Part of getting old is having to sit back and take stock of what the world has done with the ideas you supported enough to feel like you bear some responsibility for. At that point you’re either going to feel very proud of yourself, or you’re going to feel a fool who wishes he could have seen how things would turn out before making those decisions.
I think it’s probably true that I’ve been a Leftist all my life. Though I had no clear idea what being Leftist meant until this year, I can probably make a good case that my general philosophy of life has been almost entirely Left leaning. It has basically revolved around what is popular or conservative is bad, and off the wall creativity that breaks conservative restrictions is good.
Lets jump into The Wayback Machine and see how all this started. Actually, “The Wayback Machine” kind of marks our destination, as we are going back to the era of Sherman & Peabody.
Welcome to the mid to late 1960’s, a time which I was not aware was fairly dominated by Communist ideas which were being sold to me as an extension of The American Way. You know, it was just the American thing for each generation to tear down the old and try to build something better. And I suppose most people of my generation bought it, hook line & sinker, that there was just something gawd awful wrong about the post war world that existed between the late 40’s and early 60’s. It was just chock full of oppression of women, Black people and youth.
The youth thing was something I actually felt. The idea that people of my parents’ generation hated “Those awful kids” made me feel self-conscious whenever I had to approach a strange adult. The thought never occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t young people they hated, but rather those radical upstarts who were out to condemn and destroy everything they’d spent their lives building and defending. It never occurred to me this might be a kind of self-defense mode that they were being forced into by kids acting like the very Communists they’d gone to war 2 or 3 times to prevent from causing this very kind of situation.
No, I didn’t get that, because at the time I had no idea what Communist ideology was really like. But it was being taught to me and becoming a part of my nature through everything I absorbed from Hippie Pop Culture. And I suppose somewhere along the line I somehow took in the idea that I was always supposed to go with the thing that was oppressed or marginalized, and reject that which was popular with the masses as shallow and mindless.
Ah, but this backfired the day I asked my father where we could go to buy more 78’s, and he went into this spiel about how they didn’t make 78’s anymore, and how Rock & Roll had killed the kind of music that was on them. And right then and there I accepted the conservative idea that Rock & Roll was bad for the Cultural Marxist reason that it was oppressing this other kind of music.
Thus we have this odd combination of conflicting influences that was trying to convince me that the world before the Communist influenced Hippie movement was bad, while I was totally rejecting the Pop Music of the day for Swing Music and Old Time Radio shows. But what does a 10 year old kid know about such political anachronisms?
It was not until 1975 when I was 13 that I rebelled against myself and got totally into the Pop Music of the day, which was by then heading into the AOR/Disco era, with all my older brothers and their friends dumping their older Hippie Rock albums on me as they all simultaneously dropped their former Communist ideas, became Conservatives, got into Country Music and ran off to join the army. What sell outs, I thought, not realizing that this indicated there was something inherently immature about Communist influenced Hippie values.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but even during that one era in the mid 70’s where I was totally down with the Pop Culture of the day, those Communist influences I’d absorbed earlier were effecting how I approached it. This is why you will find, even to this day, that probably half or more of the recording acts in my record collection are Black acts.
Now, I just started to write that it wasn’t like there was anything about Black Music that White people couldn’t get into in those days, but that is a total untruth based on my own acquired tastes. It discounts that, not only did it totally piss my parents when I started bringing home Parliament/Funkadelic albums, but by the end of the latter years of the 70’s there was so much outrage over the Pop charts being swamped with Black Music to the point that it seemed like White Music was going to disappear, that separate radio stations for White and Black Music were established, and blowing up Disco records at stadiums typified the mood of the day.
But myself, being an idiotic Liberal who had to be forever in the underground of music and trying to be down with the oppressed culture, made myself fluent in Black Music, DJing all Black parties, thinking I was cool for trying to break down barriers and totally ignoring that the only reason I was wanted there at all was as a comic oddity to be laughed at by the nicest of those people, gotten over on and made sport of by the average of those people, while being looked on as an object of extreme hatred by the worst of those people.
I didn’t realize at the time how much like the White kid in “Car Wash” I was. You know, the one always reading from his little red book of Mao quotations, and expecting the angry Black Panther type dude to relate to him. And the end result of all this misguided idealism was the the Black Panther type dude in my real life ended up beating my head open with a 2×2 and leaving me for dead in the street, the extent of his hatred for Whitey felt in every blow.
At the same time all that stuff was going on, I was leading another comparatively secret life – my life as a Furry. And remember, this was the 70’s. There was no Furry Community. And I was into something that was so anti-establishment I felt like I was the only one into it, save for the Furry authors I regarded as my mentors. And I saw myself taking their previously unrelated ideas and putting them into a new movement of my own invention. And one of the names I concocted for this invention of mine was, believe it or not, “Furry.”
