GM: Again, I think it just applies to a different kind of world. What I'd like to see, the next thing I'd like to see is kids given votes. Let's give children a vote and then see what happens. [Laughs] Because they get no rights and because they have no rights they get preyed on by all kinds of people. And our culture fetishizes them so much because they have no rights, they're all little animals, which is the Victorian idea. I just think give the kids rights and see what happens. It's Horus, it's the next thing, we should be asking kids how they want to run their schools. We should ask them what they want to be taught, and if they want to be taught how to make bombs, then tell them how to make bombs, but then say I'll tell you why you shouldn't make bombs. That's the trade-off. And slowly but surely we might be able to teach kids real stuff. You know kids in the ghetto, you think they really want to learn math? No they don't, not unless they can learn to count their drugs. Tie it in to what the fuck they're doing and then try to ease them out of what they're doing.

JL: I know there are teachers who have been fired for relating math problems to situations like that.

GM: Yeah, and those teachers are out there, and slowly but surely . . . because the system isn't working, you know, and teachers know it isn't working, because they're under threat and under pressure every day, the kids just want to kill them, because the kids feel as if they’re in prison, and the teacher then becomes the warden. Everybody wants to be taught, everybody needs to know shit. And kids are learning machines, it's just the system that just makes such an absolute mockery of that. Especially when kids are watching TV, and they’re seeing other kids flying around, you know, "Powerpuff Girls" . . . everyone wants to learn stuff like that. They'd be sent to jail if they did.

JL: I wonder if you've read a writer--well, he's not really a writer, but a teacher--named John Taylor Gatto?

GM: Yeah. That was the inspiration for all this stuff.

JL: I was just reading him recently, and his idea that school bells destroy the attention span. I've been thinking a lot about what ADD is, what hyperactivity disorder is. We give children huge doses of caffeine from an early age, we subject them to school bells . . .

GM: We subject them to sitting in front of television families, watching the set flicker . . . you're actually not supposed to sit a kid in front of a television until he's six years old. So you don't fuck up his perceptions, you know? And you have people just sticking them there . . .

JL: What do you think of--I don't know what the situation in Europe is, but in America so many kids are on Ritalin now . . .

GM: They're paying for those addictions, as kids always seem to do.

JL: Do you think that maybe hyperactivity disorder is a good thing, that it's kids maybe perceiving information in a new way?

GM: Well I think it's that, but also I think that if you just take all the sugar out of their diet . . . but you know, maybe it's in the system, I have to trust the system, maybe it's part of getting them to think in a certain way or to speed them up, and not to switch to another mode of thinking . . . so I dunno. If it's fuckin' 'em up, then it's bad. [Laughs] Some of these kids work at superconducting brain speeds, and that's fine.

JL: A lot of your work, since maybe Kill Your Boyfriend, has been really focused on kids, and youth culture, and the idea of always finding what's new. Why that focus?

GM: Just because I'm an Aquarius, I'm a classic Aquarius, I'm obsessed with everything that's new. This is all personal crap. So you know, it all enriches me. I don't like the music I used to listen to, I prefer the new stuff coming out, that's my personality.

JL: Do you really think that things are going to change?

GM: Things are changing all the time. Of course they're going to change.

JL: But I mean, at the base level?

GM: Yeah! Things already have. Look at history, everything's changed. Once upon a time we had slavery, we had all these things. We still have problems, every stage has problems, but we keep getting rid of problems as well, and we're getting better. We're getting better all the time.

JL: It seems to me, though, that a lot of pop culture is fixated on the idea of the occult in terms of what's hidden, what product you don't have, what's coming next, what are we going to give you, what's the future. And all spiritual systems going back however many thousands of years have the basic message--you know, The Beatles had the basic message--Be Here Now. Don't think about the future, nothing's coming around the corner--I mean, it's a beautiful day, we're here, why worry about what's coming tomorrow?