mushinnoshin

Last night brought nearly three hours of Henry Rollins doing his uproariously funny spoken-word gig last night. I’d seen the Rollins Band play many moons ago (Lollapalooza ’91, back when the ass-kicking What Am I Doing Here was on my shortlist of favorites), but never had the chance to see him do his spoken word live.

He really is a master storyteller. He has this way of nesting stories-within-stories, three, four, five levels deep, to the point where it almost comes off as rambling — until he starts winding them back, closing each one out in proper reverse order, like nested methods in a piece of program code returning in succession.

With his energy, his intelligence, his curiosity about the world and his willingness to actually put his feet to the pavement — well I’m not going to call him a hero of mine, because I don’t do hero worship. I’ll just say he inspires me to want to be better — to be stronger, more active, more determined, more willing to get my ass off the couch and actually work for the sort of world I want.

Surprisingly he didn’t get too overtly political, at least not as much as he has in some previous material. He took some potshots at McCain for trying to chicken out of the debate, and had a few barbs for Palin, and even did a not-half-bad Bush impersonation in a few places, but it was almost always one-liners and zingers, the real meat being his stories from the road. Of course that road took him into Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Laos, among other places, so the political baggage he brought with him as an American was always certainly an inextricable part of the story.

I can’t begin to relate it all to you, but I do want to share one thing, partly because it really struck me and partly because it was near the end of the show and thus remains freshest on my mind — :)

He was telling us about visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and told us about a conversation with the native who was showing him around. The native told him that his mother had been killed by the regime — she was a teacher, and was executed for being “an intellectual”. And Henry ties it back to how it seems to be the case that nearly every despotic regime makes a priority of taking out the intellectuals.

Something to think about whenever you hear the right wing thugs call someone an “elitist”.