And while I was doing that I was also being influenced by all that Hippie Music that had been dumped on me, among which were these acts that were called “Art Rock,” or “Progressive Rock” by the infidels corrupting the purity of the movement. And from this music I was extracting the spiritual philosophy of the Communist influenced Hippie movement, which I determined to smash together with the Furry thing and create a religion/philosophical movement that would change the world.
Never did the thought occur to me that the world did not need changing. The irony is that I was thinking all this at a time when society in America was at the highest peak it would ever reach. The Hippie Revolution had done its job. The war had been put down and the concept of equality was firmly embraced and would have, if left alone, have ended all discrimination and social marginalization by the end of the 80’s.
But this is what happens when Communist influences are at work in your life. No matter how successful you are at making equality the status quo, once what you wanted to become the status quo has done so, you have to immediately become discontent with it, because the status quo always equates to Bourgeois.
Using music as a parallel for how everything else went, the Bourgeois music of the 60’s (basic Rock & Roll/Pop) was oppressive in its simplicity. This was oppressive to musicians who wanted to create more complicated music forms and express deeper ideas than the common “My baby done left me.”
Just as in the modern SJW movement, the idea was to breakdown these common, easily understood music formats, and replace them with modern art type music. And if you listen to John Lennon’s contributions to that idea, or even George Harrison’s “Electric Sounds,” or even the early efforts of Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream, you can see that where this movement was headed was the total destruction of everything anybody could recognize as music.
It actually says in the liner notes of a Tangerine Dream boxed set that “Even songs had become Bourgeois.” Basically at the height of the Art Music movement you just got up on the stage and made any noises you wanted for 20 minutes or so, and nobody on the dance floor cared because they were all stoned out of their minds.
Actually, if you think about it, acts like Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, and Kraftwerk can all be looked on as influences of the modern Techno/EDM movements. And this is just one more parallel that can be drawn to my generation and what’s happening today. It’s all caught up in that Cultural Marxist idea that you criticize and deconstruct everything until it becomes so unappealing that no one in their right mind would want it. And this gradually conditions entire generations to living outside the bounds of all good taste and common sense.
Music itself becomes Bourgeois. And suddenly the upcoming generation doesn’t want to hear anything that conforms to any acceptable theory of music. They want Anti-Music.
Fortunately for the Hippie generation, there was a general world backfire to this deconstruction. And you had a counter movement to make Pop Music more sophisticated rather than deconstructing it to pure noise.
Just as I had backfired into the Swing era, Rock musicians backfired into Classical, Jazz and Folk, mixing it up into a new form of Electric Classical Music, which probably flew at the time because it was too complicated for the stoners to hear it as anything but more incomprehensible noise. But to more learned ears it was taking the ideas of melodic beauty, symphonic structures and emotional pathos into the new generation.
It was glorifying White European musical ideas, which was seen by some as uncool compared to the Eric Clapton’s and Led Zeppelin’s of the era who glorified the musical ideas of obscure Black musicians. And the music establishment instantly favored Blues Rock over Classical Rock, which seems to fit with ideas of the modern SJW movement.
This Blues Rock glorifies an oppressed minority, therefore it should fill The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. But this Classical Rock glorifies White influences. It also tends to sound acceptable to the ears of that older oppressive generation that the revolution is trying to put down.
Thus, this Blues Rock would be awarded and heralded to the end of time, but Classical Rock would be wiped from the musical history books as much as possible, as if it had been some kind of traitorous disgrace.
Fortunately they were not able to completely expunge it from the history books, because too many people liked it when it was new. Like the music of acts like The Carpenters which was openly criticized for catering to the ears of that cursed older generation, it remains too popular to ever be made to completely be forgotten.
But this is where things get really screwy. Eventually it occurred to the aging Hippie generation that they missed Classical Rock, and they tried to start a movement to revive it. But Communist influences prevailed, and the musicians trying to carry on the ideas of those older groups were confused.
What was the purpose of the music of that era, they pondered. Some groups were all about Classical structures and creating vivid symphonic pictures, while others were all about deconstruction of musicality. And, while Classical structures are pretty hard for less educated bands working out of garages to deal with, deconstruction is easy.
So, the Prog Rock revival movement ended up being mostly Communist in nature. The overwhelming drive of most Neo-Prog bands is to be Anti-Music in a deceptively musical way. The ideas expressed in the majority of Neo-Prog are expected to be overwhelmingly dark and negative. Imagery is generally horrible. Depressing albums are praised in the Neo-Prog fandom. Happy music is dissed, and thus avoided. Excessive creativity is also dissed.
