Off the Map

Off the Map was hiding amid the sub-par refuse of a rotting collection of used paperbacks at the Marion Goodwill, which is in the same general area wherein WALMART roosts like a sleeping dragon of corporate commerce, eating up everything and all things with its concrete, predatory, psychopath's gob. You cannot escape Walmart, its influence on each and every aspect of human life (much as Amazon) is ubiquitous and inexorable; ancient man could not have conceived it. I mean, ancient man postulated a divine destiny for himself, and his world. Walmart is the commodified OPPOSITE of that vision, a bloated, commercialized market whore who would sell the skins of newborn infants to increase its already vast, vast (really incalculable) global enterprise. But enough about Walmart.

I knew immediately that the book was different from the Danielle Steele paperbacks and weight-loss guru detritus (each promising that morbidly obese Americans could reduce their bloated waistlines through some new miracle diet or fad combination of foods) that crumbled across the top of the chipped, dusty shelves. It had a yellow cardstock cover with a graphic novel-level cartoon of two stoner chicks hitchhiking in front of an abandoned building or whatever. The ubiquitous, radical, "jagged arrow in a circle" symbol was prominently displayed on the front of the building, and I knew what that meant. I flipped open the book and started scanning, hoping this wasn't a puff-poo corporate alternative or cash-in on the part of a conventional publisher to try and turn a buck (and thereby gain control) of radical chic or the vogue of unconventional and "punk" lifestyles. I was surprised when I read the words, "Crimethinc Ex-Workers' Collective" on the lawyer page. I vaguely knew them to be, like AK Press, a small publishing collective of self-styled anarchists, but my sympathies run to the radicals, and their literature is always going to compel me. So I paid the fifty cents or whatever and discovered a book I've read twice now.

"Kika" and "Hibickina" (alternately Hib Chickina) are two American punk rock kids who go on a tour of squats from Amsterdam to Barcelona, having taken themselves out of the mainstream world of privilege and are basically following an inner prompting to go wherever and do whatever they hell they have a mind to. Around them, the world of affluence and the hustle and bustle of eager tourists contrasts sharply with the underground world of the squatter punks and social misfits, the outcasts of Europe, and the flotsam and jetsam and "just plain folk" who stop to give them lifts from one destination to the next.

Characters in Search of an Author

Along the way, they crash in squats, taking a tour of the punk rock subcultural network that stretches across arbitrary national and international boundaries, connecting the dropout, misfit, and homeless kids of the scene (hopefully) from here all the way to Spain, France, and the Netherlands. Kika observes, "...There's really no reason to reconcile yourself with the clock. Clock time becomes irrelevant, and Neptunian Time--the irreconcilable hours of sleeping or waking dreaming--takes over."

The two girls, by dint of their odyssey, have disappeared themselves, or dropped out of the conventional, larger pattern of life, opting for the small egresses and hidden pathways in which the world revolves around them; but, as Tichbourne observed the night before his execution, in his famous "Elegy,": "I saw the world and yet I was unseen." Kika and Hib are displaced persons in the capitalist scheme, watching tourists enjoy luxuriant getaways and spend dollars in all the proper places. But, amid this, they observe the downtrodden, the filthy, and the lonely mired in despair because they are unofficially designated LOSERS in the capitalist game. They write:

When we peel back all the layers of neurotic pain and distrust and neurotic surface fears, what lies beneath is that infinite primal fear of being stuck forever with no love. We have built our societies on the pursuit of success: traditionally, that's meant beauty for women and power for men, although increasingly these overlap. Daily we see the dismissal of the ugly, the, weak, the old, the powerless.

The existential angst of modern dystopia is offered a panacea by the corporate power structure, in the form of mass-advertised commercialized goods and services; each that may, in its own way be ultimately destructive, but, regardless, none of which is anything but superficial, a way to placate a growing emptiness, a dissolution of social structures brought on by fast-paced consumerism, wealth inequality, social upheaval, and constant technological innovation, all of which conspires to alienate the common individual.

They continue:

So that we know that one day it could and can and will be us that is dismissed. Whether we have the tools to fool everyone until we are old, or whether tomorrow someone sees our cracks and stains and rejects us, the fear of isolation is valid because all around us are images confirming that isolation is our destiny. Buy your way out of isolation, out of dismissal and anonymity, say the corporations. Try this product, this shampoo, this razor, this cellphone, this car...blah blah blah. Buy in. But the billbords of sexy girls gaining the attention of powerful men are empty promises when below them an old woman sits alone at a bus stop.

Also:

Corporations sell us tools to aid our division into leagues of power and beauty. But they lose customers when people start crossing lines of their own volition.

