Did you know that Jewish people are being harrassed and insulted, physically attacked, fired from their jobs, and having their very identities slandered and negated by hateful mobs?

It’s true, and it’s all because they are standing up against of the State of Israel’s campaign of vengeful slaughter.

They are being told, by fellow Jews and Gentiles alike, that they are the Wrong Kind of Jews—Misguided Jews; Fake Jews. It’s funny because for all the apparent concern about Antisemitism, the only type anybody seems to care about is the absurd classification of Antisemitism-as-critique-of-Israel.

This IS antisemitism, in a very real and unmistakable sense. If any of these people on MSM News shows, or in the Federal Government or the angry mobs of violent counter-protestors, were to say to Trans college students that they ‘weren’t really Trans’ or ‘they’re misguided’ about their identity and associated ideological affiliations, the ENTIRE LIBERAL WORLD would be screaming to ‘Stop the Violence!’ but somehow the same care and respect is completely absent in their regard of these Jewish citizens—many of whom from the recent university protests are some of the finest young academic minds of our society. And the State of Israel, the ADL and AIPAC are fueling these institutional gestures of identity-delegitimation and -negation. They are engaging in PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE with American Jews who don’t put allegiance to Israel before their moral conscience.

That’s how little these institutions actually care for their fellow Jews—at least, if they don’t get into line and serve the agenda of the ruling elite in the Israeli Ethnostate. This is a salient description of what all the hubbub around the anti-Genocide protests are all about—most of which seem to be around 20-40% Jewish participants, if not more.

If like me you are a Gentile, and you wish to refrain from Antisemitic thought and behavior, I highly encourage you to allow our fellow Jewish citizens to voice their opinions and feelings about what the Jewish state is doing to the Palestinians without presuming the entitlement to harass, abuse and sabotage them for expressing their Jewish identity in the way it occurs to them.

Otherwise, what exactly is it you think you’re doing?

Its been a while since I've posted on here I know.

I've been writing and illustrating a comic book exploring some trippy religious philosophical and mythological themes through a sorta silly/sarcastic lens, called 'The Transmigratory Adventures of Philip K in the Land of the In-Betweeners’.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tsamnation/philip-k-3?ref=creator-nav

I dont know why I didn't think about plugging the crowdfunding campaigns for the first two issues on here, but below is a link to the kickstarter campaign currently underway, and below that some black and white images from the present issue (im doing all the digital coloring while the campaign progresses throughout february) and color pages from the previous ones.

There's a lot of great reward options including copies of any and all issues, original page art, color prints from the comic and a new black and white art print of an abstract drawing I did a couple years ago. Also theres an option for original art commissions, if you're into that. But just to buy a copy of the issue at hand its only 5 bucks (cover price) plus shipping, and you can get all three issues for 13 plus shipping, which makes it a pretty consumer-friendly comic book kickstarter!

If you have a chance to share the campaign on your social network profile it would be extremely appreciated! Hope you are all well.

-Sam

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tsamnation/philip-k-3

Some pages from issue 3:

And some from earlier issues:

Hop on over to the kickstarter today!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tsamnation/philip-k-3?ref=creator-nav

Do you know who Steven Donziger is? If the answer is a likely 'No', there's a big reason why. The Biden Justice Department doesn't want you to know about Steven Donziger, and what they are allowing to be done to him with the United States’ Judicial apparatus.

Donziger's Lawyers, as well as representatives of the United Nations, have both attempted to engage President Biden and Merrick Garland, Attorney Genral and head of the Biden Justice Department, on the matter—and they aren't returning calls. The solution employed by the highest office in our nation is to Ghost the legal entities seeking to parlay. Average citizens have been calling in to Garland's hotline, too, including myself—you should do it too, after you've read this (Department of Justice hotline: (202) 353-1555 ). You might also reach out to your Representative.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has levied a decision—against Member Nation, the United States of America— that Donziger be released, charges be dropped and restitutions be paid for the damages already done to him. And hardly any mainstream American news outlet has even spoken of the matter—none of the Broadcast stations, except in one case where a guest on MSNBC artfully slipped his name into the conversation.

Donziger has been on house arrest for more than 800 days for refusing to hand over his phone and laptop, and other technological devices, to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who was presiding over the case when Donziger was slapped with his contempt charge—because it was an absurd thing to require a practicing American attorney to do and it would have conceivably violated the security and privacy of persons he represented in the case from which this Kangaroo Court Show Trial has evolved. Steven Donziger, for those of you who do not know, is currently locked inside his Manhattan apartment, with a permanent electronic ankle bracelet—all because he won a case against Big Oil.

(watch Chris Hedges break it down, or read his article, if you want a more intelligent and comprehensive tour of the facts on the ground—or read his corresponding article)

The 9 billion dollars' restitution that was the punitive decision against Chevron (inherited when they purchased the holdings of Texaco) by the highest courts in the sovereign nation of Ecuador, has not been paid. Instead Chevron pulled out of Ecuador and refused to comply. And they did nothing to clean up the environmental devastation—toxicity which has maimed, caused birth defects and claimed lives among indigenous people dwelling on the Amazon.

When Donziger then began to pursue litigation against Chevron for the damages it owes, in other nations where they continue to do business, Chevron began to retaliate, against the attorney who won. They bought a judge in Ecuador to fabricate a false testimony that Donziger was railroading the poor defenseless Oil Monolith, on which basis they sought to prosecute Donziger in the US Judicial System for Racketeering. Of further interest is the fact that the Ecuadorian Judge Alberto Guerra, who was hired to make this claim, after meeting with Chevron over 50 times before consenting to do so, was relocated with his family and is now an Ecuadorian Ex-pat living in the United States. He’s also recanted most of his claims, since making them. When the Federal Prosecutors from the United States Justice Department refused to participate in the farcical proceedings Chevron was obviously seeking to set up, they instead elected to send some of their Litigatory knee breakers in, to scare some sense into Donziger, and to disable him from taking further action to enforce the Ecuadorian Court's decision against them.

Now, I'm an extremely emotional guy—and while I have great confidence in my intellectual powers, I'm not a journalist. I'm not objective enough to deserve that title. I don't like research, and I get bored writing down facts. So I'm going to trust that you follow some of the links I'm including in this essay, to answer any questions that may arise in my telling of his story.

Here's the big takeaway of the moment. Steven Donziger went into his Sentencing on October 1st. During the proceedings, Judge Lorraine Preska is reported to have read a newspaper all the way up until the moment she announced his sentence. It should go without saying that this entire process has happened without Donziger having once appeared before a jury of his peers—they've literally crafted the proceedings to specifically happen in a way that prevents him from seeing a jury—because it would obviously fall apart on them, if the decision was left to a body of American Citizens to decide. Because the Evidence all points to Chevron's doubling down on bad action.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about this deeply dangerous violation, of the very sanctity of American Judicial Process in our Democratic System, is what Judge Preska told Donziger in his sentence. It concerns me, because it reveals in this woman—a woman who is occupying a seat of power from which she could potentially destroy the lives of any american citizen she chose to—it reveals in her character a sort of gleeful, taunting brutality; it evidences a sort of bloodlust within the United States Legal system, a desire to savage the innocent and upstanding in our country—as opposed to overseeing their protection, which is what the Law is supposed to do.

Judge Preska said about Steven Donziger in her preamble to sentencing, "...only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the Law."

Just think about that a moment. That's a verbal implication of physical threat unto his person, even sublimating the sense in her employment of nonobjective hyperbole, as she's sentencing him to time in lock-up. People get beaten, raped, killed in Prison. In the event that the movement surrounding his case fails to protect him from this further and intensified incarceration, I half-suspect that once his fellow inmates hear his story, many of them will probably want to protect him. And he seems to be such a genuinely kind and respectful human being, I would imagine his presence there could even improve the existences of many of his fellow inmates—by his influence of character alone, if not some service of teaching or mentorship in the law or writing, or some other academic or intellectual pursuit of knowledge. But this woman, who enjoys the privilege of deciding the fates of other citizens than herself, literally conjured this image of him being harmed in her communication with him. In her announcement of his sentence!

This is not a Civil proceeding, at all. This woman, Lorraine Preska, should not be allowed to preside over the fate of any American citizen, if that is the fashion in which she sees fit to Adjudicate. Meanwhile Steven Donziger—the human rights and environmental defender—has had his right to practice Law revoked, apparently for being too successful at it.

The Mainstream media will not report on this. The Office of the President will not address this. Guys, this is a foundation of our Democratic Ideal being disfigured and desecrated before our very eyes—and the main hope they're going on is that, if anybody does get wind of it, they'll be more fearful of their own potential incoming two-by-fours than they will be outraged, about the one being swung at Steven Donziger.

America! Fuck Yeah! Right?...

Democrats and Republicans are both ON THE TAKE. The only thing that matters to them is propping up this limping Juggernaut of free-market capitalism, and the fossil fuel production which makes it all go, until the last breath of fresh air is drawn by a human being, on this planet. Yeah there are token progressives who toil performatively for their constituencies against the intensifying immorality informing much of Congress's behavior, but they'll never be able to call it when there's no hope left within the system—their entire defining sense of government is informed by the broken system within which they work! And they aren't doing the job for pats on the back, after all; let's be honest about that at least...

We are all living in the thrall of this massive spirit of Cultural Narcissism, which has been almost a requirement for our sanity, ever since Operation Paperclip. Ever Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ever since the chilling testimony of President Eisenhower in his farewell address. Ever since the drums of war, and the theme of Hynkel, began to play in the background of Charlie Chaplin's impassioned speech to the Double Cross party—there are those who believe the 'Double Cross' implied was that of the US turning immediately on the USSR (the ones who actually did the work of stopping Hitler); likely J. Edgar Hoover was among their ranks, as his persecution of Chaplin was infamous and didn't end until he sought asylum in Switzerland, where the Great Father of American Cinema lived out his life to the end of his days, an Exile by American Fascism. It is necessary for us to make excuses to ourselves and each other, about what our government does; it is a requirement that we not question Daddy, if we want to keep getting our Allowance.

Steven Donziger has had his assets seized, his right to practice Law revoked (A Graduate of Harvard Law School, like Obama), he's had two years of his life stolen from him, and more yet to come—all because he (in a completely commonplace course of legal procedure, apparently) refused to hand over all his devices, in the interest of protecting his clients—and really, if this is the treatment he's getting, what might we imagine to be the fates of the persons in Ecuador who are the intended recipients of the Settlement he won for them against the Oil company?

So what can you do? Boycott Chevron, for one. Why wouldn't you stop giving them your money, if they're doing this to our Democracy? I think, if you patronize Chevron, while you know that they are doing this to our country, you make yourself by that degree a part of what's happening. I'm not saying that any other Oil company would behave any differently, at this point, but Chevron is the one presently playing this game of chicken with the future of American Democracy.

But this isn't the only malappropriation of Democratic machinery the US Justice System is currently involved in. I would point you to the young Leftist Daniel Baker, who—after tweeting in response to the January 6 Capitol Riots—in which participants branded Swastikas, Confederate Flags, erected a gallows on the lawn, brandished weapons and firearms and even assaulted Capitol Police—has now been sentenced to 44 months in prison.

This young EMT, who has an apparent history of tweeting hyperbolic statements about the United States' very obvious and widely reported slide into real gestures of Fascism, both in demonstrations by citizens and in gestures by the State, had already spent seven of his ten months already served in solitary confinement since his apprehension for a Twitter post—during which time he's reported being harrassed, beaten and psychologically tortured by his incarcerators—prior to this sentence of 44 months.

Who among the armed attackers at the Capitol on January 6 have received such a sentence? How many, even, have been charged or sentenced at all? This event resulted in numerous deaths (although in my humble opinion if you don't feel suspicious about the reported officer suicides there's probably little that can be done, to pull you out of the waters of your state-sponsored self-delusion).

In the essay preceding this one on my blog (there's been quite a gap between postings, I admit—I've been working on a couple novels and I've been struggling to find novel ways in which to word my objections to what I see happening around me, at home and abroad), I challenged the Boogaloo Boys' premise shared around earlier in 2021, that black power and white supremacist groups should be able to unite under a common cause. In the course of that essay, I acknowledge that an armed revolution has probably been a moral obligation to the world which conscientious Americans have chosen to ignore since before I was born. How long is it until they start crawling the Internet with Search Engines, and decide to incarcerate me for writing that?

I'm seriously considering my potential options as a future Ex-Pat, right now—partially because I feel like there's no other way to divorce myself from the course our elected leaders have us travelling on—for twenty years now, we've behaved like the Third Reich—no, no gas ovens yet, but we sure have become good at killing and ruining the nations of a very specific Ethnicity of human being. It is no secret that the 9-11 attackers were Saudis. We have never even spoken ill of that country, in regard to some of its officials' demonstrable ties to the 9-11 hijackers. This Holy War we've been on is a stain on our history, and it's gotten so bad they had to make the 'Asian Pivot'. Time to target a different Ethnic Group, with our Military-Industrial Fascism.

Julian Assange is going back into extradition trials this week, in the UK—after recent information leaked that the CIA had plans to assassinate Assange during the Trump Administration. Do Americans care, at all? Many of the people in this country HATE him, for making them aware of the lawless carnage our soldiers have carried out in our name throughout the 'War on Terror'. He made us look at those smiling faces of US Soldiers, as they sexually degraded and tortured the kidnap victims that were the occupants of Abu Ghareib. News Outlets have constantly framed him as a terrorist, for his truth-telling; Saturday Night Live, for a period of time, satirized his ongoing persecution as if he were some sort of James Bond villain, encouraging America's denigration, hatred and disregard for the well-being of Assange—whose story now could be compared to that of Hypatia or Galileo, or any number of persecuted truth-tellers from Western History.

All of these men I've mentioned are being subjected to a Secular Inquisition—they are heretics, in the eyes of the Church of American Fascism. I don't know about the clarity of your own moral perspective—but I can't Not See, anymore.

As Edward Snowden said in his contribution to the Belmarsh Tribunal held in Britain on October 22, 2021, "If you love the truth, as I think everyone here does—you wouldn't be listening to this; you wouldn't be watching this; you wouldn't be participating in this; you wouldn't care about this, unless something in you told you that something important was happening, here— and if you do care, as I think you do, you are a criminal in the same category as Julian Assange."