As with Techno, in Neo-Prog you are expected to drone on for 30 minutes or more in a boring fashion that allows people to totally zone out. There is not really anything there striking enough to grab and hold anyone’s attention. But so long as the instrumentation of 70’s Art Rock bands is used, as will as a few imitative chord structures, fans are lulled into the illusion that they are enjoying the continuation of the “Progress” that is expected from what some call “Progressive Rock,” but really they are supporting the deconstruction of it, the unrelenting criticism of it, the reducing of the most artistically expressive musical concept ever invented to a movement of regressive, mind-numbing noise that contains not a scrap of the originality or inspiration that has kept those old albums from the 70’s perpetually on the best seller lists.
All of those attractive attributes have been criticized away in Communistic fashion. They want this music that was both criticized and loved for its White inspiration and appeal to the Bourgeoisie without those elements they regard as oppressive, creating in the process a kind of music that is the ultimate oppression to people, young or old, who feel an affinity to that original music Neo-Prog falsely claims to be a continuation of.
It has taken me many years to understand this. I have only just learned how the American tendency to deconstruct its culture is Communist in origin. Actually, it seems to me that the political idea of Right and Left is all wrong. What you really have is Up and Down, the left being down, deconstructing its way towards Hell on Earth, while the Right aspires to reach up for Paradise on Earth. Their ideas rarely achieve anything towards that goal, because Christianity can be just as deluding as Communism, but the good intention is there.
Moving on into the 80’s, I continued acting on my Hippie Communist influences. I was coming of age, and I determined that the insistence of society that I become an adult was oppressing me. Actually, it was. I wasn’t dealing with it well at all, and it was depressing me no end.
Thus another rebellion was required. I would refuse to stop watching cartoons. In fact, I would not only watch cartoons, I would prove to the world why cartoons were an acceptable interest for adults. I’d work them into my Furry thing and do startlingly adult things with them.
Unfortunately, by the end of the 80’s, other Communist influenced people had deconstructed and destroyed 80’s TV cartoons. See, this Commie influence just runs rampant in society. It doesn’t unite people or keep them working together towards deconstructing the same things, or elevating the same things. So sometimes we end up working against each other.
This left me in the 90’s looking for a new way to show my rebellion against the oppressive norms of society. So, when I discovered the fledgling American fandom for Japanese animation, I thought this stuff showed the oppression of the American animation industry that was keeping animation from reaching its potential as an entertainment medium for all ages, and overnight I became a major player in the bid to get Anime recognized as something that should be respected.
I can’t say the Anime fandom exactly warmed to my revolutionary attitude. Looking back on my writings at the time where I talked about strapping on one’s bunny ears and saving the world feels quite cringy at this point. But, I unfortunately can’t say it was an unsuccessful revolution. I, in fact, got everything I set out to achieve.
I helped raise Anime from one of the most obscure little fandoms on the face of the Earth to a mainstream phenomenon that today is pretty much a household word. And I’ve never been sorrier to have achieved anything in my life.
The moment Anime hit the mainstream, it started deconstructing itself. Practically overnight it went from an art form with unlimited potential to something that existed for nothing but cannibalizing itself for the sake of pandering to its lowest common denominator audience. Not only were the new titles unwatchable, but the presence of Anime in the mainstream caused American animation to start deconstructing itself as well.
Well, actually, American animation has been deconstructing itself since the advent of TV animation in 1950. By the 2000’s American animation had already deconstructed to a point where it was having difficulty maintaining its ability to be taken seriously, and the Anime influence added to the mix was not helping.
You see, I failed to take into account that American animation and Japanese animation are the products of two entirely incompatible cultures. No American company is going to give you an Urusei Yatsura, and no Japanese company is ever going to give you a Last Unicorn, not without Americans standing over their shoulders telling them how to do it. The Japanese just don’t understand that kind of Christian based story telling. Anime is ultimately useless as a level up for American animation, just like flooding the Western world with Muslims is ultimately useless as a level up for social equality.
Incompatible cultures don’t get together and blend just because you force them into the same space. They either become antagonistic towards each other, or they end up diluting each other and destroying the finer qualities of both, because ultimately it’s what makes something unique and incompatible with other things that gives it what makes it popular or desirable. Once these desirable cultural oddities are eliminated, you’re left with something totally superficial. And you need look no further than any dubbed and Americanized Anime to see how that works.
As a foreign culture thing that could be viewed as educational, I believed Anime could have been an incredible asset to the West. As a venue of cheap over sexualized super-heroines and macho bad-asses with personalities of cardboard, it’s worse than useless. It contributes to nothing but the dumbing down, the deconstruction of young people; young people who couldn’t throw a stone in this country without hitting something that wouldn’t be more culturally enriching than whatever Anime is currently being raved about on social media.
But, this also fits with Communist influences. You see, I was successful. And in Cultural Marxism, that’s a bad thing. I was used to Anime being this obscure thing that I could view as being oppressed into the underground. Suddenly I saw it flouncing around in the mainstream, flaunting it’s superficiality. And what ever’s in the mainstream must be oppressing something. So, the minute whatever underdog you’re backing hits the mainstream, you have to drop it like a hot potato. Is it any wonder I constantly find myself fearing success in any endeavor I undertake?
This left me in the 2000’s wanting to get back to my Furry thing, and there was now this fandom supposedly for what I’d been doing all those years. So I wanted to get in on that. What could be more obscure or oppressed than a cultural idea I was used to being the only one into?
It was, in fact, a fandom found at the extreme bottom of The Geek Hierarchy. The most misunderstood and hated group of people on the internet. And, not having learned my lesson from my Anime experience, the first thing I did was start trying to elevate the Furry Fandom to a position of respect.
And again, I was somewhat successful. I was, in fact, sitting on the very verge of seeing Furry Fandom overcome its oppression and earn its rightful place among all the other fandoms for respectable art forms, when who should show up at the very last second but the new wave of Cultural Marxist Hippies known as SJW’s.
And what did the SJW’s see? They saw a fandom on the verge of hitting the mainstream. And anything that’s successful must be oppressing somebody. Therefore it had to be subjected to insane levels of criticism and deconstructed.
Let me contemplate that idea for a moment. Deconstructing Furry. How does that work? Furry is, in and of itself, a deconstruction of society. It’s part of The Sexual Revolution. Just like everything from Anime Fandom to Gay Pride parades, Furry is one of those things born out of the revolution of my generation rebelling against the oppression of a stifling Right Wing society that holds concepts of sacred normality.
My generation . . . Well, actually, my older brothers’ generation, set out to lay waste to those concepts of normality. In a way, Furry Fandom and all that clings to it is the ultimate victory of that revolution.
Crap, if Furries can be accepted as “Normal,” off the wall has become the new normal, and the total turning upside down of the oppressive Normies by the radical individualists has been achieved. Furries fulfilled the God damn Cultural Marxist Manifesto. And if all the deconstruction had stopped right there, Marx would have been vindicated, and it’s quite possible a paradise of total freedom and equality would have resulted from all this deconstruction.
But now we see the ultimate folly of Cultural Marxism. Because the new generation of Cultural Marxists, raised by my deluded generation, was not about to be cheated of its own revolution just because the goal had already been achieved.
Hell no. Now the Furries were seen as oppressing the SJW’s. How dare we have this community where everyone is accepted and tolerated? How dare we offer concepts that obliterate all awareness of race? SJW’s need race. They need to be able to call people racists and Nazis, even if there are no racists or Nazis, because this new revolution is their destiny, and anything that denies them their destiny is oppressing them.
Thus, the deconstruction of society must continue beyond all reason. It’s not good enough that Gay people have been liberated. Gay people must now be made to look as stupid and offensive to reason as possible. Female equality? Not enough. Feminists must be shown as the most hateful and undesirable misandrists imaginable. Zero tolerance for White people. They must be attacked for just standing there being White. And God save you if you dare to sit there being male. Everyone must embrace Transgenderism, especially children. All national cultures must be utterly destroyed. And, finally, the ultimate deconstruction, pedophiles must be normalized.
See why I’m so terrified of success? I got everything I ever wished for. I lived to see the paradise that was Furry Fandom. I lived to an age where true freedom of people to be anything they wanted to be was achieved. I lived to see the underdogs elevated to the top of the heap. But it’s a self fulfilling prophesy of Cultural Marxism that success means you become the very thing your indoctrination demands must be destroyed. Thus, any time a generation of Cultural Marxists achieves success, another generation will be waiting in the wings to reduce their achievements to ashes.
Where do we go from here? Hell, I guess. I don’t see any way of avoiding that now. No sense even contemplating it. Instead, I’ll wrap this up by pondering where I went wrong, and what I should have done; what the world should have done.
As I see it, America used to have a pretty good work ethic. But, after WW2, parents got this notion they were going to hand their children a world where everything was already provided for them. And recently I’ve formed the opinion that you should never give anybody anything, because gifts are never appreciated. Only things one has to personally work for are appreciated.
