Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

The threat of wide­spread vio­lence and unrest descends upon the coun­try, thanks again to a col­lec­tion of actors vicious­ly opposed to civ­il rights, and in many cas­es, to the very exis­tence of peo­ple who are dif­fer­ent from them. They have been giv­en aid and com­fort by very pow­er­ful enablers. Vet­er­an activists swing into action. Young peo­ple turn out by the hun­dreds week after week. But for many ordi­nary peo­ple with jobs, kids, mort­gages, etc. the cost of par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­stant protests and civ­il actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, giv­en many awful exam­ples in recent his­to­ry, the cost of inac­tion may be also.

What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huer­ta, after all. Few of us are rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and few may wish to be. Not every­one is brave enough or tal­ent­ed enough or knowl­edge­able enough or com­mit­ted enough or, what­ev­er.

The prob­lem with this kind of think­ing is a prob­lem with so much think­ing about pol­i­tics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as supe­ri­or beings—to do every­thing for us. This can mean del­e­gat­ing all the work of democ­ra­cy to some­times very flawed indi­vid­u­als. It can also mean we fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand how demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments work.

In the video above, Noam Chom­sky address­es the ques­tion of what ordi­nary peo­ple can do in the face of seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able injus­tice. (The clip comes from the 1992 doc­u­men­tary Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of peo­ple are work­ing all the time, and they’re work­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties or their work­place or wher­ev­er they hap­pen to be, and they’re build­ing up the basis for pop­u­lar move­ments.”

In the his­to­ry books, there’s a cou­ple of lead­ers, you know, George Wash­ing­ton or Mar­tin Luther King, or what­ev­er, and I don’t want to say that those peo­ple are unim­por­tant. Mar­tin Luther King was cer­tain­ly impor­tant, but he was not the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. Mar­tin Luther King can appear in the his­to­ry books ‘cause lots of peo­ple whose names you will nev­er know, and whose names are all for­got­ten and who may have been killed and so on were work­ing down in the South.

King him­self often said as much. For exam­ple, in the Pref­ace of his Stride Toward Free­dom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 most­ly ordi­nary, anony­mous peo­ple who made the Mont­gomery Bus Boy­cott happen—“While the nature of this account caus­es me to make fre­quent use of the pro­noun ‘I,’ in every impor­tant part of the sto­ry it should be ‘we.’ This is not a dra­ma with only one actor.”

As for pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als like him­self engaged in polit­i­cal strug­gle, Chom­sky says, “peo­ple like me can appear, and we can appear to be promi­nent… only because some­body else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “help­ing peo­ple devel­op cours­es of intel­lec­tu­al self-defense” against pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Respond­ing in a 1963 inter­view above to a crit­i­cal ques­tion about his meth­ods, he coun­ters the sug­ges­tion that non­vi­o­lence means sit­ting on the side­lines.

I think of love as some­thing strong and that orga­nizes itself into pow­er­ful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a strug­gle that means we sit down and do noth­ing. There’s a great deal of dif­fer­ence between non­re­sis­tance to evil and non­vi­o­lent resis­tance. Non­re­sis­tance leaves you in a state of stag­nant pas­siv­i­ty and dead­en­ing com­pla­cen­cy, where­as non­vi­o­lent resis­tance means that you do resist in a very strong and deter­mined man­ner.

Both Chom­sky, King, and every oth­er voice for jus­tice and human rights would agree that the peo­ple need to act instead of rely­ing on move­ment lead­ers. What­ev­er actions one can take—whether it’s engag­ing in informed debate with fam­i­ly, friends, or cowork­ers, writ­ing let­ters, mak­ing dona­tions to activists and orga­ni­za­tions, doc­u­ment­ing injus­tice, or tak­ing to the streets in protest or acts of civ­il disobedience—makes a dif­fer­ence. These are the small indi­vid­ual actions that, when prac­ticed dili­gent­ly and coor­di­nat­ed togeth­er in the thou­sands, make every pow­er­ful social move­ment pos­si­ble.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in August 2017 when white suprema­cists (aka the pres­i­den­t’s “many fine peo­ple”) marched in Char­lottesville, VA. It speaks no less direct­ly to the trau­ma of the cur­rent moment, so we’re bring­ing it back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky & Har­ry Bela­fonte Speak on Stage for the First Time Togeth­er: Talk Trump, Klan & Hav­ing a Rebel­lious Heart