We all know that our Democratic Ideals have never actually been fully realized in this country's history, except in increments bought with tears and blood; by the sacrifices of uncompromising Idealists. The further we allow the greed of our Duopolistic Government's Corporate Sponsors to propel us down this path of Iniquity, the more blood it will require to eventually dig ourselves back out...

Most of us are familiar at this point with the concept of a Collective Unconscious, with which many who identify as Atheist or Agnostic will often associate any inexplicable phenomena they encounter in their conscious experience.

It’s ‘The Universe’, or the Agnostic God, the thing that explains Synchronicity, as Jung put forth. And I’m only so initiated into Jung’s thinking—I don’t believe I’ve read anything of his in its entirety, anyway—so it might be I missed a nuance of it, but it’s occurred to me lately that there’s an aspect of this model I’ve been overlooking, as I’ve applied it to my life. So, perhaps, have we all.

The Unconscious human mind is full of impulses, both noble and vile. Within Human Nature, we have both the impulse to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others, and also the impulse to sacrifice others for our own sakes. That is why we call the act ‘Forsaking’.

So, if we talk about a ‘Collective Unconscious’ as being God, would it not be logical to deduce that there was a dualistic nature to this quasi-deity? There would be both an unconscious force of loving devotion, and also one of resentful aggression—and they would break down into micromoments among humans, and these refracted expressions of the Hostile or the Generous Act would also find expression in the many gestures of Macroviolence that are often the products of organized Human Will in this brutalistic global society.

What is the essence of Evil? I have heard it described as Selfishness but it occurs to me that it is entirely natural, to the pinpoint locus of a Human Consciousness, to perceive itself as the center of the Universe, at least on a base level—I don’t think that is evidence of Ill will, in and of itself.

I think the essence of Evil is when one’s self-indulgence guides them to seek profit at the expense of the Other. And by this I don’t mean ANOTHER, I mean THE OTHER—the one we tell ourselves doesn’t matter as much as our own people do.

This is the essential dynamic of Cannibalism, incidentally—Just to use an extremely sensationalized comparison. And I don’t think the evidence is universal that a Human Being will always forsake its fellow, just because the Other offers a path to oneself’s own salvation. In Nathaniel Philibrick’s Historical recounting, In the Heart of the Sea, I was stricken by the story of one Owen Coffin, nephew of the Captain George Pollard Jr., on the legendary Nantucket whaleship, the Essex.

This is not to be confused with the horribly misguided Ron Howard film adaptation of the same name from within the last decade—that was a travesty of compromising and hyperbolic fictionalization (WTF, Opie!), of a story that is already nearly perfect in the cautionary narrative it evokes for our Species.

You might not be aware that the story of the whaleship Essex was Herman Melville’s true-life inspiration for the plot of Moby Dick. He himself was a mariner for much of his life, and the tale was better than well-known in his day—indeed, it was one of the early Gospels of modern seafaring Culture. Essentially, the story comes to a climax when—apparently ignoring all sorts of ill omens—Pollard insists on sailing the Nantucket-based vessel deep into the Pacific, toward the Galapagos. Some men had even abandoned ship, at a port in South America, so sure were they of an imminent doom on the horizon. It’s all documented in the book In the Heart of the Sea, in breathtaking detail (really, read this book some day).

The ship comes upon a massive quarry at one point—a supernaturally immense White Whale, which becomes angry and pursues them. Eventually it rams and it thrashes the mighty vessel into splinters, as the surviving crew make off in their handful of 20-foot-long forward harpoon boats (rowboats, essentially).

They drift for weeks; find an island with a sea turtle population, where they take a rest and feed. Then they pack the boats with turtle meat and head off again. After they run out of turtle, still adrift on the Pacific (in 1820), they begin to draw straws to see who will be made into a meal for the collective.

It’s a grim account, at points hard to read. But one moment really hit me like a sack of bricks (to the extent I wrote and recorded a song about it). Owen Coffin, the teenaged nephew of Captain George Pollard, Jr., draws a short straw—meaning he takes a bullet in the head and gets sawed into cutlets. Captain George offers to take the straw from him, and Owen refuses, saying (paraphrased) “All things being the same, I like this lot as well as any other,” and his friend—who’d drawn the straw to do the deed—despatched him.

Apparently, when the men were finally found by another seafaring vessel, they were sucking on the bones of their dead shipmates; reluctant to part with them. That’s the fate Owen Coffin avoided, by grace of his submission to his own.

And this illustrates a handy thing about Evil: it often feels justified to the perpetrator. I’m not trying to shame people who survive extraordinary odds by cannibalism, necessarily. But how many mass murderers, who survive their apprehension into custody, don’t express some sort of deep-seated resentment of society when interviewed about their reasons for doing it? Something in their past collaborated in setting the stage, for their Divergence.

