Buy it.

Sunny day. Brutally sunny day. Punishingly, horrifically sunny. Drought. I’m sitting in a shaded cafe, second floor, view of the fishing fleet, the pebble beach, and the open semi-industrial stretch of merciless concrete we sometimes use for shows and markets. Ferris wheel. Broken castle.

I wasn’t going to write about this. I was going to tell you how my thoughts on the Lakota have developed and altered since that post about the headdress (headress?) in December. But I’m sitting here, withering myself with a black coffee, iced. Stretching my sanity over my skull. And the music they’re playing is something like ‘top 60s and 70s hits for a sunny day’. Some of them I think fair enough, it’s pop, it’s nice, mellow summer fare. But we had a couple of exceptions.

The Doors to start with. And then Pink Floyd. The Doors I can understand. I might view them as a mystical act best enjoyed on hallucinogenic drugs or a chunk of crystalline ketamine, but I realise they have a rambling, pop-adjacent dimension that lets them be played here. Bollocks. Another tune, just as I’m writing this. “Show me the way to the next little girl – how? – don’t ask why – how? – don’t ask why. ” That’s not the kind of thing a normal person listens to. The jingling, circus-like jangling in the background. The horrific undertones of abuse, trauma and death.

It’s revolutionary music. Violent. Unpleasant. Confused. This is important. But instead it was purchased, and widely sold. Drugs become a method of sedation rather than revelation (sometimes the line between those is very slim).

They’re calling time. In the cafe. I have to break this illusion and leave mid-script. The whirring ferris wheel – ‘Warriors… come out to plaaaayyyaaaayyyy’ – and the mythical storm cut castle can return for their images another day.

I pack away my laptop, finish my coffee. Walk out via the exhibitions. Yes, this disgraceful place is a wealthy gallery. I mean, a gallery that exists because of people who can afford to buy art, invest in it, tens of thousands of the Queen’s sterling and rising, rent it. I go into the shadow realm, the darkened show. Lucien Freud and Henry someone. An invigilator with a book notices me, barely moves, approving – I’ll have at least five minutes to browse.

I don’t like the shows right now. Lots of sea stuff, blue, and then this Freud. There’s someone in their hallway gallery – the pauper’s spot, free to the public – who’s a bit more interesting.

I get out into the sun. Long past midday now. Five. That’s evening perhaps? Less blistering. See a little drinking den, the Jolly. Wooden cave with good light from the mouth. Best drinks in the old town. Plays this 60s, 70s stuff, not from a top 50 summer selection. Plays albums, plays curated personal collections. Can continue the discussion here. Re-establish the illusion.

Yes, Pink Floyd. They killed Syd. Hold on, we can’t go here yet, not yet. At the bar, picking out a delectable cider, old apple juice and maggots. Sipping this unclear brew, perching on a copper-topped table. Outside, behind the noise of the traffic, past the marching of passersby, the distant cackling of demented children – a ride out the front of Flamingo’s that plays this canned nightmare every ten or fifteen minutes to draw victims in.

I’m not sure if I can say that with any depth of understanding that Pink Floyd killed Syd, but there it is. Syd ate too much acid, sure. Went mad, of course. But his greatest sin? He didn’t want them to go big. Didn’t want the record deals and the ‘success’. If he was going to carry on, wanted more mad parties with little audiences, lights, noise, space travel. More like a psychedelic improv act. Roger wouldn’t allow that. Jeopardise his success. Syd’s mad they say, can’t be trusted.

But you know a revolution is mad. Completely insane. That doesn’t make it any less significant, necessary, maybe even beneficial. I’m not actually a fan of revolutions, real ones, myself – I think they do too much damage. But culturally, in the realms of metaphor and social comprehension, I like to think that’s alright. Damage needs to be done. Have to cut off the dead weight, burn the rot.

Believe me, I know this comes with a lot of casualties too. And I don’t feel so good about that. But I’m much more addicted to world-altering cultural change than I am to taking up arms and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Which is to say, I’m much more addicted to change than I am to staying still for the sake of a false security.

Revolution – politically – tends to be a bad thing. Heads will roll. It’s all set up that way. We gave all power to the Leviathan, as Hobbes said, so it would discourage anyone else from using its power to destroy. That means it’s inevitable that any attempt to wrestle that power back will lead to deaths, suffering. Violence is all the Leviathan has. If you take that away from it, it ceases to exist. It doesn’t want to die.

