Make Politics, Not Art

Like most people, I started planning my first terrorist atrocity around the age of twelve. Back then, the plan was to blow up the Bank of England, which I understood to be the epicenter of the entire capitalist system: so crucial, in fact, that simply igniting some fertilizer around the place would immediately blast us all out of the current of history and into a glorious new world. The plan for getting my bomb into the building was less clear-cut. I thought I might study economics, apply for a job there, and sneak the bomb in during my interview. But that would take about a decade—I didn’t want to wait that long. I needed to do it now. I nursed happy visions of the whole building collapsing in a cloud of limestone dust, broken masonry, and screams. If you’d asked me why I was so certain that violent means were necessary, I’m not sure I would have understood the question. People were dying every day; animals, plants, ecosystems—the planet was dying. H…