As Americans, we are taking part daily, hourly—every living moment, really—in a great deal of extreme Evil being perpetrated around the world, in the name of our own Global Economic Hegemony; which is to say, the ensuring of our maximum profit at the expense of the rest of the world’s people. We forsake, as a collective, real living human beings. So that we can be assured of our enduring Upper Hand.

Our wars, definitely since 9-11, have been unilateral forward actions of Imperial barbarity, all of which have evolved out of well-documented gestures of Official deception—although if you read about Nayirah Al-Sabah, the lead-up to the first Gulf War begins to feel familiarly laced with fabrications and deceptions against the American people, as well.

This is a long, oil-slick chain of brutal Evil, what we’ve all been endorsing with our votes and our taxes. And what’s worse, we keep insisting on propping Servants of the same forces of greed and exploitation into the positions of power in our country. They feel familiar to us, like a brand we can trust. Like Coke, or Pepsi. In all truth, it’s often a real challenge, to tell the difference between the two.

And the effect it’s having, of this deepening placement of trust in this intensifyingly evil mechanism, is the hyper-reactive hostility that’s become the norm between citizens; and in the perversity of our Police Officers’ behavior towards unarmed American citizens. Or in the recent trend lethal clashes between citizens, at protests. That is Hell, coming unloosed.

I know it’s extremely unsexy to even think about Morality, in this culture, but we need to really examine what we’re taking part in, here. This is Evil, there’s just no two ways about it. And in our support and endorsement of that Evil, we are worshipping a secret cult of Demon Princes.

Okay, for those of you who are still reading, allow me to restate:

We are worshipping a secret cult of Demon Princes.

This cult is so secret, I’m almost certain they don’t even know they’re a part of it. They don’t realize what they have become—or, what has become of their forsakened humanity. And that’s what we do, when we forsake a fellow human being. We forsake ourselves, just as Voldemort did in his creation of Horcruxes in the Harry Potter books. He fashioned his own Human essence into something Vile.

Evil is not supernatural, and likewise Demons do not wear hides—that is, until you raise them into yourself through your acts.

Demons are things that live in us and justify the manners in which we forsake one another. “What am I talking about?”, you might ask—well, I’m talking about Family, actually. It’s disgusting, but that’s what I’m talking about.

I think it’s pretty fair to say that every family is, to some extent, dysfunctional. Okay? We still on the same path?

Okay, so in my experience—in my family—there have been certain themes of abuse which have descended through the generations. Each generation does what it can to dismantle the abusive behavior—at least those who don’t become deeply initiated into its indulgence, themselves—but the layers just keep showing up underneath, you know? It’s insidious.

I think this is what a demon is.

It’s that spirit of abuse that haunts a family, over generations—that gargantuan blind eye of truly Narcissistic self-indulgence. Each family has its own flavor, right? And some flavors are more compatible with some people, than others.

It’s like, if you aren’t seeking out the people you find in life based on the spirit of Love you’ve fostered then you’re finding people who connect via the other thing.

You know as well as I do, when it comes down to it, America as a collective body does not show a lot of love for its neighbors—and that’s also reflected inwardly, in the ways Americans treat each other. The behavior we witness and endorse externally becomes reflected internally, as well. It becomes a sickness of the Soul.

It is a Horcrux.

The fact that it takes an Atheist to point this shit out is perhaps the most maddening aspect, too, because all the Christians in this country who supported either Biden or Trump in this last election are doubling down on these truly Satanic Principles of Profit, and forsaking their fellow human beings. Bernie Sanders preached a gospel of abundance and communal fortitude, and most of y’all just shouted from the back of the room that he should “Sit down and shut up.”

Do you think for one moment that going and sitting in a pew for a few hours once a week is going to Save your Soul, after being willing party to Fratricide? Do you not feel the Martyr weep over your grave, as you put that agent of Evil into power?

You have a voice, and if you use it to promote evil you are a mouthpiece of Satan. And let me clarify that—as an atheist—I do not see a lot of value in the employment of that term, save for the potential effect it may have of shaming people who mistakenly identify themselves as Followers of Christ, into thinking about maybe actually living by his principles as a means of securing that identity.

The forces of Good and Evil in our collective Human Nature are the only ones that exist. A Demon is an idea, a thoughtform for which you make a home in your mind; it’s what gives you warrant to take your power at the expense of another. We’ve been doing this on a massive scale, in this pre-func to Global Resource War that has been the last thirty years of American Foreign Military Policy. We even had prophets, warning us along the way, but the gates are wide open now. Ever since Ministry released Psalm 69, really.

