from COUNTERPUNCH (CA): 'Planet of Slums, Age of Riots'

From Tottenham to Oakland
Planet of Slums, Age of Riots
By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER


Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…
There are too many to count
Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…
We almost can’t keep the names straight.
Clichy-sous-Bois, Caracas, Los Angeles…


The phrase “riot in London” echoed strangely in my ear, prompting only muted interest. I have been present for a few riots in London and in nearby Cambridge, marches against the war and the perennial Mayday battle between anarchists and the Metropolitan Police. From these to the more recent anti-cuts marches which ended in sporadic clashes with police, my interest has gradually waned, and when I most recently heard this phrase “riot in London,” I expected it would be followed by yet another description of a ritualized protest, with some marchers “kettled” and some anarchists fighting police. This is not simply a criticism: I was not not excited, but I was certainly not excited either.
Instead, the details began to emerge: the immediate spark was the police murder of a Black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot to death by police, and the beating of a 16-year old woman demanding answers from police about Duggan’s death. The fuel for the fire had been long accumulating, however: institutionalized racism in the form of poverty, police stop-and-search methods, and more recent Conservative Party cutbacks in the name of “austerity,” this year’s chosen catchword if “revolution” doesn’t eclipse it entirely.
The similarities with other serious waves of social rebellion then began to emerge with increasing clarity. This was both about Mark Duggan and it was not (here we can agree with the British Prime Minister David Cameron, albeit toward the opposite end), just as the recent rebellions in Oakland in 2009 were both about more than Oscar Grant, just as 2008 Athens was about more than Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 1992 L.A. was about more than Rodney King, the 1965 Watts Rebellion about more than Marquette Frye, and so on. And like these previous moments, the London rebellions are spreading with a degree of spontaneity and a flexibility of organizational forms that has left police utterly confounded. There have already been more than 1,000 arrests, and as hysterical media outlets up the rhetorical ante with talk of “guerrilla warfare,” the police are gearing up for far more.


Mob Hysteria
When economic violence reaches a certain point, social counter-violence soon follows, and yet it is rarely the bankers or the politicians, the purveyors of global austerity measures, who bear the brunt. It begins with name-calling, and no name has more political and historical resonance than “the mob,” the most traditional of slurs. From Philadelphia to London, we are told, the specter of the mob looms, and to the image of the “baying mob,” that keystone of journalistic integrity The Sun has also added the image of the “trouble-making rabble.”
Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: “the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…”
To use the word “mob” is a fundamentally political gesture. It is an effort by governing elites and conservative forces to delegitimize and denigrate popular resistance, to empty it of all political content by drawing a line of rationality in the sand. To make demands is reasonable, but since “the mob” is the embodiment of unreason, it cannot possibly make demands. Never mind the very clearly political motivations that sparked the rebellions around London, as well as the growing and equally political concerns about economic inequality and racist policing: these have been well documented, no matter how little many Britons want to hear it.
But I want to address directly the idea that the riots are fundamentally irrational, as the smear of “the mob” would symbolically insist. Let’s listen closely, let’s block out the torrent of media denunciation and hear what the rebels are saying themselves:


Argument 1: Nothing Else Has Worked, This Might.
When ITV asked one young rebel what, if anything, rioting would achieve, his response was as matter-of-fact as it was profound:
“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?... Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”
As another put it: “you can’t do nothing that’s normal for it to happen right.” In other words, legitimate discontent has not been heard through official channels, and so those suffering turn to unofficial ones. If someone has an effective counter-argument to this, I’m all ears. This is not to suggest that the rebellions have a singular logic shared by every participant, but that there is logic to be found nonetheless.
This isn’t the only time riots have worked, either: in 2009 Oakland, it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant. And this effectiveness extends to the tactical, while the left marches and is surrounded by police, these street rebels have proven far less susceptible to tactics like “kettling”: as The Guardian put it,
'roaming groups of youths cannot be effectively kettled. And unlike activists they will often return to the site of trouble, seeking direct confrontation with police.The looters appear to have been more savvy. Large groups targeting shops have been melting into a nearby estate in seconds at the first sound of sirens arriving.'


Argument 2: The Rich Can Do It, Why Can’t We?
Poor people aren’t stupid enough not to have noticed what’s been going on in the world around them. As capitalist crisis has set in a massive redistribution of wealth has taken place, with banks and investors bailed out at the expense of the population, effectively rewarding them for predatory behavior and leveraging national debt into economic growth. The rich line their profits as essential services and benefits are slashed, and faced with such obvious “looting,” we are somehow expected not to notice.
One onlooker to the London riots puts it precisely:
'This is about youth not having a future… a lot of these people are unemployed, a lot of these people have their youth center closed down for years, and they’re basically seeing the normal things: the bankers getting away with what they’re getting away with… this is the youth actually saying to themselves, guess what? These people can get away with that, then how come we can’t tell people what we feel?'
As one young female looter told The Sun, “We’re getting our taxes back,” and as another told The Guardian, “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters.”


