NEWS: Garbage Truck Morality by Jonathan Shaw

CULTURE: Garbage Truck Morality by Jonathan Shaw

Imagine you're a crusty old survivor of long, hard heroin addiction and chronic alcoholism. Imagine you're finally clean and sober, but still slowly waking up from a long nightmare sleep, recovering, a day at a time, from all the fucked up cultural programs and violent childhood traumas, years of warped perceptions and surreal lifestyles that set you on the path of self-destruction in the first place.

Imagine you look in the mirror one day and see a cynical old dude who mostly dislikes people and just prefers to sit alone by the sea reading, writing and studying. You see someone who loves to body surf during the day, while others are at work, and ride a motorcycle through the warm night air, consorting with criminals, whores, drug addicts and other social-outcasts while most people are asleep or out drinking and partying as the Empire crumbles and implodes.

You can probably imagine how it might be a bit of a stretch for such a man to appear "well-adjusted" in the overall context of the human society he inhabits. He's finally given up trying to fit into that bizarre, baffling social structure altogether...After all, being "well adjusted" in an insane world doesn't exactly represent the highest pinnacle of sanity to people like me. For the average "well-adjusted" person (if there could ever possibly be such a creature) somebody like me might even appear somewhat "dysfunctional." I've been called that shit a few times over the years.

Fair enough. I admittedly don't fit the popular conception of someone who "functions" easily in the mainstream of human affairs. I'm not a "team player" and I certainly don't strive to fit in with Nine to Five society. I don't read the paper, don't watch the news, don't even own a fucking television. Never voted in an election. Never went to high school or college or held a real job. Never got married or raised any kids or "settled down[/ii]."

Human society as a whole has always been a big letdown to me. And it seems more than ever now to be collectively brainwashed into a steadily deteriorating perversion of "reality" by the highly contagious scourges of TV, a bullshit Obedience Training system called "education" and the insanely ridiculous mind-fuck matrix of worldwide poli-tricks and politricksters; an incredibly complex soap opera played out by a creepy cast of characters that make the Cosa Nostra look like a bunch of ineffectual little boy scouts.

It seems that most of human society has been so efficiently conned into clamoring like lost children for some illusory sense of "security" in this big collective hallucination of a world, that this surreal little consensus "reality" has actually manifested into some very sick shit indeed now...The kinda shit that would have the good George Orwell doing back-flips in his grave. Big Brother is upon us with Homeland Security, which has a surveillance camera on every fucking street corner and satellites patrolling the stratosphere like floating robot storm trooper armies.

It's like some horrible sci-fi movie shit. But this shit is real -- whatever the fuck that means anymore, especially in the light of the most cutting-edge quantum physics. Surreal is more like it... Bogus "terrorist attacks," and now a carefully manufactured "financial crisis" and bullshit "swine flu" scaremongering, to go along with all sorts of other creepy, paranoia-provoking scenarios, strategically orchestrated to generate even more fear. Fear always seems to work like a charm for rallying popular support for insane practices that will clearly lead to the extinction of the human race if not perceived by the masses very, very soon. Shit! Ya gotta ask yourself, what the fuck is going on here?

Ahh, but why sweat it? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, right? Why even think about such depressing shit when you can just play the game and cast your ineffectual little vote for "CHANGE" and give yourself some vague sense of "HOPE"...that warm and fuzzy opiate feeling of security and power and control and...freedom? And why worry or think about any of that nasty old pessimistic, kooky "conspiracy theory" shit -- even when it's right up in your face all day long now in the countdown years to 2012? Especially when you can simply avail yourself of the good old "democratic process," or so many other new opportunities for distraction and mindless entertainments available to the thundering human herd living under the inevitable gathering storm clouds?

So many great world-changing political causes to devote your energy to, so many new iPod selections and cable channels of sports and celebrity gossip to choose from...Life has become a fucking fast-food climate-controlled safety-insured spectator sport for the masses! Wheeee! Aren't we happy with all our fucking freedom? Who wants to talk about the fucking Apocalypse?

"Not me, baby! I'm too busy voting for 'CHANGE' and watching Paris Hilton's scabby cunt on my big new flat screen plasma TV! I can't think about all that depressing 'Conspiracy Theory' stuff or I might get freaked out and become all 'dysfunctional', God forbid... "

"My doctor told me I was suffering from 'bipolar' depressions and then he gave me this groovy new 'mood-stabilizing' medication. I feel so much better now..."

How many times have ya heard that shit? Of course our sacred medical healers never tell us that taking psych meds for deep-seated existential pain is like kissing a fatal gunshot wound to make it all better...The instinctive, gut-level human reaction to all this oppression and mass mind-control seems to manifest more and more these days in waves of massive alienation, confusion, mental meltdowns, nervous breakdowns, incurable addictions and of course... "bipolar depression," along with a million other fancy new ailments cooked up by a greedy, transnational medical/psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel in order to sell us a shitload of deadly, soul-snatching, mind-warping medications...Just another way of sedating an uneasy population in order to make people feel more "well-adjusted" to the intrinsically insane world we've created for ourselves through our own collectively fucked up, ego-driven thought processes to begin with.

But the chemical lobotomy approach ultimately deals only with the symptoms of such mass psychic unrest -- never its root causes. I personally have never met a sensitive, thinking, feeling human being who didn't exhibit, at one time or another, all the characteristics of what is so glibly termed "bipolar" in the medical racket's latest hocus-pocus jargon.

All these so-called “psychiatric conditions” are certainly nothing new. “Hyperactive” or “Bipolar” or “ADD” are convenient psychiatric labels for the basic existential pains of psychic growth intrinsic to the human experience -- they've existed ever since man first crawled out of his cave, looked up at the sky and said, “What the fuck?”

And it's pretty interesting when you stop to think how such fancy terminology for an intrinsic element of the human condition didn't even exist 20 years ago in the popular psycho-medico baffle babble! These recently-coined blank prescription-pad terminologies are used to generate vast profits by pushing industrialized dumbing-down cocktails to further befuddle and pacify an already largely clueless and massively exploited world population as we're led right to the fucking slaughter...

In the words of Voltaire: "All certain tyrants over souls wish for the men they teach is that they should have unsound minds."

Food for thought? Maybe, but who is encouraged to even really think anymore? And why dwell on any of this stuff anyway? Especially when we're kept way too busy trying to keep up with the fast-paced lives we gotta live now just to keep up with all the bills we gotta pay and all the other shit we gotta swallow in order to just tread water in today's Global Village? It's looking more and more like a fucking Global Concentration Camp to me... But why dwell on negativity when we can just take our little "mood-stabilizer" pills and get on with our busy little sheep-like routines? Mentally straitjacketed and sedated. But happy...Contented like fucking cows...

Maybe it's time to dust off The Matrix and watch it again. And pay attention this time, kidz! It's not really a Science Fiction movie, ya know...

And then there's Religion...The greatest brainwash mind-fuck swindle of all time! Look at all the millions of Jesus addicts ya got crawling the planet nowadays! Shit, man, I'd rather be sucking on a crack pipe. At least there's a bit more dignity in smoking crack...and that ain't saying much, since there's about as much dignity in a crack pipe as in the noble liquid that gathers at the bottom of a garbage can. Believe me. I know.

Which reminds me... my old friend Bonge, a New York City Hells Angel, calls that shit Garbage Truck Scum.

Just about any urban biker can tell you all about that toxic slime trail that leaks out the back of garbage trucks as they make their nocturnal rounds, laying a deadly snail trail of slippery slime right down the middle of the road. This noxious shit seems to always accumulate in great quantities in the exact worst places. Usually at a crossroads or on street corners where the garbage truck makes a sharp turn, causing a good amount of the stuff to come sloshing out the side of the truck, instantly converting the curves into snot slick toxic traps for unwary bikers to soil-sample a tasty face-full of the dreaded Garbage Truck Scum. Bonge and I have both fallen pray to its perils, and both got the road-rash scars to prove it.

Garbage Truck Scum...Made from hydraulically compressed maggot-infested rotting food juices, tax returns, baby diapers, poodle shit, utility bills, crusty socks, parakeet vomit, vacuum cleaner liners, dusty old family albums, phlegm-encrusted snot-rags, bloody tampons, cigarette butts, expired parking tickets and love letters, ass-wipe paper, used syringes, old mildewed clothing and sports equipment, worn-out short-circuited battery-powered, smegma-filmed dildos, sweat stained pissy old underwear, old hotel room bibles, broken umbrellas, squashed cockroaches, dead mans shoes, flattened rats, cum-loaded rubbers, used geriatric diapers, cat box contents, defunct goldfish and other expired household pets, rusty utensils, dust bunnies, monkey turds, deceased animals of all species, including the occasional human body, or body part -- most often in the form of that exotic urban fauna, the aborted fetus... All this and more, among other strange and wonderful delicacies and heart-swelling reminders of the nobility of mankind's grand, heroic honors and achievements here on our dear old Mother Earth.

Ahhh, Garbage Truck Scum! Makes the soul soar high with pride, just for being a member of the great human family!

Now you might be wondering by now just where I'm going with all this talk of politics, religion, education, entertainment, a sedated, dumbed-down world population and Garbage Truck Scum...Well, here's my point. I was talking about how most "well-adjusted" people might be tempted to judge someone like me as dysfunctional, right? No job, no wife and kids, no car, no TV, no vote, etc...Well, I would contend that, due to the aforementioned mind-control plagues and general human laziness and stupidity, most "well-adjusted" people are, for all intents and purposes, SLAVES -- with a shit load of Garbage Truck Scum sloshing around in their skulls for brains!

Of course it's only fair to remember that all of us -- myself included, no doubt -- are slaves to greater or lesser degrees. And most people stay in perpetual bondage to "self" to large extent all their lives. I believe that's just the kind of party we all came to when we were spewed out onto this hairball planet in the temporal form of human beings. And we do pick up so much baggage along the way...opinions, memories, addictions, traumas, fears, educations, political and religious training, cultural programming. Prejudices, positions to defend, debts, fallen arches...

Cyril Connolly put it like this: "We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self." I must sadly agree, even as I continue searching for a way out like a rat scrambling around in a maze of earthly illusions. But everybody knows the easiest way to see the route out of a maze is to view it from above...So there's a little clue to finding our way out of the Matrix. Rising above our own limited perspectives, our own self-imposed mental slavery.

But, out of all the many and varied types and tribes of slaves ya got here on earth, there are NONE so pathetically and inexorably enslaved as that great majority of ignorant, unquestioning well-adjusted bleating sheeple who still believe that they AREN'T slaves!! Those guys are the biggest fucking slaves of all! They haven't even taken the first step to freedom. They still can't even see the shackles that bind their minds...

Ironically, it's usually those very same freedom-spewing fools who are the first ones that folks like you and I gotta watch out for these days... Cuz they're the ones who -- still living in painful ignorance of their own enslavement, and loudly proclaiming themselves "morally upstanding" and "free" -- will gladly spend so much of their "free" time actively condemning other people's chosen lifestyles and even their very freedom of expression.

At the extreme end of the brainwashed and enslaved, ya got the rapidly proliferating masses of fundamentalist and "Born Again" Christians swelling their ranks into a veritable plague here in Brazil and everywhere else. While these folks are certainly not the only ignorant, mind-controlled shitheads creeping around the planet now, they are about the most obnoxiously visible and vocal of all those wonderful, well-adjusted police-state sheeple who know just what's best for you and me and everyone else too.

Religion, of course, has always been used in the hands of two-faced moralists, tyrants and pathological control-freaks as an instrument of repression and mass mind-control. Just ask Martin Luther King and Malcolm X...Ask John Lennon or Bob Marley. They were all persecuted and murdered because of their dedication to voicing unpopular truths to the masses.

