The Poverty of Violence, The Violence of Poverty.

 

Please excuse my constant raves about my book "Punk Outsider" but daily I can't helping thinking about what my underlying themes are. One of them is "violence" as experienced living in the late 20th Century, particularly for those in the lower strata of society, the poor, the marginalised, the rebel, the disaffected.

Each story in Punk Outsider can stand alone and also is connected to the next story, like pearls on a necklace, the whole giving a picture of the protagonist's life and journey, with no destination and no conclusion. Each story depicts some form of violence, all the variations inflicted upon the unlucky, the unwary, the unstable. The first story, "At the Cafe of the Fool's Nemesis" reveals, for me, the greatest and ongoing violence perpetrated upon us street level citizens, the constant harassment by the State and the Police.

The police beat us up, frame us, arrest us, busts us for drugs which they sell themselves, then verbalise us in court and lock us in cells. If we dare complain the pigs are sent in to break strikes at our work-places and protests on the street. The State throws us off the dole, our pensions are cut, there's no jobs to get, it's all been outsourced. If developers lobby the crooked pollies we are kicked from our homes, the State drives us to suicide by hounding us for debts, sends us to war and blows off our legs, and for all the horror never regrets or our trespasses forgets. We're spied on in our homes and as we walk down the street, we are badgered and slandered, depressed with defeat. Our water is poisoned and environment exploited so life is made cancerous and hospitals too crowded to provide relief. We're made into slaves and worked to death, the violence against us is never ending, the air polluted with every breath.

So we turn to drugs as an escape from the terror and tedium, preferring to pass-out and dream of a better world. And some of us die from overdose or we become brain-dead. Or we're murdered by other desperadoes to steal our bread. Street gangs of thugs, skinheads and gronks take out their frustrations by beating us up or are just plain filled with hate for anyone different or who they think don't rate. They hurt us and chase us and kill us sometimes or put us in hospital where we die in the line. We're turned against each other instead of our overlords who laugh as they control us from their castles, we're made into gladiators fighting it out in a pit, for the few crumbs they toss us where we survive in the shit.

We're constantly berated if we fight back, when we have to defend ourselves from a fuckwit attack. We're labelled as toxic, masculine and slack, somehow we should negotiate with a knife in our back. I can't just stand there and let some hoon beat me up, singing peace, love and lentils and sweet kumbayah. I never go out and pick a fight because I enjoy it or I'm mean and cruel, I'll even negotiate if threatened to a duel. But when my friends are threatened and their blood is spilt then I jump into the fray and I don't feel any guilt. When my girlfriends are raped and all I own is purloined then my temper is inflamed and the battle is joined. My friends and I try to live in peace, we don't try to be bosses or become police. For months we put up with deprivation and fear, then one day our backs break by a straw, our eyes fill with tears, and up against the wall, with nowhere to go, we hit back at our tormentors, that's all that we know how to react: when our survival is threatened, our violence is shown.

I absolutely don't condone violence against women, I come from a broken home where my mother was beaten constantly by my drunken father, a returned sailor from World War 2 with PTSD. They fought over money, and his jealousy, sure she was meeting men at the factory where she slaved. And he had a hair trigger temper, little things set him off, he first hit me when I was an infant and cried too much which jangled his nerves. When my mother slapped me for being naughty she called it a love tap, but my father punched me in the face often out of the blue. Unlike my father I never hit a girl, I walked away in a huff. But I admit there was that time when my non-girlfriend got me sacked from a much needed job then spat insults in my face till I exploded with wrath. She was a spoiled, self-entitled brat from a millionaire family who never had to work hard or be in need, but sold clothes like a hobby, rags that she stole from St Vincents or old ladies market stalls. Her mother gives her a few thousand every time she asks and there she was calling me a piece of shit. I agree, I was a bastard male, I grabbed her by her rats nest hair and dragged her around the kitchen, driven to a fury I threw her to the ground. Her boyfriend pulled me off her, and I stormed away, she then insulted my mother and I've never spoken to her again, till this day. I'm not saying their are times women deserve it, but this is what happened and I'm ashamed to say it.