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Ava DuVernay’s Selma Is Now Free to Stream Online: Watch the Award-Winning Director’s Film About Martin Luther King’s 1965 Voting-Rights March

Ava DuVer­nay made her award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary 13th free to stream online. Now comes her film Sel­maThe 2014 film chron­i­cles Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.‘s cam­paign to secure equal vot­ing rights with an epic march from Sel­ma to Mont­gomery, Alaba­ma, in 1965. Ava DuVer­nay writes on Twit­ter: “Para­mount Pic­tures is offer­ing SELMA for free rental on all US dig­i­tal plat­forms for June, start­ing today. We’ve got­ta under­stand where we’ve been to strate­gize where we’re going. His­to­ry helps us cre­ate the blue­print. Onward.” You can watch Sel­ma on YouTube/Google Play, Apple, Ama­zon Prime and oth­er stream­ing plat­forms list­ed here. The trail­er appears above.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Ava DuVernay’s 13th Free Online: An Award-Win­ning Doc­u­men­tary Reveal­ing the Inequal­i­ties in the US Crim­i­nal Jus­tice Sys­tem

Watch Free Films by African Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion … and the New Civ­il Rights Film, Just Mer­cy

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Watch Ava DuVernay’s 13th Free Online: An Award-Winning Documentary Revealing the Inequalities in the US Criminal Justice System

Ear­li­er today, we high­light­ed some free cin­e­mat­ic offer­ings online, includ­ing the new civ­il rights film Just Mer­cy, and a slew of films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion made by African Amer­i­can direc­tors. Then we stum­bled upon this. Above, you can watch Ava DuVer­nay’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed film 13th. Com­bin­ing archival footage with tes­ti­mo­ny from activists and schol­ars, DuVer­nay’s doc­u­men­tary focus­es on the U.S. prison sys­tem and “how the coun­try’s his­to­ry of racial inequal­i­ty dri­ves the high rate of incar­cer­a­tion in Amer­i­ca.” It won Best Doc­u­men­tary at the Emmys, the BAF­TAs and the NAACP Image Awards.

Update: Dur­ing the month of June, DuVer­nay’s film, Sel­ma, is also stream­ing free online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Ava DuVernay’s Sel­ma Is Now Free to Stream Online: Watch the Award-Win­ning Director’s Film About Mar­tin Luther King’s 1965 Vot­ing-Rights March

Watch Free Films by African Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion … and the New Civ­il Rights Film, Just Mer­cy

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

The Art of The Black Pan­thers: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist Emory Dou­glas

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Watch Martin Scorsese’s Brand New Short Film, Made Entirely in His Office Under Quarantine

Most who saw the last fea­ture by Mar­tin Scors­ese, 2019’s The Irish­man, saw it at home. That had to do with the fact that the bud­get came from Net­flix, which sure­ly aimed to get its not incon­sid­er­able mon­ey’s worth by offer­ing the film on its own stream­ing ser­vice as soon as pos­si­ble. If The Irish­man’s financ­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a sign of the times, Scors­ese’s new short is even more so: shot on a smart­phone by the famed direc­tor him­self, it recent­ly pre­miered on Mary Beard’s BBC spe­cial about “lock­down cul­ture.” See­ing as the coro­n­avirus isn’t known to spare famous auteurs — and indeed does seem dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to harm indi­vid­u­als over age 70 — Scors­ese has spent a great deal of time at home over the past few months. But like all true cre­ators, he has­n’t stopped doing what he does.

“Been quite a while, now, that I’ve been quar­an­tined,” says Scors­ese, turn­ing his cam­era away from a screen­ing of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Wrong Man on his office wall. “We had been work­ing so hard on so many dif­fer­ent projects, and things were spin­ning and spin­ning and spin­ning, and sud­den­ly there was a crash. And a stop.” At first, “there was a day or so of a kind of relief. I did­n’t have to go any­where or do any­thing. I mean, I had to do every­thing, but I did­n’t have to do it then.” Then, “the anx­i­ety set in.” But as time passed, and as he tru­ly felt that time pass­ing, “a sense of relief set­tled in. And a real sense of free­dom, because you can’t do any­thing else. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this room. I don’t know when we’re going to be able to actu­al­ly start pro­duc­tion in this film.”