Indeed, in American society, it is seen as abnormal, as a failing, to live outside the dominant paradigm of "work, shop, consume," the putative "American Dream" the carrot-on-a-stick that is both inducement and cudgel, used to keep overworked, underpaid, and utterly anonymous masses of people (i.e. "the Herd") moving in the direction the capitalist class wants them to. It is no accident that American schools are always underfunded and "failing." It is the way they were designed. The proles have to be kept servile, obedient, and discouraged from taking power back for themselves. Always the propaganda of power will reflect the idea that if you fail to attain this "American Dream," it is somehow all your fault--not that the capitalist class has taken for itself a greater and greater percentage of the wealth while undercutting the workers and peons and giving them less and less benefits and pay for harder and longer hours of labor. (It is said that if American wages kept up with American productivity, which is actually quite significant, the Minimum Wage would be twenty-two dollars an hour. Instead, it is impossible to rent an apartment while working for the Minimum Wage.) The threat of poverty and homelessness, destitution and sleeping on the streets, is a very real pendulum swinging over the bowed and bloodied head of the common people, who sully forth to support a system that, largely, sees them as little more than canon fodder for the next great imperialist debacle. Thus, schools fail, education must be kept low; "entertainment" (entertrainment) and mass media must always be kept at a very low intellectual level. Most will stay stupid; or, at the very least, brainwashed.

But the network, the global network of those living outside the paradigm, subverts the order of things in such a way as to encourage a sense of community, a cooperative of autonomous parts that, together, create pockets of resistance against the monolithic might of the power structure. In Amsterdam, the situation with squatters is described thusly:

"Well," according to Dutch law, if a bulding's gone empty for one year and people squat it--as long as they have a bed, a chair, and a table somewhere inside--the squat is legal and the squatters have rights. Of course, it's not legal to actually break the door down, and if they stop you from entering, you don't have any rights. But we're good at entering, and we bring the furniture right away, so as soon as we're in, we're in. You can walk right down to the city and register. Once a squat is legal, the building owner has to go through the courts and prove that they have some kind of special plans for the building before the squatters can get evicted. But even that takes awhile, a few months sometimes, 'cause first you have to get served a notice, and well, you know. Systems." Annet grinned, the gotta-love-'em smirk of one used to slipping through the backdoors of capitalism to make some minor adjustments.

By contrast, in America, people are run out of public parks and the homeless are harassed by law enforcement, the "hired dogs" of the Ruling Class, to keep America from having to deal with the burgeoning problem. In a country with 17 MILLION vacant dwellings, it is of little concern to the wealthy if children sleep on the street in hazardous conditions. By contrast,t he squatter community has seen the lopsided moral hypocrisy and social inequity that fuels the System, and have found a way to rebel by refusing to be apart of it.

Off the Map and On the Road

Jack Kerouac wrote a similar book in 1951, of his time "on the road," with traveling companion and occasional lover Dean Moriarty. I don't know if Kika and Hib were lovers, compatriots, or just traveling companions. They seem to share a similar hunger for the minutia of life, their little cartoons and scrawls, and what I assume to be their original photographs of common people interspersed in the book. Each chapterette is a little essay headed by a handwritten title, but the reader will feel the ebb and flow of their experiences, which they do not overly editorialize, but, like Kerouac, let the stream of them occur, pass over them, and be digested in their prose. (All memory is a lie, a cinematic jump-cut of what we believe happened; as Fred said in Lost Highway, "I like to remember things...the way I remember them. Not necessarily, the way they actually were." Or something to that effect.)

Kerouac wrote On the Road to find the "Real America"; he wrote it in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz, Belsen, and the Atom Bomb. By contrast, Kika and Hib seem to be running away from it. In our modern age, we are now alienated beyond measure, "socially distanced" and programmed, conditioned now to our Brave New World of AI, in which the new evolutionary trend will see people preferring the company of AI chatbots to actual human companions. (I already find this tendency growing in myself.) Kika and Hib's world seems increasingly archaic, and historic, though it is obviously modern. The world has jumped forward, exponentially, in just a short time.

The alienation brought about by late-stage capitalism--mass shootings, political upheaval, corruption of every kind, and an increasingly insurmountable wealth gap between the ultra-rich and the beleaguered masses--will see many, many young people drop out" of a system they feel no longer has their best interests at heart (to put it mildly). You may say Off the Map (which began life as a photocopied zine) is simply a work of fiction; the cynical side of me finds the idea that two young girls could hitchhike across Europe, even as filthy vagrants, and NOT be kidnapped, raped, or killed, rather incredible and hard to believe. Be that as it may, the book presents a vision of life, alternative lifestyles, compelling enough to convince some others to begin their own vision quest. And to THIS author, at least, that makes it an anarchist thought influencer par excellence; or, at the very least a tool of subversion, a book that may not goad everyone "off the map," but, at the very least, will open up a whole new pathway along the road.

X marks the spot.

Love and napalm.

Note: Off the Map is marked on the legal page as "anti-copyright." This means anyone can reproduce it, record it, store it, trade it, and do whatever with it. The original publishers, Crimethinc, have a website here: