Hello, and welcome to my website. RANT is basically where I babble on about whatever I want - mostly punk rock, diy culture, anarcho-socialism, and general politics. There are no chats, no guestbooks, no comments sections - just RANTS.
no future: the would-be and successful assassins of 2024
A registered Republican who donated to ActBlue. A man whose most coherent political stance was supporting Ukraine. And now, allegedly, a libertarian-leaning tech bro-space type with cogent criticisms and chronic back pain.
Acts of high profile violence, such as the mass shootings that have become almost boring to Americans, feel like they should have some kind of ultra-radicalized politics behind them. That was the case with the Oklahoma City bombing back in the '90s. That was the case with the Kenosha shooting back in 2020. Political motives, especially alt-right motives, are a common narrative, which makes the three high-profile assassination attempts in America, 2024 - one of them successful - incredibly off-putting for the usual think-piece media dumbasses.
These would-be assassins and assassin all have one thing in common: politically speaking, they're just as confused as the country right now.
Thomas Crooks, whatever his immediate motive, clearly wavered in his political self-identification. Ryan Wesley was delusional about his ability to affect the war in Ukraine but had few other real politcal beliefs - the fact that he's the closest we have to a classic political assassin is strange to say the least. Luigi Mangione should have, on paper, been at risk of falling into the alt-right rabbit hole with his interest in crypto and anti-woke leanings - instead he took aim as the UnitedHealthcare CEO and succeeded.
Mangione might be the most instructive example of this flavor of assassins. He was floating through life, with a do-nothing office job, chronic back pain, and a clear interest in classic internet doomerist folk heroes (the Unabomber) and productivity hackers (Paul Lindy). It's a soup many people around his (and my) age swim in - the world is burning, even the securely employed are living on the edge, nothing seems to be getting better whether you look to ulta-individualist self-improvement gurus or anarcho-marxist lite keyboard collectivists. There are a million things to get angry about and very little you do seems to make a difference in how it all shakes out.
If you lean the way I personally do, you join your local Food Not Bombs and carry Narcan like that'll save the world. If you're a libertarian-leaning individualist like Mangione, you might decide that the best thing to do is shoot one person that'll send a message. The message he decided to send, no doubt influenced by his chronic back pain, was the CEO of the worst health insurance provider in the United States when it comes to denying claims.
Copycats are always a concern when it comes to high profile crimes - that's been proven by the respons to the media handling of mass shootings. One thing Mangione DIDN'T like about the Unabomber was his targeting of innocent people, and in the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Mangione put that into a concrete action. I don't personally like the idea of copycats, but at least these copycats might tone down the senseless deaths that come from mass shootings.
The public response to the UnitedHealthcare assassination has made one thing very clear: if you feel like you have no future, the best way to make people notice you and rally around your causes is to assassinate a guy nobody's inclined to like in their own private doomerist hellscape. If BCBS goes back on their whole "ok, I guess you can have anesthesia actually" thing, I would be very nervous if I was on their board.
Current Review
REVIEW #6
Angst - Lite Life (LP, 1985)
At some point in the early 2000s, I read an interview with Pixies lead singer Francis Black where he referenced this album as an influence. I was REALLY into Pixies back then, so of course I wanted to check it out. Unfortunately, this was the early 2000s - pre-Youtube, pre-streaming, and pre-Greg Ginn giving a shit about any bands that weren't Black Flag, Husker Du, Minutemen, and one of his dozens of side projects.
At that point, Angst's first album, Lite Life, had been out of print since the mid-'80s. It had only ever been released on vinyl and cassette, and with the state used cassette sales were in at the time it would have been a miracle if I'd found a copy that I could sort of, kind of play at the time. The state of online music was fragmentary - only a fraction of even major label artists were available on iTunes, pirate sites closed with frightening regularity, and mp3s of even middlingly successful indie artists were incredibly difficult to find in the wild.
I did manage to get a couple of Angst's songs - a cassette rip of "Love Dissolves" was one of them. But I hadn't been able to listen to the whole album until around 2016, when a vinyl rip made its way onto Youtube. Greg Ginn finally allowed the old out-of-print SST catalogue onto streaming and Youtube earlier this year. If there's one advantage to be found in the streaming age, it's that albums like this can be more widely heard, either through legal or less-than-legal means.
Because Lite Life is an awesome little album. Like Everything Falls Apart-era Husker Du, it's definitely a missing link when it comes to tracing the American indie scene from First Wave New York punk to New Wave to hardcore to, well, what it eventually became in the late '80s and early '90s. The harder edge of Sonic Youth and co. - its punk predecessors so to speak - comes and goes, mixed in with gestures towards country ("Glad I'm Not In Russia") and radio-friendly power pop ("This Gun's For You"). It's easy to see how Angst's genre-blending sensibilities with a distinct rock tone inspired Pixies, who in turn inspired countless members of the grunge scene.
With how much I genuinely love this album, I can't help but mourn its obscurity. SST has its underappreciated artists through a combination of label money troubles during its peak years, flawed contracts leading to countless lawsuits, and Greg Ginn's general disinterest in any part of his label's legacy that doesn't include Greg Ginn. But you don't have to have blatant label mismanagement and Ginn's stubborn refusal to allow bands to capitalize on their own work to cause unjust obscurities - there are plenty of labels that simply ceased to exist. They were liquidated, sold off for parts, and the music - which is, after all, why we care about them at all - was either never released or fell into a sort of strange copyright black hole.
Nothing would please me more than for bands like Angst to get their day in the sun. The easiest method would obviously be for bands to have a way to get their music back into their own hands, so they could be able to negotiate reissues, remasters and remixes, and streaming rights on their own terms. Anything to avoid the kind of difficulty that used to plague 11-year-old me when I was trying to find songs off Angst's Lite Life.
