I got out of that immediately was that now, all of a sudden, rock music had become a spectator sport, that corporate labels and their bands were the new establishment, and punk was there to fight them the way the activist hippies must have fought what the establishment must have been ten years before. And it was interesting to see the reactions in different parts of the country.

Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away.

Another part of what gave me a questioning, rabble-rousing, activist heart and soul is that when all these heavy events went down, my parents did not shelter the kids from it.

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies.

Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir.

I think one of the beauties so far of the so-called Spirit of Seattle is there aren't any leaders, pop stars, or guru figures that everyone else is falling in line with and following. No [Nelson] Mandela, Havel, or Subcomandante Ski Mask riding in on a white horse and everybody else just wanting to follow them to the promised land. We're stitching it together and doing it ourselves.

We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon."