Bread Bandits

Action #1

Bread Bandits Manifesto #1

Pane Pane Non Fontane

(or, Fewer Monuments, More Bread)

�Wonder� refers to the spectacle�the con game of business and mass culture�and to the spectacular production of food. A shameless abundance of products that look good but which provide no good fuel for mind or body.

Thus, we say, LESS �WONDER,� MORE BREAD.

However, in our alliance with the Partnership for a Reality Free America, we acknowledge that wonder (astonishment, surprise, marvel, mystery, joy) is a desirable component of life. The brand name �Wonder� attached to pseudobread misleads�connoting and promising that an industrialized imitation of food will yield a life filled with joy, mystery, fulfillment and satisfaction. If we do not want Wonderbread, we certainly do want wonder in our lives.

It has been argued (see John Zerzan, �Agriculture: Demon Engine of Civilization� in Apocalypse Culture, Revised Edition, Feral House Press, 1990) that agriculture is the root of all evil, and that prior to the development of scientific planting and food production, human life was more leisured and healthy. Agriculture eventually lead to the invention of cultural concepts of time, property, control, and the separation of work and play�and thus to physical conditions of stress, stress-related illness, and psychological disorders, and to sociological phenomena of crime, sin, violence, and jealousy. With the technological advance of the steam engine precipitating the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was abstracted by speed�and its physical, psychological, and sociological byproducts were multiplied and accelerated in society and the individual. [For a fuller treatment of the need for greater control as a result of increased production�and the ultimate development of computer technology to provide this control�see James Beniger�s Control Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1986).]

The bottom line is that in the face of production�and the work, anti-leisure, stress and psychological dysfunction it yields�we have lost our sense of wonder. We need wonder.

So we say, LESS WONDERBREAD, MORE WONDER AND MORE BREAD.

This is our final position.

Meet our demands or suffer the consequences:
of a world
filled with lies, sorrow and emptiness.
 
 

[signed]
The Panino Bandito
�Saving Wonder from Wonderbread