Ministry - Rio Grande Blood

Rio Grande Blood is the second of Ministry's anti-Bush trilogy, sandwiched between Houses of the Molé and The Last Sucker. All their album titles are parodies of other famous titles and/or humorous slogans. Ministry began as terrible synthpop with a fake british accent, then morphed into much better industrial metal and thrash.

I have a conspiracy theory that the quality of a Ministry album is inversely proportionate to the amount of heroin Al is injecting at the time. He has a conspiracy theory that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. This is not one of my favorite Ministry albums, and that's because it transcends hyperbole and invades completely inaccurate territory. Underlying sentiment yes, truthfulness not so much. It's a "truthiness" album. 

Lots of parodized and reassembled Bush samples, some funny some not. Criticisms of the motivations for various wars in the Middle East. Oil played a big part, sure, but the illogic of staging a series of multi-national terrorist attacks in order to further empower the federal government so that they can weaken the federal government is a terrifying taxi ride through crazy town. I know everybody hasn't read my 3rd book yet, but understand that it's the CEOs and majority investors in major Corporations who now represent the Marxian middle-class. Most every store is a franchise at this point, the owner/operator is petit-bourgeois. What is completely true is that Bush was elected by this modern day ultra-conservative corporate middle-class. Point being, we got where we are today by completely normal status quo, exactly the way Marx said we would. Now unbristle those tail-feathers, i'm not yaying or booing one side or the other, i'm just describing the part of his imaginary story that looks hella-accurate. 

Al was born in Cuba at the dawn of the overthrow of Batista by Castro, and his family fled to America around 1962. Reminds me of John Kay's family fleeing the erecting of the Berlin Wall, not to mention all those Brazilian emigres. 

My real argument is that there is an underlying theme here. First, Cuba, Uruguay, all these 20th-century social revolutions didn't start out as Leninist movements, that's what they two-facedly became after the actual seizing of power took place, and there were massive protests and emigration as a result of the lies. Second, Marx has been dead for decades. Third, Lenin completely misunderstood Marx; dove head first into the empty swimming pool that Marx said was stupid and pointless, took the word "revolution" literal and tried to murder his way back to the other side of the cycle as quickly as possible. 

Remember how Aaron Lewis didn't break the cycle, just waited for the elephant to circle back around so he could hop on at cruising speed? Same difference. Why is that? Well, no one is making decisions and no one is actually doing anything. It's all just reaction to the reaction to the knee-jerk reaction to the reaction to the misunderstanding of pointing out how stupid the whole thing actually is. You can't elect a bully to defend you then get upset at how much of a bully he turns out to be. You have to define what you will and won't do, then actually do and don't do it, respectively. 

So, while i'm in agreement that W was an evil puppet of the personification of corporate incompetence, i find it a little tough to quantum leap over the invisible bridge to the bizarro universe where he masterminded anything. I'm with Marx on this one, it's just complete short-sightedly dumb philosophical optimism, and it's just part of the underlying stupidity of being a dizzy sheeple on the secret payroll of Haliburton. How do you even get into a situation where your hunting buddy is on the receiving end of a shotgun blast to the face, Dick? Making it all about money is the actual conspiracy, because it diverts you from the fact that privilege is the actual prize they're hoarding at the end of the unflamboyantly monochrome rainbow of doom. 

So in terms of Ministry albums, i'd much rather listen to The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, The Land of Rape and Honey, or Psalm 69, but i get where Al's coming from.