Jesus Christ himself got his ass crucified for his trouble -- then had a magnificently dumbed-down worldwide brainwash doctrine erected in His name just for good measure! A sacred doctrine of Garbage Truck Morality which, oddly, and quite contrary to the actual teachings of The Christ, teaches nothing of personal power or individual accountability whatsoever. Shoot the messenger and praise the Lord Jesus -- and pass the blame for everything you are accountable for onto... the Devil. Nice one!

And once you're "saved" by "Jesus" you get to just go on your merry way to rob and rape and lie and cheat and steal, all in the name of God now, of course...

In some rural parts of northern Brazil -- an area especially heavily infested with the evangelical Bible Belt Garbage Truck Morality churches, it is still widely held to be a man's Christian duty to deflower his own twelve-year-old daughters before turning them out into a life of commercial prostitution. Sounds great to me! Ahhhh, the glorious sacred Christian sanctity of the family!!! More and more, the drug lords and the paramilitary police organizations who tacitly support them -- two sides of the same coin here in Brazil -- have been "saved" by Jesus and converted to Evangelical Christianity, even as they continue to rob and kill and terrorize the cowering middle class work force... with God on their side.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Garbage Truck Morality!

As the globalist New World Order expands its multi-national police state far and wide with increasingly far-reaching consequences to the collective heart and mind of the human herd, these bible punks have coincidently taken over the media to spread the Christian ego-babble further and wider than ever before. Yeh, just turn on the brainwash box any time of the day or night here in Brazil, and there they are, the TV preachers! Smug looking suit-and-tie used-car salesmen, pimping salvation to beat the fucking band. And pimping is the right word for it, since that good old religion is about as true to transcendental spirituality as a whorehouse is to love.

Brazil, which for centuries has been the world's largest Roman Catholic nation, is now a prime target of this new, improved Garbage Truck Morality mind-control movement -- as if the Vatican's long-established sanctified stranglehold on people's souls here wasn't gonna be enough to keep the restless population in line. A veritable biblical plague of fundamentalist Christian churches has emerged here over just the last few decades, imported right out of Bible Belt Amerikkka, coincidently -- and driven like a spike into the heart of the already long-exploited, impoverished slave-labor colonies of third-world Latin America...

And it's hardly surprising, of course, that such mindless superstitions would go over so well in a country whose spine-shivering poverty, well-organized oppression and long-standing institutionalized corruption have long paved the roads to mass oppression, ignorance and a widespread cultural suspicion of any who dare to think and act outside the box. A society run by a rich elite whose favorite pastime seems to be looking down their expensively sculpted noses at the "lower classes" from a position of "moral authority." It's an old trick, the class system. And religion. Divide and conquer. But it's the same shit jumping off all over the world now in varying forms and formats peculiar to each country, each in its own particular cultural context. The whole horror show has truly gone "global" on our lazy old asses now.

The bottom line? Well, you figure it out...Just take these brain numbing Christian doctrines and put 'em together with worldwide democratic political systems that only exist to baffle and oppress the people they supposedly serve, an educational matrix which suppresses independent research and rational thinking in favor of mass-scale unquestioning indoctrination, a highly unscientific mainstream scientific mafia which offers no better solution than handing out mind-control pills like jollypops in response to perhaps the deepest collective existential crisis humanity has ever known, and financial institutions whose only goal is to rob and plunder what's left of the world's dwindling resources.

And as the scourge of Garbage Truck Morality lumbers along its cumbersome path, spilling its toxic shit trail across this major crossroads of human destiny... it don't exactly take a gypsy fortune teller like me to tell ya what we all have to look forward to in the immediate future if humanity doesn't pull its collective head out of its collective ass real fucking soon...



(c) Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Jonathan Shaw began writing as a contributor for the LA Free Press in the late 60s. In the early 70s, he trained as a tattoo artist in Long Beach under the legendary Bob Shaw. He opened his own joint, Fun City Tattoo, in 1976 in New York's East Village. After traveling the world extensively as a tattoo artist and managing editor of tattoo magazines, he retired from tattooing in 2001, moving to Rio De Janeiro to begin his next chapter as a full time writer. His first book, Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes, is available from Amazon.com. To read more of Jonathan's writing check his blog at ScabVendor.com. You can also follow Jonathan on Twitter @jsfuncity.