I remember when I first heard their song N.W.O.— I thought it sounded cool, but it sort of seemed to sensationalize things, to me (I was, like, 16). I remember my introduction to Rage Against the Machine, too, I was at Lollapalooza ‘93 at the Gorge, and it looked like a riot out of a dystopian science fiction film. It sort of terrified 16 year-old me, actually, and it was alienating to observe the detached glee with which everybody was enjoying these songs, which felt like they were calling us to rise up and eviscerate our oppressors—I honestly couldn’t have told you who was oppressing me, back then, other than my Parents. And the fact is, by the time I was watching Tool give their sermon on the second stage that day—they were moved up to the first stage halfway through the tour; this was their moment of arrival—I was so firmly ensconced the Dystopian Mindset it began to feel like paradise.

And I would come to realize that these bands were only a decade or so older than me, maybe, and had only a slightly larger scope to their perspective than I at that point. And they were the next escalation required by an ignorant society—for whom Sonic Youth’s Teenage Riot was too optimistic, and Cobain’s pristine howl was sicky-sweet.

But the cynicism that Cobain called out to, in his more inward-oriented examinations of the culture, it already existed in us—it lived in our hearts, the natural product of Emotional abuse that was so informative of the Boomer-led household, themselves the first generation to have been publicly shamed for the practice of physical abuse in parenting, which they told us all was much worse than what we’d ended up suffering in its stead.

It made psychic hounddogs of us, as we began to sort out the cognitive dissonance of applied ill will, without having had the benefit of bruises by which to make sense of it all.

It’s not hard to draw connections between our personal senses of cynicism regarding humanity, and the greater American Hypocrisy—the conglomerate lies of military dominance, economic dominance, class dominance, social dominance, interpersonal dominance (anybody else feel like there’s a theme in play, here?).

But the Boomers lamented the misguided transgressions of their kids, crying “Why, God?” into the night as the youth of my generation stayed out late and got hooked on drugs. But they’d inevitably fall asleep under their goose-down comforters, reassured at least by the knowledge that their fortune was secure, thanks to the Nuclear Homicidal Robot that is American Exceptionalism.

The reason young people get into drugs is because of the ways their parents and society abuse them. That is the only reason to prefer chemical alteration to sobriety. That’s why I’m so fond of LSD—it obliterates everything. Only with acid, you get rebuild it all in the image you choose! As long as you don’t get your mind lost, along the way. I like Marijuana because it drowns out the influence of others on my thinking—like my father’s berating and my mother’s badgering, which I sought to evade throughout my childhood.

I hear their voices in the people I meet in the world, when the deny or harrass me.

These demons, which were bequeathed to me by the very people who brought me here, they find purchase in likely individuals I encounter in the world—those vulnerable by the fact of their own familial culture of Demon Worship—and perpetuate those gestures against me, that my parents began.

At least, when I feel beset upon by the world, that is how it feels.

Based upon his own family’s culture of Demon Worship, the personality of the Fiend Donald Trump presents a uniquely emblematic transformation in our culture’s collective sense of Self—he is unashamed of his own Personal Evil. He is aware of it, and makes profound gestures to his audience that indicate his utter lack of inner conflict regarding it.

This is the signal that informed the White Power crowd in America that they should divest themselves of their shame, as well. And, as we all discovered, there was a potent force of commonplace evil simmering in a massive share of our population, waiting for him to exploit it.

Trump wasn’t the first to lack shame, by any means. He’s just the first in whom we’ve seen no attempt to cover up the fact with Spin, or Gaslight. This is a significant turning point, which we ought all mark in our hearts when we consider our relationship to the United States of America, as it presently functions.

Evil is each of our choice, in every moment.

Ever been at a party, where people have brought dogs? And did you ever notice what happens with a guy with massive BDE walks into the room? I’ve seen it happen before—sorry to brag, but when I walk into the room, I tend to part the waters with my energy. And I’ve observed moments where the dogs began snarling at each other for no reason other than the shifted energy of a new human presence—and I’m fairly certain they were responding to the change in their owners’ energy, more than they were to the Alpha entering the room.

That moment—where the issue of dominant authority (that is what we mean, when we speak of an Alpha Male) becomes a question—that opens up a chasm of discord, as the hierarchal order upon which the group’s cohesion relies falls into a writhing mass of individual wills, striving against one another for what they feel is their rightful place of dominance.

But that is only because of Fear of being Dominated.

We fear to think of ourselves as alone, in the world. We have lived in the shadow of that fear, since our earliest biological beginnings. It informs the logic under which we submit to the hierarchy of a group, as individuals. It provides security—from physical harm, sure, but also the hierarchal group secures our access to resources such as shelter, food, and sexual partnership.

That is, if the group is functioning in a healthy and productive way.

Consider a tribal village, in which the chief pays off the strongest members of the tribe to secure his wealth, and then he pays the smartest members of the tribe to devise ways of securing more and more wealth from the labors of his tribespeople—what happens, among the lesser men and women of this tribe under such conditions?

