Surfer gets barrelled; Fundamentalist says his prayers. Both feel something that challenges the soul.
Little did you know, but that bearded Arab hiding behind a sand dune with his rocket propelled grenade aimed squarely at your Qantas flight to Bali is actually your bro. Oh sure, he hates your guts and you hate his (especially after Lindt, after Charlie Hebdo, Bali, Madrid, Bali again and New York), but that’s just because you don’t know each other.
So, everybody extend hands… it’s time to meet.
Why surf? Every time you wax your board and paddle out, you kick the dominant Western ideology in the balls. Not the theoretical principles of individuality, freedom and happiness but the actual principles of work, cubicles and fluorescent lighting. Surfing is not about making money and it’s not about being efficient.
Frankly, it’s a fucking waste of time and money. It demands your heart and energy for an idea and a feeling that can’t be explained in any rational way to those who don’t surf. It’s about stoke, which can’t be bought, sold or traded on the international markets (unless you’re talking about the Stoke Exchange).
Surfing is an alternative discourse which asserts, “You bitches can make all the efficient capital you want. Go ahead and keep the Ikea furniture stacking up in your suburban homes, Landrover Discoverys needing baths and one billion overtime hours worked last week. I’m going to the fucking beach.”
Why back an Islamic fundamentalist revolution? Every time Mr. Beard-o Jihad goes to the mosque and takes his religion seriously enough to put it before financial upward mobility, he kicks the dominant Western ideology in the balls. These fellas don’t hate freedom or life. They do hate the reality of a soulless economic system that denies there is any more to it all than making capital in the most efficient way possible while destroying countless lives and claiming that it’s really a more evolved way to exist. Radical Islamic fundamentalism is an alternative discourse which asserts, “Try as you might by shoving McDonald’s down my throat, driving your bling bling Lexus over my family and putting me to work bottling delicious Coca-Cola for one penny a year. I will not repent for believing there is more to life than making efficient dollars, pounds and euros for you and/or your fat-ass bosses.”
You may think that Islamic fundamentalism is austere and hateful. Fundy-bro may think that you are frivolous and shallow. What you feel about each other – or each other’s tactics – doesn’t matter. In truth, surfers and fundies are both part of a broader revolutionary discourse, which percolates under the surface of capital-driven humanity. People wake up, drive to work, drive home, go to sleep and die, lost to any genuine feeling. Surfer gets barrelled; Fundy says his prayers. Both feel something that challenges the soul.
Surfer and Islamic fundy: side by side, lockstep, in conflict against a piece of shit dominant ideology that denies what’s important, the very essence of life, for a measly dollar.
Skip work, paddle out, punt an air, flip off the fucking man and know that in the hills of Afghanistan Mullah Mohammed Omar is flipping him off too.
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So if going for a surf is like going to Mosque then what is stopping at Starbucks for an after surf Venti like?
Well that’s generous isn’t it?
The beauty of capitalism is its ability to monetize anything it touches, and surfing is a fine example of this. Madison Avenue and Wall Street have long used the linguistic, aesthetic, musical ‘culture’ of this little shared waste of time we enjoy to made a good bit of coin. Sure, the act or riding waves makes very few of us money, but it could be argued that the distraction part you highlighted is a means to that end. The father of scientific management Fredrick Taylor found that breaks were an important part of getting the most out of his workers. Ask any CEO of a company based in the industrialized world if he would prefer sweat shops to return to his land, and I bet he would not: who would buy the iphones and drink the lattes? We are too distracted by getting our fix to fight for higher wages or controlling the means of production. Oh hum… The surf community has long fancied itself as a ‘part of a broader revolutionary discourse’ but this idea, like that of the rugged individual, is mostly a myth. For the most part we are a bunch of reformed hippy types who grind it out between sessions. We bought in or sold out, and now its time to enjoy the ride. Truth be told industrial capitalism is here to stay: the best we can hope to do is shape it to not be so disastrous towards the environment, make sure the material benefits are spread a bit more.
As for the Jihad part, well, I am no expert I bet many would gladly put down their guns and trim their beards to make $100K a year, eat McD’s, drink lattes, and stare at pretty girls on the beach. Does radical Islam offer a different economic model- not really. What it seems to offer is a tool for those seeking power a means of recruiting desolate, dumb, or hopeless kids to do their bidding.
Yeah, you are right. Surf culture is pretty vacuous and is polluted further by this vacuous appeal with everyone wanting to be a surfer. I used to look back with nostalgia at my youth: growing up in a small town surf culture, it seemed all so gritty. Reality is it was just a bunch of tradies with weed addictions who were avoiding having to mow the lawns or spend time with their families.
Everyone has their price Travis. NZ’s last and only marxist once told me that he would sell out for a cushy 40 hour a week job and a NZD$70,000 (So fuck all) a year salary (That was after he told me I’d be first against the wall for my philosophical anarchism). And oh my, didn’t he sell out. He now works in a cushy government job aiming to stamp out domestic violence and play rugby (NZ’s opiate of the people), while still half-heartedly mumbling revolutionary mantras.
The phrase ‘NZ’s last and only Marxist’ made me smile. I imagine most far left types see the writing on the wall and opt in: its just too hard not to.
I guess it is pretty hard when no one takes you seriously from the start.
When I was in Iraq I tried for weeks and weeks to get a snowboard or surfboard sent to me so that I could sandboard on the massive dunes that you could find in the sandy parts of the country. Unfortunately I couldn’t get anything that large shipped over, so I eventually managed to craft something out of pieces of steel from a suicide bomber truck and some rubber straps from a shitty pair of Adidas sandals, and made myself a steel sandboard.
As soon as we took it out, which was a real bitch considering we had to be in full armor off base, the kids came out of the woodwork and started making their own boards out of anything they could find to do the same thing. After the kids came the older girls, and then the older young men. To this day I swear I recognized two of the young men (18-22 in age probably) from a firefight we had been in a couple days earlier.
So, what I’m basically saying, is that even a bastardized reject of a version of a surfing managed to bring people together, and be of interest to honest-to-god freedom fighters.
You like apples?
How bout DEM APPLES?
The NZ Police try to sell themselves as having “Better work stories”, but telling a drunk at 3am to always blow on the pie does not compare to the above.
That will be the next recruiting slogan for the US Marines – “We have better stories than Kiwi Cops!”
Haha, in all seriousness, life is all about the stories you can tell.
Yeah, that’s why I gave commercial tuna fishing a go before settling in to complete a Masters degree. No one likes a boring person.
Valid in the shared sentiment of both, however, one’s a man of action and the other is a man of distraction. If terrorists surfed, they wouldn’t get shit done.