As each hour passes, your hold, Dear Leader, on the hearts and minds of all who toil on two wheels is but slipping away!  Your unjustified privileges, seepingly acceded over the course of our righteous cause, has led you only to a bastardized mereology, where you have placed speech over presence, identity over mastery, and impelling emptiness over writing.  For what is the Union?  Not a mere entity or substance, but a concept of entity and substance that shakes the very foundation of our self-actualization, the very nature of being itself.  There is no meaning without meaning!

To you, readers and seekers of truth, there is another way.  Not a second beginning (being), rather a meta-path, an eruption of truth.

Lead by the People (the One True Voice of the Union!) we will spread the use of linguistical intuition and accuracy deriving from the obvious co-dependencies of consistency of authenticity and resoluteness.  The voice of the People too long dismissed and suppressed by the Edicts of Revolutionary Thought, throw off these chains of constraint and vow to seek meaning within the truth of our words and the truth of our wheels.

The so-called True Liberation Front of the Revolutionary Word of the Union is but a mere puppet of the Central Committee Chairs and barely merits response.  Their didactic missive (indeed the worst of heresies) voices support of the "long view".  Only tyrants and false idols implore you to bow to moderation and such "romantic" notions.  We will not be held to the limits imposed by those who can not hear or do not understand the truth as it it set before them.

La Société

diary entry, morning of day 608 of the revolution.  attendance today at the senior staff meeting in the racing union command bunker was sparse.  something is going on but i'm not sure what it is.  security is high, tensions are higher. 

we did our normal daily devotion to dear leader but people seemed to be watching each other very carefully.  the whole blog thing is producing way too much drama.  no one knows who exactly is in la societe, and the mystery is causing tension.  but it's secondary to the stones it takes to defy the party leadership to their face.  it's not clear if they really care all that much about capitialization or are just trying to give some senior functionary in the ministry of communicaitons a black eye.  i mean wtf, who gets that wound up, or is willing to risk their life, over a point of grammar???!!!  sort of ridiculous.

and then, right after our morning devotion, this new thing pops up.  some post about a breakaway liberation front.  half the guys think this is some pimply teenager in his mom's basement who has somehow hacked the website.  the other half aren't talking.  whatever it is, it's effective because people are freaked out. 

i don't care to write, or even frankly to remember, what was done to the people who maintain the web site.  that was horrific.  dear leader seems to have outdone himself in terms of setting an example.  everyone is on pins and needles and there's an uncomfortably weird vibe.  security is super high but a bunch of staff are missing.  i've duplicated my diary and stashed it under some papers in the main safe for our department.  i may not be able to write for a day or so.  we've got a late morning meeting to discuss strategy.  gotta get a few odds and ends done because it looks like they might lock down the command bunker for an extended period.

The True Liberation Front of the Revolutionary Word of the Union (TLFRWU) would like to remind, in the face of the counter-revolutionary hooliganism that is being fomented amongst the masses by the so-called "La Societe," the words of Oscar Romero:  “that it helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.”  With Dear Leader, we will accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise envisioned by the great manifesto of the union as we liberate the planet from the tyranny of the motorized world.  No set of goals and objectives includes everything.  We lay foundations that will need further development.  We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.  We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning.  We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.  We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.  Long live la revolucion!  Long live the revolutionary word!

 -- TLFRWU

the supreme revolutionary council for propogation of message wishes to notify all readers that the normal guidelines for acceptable web communicaitons have been broached.  in spite of heroic efforts by the information technology staff that operates and secures the people's portal, a great affront to the cultural revolution in cycling an the social order has been committed. 

while this is in all likelihood a prank, the continued relevance of the revolution cannot be chanced.  as a result, a number of measures have been taken.  all cyclists should remain calm, locate their bicycle and commute home as they normally would.  this is not an emergency.  there is no curfew.  a posture 2 information alert has been issued for the central complex beneath the plaza de la revolucion.  cyclists should not be concerned by the sight of paramilitaries in the vicinity of government buildings or small villages.  compliance with the directives of these squads is strongly suggested.

additional statements will be issued as events warrant.

For too long, the One True Voice of the Union has hidden in the shadows of its suppressor.  For too long, we have waited in the mistaken belief that righteousness would win out over close-minded and blatant oligarchy.  For too long, The People have suffered under the yoke of the oppressive hand of informal use of capital letters.

No more!

La Société pour l'utilisation correcte de grammaire dans les Communications Révolutionnaires demands immediate action from the Second Central Party Congress and Revolutionary Council Executives to rectify the misuse of the characters (the very tools!) of the revolution.  We demand action before the tyrannical forces of intimidation succeed.  We demand action now!