But in culture, the Leviathan has lost its control. I think it was never given control in the first place. I mean you have someone like Louis Absolut – is that what they call him? You know, the Sun King. You have someone like that, and it really looks as if they have an iron grip on the cultural scene as well as everything else. Terror reaching out across the vast web of popular fashion in 17^th Century France. He had to engineer that though, fight for it. And it was not kept. The people were not quite content.

Culture isn’t even what the middle class says it is. Isn’t even what the artists and writers and musicians and promoters and commentators claim. It’s this great… flowing… of happening.

But modern capitalism is powerful enough, the leviathan is strong enough, to dam it and canal it and set up reservoirs. To make it look like it’s owned and controlled. Which, in turn, means you can do things that look like a revolution against that form of ‘government’. And they’ll be received like revolutions – they won’t bring the system down, the leading revolutionaries will become the new despots, or they’ll die.

And this is where we get to the crux of the argument: if you want to kill a revolution, you buy it.

For the socialists and so-called communists that have won revolutions, they were bought with power. For our cultural icons, like Jim Morrison, like Kurt Cobain, they were bought with money – but they didn’t like the result, and slowly collapsed into self-destruction. For many, many other cultural icons, they took the golden handshake, the 30 pieces, they became the new establishment. They are still becoming, on a regular basis, a controlled flow of talent, the new establishment.

You know, all this does actually relate to the Lakota. America bought them with horses, rifles and land. And then took their food. Killed them. Bought the remains with promises of not starving, integration, new careers, new lives. Peace. Drove them to destruction, depression, near-annihilation.

Whatever you might say about Native Americans, they are tough motherfuckers. Because after centuries of shit, there are still millions of them alive, preserving whatever parts of their native identity they can. It’s very phoenix, risen from the ashes. ‘I thought I killed you?’

I find them very inspiring. Hope my British pagan comrades can take the hint.

But as I was saying, the pre-ordained failure of revolutions is written very deep. Machiavelli said it well. Something like ‘a prince can either be feared or loved, and it is far better to be feared than loved’. That’s exactly the sentiment that fucks up revolutions before they’ve even begun. Fear is violence. And violence is what you’re revolting against, preferably. You can’t beat violence by being violent. You know? You can’t start a war for peace. It doesn’t work. But we are told, and we believe, very firmly, that this is exactly what all revolutions are trying to do. We have great annals of revolutionary movements proving this exact misconception.

Thing is, the ones that weren’t based in fear, that actually worked, those ones haven’t been documented. When folks’ dislike of violence and preference for community and co-operation prevails, no-one cares. I could say this is because the historians and the writers who’d talk about it are all part of the establishment, which they more or less are. I think there’s also a more subtle thing going on though: that peaceful co-existence is our natural state. Isn’t it unremarkable, in the most beautiful way, to just be doing what you’re supposed to do? Living your best life? Naturally?

Why would you bother commenting on it if it’s just good and nice to do and…normal? I don’t mean what’s normal now. Normal now is apocalyptic. And sure, there is some merit in talking about the good, the nice. People do it, all the time. I guess the point with that is, it doesn’t make headlines, it doesn’t make book sales, not on the scale that capitalism demands. Right?

We’re no longer at the point where the Leviathan has to crush all opposition. Pretend it never existed. We’re now at the point where your opposition can be sold. That is, modified, packaged, mass-produced. If it’s suitable. And if it’s not, it can be buried – not by ‘the establishment’, but by the people around you. Your friends, families and colleagues. Because it’s boring, basically. It’s not spasmodically explosive enough for their jacked up hormones – their broken emotional receptors.

The Leviathan hasn’t just started buying revolutions recently you know. As I say, there’s infrastructure in place. Dams, canals, reservoirs, for the culture. And for the politics, well, all those revolutions seem well-controlled as well. Orchestrated. Anyone seen the Revolution Will Not Be Televised? Well, yeah, long before Trump, America colluded with Venezuela’s capitalists to kill innocent people and make their oil cheaper, and they called it ‘a revolution’. And we only know about it by accident. Also because it failed, rather spectacularly.

If you stop thinking about individual capitalists and capitalist nations, and start just thinking about capitalism – the profit drive – itself… well then you’re glaring at the Leviathan. And it’s pissed. It doesn’t want you seeing all its tentacles fucking everything beneath the table.

Seriously, if you step back and take a look at the scale of capitalism, sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking it has killed the very form of revolution itself. By purchase. Bought the rights and burned the only scripts.

But that’s where it’s good to remember these phoenix type characters. Being dead doesn’t even mean you’re dead, you know. Other scripts can be written, legal wordings overcome. The flow of culture cannot be stopped and cannot be dried. We want to get back to our goodly state of peaceful co-existence. We want to end this nightmare. That drive will not disappear.