Anarchist Cookbooks

Stopped in a bookstore on the way home from picking up my car. Bought two books. One was a cookbook. I have hundreds of cookbooks. Most all us Anarchists are big on cookbooks. You cannot whip up Freedom without a recipe, motherfuckers.

Other one was a book of philosophy, Kropotkin's "Ethics." Old boy is one of my many heroes. Smart guy from a good family who did good shit his whole life instead of fucking people over his whole long life the way everybody from a good background does nowadays.

Started reading the Kropotkin book in the pub before picking up Sonja, who  was getting her hair done. Here's a quote from a letter of his about why he wrote the book in the final years of his life, under trying circumstances. "I have resumed my work on moral questions, because I consider that this work is absolutely necessary. I know that intellectual movements are not created by books, and that just the reverse is true. But I also know that for clarifying an idea the help of a book is needed, a book that expresses the bases of thought in their complete form. And in order to lay these bases of morality, liberated from religion, and standing higher than the religious morality ... it is necessary to have the help of clarifying books."

My mind was just beginning to engage with Kropotkin's when my fucking phone went off. It was Kitty. "Me and Hunky are coming over to watch the Belmont and the hockey game. We got a trunk load of fucking near free beer fell off the back of a truck. And we want to talk to you about Mexico."

The Belmont was well run, the hockey well played, the beer the best free beer I had drank in a while. We talked about Mexico, looking at printed information and consulting the computer as we made plans for yet another winter holiday as far from my increasingly fucked, yet not quite hopeless, country as we can get.

Not quite hopeless thanks to the rebellious students of Quebec who appear to have a pretty fucking good, if imperfect, understanding of what Aldous Huxley (yet another hero) understood of the subject of ethics. "...The practice of that which is ethically best - what we call goodness or virtue - involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence ... It repudiates the gladitorial theory of existence."

Fuck the gladiators. Fuck them with goodness, fuck them with virtue, fuck them until they can be fucked no more and then fuck them some more. Only ethical behaviour can rescue us from the gladitorial situation hopeless we have all been given free tickets to watch. Give your tickets back. Better outside the Colosseum than inside cheering a fight no one but ethicless motherfuckers like Gordon Campbell, Stephen Harper and Jean Charest ever wins.