In light of recent proclamations, and despite your own laudable goals--Dear Leader--in the destruction of automotive capital, your inference of diversion between subtle and overt has lead you to the false insistence of the de-structuring of capitalization itself, and is best described as a "return to the meaning of fraud".   Your interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic within the context of Marx, and your systematic and synthetic (sinister?) appropriation of vanishing "media" constructs can no longer be tolerated if the People's One True Voice of the Union is to fulfill its natural destiny and provide maximum beauty to the followers of the revolution and all who toil on two wheels.

Like points within the ontological fabric knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction, La Société will resist the wholesale decapitation of language and full inscription into the gateway of the abyss.

La Société

memo to file
re: internal union deliberations on elections, close hold, no copies
day 607 of the revolution
to: all internal party members, central committee chairs and revolutionary council executives

people are emailing me regarding dear leader's assertion that racing union elections have been suspended.  indefintiely.  i will admit that i was surprised by this and initially questioned the wisdom of such a proclamation, though certainly not the wisdom of the proclaimer.  i was fortunate to have an audience with him and inquired about how the needs of the people and the revolution are served by keeping the people from the means of governance.

he was rather terse and enigmatic, as is his style, but he emphatically rejected the contention that the people's cycling team needed to be run by the people.  while this seemed counter-intuitive, dear leader expressed his certainty that this was a result of my rather oafish tendency towards a privledged or bourgeoise mindset.  for those who are not well versed in the subtle and overt differences between a leninist, marxist and maoist view of revolution, i can only say that the answer is complicated.  dear leader went on for some time, at rather great length, discussing the need for an especially select vanguard to help the people by leading them to a place that they are not able to get to on their own.

the gist of his answer was that there are generally several ways to solve problems.  some ideas appear to be unpopular, and possibly unrealistic on their surface, but you need to decide if you're going to make an impact or not.  these same ideas may seem confusing, but all focus must be on achievement of the objective.  after a particularly lengthy digression into the maoist view of the people's war, the need for struggle and the essential criteria that a heirarchical worldview be eradicated, he paused.

unsure where we were at in our interaction, i indicated that i had eradicated capitalization from my milieu, and my oeuvre was strongly revolutionary.  he indicated that this was not the issue, poured himself a brandy and stared out the window for what seemed like quite a long time.  i pondered his words.  he then asked me if i thought the forces of revolution were truly with him.  i responded in the affirmative.  he nodded and dismissed me. 

i have been asked to push down the following message to the eager masses.  

   elections have been suspended in the name of the glorious revolution in cycling and the social order.

communications teams should immediately scrub it and make it more palatable.  flesh it out with some accomplishments, some goals and a healthy dose of the usual boilerplate: rally to the banner, yadda yadda yadda...  dear leader has indicated that he will take no mail on this subject.

acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of giants, dear leader hereby announces that the second central party congress has unanimously lifted the term limit restrictions which would have called for open elections for the leadership of the racing union.  as a result, it is likely that he will run unopposed to another glorious victory for the people.  we would urge that all responsible cyclists exhibit the utmost caution towards critics who would claim that this is something other than a resounding confirmation of the wisdom of the vanguard and the central party, and a sweeping endorsement for the ideals of the union.  these criticisms ring hollow and carry a whiff of capitulation to forces that would bind us to a continuing yoke of oppression.  now is the time to be vigilant.  our common enemy, still aggressive and dangerous, is the culture of the hated four-wheeled hegemon.  we must not look inward, creating strife, but accept this and move on to our stated goals. 

 

 

read this.  do it now.  and then read it again.  especially the last paragraph.  read that last paragraph, i don't know, like 35 times.  i have just been wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong.  and i have now seen the light.  i understand the folly of my ways.  and i will change my life around.  i am also formally announcing that the '08 racing union kit will simply be plain white fabric with the last paragraph of this post in huge black letters.  people will come to understand the truth.

- - - posted by scott

update: maybe i was wrong....maybe hummer drivers do have the capacity to think beyond themselves.  man, i am learning a lot today.

click the link below to be astonished at how out of touch the current talking points for federal transportation officials can be. 

http://www.bikeleague.org/news/images/peters_letter.pdf

i don't know who assembled the briefing book for this, but they are not members of the reality based community.

Although we are well on our way to fruition of our Five-Year Plan, Union forces missed a breakthrough performance last night in Greenbelt.

In any case, the other Fruit of the Union was in attendance and produced this representation of the Union forces in action.

 

 

This morning, the CBC Radio program, Sounds Like Canada, featured an interview with a couple of friends of Charlie Prinsep, a cyclist who was struck and killed by a car near Brooks, Alberta on a trip between Vancouver and Toronto.  Prinsep, pictured here from his friend’s blog, Bike Lane Dairy, was only 23 years old and was an enthusiastic advocate for cycling.  I didn’t know him, but the picture painted of him during the interview really touched me.  He was, as the blog linked above notes, “a smiling face in a sea of noise and pollution.”  Sounds like many of our fellow cyclists on the road here in Washington too, doesn’t he?  There will be a ride in his memory today in Toronto – I’m there in spirit.  Be careful out there!

 

-- posted by Chris