Argument 3: Locating the Riots.
Essential to the imagery of the irrational mob is the insistence that the bulk of the destruction is centered on working-class communities, and here the logic is fundamentally colonial. The poor and the Blacks can’t be trusted: look what they do to their own. Incapable of governing themselves, they must be taught civilization, by blows if necessary. Here again Oakland resonates, as after the riots there a solitary African braid shop, one of many whose windows were smashed, became the media symbol of the ‘irrationality’ of rioters hell-bent on destruction and nothing more. It is worth noting that the poor rarely “own” anything at all, even in their “own” communities.
To break this narrative, we must read the actions of the rebels as well as listening to their words. While working-class communities have indeed suffered damage (we should note that working-class communities always bear the brunt of upheaval), there has been less talk of more overtly political targeting: police stations burned to the ground, criminal courts windows smashed by those who had passed through them, and the tacitly political nature of youth streaming into neighboring areas to target luxury and chain stores. On just the first night, rioters in Tottenham Hale targeted “Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet,” whereas some in nearby Wood Green ransacking the hulking HMV and H&M before bartering leisurely with their newly acquired possessions.
This tendency was seemingly lost on analysts at The Guardian, who were left scratching their heads when the riot locations did not correspond directly to the areas with the highest poverty. And it’s not just the lefty news outlets that let such details slip: Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron observed that:  “The districts that took the brunt of the rioting on Monday night were not sink estates. Enfield, Ealing, Croydon, Clapham... these places have Tory MPs, for goodness’ sake. A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.”
While refusing to denounce the rebellions, socialist thinker Alex Callinicos nevertheless suggests that such looting is “a form of do-it-yourself consumerism… reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era.” This view misses the far more complex role of the commodity during a riot, which was as evident in Oakland as in Venezuela: not only is the looting of luxury consumer items far more complex than Callinicos suggests, but the argument of looting as consumerism would have a hard time explaining both the destruction of luxuries and appropriation of necessities that often ensues
Despite the ideological deployment of the specter of mob hysteria, in the words of one observer, there is “nothing mindless” about the London rebellions.


“An Insurrection of the Masses”
British media has by now largely closed ranks against the rebellion, providing a seamless tapestry of denunciation that oscillates between the violently reactionary and the comically hysterical. But this was not without first making a serious mistake, an error in judgment that pried open but the tiniest crack into which stepped a man who has since become a focal point for resistance to the media hype. Darcus Howe, nephew of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, seems to have inherited his uncle’s acute capacity for seeing through the racist hype about “mobs” and discerning the political kernel of seemingly apolitical daily acts of resistance, of recognizing the new even amid the crumbling shell of the old.


When asked in a live BBC interview to characterize the recent outbursts, Howe spoke the following words:
'I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment…'
When Howe refused to follow the self-generating script, one so well-known that no orders for its reading usually need be given, the flailing BBC correspondent turned first to bad logic and then to ad hominem attack. If Howe was attempting to explain the context of the rebellions he must also be condoning their effects, and wasn’t he, by the way, himself a rioter as a youth? He wasn’t, as a matter of fact, but he was certainly accused of being one: Howe was tried for affray and riot at the Old Bailey in 1971 only to be acquitted. After Howe’s later release on charges of assaulting a police officer, Linton Kwesi Johnson penned a tribute, “Man Free,” which featured the following words
Him stand up in the court like a mighty lion, him stand up in the court like a man of iron, Darcus out of jail, Shabba!
(A video of the interview recorded from a living room has spread like wildfire, with more than 2.3 million hits as I write, and the Beeb has since been forced to apologize, blaming unspecified “technical issues”).