By “this film” Scors­ese means Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200 mil­lion true-crime West­ern set in 1920s Okla­homa that will bring Leonar­do DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the direc­tor’s lead­ing men of choice, togeth­er in a Scors­ese fea­ture for the first time. As a joint pro­duc­tion between Apple and Para­mount, notes the Observ­er’s Bran­don Katz, the pic­ture “will receive all the nec­es­sary fund­ing it needs while still receiv­ing a world­wide the­atri­cal roll­out,” but the ques­tion of when its shoot can start — and indeed, when movie­go­ers will return to the­aters — remains open. “I do know that, giv­en the grace of time and life, we will be in pro­duc­tion some­how,” says Scors­ese in his lock­down short, after a few shots of the mem­o­ra­bil­ia on his shelves.

Toward the end of this per­son­al dis­patch, Scors­ese remem­bers his final con­ver­sa­tion with the Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi. “We were at a din­ner in Lyon a few years ago and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do any­thing you don’t want to do.’ He knew. He under­stood. One can’t depend on time. One does­n’t know. Ulti­mate­ly that time has to be worth it, even if it’s just exist­ing. Even if it’s just being alive, breath­ing — if you can, under these cir­cum­stances.” But as we’ve all learned, cir­cum­stances can change, and sud­den­ly; it falls to us only to make best use of the sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. To under­score that last truth, Scors­ese char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cites a clas­sic Amer­i­can movie. Though our lives may be restrict­ed, as we see in Robert Siod­mak’s Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, noth­ing’s stop­ping us from keep­ing our eyes on the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Spike Lee Debuts the Short Film “3 Brothers”: A Remake of Do the Right Thing for Our Dark Times

When beloved actor Bill Nunn died in Sep­tem­ber of 2016, two months before the elec­tion, his pass­ing felt prophet­ic of more bad things to come. Best known as the boom­box-tot­ing, ulti­mate Pub­lic Ene­my fan Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Nunn’s char­ac­ter is mur­dered by a gang of cops, who put him in a choke­hold and suf­fo­cate him. At the time, Raheem’s death was a fic­tion­al restate­ment of what had come before, as Lee explains above in the 30th anniver­sary com­men­tary on the film.

“I’m renam­ing this ‘Anato­my of a Mur­der,’” he says, explain­ing how he based the scene of Raheem’s death on the 1983 killing of graf­fi­ti artist Michael Stew­art, who was stran­gled by 11 NYC tran­sit offi­cers. “The things that are hap­pen­ing in this film,” he says, “are still rel­e­vant today.” Lee then ref­er­ences the death of Eric Gar­ner, killed in exact­ly the same way as Raheem. Now we have seen the mur­der of George Floyd, asphyx­i­at­ed with a knee to the neck. These on-cam­era killings are trau­mat­ic, but Lee has not shied away from the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary images.

He reclaimed his place as a big-bud­get inter­preter of Amer­i­can racism with Black­kKlans­man, a fic­tion­al­ized film that ends with extreme­ly hard-to-watch (espe­cial­ly for those who were there) real footage of the mur­der of anti-racist activist Heather Hey­er in Char­lottesville. Lee faced a good deal of crit­i­cism over the use of this video, but he has again tak­en real-life footage of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings, this time by the police, and cut them togeth­er with fic­tion, edit­ing togeth­er the death of Raheem with the deaths of Gar­ner and Floyd.

Call­ing the short “3 Broth­ers,” he opens with the ques­tion, “Will His­to­ry Stop Repeat­ing Itself?” Lee Debuted the film on the CNN spe­cial “I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Liv­ing & Dying in Amer­i­ca.” The cumu­la­tive effects of his­to­ry are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the moment we are in, he says. The rage and protest on streets around the world are not a reac­tion to a sin­gle event—they are a con­fronta­tion with hun­dreds of years of vio­lent con­trol over black bod­ies, a state of affairs always includ­ing mur­der with impuni­ty. “The attack on black bod­ies has been here from the get-go,” Lee says.