When dancing at many electric rock clubs, Mod, Punk, Grunge or Rave, boys and girls jump in the mosh pit and grapple and punch, shove and pogo, twist and stomp, go-go and hustle, rustle and romp. We get punched in the eye and kicked in the groin, dropped to the floor and picked up again, our nose maybe bloody but it's all in the fun. We spew when skinheads push in with their hate and break a bottle on somebody's skull, or pick on a loner and rough them up, without any mercy, it's really fucked up. Eventually punks get fed up, we've had enough, we beat the shit out of the skins and tell them to fuck off.

Drunks are a particular drag, in a mindless rage they attack for no good reason, just out of plain stupidity and belligerence. So blind drunk they will pluck out your eyes and bite you so vicious you think a brain-eating zombie's got a hold of you. And no amount of hitting them back or kicks in the nuts will get them to cease and desist, they just keep on keeping on, alcoholic violence is the worst of the lot. On the streets, in the clubs, in cafes and in pubs, the drunks are a pestilence, pot heads are like monks, quiet and peaceful, staring into space, it's a crime pot is illegal while booze is sold on every street corner. But the powers that be, who pass the laws and reap the fines, consider grass is the devil because it can be grown in all climes. And as booze is the pigs' drug of choice they can't stand the competition from the high that ganjha gives, they'd prefer car crashes where they can pretend they care, or domestic violence and street fight nightmares. The pigs stash the extra money from bribes and confiscations, and the high prices from all the substances the ruthless control have made criminals of us all.

Being Queer invites violence, from the bigots, the repressed, the cruel and the ignorant. From childhood as a sissy to my youth as a poof, I was beaten at school, on the streets and at home, punched in the face if I squealed like a girl, kicked in the arse if I sashayed and swirled. I was raped several times as a teenager by brutal men who got their rocks off diminishing someone vulnerable with nowhere to turn for help or redress, the cops would only laugh and say "you got what you deserve and if you protest too loudly you'll be under arrest for deviant behaviour." As a sexual outlaw and psycho deviant I grew up a monster, threatened with gaol or shock treatment in a mental hospital. At 19 I was conned into having chemo-conversion therapy in an attempt to cure me of the disease of "homosexuality," in fact given LSD by a fascist cult which blew my mind out of my arse. They attempted to turn me straight, marry me to one of the cult members, then steal any kids we might have to bring them up as good Aryans to take over the world after a nuclear apocalypse. After four sessions I ran away, but I never got my feet back on the ground again and have been a dysfunctional visionary crackpot ever since.

Knowledge makes a person unfit to be a slave. The neoliberal capitalist state has tried to limit access to universities as a means of disempowering much of the populace, dumbing them down so they can't figure out what's going on in the world and can be made obedient, malleable and brainwashed into doing heinous acts like harming others or stupidly allowing themselves to be sent off to war.

The First Peoples of Australia, indigenous Kooris, have been displaced, dispossessed and murdered from the earliest days of the white colonial invasion. They've been enslaved, had their culture destroyed and their children taken away from them. To this day they are gaoled in greater numbers in proportion to the rest of white society, they are still murdered on the streets and killed while in custody. In the face of this intense oppression they have been known to fight back. The violence against these black people is intense. Australia is an apartheid society. One rarely sees black and white people socialising or coexisting in the same space. They are still having their land stolen from them by govt-backed mining companies and pastoralists. Most of the "welcome to country" and paying "respect to Koori elders" done in every govt function and cultural space is PC virtue signalling, one rarely sees a black face in the white crowd. It is traditional to have a Koori do this "welcoming" but most organisations are too tight and secretly racist to actually hire a black person to do it.

So says the Punk Poofy Cat, we live in the violence of poverty the same as a fish swimming in water, the poverty of violence is pushed on us, we are as lambs to the slaughter.

If you enjoy my writing please consider buying my book "Punk Outsider" available at Pass-Port Store and Gallery Oxford Square Darlinghurst

or order from tobyzoates@hotmail.com