Unless they can convince the strongest and the most intelligent among them to forsake the fortunes they’ve secured for themselves—and work together against the power that oppresses them all—they feed upon one another.

Any of this sounding familiar, yet?

I really like to look at artwork of people with horns. It’s become a popular trope in fantasy and science fiction, lately. Of course, we all know the place from where that visual originates in our collective Cultural Memory. It’s the Devil. He has horns growing out of his Cranium. Like, from the brain itself.

As if its mind had crafted, through some miraculous organic process, these weapons it could use in the world...

But don’t get all freaked out, because the whole mythology regarding the Devil is a bunch of bullshit, the result of which is to actually preserve the legacy of Evil in humankind to a greater degree.

Lucifer was the Angel who was cast out from Heaven by God, and became the ruler of Hell. He was cast down for his audacity—in attempting to Emulate God’s Glory.

This is to say, he sought to be like Christ.

What a weird message to present to the followers of Christ, don’t you think? Almost as if one were attempting to lead them away, from his example?

The Horns of the Devil symbolize the Intellect of Humankind—our central empowerment, in nature.

Like any sharp object, the devices and systems we create with our minds only take on a Moral quality in the world of matter according to those ends to which we apply them. As examined in the climactic Holy Moment of John Steinbeck’s touching epic, East of Eden, one word is the key, and our personal interpretation of it is everything: The Hebrew word, ‘Tim’shel’.

The supporting character Samuel Hamilton (who I love more than almost any other being I’ve encountered, in life or in fiction) discusses the matter of Cain’s fate with Lee, the butler (I guess?) of the Trask family, as they attempt to process the nearly Biblical scale of personal tragedies that had spun into being, in that family’s home. I’m providing the text here because it truly is a fascinating thing to ponder, and the concept is presented in a way which does not ask faith of the audience. It reduces the entire problem of Human Morality to a very fixed and definite scope—the Will of one human being. And it must be decided anew, in every moment of one’s life.

So here is that passage from East of Eden (if you've read it already, you may want to skip down to the end of the sizeable excerpt that follows to finish the rest of my essay—and I hope you’ll read the whole book some day, if you haven’t):

“Do you remember when you read us the sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis and we argued about them?”

“I do indeed. And that’s a long time ago.”

“Ten years nearly,” said Lee. “Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have—and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this—it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says, ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin.”

Samuel nodded. “And his children didn’t do it entirely,” he said.

Lee sipped his coffee. “Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order. And I began to stew about it. I wondered what the original word of the original writer had been that these very different translations could be made.”

Samuel put his palms down on the table and leaned forward and the old young light came into his eyes. “Lee,” he said, “don’t tell me you studied Hebrew!”

Lee said, “I’m going to tell you. And it’s a fairly long story. Will you have a touch of ng-ka-py?”

“You mean the drink that tastes of good rotten apples?”

“Yes. I can talk better with it.”

“Maybe I can listen better,” said Samuel.

While Lee went to the kitchen Samuel asked, “Adam, did you know about this?”

“No,” said Adam. “He didn’t tell me. Maybe I wasn’t listening.”

Lee came back with his stone bottle and three little porcelain cups so thin and delicate that the light shone through them. “Dlinkee Chinee fashion,” he said and poured the almost black liquor. “There’s a lot of wormwood in this. It’s quite a drink,” he said. “Has about the same effect as absinthe if you drink enough of it.”

Samuel sipped the drink. “I want to know why you were so interested,” he said.

“Well, it seemed to me that the man who could conceive this great story would know exactly what he wanted to say and there would be no confusion in his statement.”

“You say ‘the man.’ Do you then not think this is a divine book written by the inky finger of God?”

“I think the mind that could think this story was a curiously divine mind. We have had a few such minds in China too.”

“I just wanted to know,” said Samuel. “You’re not a Presbyterian after all.”

“I told you I was getting more Chinese. Well, to go on, I went to San Francisco to the headquarters of our family association. Do you know about them? Our great families have centers where any member can get help or give it. The Lee family is very large. It takes care of its own.”

“I have heard of them,” said Samuel.

“You mean Chinee hatchet man fightee Tong war over slave girl?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s a little different from that, really,” said Lee. “I went there because in our family there are a number of ancient reverend gentlemen who are great scholars. They are thinkers in exactness. A man may spend many years pondering a sentence of the scholar you call Confucius. I thought there might be experts in meaning who could advise me.

“They are fine old men. They smoke their two pipes of opium in the afternoon and it rests and sharpens them, and they sit through the night and their minds are wonderful. I guess no other people have been able to use opium well.”

Lee dampened his tongue in the black brew. “I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long.”

