Got kicked off Twitter. Again. Coming up on fifteen times now. Evidently, on a platform teeming with homicidal religious fanatics, hate-spewing racists, and gloating official mass murderers, my biting wit is too much for the Twitter censors to contend with. Hard to imagine so many crude and caustic people being so sensitive, but there you go.
This was a long one, about two weeks. I had just overcome the trauma of being locked in Twitmo in December, isolated from my following of unconcerned well-wishers, too-concerned ill-wishers along with their bots, and folks selling something. Everybody’s selling something. This song for example. Available for sale, to discriminating listeners. Not discriminatory listeners, though as nondiscriminatory it is available to all with functioning ears, interested neo-cortexes, and money.
But that’s what this is about, isn’t it? The power of payment. Pay to say. You buy the time/space (continuum), you can say anything you want, who cares if it’s true. If you challenge said fee speech, your voice can be taken. As many others, much of the stuff I do is Twitter-centric, me spouting off about something or other, thinking my pathetic squeak of a voice could reach the ears in the cheap seats. Up with the nesting birds.
The cheep seats.
I got kicked off Twitter a lot when I first barged in there like a Chinese bull in a literary cliché boutique. I’m sure I deserved it, ruffling the feathers of the delicate Tweetlings I so brusquely assaulted with my unrestrained wit and scathing repartee. My most recent exiles – the interweb equivalent of being sent to my room to ruminate upon my sundry offenses – I feel were totally unjustified.
The first of them was a couple months back and was actually my first off-kicking in a couple years. Caught me totally by surprise. I had been happily directed to Happy!on Netflix and followed its star and producer Chris Meloni on Twitter in solidarity. Some tweep noted that his serious tweetery generated marginal retweet action whereas when he went crude he found enthusiastic response. With his usual brevity Chris tweeted, Twitter Yoda. I jokingly replied, A whore, your mother is.
That bought me about a week, but I was pleased Chris didn’t block me. My most recent banishment was my answer to someone asking What would Donald Trump have to do for the GOP to remove him from office? I responded, Die. And then they would remove him only reluctantly. On this I call Bullshit! I didn’t advocate or speak in favor of his demise nor have I ever, regardless its societal benefits; I delivered an amusing yet honest (prove me wrong) response and two hard weeks in Twitmo was my penance.
Instead of walking around the place kicking shit and muttering dejectedly, I decided to do this: what you’re reading and what I’m writing about. A song. My first in years. The first part, as is usually the case, was my lyrical outpouring of bile regarding how rich people own our perception and those who challenge that ownership are censored, or compelled into self-censorship so they don’t get sent to their virtual rooms or ball-gagged. I decided I would use my exile to condemn exile and those who exile those who challenge the narrative.
Pleased with the lyric, I knew the music had to be equally tough and relentless; I’m not fucking around here. So, as usual, I made about ten different passes before I found the right music to effectively express my artistic sensibilities. So many of my songs rise Phoenix-like from the tattered remains of the brave progressions that came before but couldn’t sustain the fundamental magnificence my work demands. Within my limitations, I am pleased with the results; as always wish I could do better vocals or find a singer inspired by lyrical splendiferousness. I categorize it as Heavy Mental.
Social media frees us from obscurity through the providence of a platform from which we can present ourselves to the world – a voice – then arbitrarily enforces subjective rules of conversational conduct to justify stealing that voice. The rightful cries of anti-First Amendment speech-stifling are met with their contractually supported response, “Our platform, our rules.” This is to remind us that if we wish to commune on their little patch of cyber-space, they will tell us what to say, soon as they’re done telling us what not to say.
As the interweb is of the government (the Pentagon), the Freedom of Speech must be the price of the exceedingly profitable companies which use it. Dangerous lies should never take prominence over unpleasant truths. Fee $peech exists because of their efforts to silence me and so many others.
Fuck them.
Fight back with Art.
Fee $peech
They wrote it then amended it
Distorted and distended it
Still human rights transcended it
While human wrongs attended it
With ethnic mix they blended it
Impurity offended it
The racists apprehended it
The fascists condescended it
The arguments intended it
Restricted and extended it
Nobility pretended it
Till no one comprehended it
Our bloodshed they defended it
The media commended it
At least ‘til they unfriended it
And money then suspended it
No more free speech
Now it’s Fee $peech
Too much freedom on display?
Guess you’ll have to pay to say
The king can call for your head
You cannot call for his
A fine demonstration of how
Real freedom is
His court lies to our faces
And without consequence
Yet if we lie to the court
We suffer violence
The church consumes our body
To kill in name of God
To question, apostasy
Humans kneel before fraud
Media poisons our minds
Turns thinking on its head
We defend our enemies
And kill our friends instead
No more free speech
Now it’s Fee $peech
How much does such freedom cost?
You already may have lost
Caught up in the interweb
Pretending our voices are free
Allowed to relay what they want us to say
We watch what they want us to see
20-page service agreements
Are written to never be read
Designed to bind the blind running blind
Where freedom is all in our head
Replacing free speech with fee speech
The man with the bucks calls the tune
We are free to sing along for a fee
Though we might as well howl at the moon
Our anti-social media
Keeps us all locked up tight in our cells
Masturbation as socialization
With garbage in, garbage expels
Know more free speech
Know less Fee $peech
Know more free speech
Know less Fee $peech
When they take our words away
We have nothing left to say
© 2020 ArtAHammer
1/27/2020 Arturo Hammer
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