Lee’s short is hard to watch, and I don’t blame any­one who nev­er wants to see this footage again (I don’t). The mur­ders of indi­vid­ual, unarmed black men by groups of offi­cers take on an eerie monot­o­ny in their same­ness over time. “The killings caught on cam­era,” writes his­to­ri­an Robert Greene II, “offer a dis­turb­ing reminder of the numer­ous pho­tographs of lynch­ings dis­persed through­out the nation in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some were cat­a­logued by the NAACP and dis­played as exam­ples of Amer­i­can bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, were fea­tured on post­cards and sent to white Amer­i­cans through­out the coun­try, small trin­kets of white ter­ror.”

This chill­ing his­to­ry gives rise to an under­stand­able ambiva­lence about shar­ing videos of police killings. Are these evi­dence of bar­barous injus­tice or racist snuff films run­ning on an end­less loop? As in the lynch­ing pho­tographs, it depends on the audi­ence and the con­text in which the videos are shown. But when Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing—pre-Rod­ney King and cell phone cameras—hardly any­one out­side of heav­i­ly policed black neigh­bor­hoods wit­nessed first­hand the kind of bru­tal­i­ty that is now so depress­ing­ly famil­iar in our news­feeds.

The death of Radio Raheem was shock­ing to audi­ences, as it was dev­as­tat­ing to the char­ac­ters and remains, for those who grew up with the film, a mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic touch­stone of the time. It is tru­ly heart­break­ing and enrag­ing that such scenes have become com­mon cur­ren­cy on social media, instead of his­toric exam­ples of the bru­tal­i­ty of the past—a sto­ry, as one per­son wrote of the 1968 police killing of poet Hen­ry Dumas, of “gen­er­a­tions of lost poten­tial.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Cam­paign Film for Bernie Sanders

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

Con­sid­er the influ­ence of tele­vi­sion, even in the dig­i­tal age. Con­sid­er the pow­er that net­works like Fox and CNN con­tin­ue to wield over that neb­u­lous thing called pub­lic opin­ion; the con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of NBC and CBS. These giants don’t real­ly inform so much as sell pack­aged ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent paid for and approved by cor­po­rate spon­sors. There’s real­ly no need to update poet and musi­cian Gil Scott-Heron’s rad­i­cal, 1971 clas­sic “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised,” unless we want­ed to change the names. His voice still speaks direct­ly to the moment we live in.

We exist on a con­tin­u­um of con­di­tions that have wors­ened since the late 1960s—despite promis­es and appear­ances to the contrary—until they have become intol­er­a­ble. Scott-Heron wrote and sang about those con­di­tions since his fiery 1970 debut.

“Dubbed the ‘God­fa­ther of Rap,’” notes Brook­lyn Rail in a 2007 inter­view, “Scott-Heron has become a ubiq­ui­tous and prac­ti­cal­ly de rigueur influ­ence for every­one from hip hop­pers and indie rock­ers to aging literati and dyed-in-the-wool aca­d­e­mics.”

One might think Scott-Heron’s clas­sic spo­ken-word tes­ta­ment “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” speaks for itself by now, but it still cre­ates con­fu­sion in part because peo­ple still mis­con­strue the nature of the medi­um. Why can’t you sit at home and watch jour­nal­ists cov­er protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re see­ing “the Rev­o­lu­tion” instead of curat­ed, maybe spu­ri­ous, con­tent designed to tell a sto­ry and gin up views, you’re fool­ing your­self.

But Scott-Heron also had some­thing else in mind—you can’t see the rev­o­lu­tion on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s inter­view:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change peo­ple is some­thing that nobody will ever be able to cap­ture on film. It’s just some­thing that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with every­one else to find out what’s hap­pen­ing in this coun­try.”

If we real­ize we’re out of sync with what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing, we can­not find out more on tele­vi­sion. The infor­ma­tion is where the bat­tles are being fought, at street lev­el, and in the mech­a­nisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Amer­i­cans are the only real die-hard Amer­i­cans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve car­ried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born Amer­i­can didn’t seem to mat­ter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Bre­on­na Tay­lor and so many before them, and in the griev­ous injuries and deaths from uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mil­i­tary-grade police esca­la­tions nation­wide since.

