ABSTRACT
This chapter describes three manifestations of agency that, in varying degrees, threaten a regnant structure's dominance. Svejk is the hero - or antihero - of the picaresque novel The Good Soldier Svejk, written by Jaroslav Hasek, a Czech journalist, an eccentric anarchist, an irregular Marxist, a bigamist, and a drunkard, who died in 1923 at the age of forty, leaving the novel unfinished. Rough music is a way of showing contempt, not in Svejk's ironic posturings of subservience, but directly. There is no need for irony's protection because the makers of rough music not only think themselves to be on high moral ground, but also are powerful enough not to fear retaliation. The institution seems to have been present in most European peasant populations from about the seventeenth century down to the 1970s and perhaps beyond. Many words used in politics are pre-labeled as good or evil.
