The Revolution: Quotations from Revolutionary Party Chairman R U Sirius [Paperback]

If I were to make a list of books which turned out to have profoundly influenced my sensibilities, one of these books would be the Mondo 2000 book, A User's Guide to the New Edge, edited by Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu. Packed full of weird ideas at a time when I was hungry for weird ideas (1992), this book's ultimate gift to me was the knowledge that information could be psychedelic and that technology could be used for transcendental ends, lessons which set me on a set of investigations that I will probably never tire of conducting.

Partially out of gratitude, and partially out of genuine interest, I've always kept one eye on whatever Rucker and Sirius have been up to in the post-Mondo era (Queen Mu, alas, appears to have vanished into obscurity). Although they rarely tap into anything which gives me the same "whoa" factor that Mondo 2000 gave me, their current exploits are often pretty interesting (Sirius' Neo-Files site, for instance, is usually worth exploring). So when I saw, a few years back, that Sirius had formed a political party and published a little red book of quotations, I was intrigued. I put it on my Amazon wishlist and it finally came this past Christmas, roughly two months after George Bush won (or possibly stole) the 2004 elections.

Perhaps bad timing. Sirius' plan to run for President may have seemed like a giddy long-shot stunt back in 2000, when this book was published, but today it just makes me nostalgic for a time when we felt optimistic enough to try giddy long-shot stunts-aka the Clinton era. The both-parties-are-the-same argument that undergirds a lot of Sirius' rhetoric here-the same argument, you'll remember, that provided for much of Nader's groundswell-has gotten a serious trial-by-fire over the past four years, and no longer really holds much sway with me: if there were ever a time where lesser-evilism looked like an attractive philosophy, it's now.

All the more disappointing, because I mostly find myself in agreement with Sirius' basic political credo. The book opens with a "Nineteen Point Party Platform for National Politics," which nicely codifies that peculiarly Californian blend of beliefs: part anarcho-libertarian, part old-guard Leftist. (Sirius is enough of an idealist to say "we will repeal five times as many laws as we pass" but enough of a realist to say "you can't have the withering away of the State until you've built other defenses against total rape by the multinationals.")

The book is witty, insightful, and occasionally provocative, but there's no getting around the fact that recent political events have made it feel powerfully dated. Sirius exhorts us to fight the right evils-the National Security State, the prison/industrial complex, the global trashing of civil and human rights-but it seems to me that we're officially past the point where the daffy pranksterism of a faux Presidential campaign might qualify as a viable weapon.

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