SRF Heavy Industries

There’s nothing more tiresome than a manifesto, a wordy diatribe from some upstart or other who claims his or her reportedly unique–yet more likely to be closer to ubiquitous–experiences and circumstances have finally delivered to him or her Ultimate Wisdom of why the world sucks and has now left him or her with no other, better task than passionately attempting to pin the blame on everyone else. Usually he or she also considers himself or herself, often quite amusingly, some kind of politically or socially aware artist. Of one kind or another. Someone concerned with Morality and Ethics and Aesthetics and Justice. A self-proclaimed expert on all of the above.

This is, guardedly and against all better judgment, a manifesto.

I’m announcing a new socio-political-artistic movement, making a violent and clean break with all previously established social, political, and artistic orders. This movement is called _______________.

First the denunciations. There is no manifesto without denunciations.

We–it sounds better if I say we, even though it’s more literally I, unless I’m merely being hopeful that others agree with me and will espouse these beliefs without equivocation and embrace me as the new Karl Marx–we say we abhor violence, but really we only abhor unjust violence. We’re really quite prepared to accept any and all violence the world allows us to administer on our own collective behalf, which automatically makes it just. For example, the current violent war in Iraq, while brazenly based on ludicrous lies, pathetic deceptions and banal manipulations of the credulous masses–typically something we, as future masters of the world, can get behind as ballsy and clever–does not benefit us directly, as we’re not in power yet and none of us are heavily invested in bloated military contracting or in the oil industry. Therefore people are dying for no good reason and we, as taxpayers instead of corporate investors, are paying for it instead of profiting by it. Cut it out.

Likewise we abhor poverty and disease. Sick people are icky and ugly. We need less of that. Poor people are too poor to buy our works of art or our designer clothing or our books or our DVDs or tickets to see our movies. It’s your fault they’re poor because you don’t give them money. Give them money. And either treat those sick foreign people or stop showing them to us on television. That’s nasty.

The state of education on this planet also sucks rocks, and not particularly tasty rocks at that. We choose to write only in English because we are pompous Americans who wonder why we should bother to learn lesser languages when this one works so well and everyone else on earth seems to be content to learn English so they can do business with us. So. As I say, we write only in English, and half the people who can read English–and ought to be memorizing this manifesto in order to properly indoctrinate their children–would have to look up the world banal, a short word of only five letters, providing they remembered how dictionaries work and could find one. The optimal situation is one in which everyone in the world is capable of reading these words and recognizing the wisdom therein. Math is important too. It would be nice if everyone on the other side of the counter knew how to make correct change when we buy stuff, at bare minimum. We also need more scientists to discover how to make clever and useful toys for us, and more cheaply, too.

We’re in favor of ourselves, of course. We only have so much material and talent in us, so we choose to concentrate on how it’s presented so as to convince others, even by the use of ludicrous lies, pathetic deceptions and banal manipulations of the credulous masses, that our works are ground-breaking and valuable and worthwhile. Selling ourselves to the public is an art in and of itself and, in our undeniably accurate opinion, the only real art.

Oh. I forgot to go back and fill in that blank above. This movement is called … oh, wait.

Nevermind. We’re already in charge after all. As you were.

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