By Patches Sitty

As an anti-capitalist who has plenty of time to carefully plot the downfall of society as we know it, I often hear many ask why taking a role as an entertainer is relevant to deconstructing capitalism. Therefore, it is time I ask my comrades in struggle to make an important distinction: it’s time to quit harshing on the puppets.

Allow me to elaborate. One of the most pernicious, and rarely combated, tools of submission in the world today is the entertainment industry. Merely known as propaganda, bread and circuses for those clinging to power through the centuries, the industry today reaches nearly every human on Earth. It influences the vast majority of humanity from birth to death. Virtually all people who choose to make a stand for liberation, human rights, or anything worth a damn, must, at some point, be deprogrammed from it.

It brings me no great pleasure to wage war against the entertainment industry. I was one of its biggest fans, once. It took me 18 or 19 years, under its influence, to realize that the X-Men and Ninja Turtles, besides being merchandise brands, are reflections of real tumult and violence.  They are created to distract people, making them believe that fighting for one’s very survival against tyrannical and omni-present forces is something resigned to the realm of fantasy. In this way millions of Americans shackle themselves to the worship of fantasy heroes, deprived of the ability to realize true heroism in themselves. Or barring that, they may join the military.

Many of the most popular and well-funded video games and film properties visible today are shameless advertisements for joining the US armed forces. While I grew up on Doom II, we see this effect epitomized today by  militaristic shooters

that are now even advertised for sale in conjunction with the military. This is the vicious warmongering propaganda tool known as the Call of Duty franchise. I once claimed the  corpses of cyborg demons to my name. Now, on a variety of platforms,  one can hunt down everyone from DPRK  (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) soldiers to Anonymous hackers with knife, M16, or predator drone.

Anti-establishment types often have little, if any, defense or offense against the entertainment industry. Most often, they are still unable to extricate themselves from it. As brothers and sisters are beaten  by police in the streets throughout 2012, others sit at home watching  television cop dramas. This past May, thousands of anti-capitalist flocked to  Chicago to demand the end to the US & NATO’s world-policing efforts… thousands more flocked to movie theaters to watch the Avengers, a  Disney-owned superhero franchise about the US & “SHIELD” ‘s world- policing efforts (Marvel Comics).

Imperialism is nothing new as both an  entertaining subject and source of profit for the industry; this vein of film  (from “Birth of a Nation” to “Avatar”) is popular not just in America but in  foreign markets as well.

Do you see the problem here?

We must no longer look down on the dreamers in our midsts.  The “entertainment” we see every day is the real crap we can do without. When we meet comrades more fixated on guitars or poetry-books than megaphones, those are who we must elevate. We must give them the knowledge to make their words speak truth to power and exude the revolutionary spirit. We must give them platforms on which to be heard.

The creative arts can offer a way to radicalize people like nothing else. It can break through walls of apathy bred by years of vacuous, profit-obsessed phantasms that the entertaiment industry has inundated our communities with for decades. Their billion dollar spectacles will always fade away in the face of authentic creations of passion and struggle, that can be created by most anyone.

This is never more true and important than in the coming months. A long, hot summer of struggle is looming, from the National Conventions to the renewed call to shut down Wall Street on 9.17.2012. Let us do our part to put as many pied pipers to the torch as we can in the meantime, so that our society can hear the music in the streets.