If you’re one of the many people who can’t stand the 28-year-old, there could be a lot of frustration in your future.
Yes, you won’t be able to wait for the show where Ryan Lochte hosts competitive eaters challenged with palmetto bugs from Florida or a weekly contest to determine who are the best Call Me Maybe lipsynchers.
Or a show to be called “Stink!” explaining the science behind lighting farts, the bad odors emitted by dead animals in the road, and the chemistry of over the counter laxatives and enemas.
From the record label of Wade Page’s neo-Nazi bands, this memo:
Label 56 is very sorry to hear about the tragedy in Wisconsin and our thoughts are with the families and friends of those who are affected. We have worked hard over the years to promote a positive image and have posted many articles encouraging people to take a positive path in life, to abstain from drugs, alcohol, and just general behavior that can affect ones life negatively. Likewise we have never sought attention by using “shock value???/ symbols and ideology that are generally labeled as such. With that being said, all images and products related to End Apathy have been removed from our site. We do not wish to profit from this tragedy financially or with publicity.
In closing please do not take what Wade did as honorable or respectable and please do not think we are all like that.
Old School of Hate features, astonishingly, a song actually entitled, “Balled of Earl Turner.” Turner was the fictional hero in William Pierce’s race war in the US novel, The Turner Diaries.
C. J. Trahan’s “Confederate Anthem,” because of its popularity on YouTube, apparently endeared itself to some confused Tea Partiers — more than you would think — who had no idea of its real nature, believing it just a cool song.
It was adopted by someone unknown into a Tea Party anthem against “socialism” and Barack Obama.
“A song written by a concerned, non-funded American Citizen in opposition to an ever-growing tyrannical government … I’m a Good Ole American,” writes the uploader of Rebel’s “Confederate Anthem,” slightly re-written and retitled as “I’m a Good Ole American.”
However, individual members and followers are still quite capable of extreme violence.
The white supremacy scene even has the acoustic side, apparently. This grim piece of work, taking its intro from Taxi Driver, is from an album called Beatdown Ballads, not quite something for even the most iconoclastic obscurity hit parades.
In a commentary published in the same journal issue, Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services said doctors should prescribe exercise to their patients to reduce their risk of dying.
On how weight-lifting may help prevent a form of diabetes.
Full disclosure: I used to be a fanatical weight-lifter. Fortunately, that’s well over.
Wade Michael Page, the gunman in Sunday’s Sikh temple shooting, had a history of problems with alcohol, which led to him losing his military career and, more recently, a job as a trucker.
The white racist punk rock scene has existed almost as long as punk rock itself. It lives along side the regular scene, its members often seen at shows by mainstream bands.
If you looked you could find them without trouble in the Lehigh Valley when I wrote for the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Reads a piece from the Call in 1988 by reporter Gerald Shields:
Allentown has become an East Coast hub for “skinheads,” a loosely organized group of youths known by their shaved heads who flock to the city every weekend to attend punk rock shows at a center city club, according to interviews yesterday with three youths involved in the local club scene.
Meanwhile, South Whitehall Township police continued their investigation yesterday in the stabbing of three teen-agers on Friday night. Police said the attack was done by a group of about 15 skinheads, who stabbed the youths and beat them with chains …
Local youths who are knowledgeable about the movement said yesterday that skinheads from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut come to Allentown every weekend to visit Oliver J.’s, a center city Allentown under-21 club, which caters to the youths.
I assiduously avoided Oliver J’s.
There’s only so many times you can face writing weekend wrap-ups on fights, miscellaneous violence and petty riots until the thrill wears off and by 1988 I’d seen more than enough bleak punk rock shows.
Another infamous story from a number of years ago is here.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is well aware of this music scene and for the Post, Mark Potok had a few comments:
The assault Sunday put a spotlight on a little-known but vibrant — and sometimes violent — music subculture, according to watchdog groups. “There is a whole underworld out there of white supremacist music of which the public is almost entirely unaware,??? said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which first flagged Page’s connection to hate groups in a blog post Monday. The group has been monitoring Page since 2000, when he began playing for bands with names such as Max Resist, Blue Eyed Devil and Intimidation One.
“This guy was in the thick of the white-supremacist music scene,??? Potok said. “He was not a fringe player. He was well known in the scene and played in some of the best-known bands??? …
His wanderings at one point led him to Georgia to attend “Hammerfest,??? an annual white-power music festival that the Anti-Defamation League calls “a virtual Woodstock of hate rock.???
Paradoxically, even Nazi punks don’t spend much on the records of their favorite bands, a tacit admission the grim music is 100 percent crap, although the audience very actively engages in live events. One can look at it as the backdrop for bonding rallies where the purpose is to gin up violence and the thoughts of it against others.
The quintessential bottom out of sight crowd, they are thin in the wallet.
