(pronounced: kuh-BAL), or: Media Manipulation, Unauthorised Mindset Alteration and Singular Bilateral Sociometric Ametricism in the Nineties
Nothing to do with Cabala. You want Cabala, go read Crowley.
Even as I sit here typing this, the forces of Divisism (pronounced: div-VIE- sizm) are eating away at our foundations. It seems that, these days, you can't go to the toilet without coming back to your computer and finding that seventeen Cabals have been formed in the time it took to excrete your wastes, half of them dedicated to taking, either legally or illegally, what you have and shoving it up your arse, half of them dedicated to telling you what you should be doing with whatever the first half left you, and all of them have weapons.
What can you do?
Well. As The Human League said, on that album, 'Reproduction' - The Path Of Least Resistance. They want to run your life? Let them. Just sit back and let the bastards walk all over you, reduce you to a number in a database, a barcode tattooed on a wrist, a thin wail in a cold prison cell late at night.
THEN - when you have them convinced that you aren't a threat - join a Cabal yourself.
If you can't find one, start one. If you do have to start your own cabal; most importantly, make sure you give it a good name. Don't worry about making the words in the name fit some sort of cool-sounding acronym; you can select that and just tell people that "KFNRA actually stands for `Structuralist PostModern Neo-Retro-Anarchist Formalists for Equal Rights in the Autoteller Queue', you know."
Get some wraparound sunglasses.
Change your name. Don't worry about using one that belonged to some revolutionary, like Che or Lennon or Frida Kahlo. Just about every name has been attached to someone in the cabal business at some stage. Do try to avoid trite, cliched ones like, uh, Aleister Crowley, Che, Lennon or Frida Kahlo. Sometimes, it's better to grab a handful of scrabble tiles, throw them out the window and then go read the garden.
Weapons aren't absolutely necessary, but if it makes you feel better, carve a fake Uzi out of balsawood. Real Uzis are quite heavy. Still, weapons that kill people are a half-measure; you can stop people from doing what they shouldn't by killing them, but it's much better to change their mind-set. Information war. In this situation, your weapons are your means of communication. It's more important to have good stationery.
There are two schools of thought here; one group that claim your letterhead should be simple and menacing, like the words UNEMPLOYED BISEXUALS FOR SMASHING THE SYSTEM across the top of the page in seven-point type, the letters spaced out -
and the other group (of which I am a member, and usually those with access to better desk-top-publishing gear) who claim that it's more important to have a graphic. In colour, if you're rich enough, but monochrome clip art is okay as long as firstly, the resolution is such that you can't see any jagged edges (300 DPI), and secondly, it has to be pornographic. The more explicit, the better. the best way to achieve this is a personal computer, a hand-scanner and a handful of underground comics. Foglio's 'XXXenophile', Welz's 'Cherry', Waller and Worley's 'Omaha' and anything from 'Tales from the Leather Nun' will do. The idea is to have a nice, innocuous name in one corner and, in the other, something that will blister the retinas of the average straight-person who doesn't read underground comics. This sort of thing is essential for dealing with the Establishment; but most of your communiques will be issued to other Cabals, and if your letterhead is more impressive than theirs, then you've won half the battle already.
(don't forget to put a very, VERY small label on your envelopes, that says 'this letter contains possibly offensive material' ... still, in my opinion, every government letter should have this on the outside.)
What do you say in these missives? Anything that comes into your head. Any gaw-damned thing you like. It might be helpful to read up on your post-modernists, here (see 'How Many Post-Modernists Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?' in Moose Magazine, issue 1). The ability to rant on for pages and pages without saying anything is the textual equivalent of a tactical nuclear warhead. If your cabal actually has a focus, such as Structuralist PostModern Neo-Retro-Anarchist Formalism for Equal Rights in the Autoteller Queue, then all the better. We'll come back to the topic of focus after a few more words on ... Media.
Until we get public-access television or some other method of cheap video propagation, then audiovisual propaganda will remain a low-level mode of communication (unless you happen to own a television station, in which case, we'd like to have a few words with you). There's only so many people you can offend by handing out videotapes, particularly when your targets are unemployed Cabalists themselves and most of them can't afford VCRs.
Far and away the best weapon is the newsletter/shit-sheet/rant page; even better if you can get it onto the Web. Anything from two typewritten pages with no correction ribbon, stapled together and left at a tram stop, to colour mini-magazines that you could market alongside TV Week - the limit is your budget, or whatever equipment you can beg/borrow/steal time on.
Since the advent of bulletin boards and continent-spanning networks, text files (such as MOOSE) have come into their own. If you're on a UNIX system, you can even set up a mailing list, but these are limited to people with net access.
These shit-sheets (goddess, I love that expression) should be irregularly numbered ... a violent/explicit graphic ... well, the details are up to you. Depending on how revolutionary/post-modern you are, you can alternate between recipes for explosives made from talcum powder, and pleas for financial aid for your imprisoned companions (if you don't have any, then invent some. People will think that, if some of your cabal have been arrested, then you must be doing something right. You may even go as far as to be arrested yourself; just remember that being arrested for spray-painting graffiti on police cars is much more impressive than being arrested for exposing yourself outside primary schools).
Back to the question of focus:
Religion used to be a good lurk ... like, about three hundred years ago. The only ones who take religion seriously today are the fundy Xtians who make a lot of money out of it. If you start a shit-sheet with a religious bent, then a good percentage of the populace will dismiss it without even glancing at it. If you are a religious nut, you can try to sublimate your ranting in pseudo-scientific terms, but this only serves to irritate people more when they finally realise what you're on about. Stick to wearing a sandwich board that has 'THE END IS NEAR' written on both sides.
Mysticism, on the other hand, can encourage an unexpected degree of enthusiasm. If your cabal is based on Masonic models and you have really funny initiation ceremonies, then all the better. That stuff about sacrificing a pure black rooster under a full moon on a consecrated altar is a bit passe, though. Discordianism and MOOism, by the very nature of their loosely defined borders, are popular. All you really need for a Discordian cabal is a wide assortment of strange titles and letterheads, a post-office box, some vague theme and a good imagination.
Social ills are 'in'. There are so many of them, it can be hard to select one to throw your resources behind, but remember that your credibility can suffer if you form an armed terrorist cabal who specialise in death-threats, named 'Concerned Citizens for Regularity In Channel 2's Early Morning Showing of Dr Who'.
Sexual alignments (or society's biases against them) are in, although be aware that depending on how outré you are, some of them may be illegal. I suggest you ring up your local police station and ask the officer on duty about this, describing the act or acts in detail. If nothing else, you'll make his or her day more interesting. Do it from a public phone box, though, and be prepared to run away quickly.
So, what do cabals actually DO?
I'll have to get back to you on that ... I have five cabal meetings to attend - two of them organised by me -and the letterhead isn't quite ready yet ...
Frater Pedantrios,
Degree XXIV
Discordian Cabal for the Dissemination of Silly and Unusual Text
Melbourne, Victoria
All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated.