An Interview with Jello Biafra on 10.17.2005
Issue 203 / November 2005 More from this Issue
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SLUG: Despite the unpopularity at the polls, it would seem that people are convinced of his roll and that he is doing all these things.
JB: Well the other part of the equation that's scarier still; you'll notice he doesn't like to admit that he's wrong about anything. He's never made any mistakes, and the reason he's never made any mistakes is because he's convinced he's getting all his orders from God -- just like Bin Laden. He thinks he's God's vessel to execute the will of the Almighty. There was a religious-Right DVD produced before the 2000 election called Faith and the Whitehouse that claimed there is a little hill on Bush's toy ranch in Crawford, Texas where he likes to go up and hang out there all alone, talking with God. That's why he has such wonderful ideas and he's never wrong (laughs).
SLUG: If George Bush were Richard Nixon, do you think he would have been impeached by now? Meaning if circumstances now were the same as those of the early '70s
JB: Absolutely. I was in my early-to-mid teens at that point, and I remember very well the whole Watergate hearings -- the best reality show ever! And I remember when news media actually took their jobs seriously and reported actual news; I remember when there were actual differences between the Democratic and Republican Party.
SLUG: Anarchy always seemed like a great war-cry, but in your experience do you think the word anarchy is just a synonym for apathy?
I don't think that, no. I do think the best hope for anarchy is to live your own personal life in such a way that you don't need some baby-sitter like a cop to keep you in line. But whether we've evolved high enough as a species to make pure anarchy work on a mass scale, I have my doubts. I think dolphins are much better than that; they don't seem to need real estate or need to put up barbed-wire fences everywhere, or your so-called "gated communities". But I also stress in my spoken-word shows the need for people to look back at the different revolutions that all went down around the late '80s/early '90s and how some places are really fucked up now and some are measurably better, though far from perfect. The inspiring ones to me remain the former Czechoslovakia and South Africa where, in both cases, nobody expected the dictatorships to fall when they did. Luckily, the front-line, hardcore radical opposition had some idea of what the hell to do if that power vacuum ever occurred. The same can't be said for Romania, the former Yugoslavia or someplace like the Congo.
I think the radical, political underground here is a long way from having any real consensus or concept of that they do like and what they like to do. Everybody knows what we don't like, but okay, how do we fix this shit? So I encourage people to do little brain-stretching exercises where you think, "Okay, what would I do about this particular issue if I was President or governor right now? What would I have to do if I had a chance to get this mass transit system down to Provo actually built? What would I do if I were in place of the boss I hate so much at work? How would I run the place better and make it work?" There's not going to be magic answers every time, but it can't help but make you smarter. At least you'll have better questions when you look around and start asking. Hopefully, in the long run, people identify what they know and are good at that they can contribute if one day corporate dictatorship falls and, either we run this place right, or the loony rednecks with the monster trucks and the gun racks and the Confederate flags run it instead. We can't let that happen.
SLUG: I like your statement about punk on "Those Dumb Punk Kids (Will Buy Anything)" off Sieg Howdy! I thought you got it perfect: the old-school ripping on the new-school and the new-school trying to pretend
JB: I'm not into this whole "school" thing, at all. When punk, as we know it today, first broke out, there was no goddamn school. We were blowing up the school; we were blowing up the Hotel California and all those other stupid clichs that made the '70s such an empty, stale time to live in (laughs). You probably didn't have to come up in a country-rock town. Talk about never being able to overcome child-hood wounds. What torments me on a daily basis is that the Eagles still exist and people still listen to them.
SLUG: (laughs) and pay $300 a ticket to see them.
JB: And now it's spawned ten million pop-punk clones who want to be the next Green Day or Blink 182, but basically just sound like the Eagles with loud guitars: the same whiney vocals and the same stupid lyrics. As soon as I hear that coming out of my stereo, out the window it goes! Your time on my Demo-CD Gong Show is finished (laughs)!
JB: Well the other part of the equation that's scarier still; you'll notice he doesn't like to admit that he's wrong about anything. He's never made any mistakes, and the reason he's never made any mistakes is because he's convinced he's getting all his orders from God -- just like Bin Laden. He thinks he's God's vessel to execute the will of the Almighty. There was a religious-Right DVD produced before the 2000 election called Faith and the Whitehouse that claimed there is a little hill on Bush's toy ranch in Crawford, Texas where he likes to go up and hang out there all alone, talking with God. That's why he has such wonderful ideas and he's never wrong (laughs).
SLUG: If George Bush were Richard Nixon, do you think he would have been impeached by now? Meaning if circumstances now were the same as those of the early '70s
JB: Absolutely. I was in my early-to-mid teens at that point, and I remember very well the whole Watergate hearings -- the best reality show ever! And I remember when news media actually took their jobs seriously and reported actual news; I remember when there were actual differences between the Democratic and Republican Party.
SLUG: Anarchy always seemed like a great war-cry, but in your experience do you think the word anarchy is just a synonym for apathy?
I don't think that, no. I do think the best hope for anarchy is to live your own personal life in such a way that you don't need some baby-sitter like a cop to keep you in line. But whether we've evolved high enough as a species to make pure anarchy work on a mass scale, I have my doubts. I think dolphins are much better than that; they don't seem to need real estate or need to put up barbed-wire fences everywhere, or your so-called "gated communities". But I also stress in my spoken-word shows the need for people to look back at the different revolutions that all went down around the late '80s/early '90s and how some places are really fucked up now and some are measurably better, though far from perfect. The inspiring ones to me remain the former Czechoslovakia and South Africa where, in both cases, nobody expected the dictatorships to fall when they did. Luckily, the front-line, hardcore radical opposition had some idea of what the hell to do if that power vacuum ever occurred. The same can't be said for Romania, the former Yugoslavia or someplace like the Congo.
I think the radical, political underground here is a long way from having any real consensus or concept of that they do like and what they like to do. Everybody knows what we don't like, but okay, how do we fix this shit? So I encourage people to do little brain-stretching exercises where you think, "Okay, what would I do about this particular issue if I was President or governor right now? What would I have to do if I had a chance to get this mass transit system down to Provo actually built? What would I do if I were in place of the boss I hate so much at work? How would I run the place better and make it work?" There's not going to be magic answers every time, but it can't help but make you smarter. At least you'll have better questions when you look around and start asking. Hopefully, in the long run, people identify what they know and are good at that they can contribute if one day corporate dictatorship falls and, either we run this place right, or the loony rednecks with the monster trucks and the gun racks and the Confederate flags run it instead. We can't let that happen.
SLUG: I like your statement about punk on "Those Dumb Punk Kids (Will Buy Anything)" off Sieg Howdy! I thought you got it perfect: the old-school ripping on the new-school and the new-school trying to pretend
JB: I'm not into this whole "school" thing, at all. When punk, as we know it today, first broke out, there was no goddamn school. We were blowing up the school; we were blowing up the Hotel California and all those other stupid clichs that made the '70s such an empty, stale time to live in (laughs). You probably didn't have to come up in a country-rock town. Talk about never being able to overcome child-hood wounds. What torments me on a daily basis is that the Eagles still exist and people still listen to them.
SLUG: (laughs) and pay $300 a ticket to see them.
JB: And now it's spawned ten million pop-punk clones who want to be the next Green Day or Blink 182, but basically just sound like the Eagles with loud guitars: the same whiney vocals and the same stupid lyrics. As soon as I hear that coming out of my stereo, out the window it goes! Your time on my Demo-CD Gong Show is finished (laughs)!
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