I actually suffer from bipolar disorder, which is hardly a laughing matter. Still, I do agree that people are quick to assign disorders and labels to people who likely do not have them and instead are being poisoned by external factors rather than internal brain chemistry. Finding proper ways to deal with the mixed messages we receive already conjoined with the vast amount of negative news and information we are bombarded with on an exponentially growing basis requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline. It is no easy feat.

As for the conclusion of this piece, I have to say that it's quite easy to believe that this is a fallen world that continues to worsen by the minute, but sometimes I question if that's merely a reflection of how unhappy some of us are with where the world has evolved.

Hanlon's Razor really helps me in situations like this. It reads: never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don’t assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one — until you can show it isn’t you.

Thanks alot! I appreciate your comment.

Okay, okay. So we're all fucked.... now what.

The best advice I've been able to come up with so far boils down to something like this:

Free your mind...
1. Turn off the TV.
2. Don't vote.
3. Don't riot.
4. Don't bitch and moan.
5. Do get educated and investigate the world you live in. Do some deep independent research outside the mainstream media and the highly questionable scholastic system... You can start by googling "Zeitgeist" and watching that brilliant and thought-provoking two part documentry film a few times if you haven't already done so.
6. Do pay attention to your own god-given, built-in Bullshit Detector.
7. Do dare to pass on whatever you learn... Tell your friends.
8. Do try to keep and maintain an open mind to new ideas and information at all times. The future of the human species may very well depend on your open mindedness and willingness to search for the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. More will be revealed...

I vote.
But I also don't bitch and moan. too much.

Zeitgeist is a cool film and a good idea but like everything I'd watch it as the tendency for cults to arise is always there.

The thing is everyone has their own version of reality and we try to make it expand by finding like minds or trying to create a larger version, through conquest, destruction, construction and all our little realities bump into each other daily, and for the most part I like it.
With out medication unless Jim Beam is considered "medicine".

Well there's so many arguments that could be made. I think people should be able to decide whether or not they want to vote. And I think alot of the research that JS is suggesting, if done extensively, would lead people to the conclusion that voting is probably NOT a great idea. But I guess the people should be able to decide that for themselves. I love this piece, there are obviously a few things I don't agree with, but the spirit of it is pretty fucking spot on.

As Herbert Spencer put it, ''There is a principal which is a bar
against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principal is contempt prior to investigation.''

being tricksters 'to some extent' sounds like being 'a little pregnant' to me... either the political system is rotten to the core or it isn't. How can it be rotten 'to some extent'?
and if it is rotten to the core (which I believe it obviously is) how can a problem be solved at the same level of consciousness which created the fucking problem to begin with.
'Democrat' and 'Republican' are just convenient labels used to trick people into believing there's any 'hope' of change by supporting a SYSTEM which is inherently faulty.
Albert Einstein put it pretty nicely when he said (to paraphrase) that a good definition for insanity is repeating the same experiment again and again expecting a different result...
If you are willing to do some independent research into the Obama scam, you will quickly see that things aren't quite what they appear to be there, and that the rabbit hole is a lot deeper than most people want to believe...

To me ( as commie loving, queer strutting UK resident) there's not much of a difference between Democrats or Republicans, so the way I see it your point is moot. Democrats are certainly not what could be described as "left wing" or "socialist".

I'm not sure I agree with some of your points, and I don't think that "conspiracy theory" (as you yourself call it) is somewhat representative of the "Truth" (it's a flawed way of looking at history IMHO) but I love the sentiment nonetheless.

Also, if you hate TV so much I recommend you watch The Wire. That alone will tell you more about the kind of system we live in than any number of fringe works.

Sheesh.

People were saying "every year is worse, and the end is nigh" 8000 years ago, and they've been saying it ever since.