A web article from a few years back reveals the numbers behind Definite Hate, one of Wade Page’s bands:
A deal with Resistance [a now defunct label of the National Alliance] isn’t about money: Though the label paid the $2,000 in studio costs, it offered no advance, no video budget and no cut of the merchandise. Definite Hate received $1 for every disc sold. (Resistance’s best-selling release, Rahowa’s Cult of the Holy War, has sold about 25,000 copies worldwide.)
Nothing quite says “No sale” with such rock-ribbed authority like swastikas, SS lightning bolts and “Heil Hitler” tattoos on the face, neck, hands, chest and arms.
Generic Nazi punk hatecore grenade, distinguished only by accidental infamy.
It’s 2012. What are you going to do? They’re coming up your streets, jackboots stepping high, looking in your windows. What are you going to do? Put a (bleepin’) gun in your hands! — Tampa Bay newspaper
On Nugent’s bottom out of sighter fans: “Almost all of his loyalists here were dudes.”
Earlier in the week, for pre-show press, in e-mail to a local New Times publication in Broward County: “Obama represents everything bad about humanity’.”
Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!??? “My life is filled with joy!??? Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not ..
From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure??? from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes …
The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises.
I got over not being lovable and embraced the inner fail a long, long time ago. I have a hard time even being in the same room with armchair Dale Carnegies and Norman Vincent Peales.
DD blog wrote about Ehrenreich’s book, “Bright-Sided.” and its dissection of the Culture of Lickspittle, back in 2010 here.
[Slowness in the 2010 census] was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers … Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
Peter Pry: Our Task Force is an experiment in returning to an earlier era, when the private sector played a much bigger role in U.S. security, as in the War of 1812, which was not won at the Battle of New Orleans, but on the high seas by American privateers who crippled Britain’s merchant shipping. I like to think of our Task Force as a group of expert intellectual privateers, operating on a shoe string, but achieving decisive results by raiding and sinking the myths, propaganda, and bad ideas of lobbyists and bureaucrats who would leave our nation vulnerable to an EMP catastrophe.
FP: Is there anything the average American can do, or is this Washington’s problem?
Pry: Call and write your Congressman and Senator and tell them to support the SHIELD Act (HR 668), sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks, and the legislative initiatives of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett to protect our national electric grid from EMP.
–Contribute to Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s re-election campaign. Bartlett, who has been the national leader on EMP preparedness, is fighting to keep his seat because his district was gerrymandered.
Senate Republicans regularly promote themselves as the true custodians of national security. This claim seemed particularly hollow last week when they helped block a new measure aimed at protecting America’s vulnerable computer networks from attack by, among others, potentially hostile foreign governments …
The cost of inaction is already high. Every day, China and other foreign governments, hackers and criminals are working to break into American computer networks. They have targeted major companies and military contractors; last year there were 200 attacks on vital infrastructure — power plants, electric grids, refineries, transportation networks and water treatment systems.
Most of these facilities are owned by the private sector, whose defenses are dangerously weak. Many companies do not even insist on secure passwords for computers. Nightmare scenarios include computer attacks that shut down the stock exchange, a nuclear power plant, the nation’s rail system or all three at once.
This is not scaremongering.
Yes it is. Outside computer attacks that shut down the stock exchange. Give it a rest.
Wade Michael Page, the forty year old ex-soldier named as the perpetrator of the latest massacre, this in Wisconsin, was a member of the Nazi punk band, End Apathy.
Like every other punk band in North America, End Apathy entered Ernie Ball’s Battle of the Bands contest for a slot on the Van’s Warped Tour. The Google entry caught my attention as readers will recall I’d asked them to vote for the DD band’s page a couple months back.
“In a 2010 online interview with End Apathy’s record label Label56, Wade said he had founded the band in 2005 because ‘I realized … that if we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways it would be the start towards moving forward,'” reads a Reuters piece.
In the last twenty years there has never been a shortage of Nazi punks, a fact the label’s catalog well illustrates. The page advertises a show of white neo-Nazi punk rock, over the past weekend, in Bratislava and Budapest. It also pushes End Apathy “shirts and vinyl” merchandise, including a women’s ‘babydoll’ T, all since removed.
An expert from the Southern Poverty Law Center told Reuters Wade once attempted to buy “goods” from the National Alliance, the primary neo-Nazi group in the United States. The group was once lead by William Pierce, the author of “The Turner Diaries,” the best-selling premier piece of white extremist hate fiction in the country, a book favored by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh..
O votes, 22 fans — reads Wade’s Battle of the Bands page. The band also had the page mirrored at a RockStar Energy Drink contest. The profile has since been removed although a cached page at Google can be found.
The vinyl and its art, from End Apathy and like-minded peers at Label56, explicitly telegraphs a philosophy of hate that erupted in Wisconsin with deadly results over the weekend.
The popular neo-Nazi split single format, optimized for atrocities and all grim outlooks.
