I was once invited outside for a fight by a fan of the Dead Kennedys for suggesting that the song Police Truck might be interpreted as pro-police. It documents a scene of police brutality accompanied by a pruriently righteous guitar part. It's an early song, and the Kennedys themselves evolved a more politically constructive lyrical and musical style. From the leering aggression of Saturday Night Holocaust to the fair-minded suggestions of Stars and Stripes of Corruption ("How about more art and theatre instead of sports?") the Dead Kennedys certainly made a rational political journey. But the music was somehow neutered, and everyone prefers the early work, rage and moral nihilism notwithstanding. The Kennedys ran up against the limitations of punk, of a restricted aesthetic. Unprepared to burst their musical boundaries, they gave up the ghost and disbanded. They had no tools to advance their style without diluting it. Kurt Cobain's suicide I interpret as a musical admission of defeat, among other things. There was nowhere else for Nirvana to go without abandoning the Seattle sound entirely. Despite his political engagement, he ended up trapped in his aesthetic graveyard; improvising freely at the end of a performance, "did you really pay to listen to this shit?" he asked the audience. But by decisively abndoning his fans and truly investigating the "shit" they resented, he might have saved his art.

Perhaps there is no rational political future. Perhaps there is only continued existence and grey variations of more of the same. The films of Lucio Fulci convey this philosophy with open-eyed horror. The drab grey hell of The Beyond is a symbolic representation of the non-possibility of any fundamental change in economic or social relations. Beyond this world, suggests Fulci, is a pale waste inhabited by homeless alcoholics. We are condemned, in this world and the next, merely to feed and to wander. His hero and heroine, abruptly transfered to the afterlife, find they have become blind. There will be no redemption or change. Fulci himself, as a Catholic and an anti-fascist, shrank from the horror of this, but despite himself he was unable to film happy endings.

If religion provides only illusory comfort, and if Marxism too is an illusion, if there is no religious or secular hope, one ends, in Art, with the repetitive and destructive emptiness depicted by Fulci, or the weary estrangement of this poem by Kipling, one of his Epitaphs of the War:

SALONIKAN GRAVE

I have watched a thousand days
Push out and crawl into night
Slowly as tortoises.
Now I, too, follow these.
It is fever, and not the fight -
Time, not battle - that slays.

Rudyard Kipling