Scott-Heron asked us to ques­tion the nar­ra­tives. “How do they know?” he sang in “There’s a War Going On” at Wood­stock 94, above. How do the self-appoint­ed guardians of infor­ma­tion know what’s real­ly going on? Tele­vi­sion spreads igno­rance and mis­in­for­ma­tion, as does radio and, of course, social media. This much we should know. But we’ve mis­in­ter­pret­ed “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” if we think it’s real­ly about mass media, Scott-Heron always main­tained. Before we can engage mean­ing­ful­ly with cur­rent events, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change must hap­pen from the inside out. No one’s broad­cast­ing the truths we first, most need to hear.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gil Scott-Heron, God­fa­ther of Rap, Rest in Peace

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Best Campaign Slogan of 2020 (So Far)

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DEVO Is Now Selling COVID-19 Personal Protective Equipment: Energy Dome Face Shields

Accord­ing to DEVO’s co-prin­ci­ple song­writer and bassist Ger­ald Casale, the exper­i­men­tal art band turned ear­ly MTV pop-punk dar­lings were “pro-infor­ma­tion, anti stu­pid con­for­mi­ty and knew that the strug­gle for free­dom against tyran­ny is nev­er-end­ing.”

Their sin­gu­lar per­for­mance garb also set them apart, and none more so than the bright red plas­tic Ener­gy Dome hel­mets they donned 40 years ago this month, upon the release of their third album, Free­dom of Choice.

The record, which the band con­ceived of as a funk album, explod­ed into main­stream con­scious­ness. The visu­als may have made an even more last­ing impact than the music, which includ­ed the chart top­ping “Whip It.”

Even the most anti-New Wave met­al­head could iden­ti­fy the source of those domes, which have been likened to upturned flower pots, dog bowls, car uri­nals, and lamp shades.

What they prob­a­bly don’t know is the Ener­gy Dome was “designed accord­ing to ancient zig­gu­rat mount pro­por­tions used in votive wor­ship. Like the mounds, it col­lects ener­gy and recir­cu­lates it. In this case, the dome col­lects ener­gy that escapes from the crown of the human head and push­es it back into the Medu­la Oblon­ga­ta for increased men­tal ener­gy.”

Thus sayeth Casale, any­way.

DEVO’s 2020 con­cert plans were, of course, scotched by the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, but the band has found an alter­na­tive way to mark the 40th anniver­sary of Free­dom of Choice and the birth of its icon­ic head­gear.

In addi­tion to face masks embla­zoned with the famil­iar red tiered shape, DEVO­tees with mon­ey and con­fi­dence to spare can ante up for a DIY Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equip­ment kit that trans­forms a stan­dard-issue Ener­gy Dome into a face shield.

It’s worth not­ing that before tak­ing your con­vert­ed ener­gy dome out for a par­ti­cle deflect­ing spin, you’ll have to truf­fle up a hard hat sus­pen­sion lin­er and install it for a prop­er fit.

Casale her­ald­ed the open­ing of DEVO’s merch store in a Face­book post:

Here we are 40 years lat­er, liv­ing in the alter­nate real­i­ty night­mare spawned by Covid 19 and the botched response of our world “lead­ers” to do the right thing quick­ly. We are not exag­ger­at­ing when we say that 2020 could be the last time you might be able to exer­cise your free­dom of choice. If you don’t use it, you can cer­tain­ly lose it.

Uh, he’s talk­ing about vot­ing, right, rather than storm­ing the capi­tol build­ing to demand the pre­ma­ture reopen­ing of inessen­tial busi­ness­es or mak­ing out­sized threats in response to gro­cery store mask poli­cies?

Per­haps the pow­er of the Ener­gy Dome is such that it could reawak­en the pro-infor­ma­tion, anti-stu­pid­i­ty sen­si­bil­i­ties of some dor­mant DEVO fans among the unmasked rank and file.

As Casale him­self posit­ed in an inter­view with Amer­i­can Song­writer: “You make it taste good so that they don’t real­ize there’s med­i­cine in it.”

Pre-order masks and PPE kits from DEVO’s offi­cial merch store.

Down­load instruc­tions for installing a hard hat sus­pen­sion replace­ment inside the Ener­gy Dome pri­or to attach­ing the shield.

via Con­se­quence of Sound

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Design­er Cre­ates Free Tem­plate for an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Down­load, and Then Use a Print­er, Paper & Scis­sors

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Presents His Per­son­al Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh & Oth­er Arists Tell Their Musi­cal Sto­ries in the Ani­mat­ed Video Series, “Cal­i­for­nia Inspires Me”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Here lat­est project is an ani­ma­tion and a series of free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks in pub­lic and wear them prop­er­ly. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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