EYE ROLL

While I agree for the most part, Bi-polar is a renaming of the old "Manic depressive" and those of us who do suffer from it, really do suffer. Where I agree is everyone's kid has ADD/ADHD, or my new favorite, Aspberger's Syndrome. Nine times out of ten, little Johnny doesn't have a true illness, he's a douchebag because he has shitty parents with piss poorwho don't really want to deal with him, and it does a real disservice to that one kid who really does.

It also ignores the fact that there's scientific indication that the human brain is evolving faster than the rest of our bodies, largely due to societal factors and likely producing things such as--ta da!--newer psychological issues.

The more I'm thinking about this piece, the more holes I'm seeing. Even if something has only been around for twenty years, just because something has only been around for twenty years doesn't mean it's FAKE!

I definitely do agree with what you're saying, on the tip that when I was 15 or so I was hospitalized because my hormones were so out of control that I went a little cookoo.
However, what i think Jonathan is saying is more about the ways they TREAT these problems. In my experience being in the nut bin for quite a while, through the use of psych meds, I was dumbed down to the point of being pretty much a vegetable.

The point being that the lithium and the seroquil were not the fucking right way to have dealt with it. And I had no choice in the matter, being under 18. I should not have been sedated and made to sleep all day and drool. That's just fucking WRONG. And doctors these days are definitely more inclined to avoid the problem which should probably be worked out through intensive therapy and self-appraisal. They just want to dope you up and send you on your way.

PS-- I have a brother who has "Aspbergers" and really in my opinion he's just a fucking weirdo, God love him. I find his antisocial tendencies to be absolutely adorable, and not unlike my own. I guess people don't want to accept that they popped out little freaks. They'd rather just see it as a mental disorder and play that card.

After all, it's easier to sit at the playground and say "Oh sorry Johnny threw a Hot Wheels car at your kid's face, he just has asbergers" than say "Oh sorry Johnny threw a Hot Wheels car at your kids face, he's just an antisocial asshole."

Y'know, who is served by columns that say "voting is bullshit, the world needs to shape up 'cuz it's goin' down the toilet MAAAAAAAAAN, and oh yeah, Aspberger's is fake?"

Ooooo! I know! I know!

It's the status quo, isn't it?

WELL, HOLES OR NO HOLES, AT LEAST YOU'RE ''THINKING''... THAT'S CERTAINLY A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, ESPECIALLY FOR SOMEONE WHO SEEMS TO HAVE SO MANY PREFABRICATED OPINIONS GOING ON. IF YOU KEEP THINKING LONG ENOUGH, WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU MIGHT EVENTUALLY STUMBLE UPON -- ESPECIALLY WITH AN OPEN MIND... KEEP GOING...

I think the bigger picture here is that the world is in dire need of a spiritual band aid and ignoring that by focusing on other things will just prolong the problem.

What if "The Matrix" is showing on TV? Do I keep the TV turned off? Or do I watch it and risk being TV-mindwashed?

The dilemmas.

I thought that was pretty good too. It pays to keep a sense of humor at all times, hence the overall tongue-in-cheek tone of my piece...
That being said, I would like to stick my dick in the fan again by attempting to answer the question...
Here goes:
If you didn't have a TV in the first place, you wouldn't know it was on and you'd be obliged to watch it by other means, thereby dodging the insidious, malevolent subliminal programing and creepy subtext infused into the collective unconscious more and more these days over the airwaves...
Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!

Did someone pay real money for this article?

'Cause, seriously, I for one don't need a random ex-junkie to tell me to wake up, turn on and drop out (to mangle the phrase).

Oh, and Zeitgeist makes a great bloody mary. Usually some nice bikes outside, too.

If ya meet a random ex-junkie, suck his pee-stick. genius!

You managed to find your Caps Lock again. Also genius.

Unless you were trying to insult Stiles by referring to him as a "genius" facetiously. That would just mean you needed to learn how to type better.

Say, "genius," why don't you go ahead and tell me who fabricated my opinions for me, then? Use examples from what I've written, and show your work. Beyond that, the old "keep a sense of humor" dodge is shite, because I think this whole thing is nothing if not hysterical.

Consider pre-writing or peer editing.