“The Nature of the Historical Moment”
Darcus Howe is right: there is something peculiar about “the nature of the historical moment.” Maybe it began in 1989 in the South, when Venezuelans rose up against neoliberalism in the Caracazo rebellions only to be crushed in blood and fire with up to 3,000 dead. Who was the subject of that near-insurrection, that world-historical detonator which forever transformed Venezuela and unleashed all that has come since? The poor dwellers of the barrios surrounding Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, the product of decades of systematic underdevelopment and the nascent neoliberalism that had accelerated its effects. These were the residents of the slums of which our planet was soon composed, in Mike Davis’s haunting words, and without access to political power or a workplace to strike in, they had discovered the location of their political action in practice: the streets.
But as jobs have moved South, crisis has come North. Or rather, it has been here all along, in the South of the North and the North of the South, but austerity measures have begun to shift the effects of the contemporary crisis to reach a far broader demographic. In this context, critiquing the effects of riots in our historical moment is about as effective as bemoaning the existence of gravity. Those taking to the streets of London and elsewhere are the social product of capitalist restructuring in the long term and austerity measures in the short term. But a historical subject does not gain its status merely from being a product: first it must act.
Darcus Howe’s uncle, the late C.L.R. James, was straightforward in insisting that it is in such action that the new world emerges from the shell of the old, and here I only hope to note some hopeful indications of this. First and foremost is the unprecedented spirit of unity that has emerged in the streets of London and elsewhere. As The Guardian reports:
'…the rioting has been unifying a cross-section of deprived young men who identify with each other… Kast gave the example of how territorial markers which would usually delineate young people's residential areas – known as ‘endz,’ ‘bits’ and ‘gates’ – appear to have melted away. “On a normal day it wouldn’t be allowed – going in to someone else’s area… Now they can go wherever they want. They’re recognising themselves from the people they see on the TV [rioting]. This is bringing them together.”'
This sense of unity is not merely among different sets from different areas, but also extends to the unprecedented multi-ethnic demographic that has participated: poor whites, Black British, African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, South Asians, Muslims, and Jews have all played a role. While some in the Jewish community have complained of being singled out for the participation of Hasidic Jews in the first night’s rioting in Tottenham, this should instead be read against assumptions that the crowd was only Black or only Muslim. All ages have participated as well, with entire families spotted either looting or warning looters of approaching police. The youth, and especially young men, have nevertheless constituted the functional spearhead of the rebellions, with one observer insisting that “this is a movement of the youth, of the young people saying, guess what mister, I’ve got no voice, no future, no leadership.”
But if C.L.R. James saw the potential for unity amid such rebellions, cracks in the shell of the old often produce dangerous shards, and so he was also keenly aware of the equal potential for the opposite: racist backlash among even poor whites. Thus while the more the more liberal wing of white supremacy has appeared in the form of “broom armies” cleaning up the aftermath of the rebellions (wearing t-shirts emblazoned with such heartwarming slogans as “rioters are scum”), “mobs” of white racists like the “Enfield Army” have also emerged, offering their services to the police against the rioters (this alongside the more organized white supremacy of the English Defence League).


“The Left Must Respond”
In a short web comment, Daniel Harvey expressed the sentiment of many on the radical left seeking to walk the fine line between uncritically embracing the English rebellions and falling into the right-wing media strategy of denunciation:
'We have to remain loyal to this crisis. We have to support the eruption of the unheard and the unspoken in our obscene society… the problem is not the excesses o'f this or that action, it is that the rioters are simply not radical enough.  We have to radicalise them further… We have to support the anger, but make the anger political, and thereby turn it into something genuinely powerful and dangerous – a revolutionary moment rather than a riot.'
This is certainly true in one sense, but it runs the risk of neglecting the fact that “the left” is far behind the rebels in the streets. In some key ways, these riots are far more radical and more effective than the left has proven itself to be, and the rebels have certainly surpassed the left in tactical savvy as in sheer bravado. Who is really more radical?
Certainly, “the left must respond” as one op-ed puts it, if only to fight the messaging of the right, but only if we recognize that there is much we can learn from those rushing through the London streets. As one observer puts it, these youth “got nothing to lose,” to which we might be tempted to add, ‘but their chains…’


George Ciccariello-Maher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University. He is completing a people’s history of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and beginning a history of rabbles, mobs, and gangs. He can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.


http://counterpunch.org/maher08122011.html

Petrarch/Zizek: PESTIS ILLA FANTASMATUM- A PLAGUE OF FANTASIES

(SECRETUM, 1350)

Aug. Rite discernis, atqui verificatum est in vobis illud apostolicum: «Corpus, quod corrumpitur, aggravat animam, et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem.»

Conglobantur siquidem species innumere et imagines rerum visibilium, que corporeis introgresse sensibus, postquam singulariter admisse sunt, catervatim in anime penetralibus densantur; eamque, nec ad id genitam nec tam multorum difformiumque capacem, pregravant atque confundunt. Hinc pestis illa fantasmatum vestros discerpens laceransque cogitatus, meditationibusque clarificis, quibus ad unum solum summumque lumen ascenditur, iter obstruens varietate mortifera.

S. Augustine. You discern rightly, and the words of the Apostle are fulfilled in you, which say, 'The corruptible body presseth down the soul and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things. Of a truth the countless forms and images of things visible, that one by one are brought into the soul by the senses of the body, gather there in the inner center in a mass, and the soul, not being akin to these or capable of learning them, they weigh it down and overwhelm it with their contrariety. Hence that plague of too many impressions tears apart and wounds the thinking faculty of the soul, and with its fatal, distracting complexity bars the way of clear meditation, whereby it would mount up to the threshold of the One Chief Good.

Laurie Penny: Panic on the streets of London

http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html


CReATIVE COMMONS

TUESDAY, 9 AUGUST 2011

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?


In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart. 


Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.


Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:


"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"


"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."


Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’


There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.


Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.


Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.


Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.


I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

Wikipedia: Dark Carnival (Insane Clown Posse) [ESSAYS ON ABJECTION]

Dark Carnival (Insane Clown Posse)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Creative Commons Licence)


The Dark Carnival is the mythology of the concept album series used in much of Insane Clown Posse's discography. It is a concept of the afterlife in which souls are sent to a form of limbo while waiting to be sent to Heaven or Hell based on their individual actions. These concepts are related by Insane Clown Posse in a series of albums called the six Joker's Cards. Other artists within the Psychopathic Records label have also contributed to the mythology through various songs and albums. In 2009, the first of a second set of Joker's Cards was released.
Contents [hide]
1 Creation
2 Overview
2.1 Joker's Cards
2.1.1 First deck
2.1.2 Second deck
3 Themes
4 References
[edit]Creation


The concept of the Dark Carnival was inspired by a dream Joseph Bruce had, after the foundation of Insane Clown Posse, in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him.[1] The group decided to incorporate the dream into their newly created persona.[1] The spirits, they decided, would be revealed in a series of albums called the six Joker's Cards, each relaying a message or moral story.[2] The character Bang! Pow! Boom! was created in 2009.[2] The group discussed the character's creation and relation to the Dark Carnival with Robert Bruce before its release.[3] Though the group originally intended to make the character separate from the six Joker's Cards, it was later revealed to be the first of a set of six new Joker's Cards.[2][4]
[edit]Overview


"The way I see the Dark Carnival is it's a place where you have all the evil souls that are going to be going to hell. Some of them may ride the "Murder Go Round" [or] the "Tilt A Whirl." Some of them may ride the "Terror Wheel" [or] the "Tunnel of Love." There are all different shows and rides at the Dark Carnival which will take you to hell."
Joseph Bruce[2]
Bruce describes the Dark Carnival as "a place where you have all the evil souls that are going to be going to hell."[2] It features multiple rides and attractions which assist in this purpose, which are the focus of multiple albums and songs within the group's discography.[2] Each of the Joker's Cards relate to a specific character — an entity of the Dark Carnival — that tries to "save the human soul" by showing the wickedness inside of one's self.[1][2] Bang! Pow! Boom! was introduced in 2009 as the first of a set of six new Joker's Cards.
[edit]Joker's Cards
[edit]First deck
The first Joker's Card, Carnival of Carnage, is a representation of the ghettos and the violence that occurs within them.[5][6] It takes the form of a traveling carnival which releases the same brutality on those who have ignored the inner cities' cries for help.[6] The Card issues a warning against the upper-class and government's negligence toward the lower classes.[5][6]
The Ringmaster, the second Joker's Card, is the overseer of the Carnival of Carnage.[7][8] He leads "the phantoms of the dead" that take the form of the Carnival. The creatures fiercely tear doomed souls from their living bodies and drag them down into Hell.[7] The Ringmaster himself is created through one's own sins, and is one of several who will judge whether a soul is worthy to enter heaven or doomed to eternal hell.[7][2]
The third Joker's Card, the Riddle Box, is another entity used to determine fate.[9][2][5][8] Upon death, a soul enters a dark chamber containing a jack-in-the-box on an old wooden table. The front of the box has a "painted question mark faded with time," representing the mystery of your own afterlife.[9][2] As the handle is turned, a melodic tune begins to play, and when the music stops, the choice is made. The pure see a vision of God, warming their souls as they enter eternal peace.[9] The wicked see an immense fog seeping from the box, "stripping their sanity, as they witness an image of hell, spawned and formed from their own evil; a hideous reflection of their demented souls."[9] The floor falls from underneath them, casting the doomed into the bottomless pit of Hell.[9] The fate determined by the Riddle Box can be found by looking deep within yourself, and can be changed with righteous actions.[9][5][8]
The Great Milenko, the fourth Joker's Card, is an Illusionist and a Necromancer, though acting on dead minds rather than dead spirits.[10][5] His purpose is to try and trick individuals into greed and other such sins.[10] He takes out the worst in an individual and creates powerful illusions in an attempt to cause them to become hedonistic and greedy.[10] The Great Milenko is present within every person, and an honorable individual must fight his magic in order to make it to heaven.[10]
The fifth Joker's Card, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, focuses on the 19 circles of hell, and the morality of man as he is torn between righteousness and evil.[11] Jack "the sinister" and Jake "the just" emerge from the smoke of a candle.[12] The Jeckel Brothers juggle pulsating blood-covered balls representing the mortal life of the dead.[12] For every sin committed, another ball is added.[12] Jack throws Jake curves in an attempt to see a ball drop, and if a soul witnesses Jake drop one of the balls, he will be damned to hell. Souls who see Jake successfully complete the act ascend to heaven.[12]
The face of the sixth Joker's Card is "The Wraith"—or simply, Death. The card featured two "exhibits", Shangri-La and Hell's Pit, which were each given its own album.[13] The Wraith: Shangri-La revealed that the hidden message of Insane Clown Posse's music was always to follow God and make it to Heaven.[13] Hell's Pit toured where those who do not atone for their sins nor follow the ways of Shangri-La are sent, illustrating the horrors of hell itself.[14]
[edit]Second deck
Bang! Pow! Boom! is the first Joker's Card of a "second deck."[4] The entity is a continuous explosion used to clear the carnival grounds when they become too crowded with evil souls.[2] At the 2010 Hallowicked concert, it was announced that the second new Joker's Card would be The Mighty Death Pop![15]
[edit]Themes


