves according to the lines of nationalism, politics, religion and even art, the more a large portion of us becomes mired in denial as to our own humanity.

Where did we as a society go wrong? When did the ‘art’ of being human change from ‘form to function’? Perhaps it’s time we should hold a candle to (pregnant pause and drum-roll) … kindergarten and its schizophrenic type orientation to social order it embeds in children.

Continue reading →

Dadaisn’tism: Copious Habeas (and other assorted frothy nothings)

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , , ,
Dada - Jasyaspora by Jay Schwartz“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea.”
 – Tristan Tzara
“I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired, that’s all there is to it.”
– Thelonious Monk

 

It’s not easy tipping the planet back on it’s axis. Somewhere along the way, our way of life fell into a form of ‘gimbal lock‘. With reference to the Apollo 11 Moon mission, I could explain what this condition means, but doing so would detract from its poetic ‘bombasity’. And, after all, what would be the point of enjoying poetic license if I couldn’t take liberties with the ‘unliberated’? Which brings me to the point of this post …

Continue reading →

Don Dada (When Words Fail)

Jay Leonard Schwartz Dadaism, Defying Expectations, Occupy Karma , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Hoch-Cut_With_the_Kitchen_KnifeEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
– Ralph Ellison
Thought is made in the mouth.
– Tristan Tzara

I think the time has come to rewrite the dictionary. It’s not the words so much I have a problem with, as much as it’s the way we use or misuse them – some words as dictated by our standard dictionaries and so-called reference material, other words as dictated by the mainstream media (MSM). In both cases, we have established a penchant to parrot ad nauseam that which we hear or have been taught, very rarely taking liberty or poetic license with the same words, as I often do on this blog, more often than not in a wholly and ‘pseudolly suitable un-surreptitious’ manner.

Take for example the words ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. There are succinct published definitions to be certain, even in 10 words or less. Nevertheless, the ultimate application of their definitions is best defined by the actions of government officials, intelligence gathering agencies, the military, law enforcement personnel, and an entire legal profession of dark suited pontificators. Of course, Big Business interests figure into this conspiracy of terms, as well, but let’s not get paranoid!

So, it seems to me that no one really know what democracy means anymore. Countless definitions exist, but in reality the term has come to mean different things to different people. Perhaps it no longer matters, since the concept has very little ‘personally redeeming value’. In most cases, what you can count on, but can’t look up in your ‘Funk & Wagnalls’, is that both ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are defined at the street level … when they are lost.

Continue reading →