The world that was handed to my older brothers was a spectacular post-war paradise. It had some bugs that needed to be worked out, but in time those bugs could have been fixed without totally trashing the gift. Indeed, I have to say the entire history of America is one of people taking for granted and under appreciating what was supplied by the previous generation. Thus, with or without the help of Cultural Marxists, Americans have been deconstructing America from day one.
Maybe, if someone could get in a time machine and kill Karl Marx before he had a chance to write anything, and then save John Kennedy, most of the horrors of the last 120 years could have been avoided. Assuming the first item did not accomplish the second one. After all, no Marx, no Communists. No Communists, No Nazis. No Nazis, No WW2, no Soviet Union, no Vietnam, no Cold War, no reason for a Kennedy assassination.
It’s amazing to think of the incalculable harm caused by the writings of one man. He makes Hitler and Stalin look like pikers. And yet, somehow people look on this man in a positive light. I mean, the ultimate comeback to being called a Nazi ought to be to call your accuser a Marxist. But what can you do when so many people in the world are acting under the influence of Marx and don’t even realize it, as I have so recently discovered.
But, alas, no time machine is available, and Marx was in my life by the time I was old enough to listen to the radio, or watch the TV. There was no way to avoid him.
The only thing I can think that would have changed my life would have been if somebody had realized early on that my talent, my drive, the destiny I was fated for, was selling records. If I could have gotten a job working in a record store early on, I wouldn’t have had so much idle time for lofty thoughts, grand dreams and white knight causes. I’d have just gone on to live a normal life, with normal aspirations, among normal people, and maybe I’d have done well. Instead, I now have to look back on a wasted life of distorted reason with no accomplishments I can feel proud of.
I can no longer pretend to know what I believe, or even what constitutes a solid right or wrong. Was I wrong to stand up for Gay rights, woman’s rights, Black rights and any other cause that came down The Pike? Would I have done it if I’d foreseen that in the end the only fool who ever gave a damn about Martin Luther King’s dream was me, and everyone else would eventually stomp all over that dream to finally get the chance to put chains on Whitey? Doesn’t sound very much like enlightened self-interest to me.
No, I would not change anything I’ve done. I still believe in The Dream and stand against anyone, White or Black, Left or Right, who spits on it.
This is not about race or politics. This is about the survival of civilization and the human race itself. Equality is necessary for peace, and anyone who is not happy with equality is the enemy of peace.
Equality does not mean that all people are the same. Equality means accepting the fact that all people are unique and must be allowed the same freedom to go their own way, to find what they’re good at, what they love to do, and what they want to be. It’s called the pursuit of happiness. Deal with it.
Happiness is not pursued through the artificial elevation of Affirmative Action or Forced Diversity. Happiness is pursued by seeking out your unique identity, your special talents and limitations. It is not pursued by letting bigoted idiots impress on you the things they think you ought to want.
And if you disagree with this philosophy, I am not concerned with what you think of me, or what names you might call me. You should be more concerned with what I think of you. Because The Dream shall rise again. And when it does, all those who stand in opposition to The Dream are going to be the ones being shouted down and dismissed as racists and Nazis.
My advice to anyone who cares about the survival of this world is to just stop deconstructing things. Recognize that the only reason for thinking something good must be bad, or something bad must be good, is because somebody who has no business putting his hands in your head is screwing with your brain. And you ought not to let them do it.
Let your own common sense be the judge of right or wrong, and when something is just carrying a good idea too far, or making light of something that is really, really bad.
Recognize that being fair means that everyone has the same opportunities, according to the talents they can demonstrate. Don’t keep a future Einstein out of school because you want to give an opportunity to a kid who shows no talents at all, other than not looking White. And by the same token, don’t let an Einstein of color be kept out of school because all the seats are taken up by unqualified kids who got in for displaying color, rather than potential.
The idea is that everyone is in a race to determine the best runners to take over as the leaders of the next generation. Let these people be judged by their skills and the validity of their ideas, not by the handicaps you set up for them.
Put down this Cultural Marxist bigotry that says all people shall be judged by their race. It’s racism, damn it. Do you really think you can avoid being called racist by going along with racists? Sooner or later this idiotic crap is bound to come back and bite you in the ass. If only by unleashing a new generation on the world that is totally incapable of assuming its responsibilities.
Just stop the deconstruction now. Either go back to the equality that had been achieved by the Hippie movement or go back to where things were before the Hippies and start over from there. I’ll not even complain if you want to go all the way back to the signing of The Constitution and start from there. Just, as you proceed forward, be guided by principles of appreciating and building on what went before, and don’t ever be fooled into thinking a philosophy of endless deconstruction and trading good for bad leads anywhere but to the social trash heap.
Furry Times 