The Dark Carnival acts as a way to remind people of the repercussions of their individual actions "in a language that today's world will understand and listen to."[1][16] It denounces actions that members Bruce and Joseph Utsler stand against, including pedophilia, racism, bigotry, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.[16][17] The themes of the Dark Carnival focus on death, morality, heaven and hell.[2]
According to Joseph Bruce, the reason that Insane Clown Posse's lyrics featured profanity and references to violence and sex was because "That's the stuff that people are talking about on the streets. [...] You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them and show you're one of them. You're a person from the street and speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them God has helped me out like this and it might transfer over instead of just come straight out and just speak straight out of religion."[18]
Joseph Bruce also states that "The ending of the Joker Cards, the way we looked at it, was death. Heaven and hell. That's up to each and every juggalo [to decide]. We're not an ultra religious group. I don't go to church or anything. I like to believe in God."[19]
[edit]References


^ a b c d Bruce, Joseph; Hobey Echlin. "The Dark Carnival". In Nathan Fostey. ICP: Behind the Paint (second ed.). Royal Oak, Michigan: Psychopathic Records. pp. 174–185. ISBN 09741846083.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Friedman, David (November 2009). "Juggalos". Murder Dog. pp. 192–198.
^ Joseph Bruce (2009-08-31). "EXCLUSIVE Violent J Interview!!!". Psychopathic Records. Retrieved 2009-11-25.[dead link]
^ a b Insane Clown Posse (Presenters). ICP Seminar - Friday, August 13th - Gathering 2010. [Videotape]. Retrieved 2010-08-20.
^ a b c d e Phoebus Apollo (2004-01-22). "An Intelligent Look at the Insane Clown Posse". phoebus apollo. Retrieved 2009-11-25.
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^ a b c Jon Ronson (2010-10-09). "Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 15 October 2010.
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an info about comments (for Jodi D)

the comments are moderated- which means one administrator (there are 3 of us) has to OK them. Having to do with somehow sensitive stuff and people (I manage an acute cases psychiatric unit, besides working privately as a psychotherapist- also it is a public institution, with the problems thereby) I thought better to retain a measure of control on the comments. Which comments are anyway what I work for, I'd say, in this blog. I never censored anything, by the way.
Ciao, Jodi
Giacomo

Johnny

Johnny had a gentle voice
moved a gentle body
went to fight in a great war
never to be returning


and all the girls cried: step on lightly Johnny!
the beauty you wore won't disappear
Jonnie, Johnnie


saw a movement in the night
had a crimson color
Johnny whispers at my back
"don't fade with the morning"



NOTE: this was written in times of civil war. It didn't simply play with metaphors, just tried to express as much sorrow  as I managed to do. Those were not really easy times, not at all.

'and do not go' (ancient song) [and is this Imaginary, Symbolic, or Real? is jouissance going to be shared? or is it all contained and realized in this image, in this music? And, finally, like I wrote once, will there be some prize for me after all, all of this time?]

and do not go
and do not go
baby don't go
and do not go


our joy's so near
baby stay here
stay with me here
our joy is here