Weekly Reader

MH: Yeah, the Crass covers were, and still are, very powerful. Both the music and artwork of Crass were uncompromising and definitely had a huge influence on what I call the second wave of UK punk, from the '80s, Discharge being a big part of that. A lot of the original punk bands had become mainstream (The Clash), split or evolved into bands fueling the newly emerging Goth subculture, and playing big venues, so there wasn't a lot around for younger punks to get involved with.

Historically the best anti-war imagery in my view was from John Heartfield (1891 -1968). He was a German artist who back in the day was probably amongst the first to use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. Calvin almost exclusively used his artwork on subsequent singles and albums. I think it is important that people are aware of that, as I have read in in a few articles that they think that Calvin made the artwork himself. (After I did the single covers for Discharge, I taught Calvin Morris how to prepare artwork for printing, at the printmaking studio at my college)

Grisly exposés are as old as the meat industry itself, but Blanchette is not interested in scandal. The genre implies that the meat industry is a secretive outlier or that it can be redeemed through liberal reform. Books in this mode tend to steer between industrial horror and vegan asceticism to arrive at the safe harbor of the small farm, yet here too Blanchette departs from the norm. He does not believe that bucolic romanticism has anything to offer us now, an insight that was plain a century ago to the political economist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen ridiculed “the Independent Farmer of the poets” as a “holdover” from an “obsolete past” and predicted his doom “under the dominion of absentee ownership in its later developed phase.” Veblen also stressed that “the case of the American farmer is conspicuous; though it can scarcely be called singular.” In similar fashion, Blanchette recognizes that the meat industry isn’t a macabre exception but rather is typical of contemporary capitalism, even if its extremes make contemporary tendencies more readily apparent. Like the bodies of the pigs it has engineered, the meat business has become a vast, fragile beast teetering on the brink of ecological and financial ruin.

The last four years have been a period of numbingly rapid change in our politics, a critical juncture containing the seeds of many different potential future paths. That rapid change has built on a much deeper structural foundation rooted in everything from demographic turnover and shifts in partisanship to full-on breakdowns of the formal and informal institutions that make up our political system. This adds up to a full-blown legitimacy crisis for the system as a whole. It’s a great deal to take in, even if we choose to put aside the raging pandemic for the moment and concentrate on the purely political. We won’t be able to grasp the full implications of everything that’s happened for years and even decades to come.

Weekly Reader

Sacrilege also fully embraced the Discharge "d-beat" sound (although it wasn't referred to by that name yet), which no one in New York was playing, and only a handful of American bands (almost all in California) were playing at all at that time. Besides Discharge, influences included other English bands like Disorder and Chaos UK, Scandinavian bands like Anti-Cimex and Appendix, but very few American influences (such as Crucifix). Sacrilege also kept their lyrics serious, leaving behind the sometimes humorous and bad taste songs that Hellbent had occasionally played, as well as the more fun-oriented covers. Although other bands of the time in the New York area had extreme looks (Misfits, Genocide), or anarchist or left wing lyrics (Reagan Youth, False Prophets), no one had combined the extreme punk look, serious political lyrics, and d-beat European punk sound previously in New York. With Clay and Tim being NYC newcomers, the band were considered oddities by some, although Vic also being in Reagan Youth and Adam's past with Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front kept them from being complete outsiders.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

What does that look like? For starters, more marginalized people need to be brought into promotions across the board. Not just as performers, but as bookers, producers, announcers, and so on. Promoters and fans need to come to terms on a real, actionable code of conduct and accept that whatever minor losses there are at the gate due to that code will be worth it for a safer, less hostile working environment for marginalized performers, and a better time for fans. Promoters and wrestlers need to listen and act of their own volition when someone in the industry is outed, and not just when it comes to future bookings. If an abuser’s work is in your video archive, remove them. When the commentary on women’s matches makes your performers uncomfortable, re-record and re-release them. When you’re booking someone new to your promotion, don’t just do it based on a GIF or a match, do some research, make sure their reputation is good, and move forward in good faith. This is difficult work, but it is necessary if wrestling is to survive as a form of entertainment and a kind of labor. A better professional wrestling is possible—I wouldn’t have dedicated so much of my life to it if that wasn’t the case. How bad do we want it? What are we willing to do to get there? Those are the questions. I hope we’re able to answer them together.

Since 2001 the terrorist has come to be imagined almost exclusively as Muslim or Arab. This confusingly ill-defined minority has been made the domestic subject of the War on Terror and is subject to its devices, including indefinite detention, the No Fly List, extraordinary rendition, and extrajudicial killing. For example, in 2011, President Barack Obama ordered a targeted drone strike to kill sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen from birth, while he was in Yemen. Leading up to this act of preemptive state violence, the teenager was not charged with—nor even suspected of—having committed or supported any acts of terrorism. But his father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was charged with providing material support to terrorists and killed two weeks earlier in a targeted drone strike. The young Al-Awlaki was the second (his father the first) extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen via drone strike. Violence against children is common practice in the house that counterterrorism built: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also a creation of the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and so the migrant children being abused and dying in U.S. custody today are also victims of the furious rush of resources and energy into fighting terrorism.

These fellow enthusiasts would forever remain invisible; all I ever had was a near-complete save file assuring me that someone else out there cared about Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire 2, Final Fantasy 6, and other classic RPGs that my peers knew little about. Their names ranged from mundane "BEN's" and "JOE's" to whatever curse words were filthy enough to spell out with five or six letters. "FUCKER," wherever you are, I appreciated your Dragon Warrior 3 save file and I hope you're doing well.

Whatever my patron was named, my routine was to get as far into my rented RPG as possible before my time was up. When the deadline loomed, I'd latch onto the hero of the first save file and eliminate the Mana Beast, Dark Gaia, or whomever else I was up against. It was a good strategy that served me well. Yes, I could re-rent an RPG and try to power through it myself, but that wasn't always possible since my brothers and I took turns renting games from week to week. My older brother gravitated toward hockey and basketball games. He didn't care if I had the Mana Beast on the ropes and needed just a little more time to polish it off.