Lee laughed. “I guess it’s funny,” he said. “I know I wouldn’t dare tell it to many people. Can you imagine four old gentlemen, the youngest is over ninety now, taking on the study of Hebrew? They engaged a learned rabbi. They took to the study as though they were children. Exercise books, grammar, vocabulary, simple sentences. You should see Hebrew written in Chinese ink with a brush! The right to left didn’t bother them as much as it would you, since we write up to down. Oh, they were perfectionists! They went to the root of the matter.”

“And you?” said Samuel.

“I went along with them, marveling at the beauty of their proud clean brains. I began to love my race, and for the first time I wanted to be Chinese. Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing. I bought every known Hebrew dictionary. But the old gentlemen were always ahead of me. It wasn’t long before they were ahead of our rabbi; he brought a colleague in. Mr. Hamilton, you should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking—the beautiful thinking.

“After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’ The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek.”

Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”

“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.

Adam said, “Do you believe that, Lee?”

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”

Adam said, “Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?”

Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”

Adam said, “I don’t see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this.”

“Neither do I,” said Lee. “But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’”

This speaks to both the force of Good in the world and also the force of Evil. Evil is not an external force. It only exists in the heart and the will of a single Human Being. It only exists when we decide to consciously forsake our fellow human beings. That is what evil is, and God and the Devil ain’t got shit to do with it.

When we do it again and again, these little evils start holding hands across time, and pretty soon there’s this invisible chorus—an eternal rite of sublimation—to Evil, resounding all around us. Everywhere we go, in the world.

Likewise it is only upon us, AS INDIVIDUALS, to change the balance of Good and Evil in the world we share. It is only by changing the Microeconomies of Morality in each of our lives, that we can reach the center of this Cancerous Growth—and, at least in the USA, that center is in the halls of Legislation. That is where the most crucially decisive gestures of Domination, Larceny and Fratricide occur in this country, by which the entire span of smaller evils is legitimized.

Every President who brings onto his cabinet representatives of these forces who are trying to siphon the vitality from the people of the world—NOT just our country, the WORLD—is serving a great Evil. On a GARGANTUAN scale. You guys, do the fucking math—it’s grotesque. It’s worse than ANY horror film.

Cthulu is REAL. It’s this giant shit we’ve been taking on each other, and accumulating into a mass. And it’s been growing around us—inside us—for Centuries, Millenia. And its reached a point of Critical Mass, and Terminal Velocity, and the number of people having to crowd and compete for scraps from the Oligarchs’ tables is increasing exponentially.

Whatever we do as individuals, as groups of Human Beings we are in the steadfast habit of turning away from the harvesting of one another’s Creative potential; instead, we work to Sow and Reap the will of Cain, in our brother.

We are living in Hell on Earth, right now. It’s what we’ve made, of Nature. We need to stop blaming the Babadook, and take a look in the mirror. I’m not perfect, and neither are you. Becoming better takes real work.

That’s why Christ said, “Judge Not, lest Ye Be Judged Yourself,” because he saw that everybody was passing around this Judgment, this vengeful commerce of the Victim—everybody feeding on one another, under the Yoke of Rome, and the Jerusalemites who played along.

Sucking marrow from the bones of their shipmates.

That’s why Moses delivered the Ten Commandments. Because he realized that people were lifting up principles of Narcissism and Misanthropy, and creating a culture of Evil as a result.

You don’t have to identify as a Christian, or go to church, or even use the word God, in order to come to terms with this concept. For the last time, I am not talking about something Supernatural. This is the real world. This is what’s creating all the mass shooters, the Incels, the Suicides (and suicides, and suicides).

This is, in essence, the only true Economy that exists in our world—for money is a representation of the justice we deliver unto one another, as we make recompense for the gifts of produce and service we find, when we trade with other human beings.

If you don’t appreciate your Plumber, fuck you. And if you think any President of the United States who’s presided over this evolution of Brutality in our culture—throughout my entire lifetime, at least—if you think they’re some kind of heroes? FUCK YOU, even more.

These are the Gatekeepers of Hell on Earth. They follow the Wills of a secret cult of Demon Princes—who have forsaken their humanity, over a lifetime spent forsaking their fellow man. They do not follow the Wills of the good people of this country; not Red or Blue, Black or Brown or White.

They are the ones doing this. Right before our eyes.

Please WAKE THE FUCK UP, America, and smell the Brimstone...

[Note: apologies to any LGBT readers for the exclusively heteronormative regard of this essay, I'm just pontificating based on personal experience.]

Most young boys just want to find a way to have love and partnership, when they think about the object of their desire. As they grow, there’s a kind of gradual awakening that occurs within the minds of a given generation of young boys, as they come to terms with the fact of their sexual impulse, and discover a means by which to actualize it with young women. It’s not a specific timeline; it’s entirely subjective to the individual. It’s also related to their position within the social order.

Some boys learn from their Alpha figures, be it the father or the elder brother or what have you, about the way it all goes down with a woman. There are casual rites of preparation which occur between the men in the family, that collaborate with his general observations of the world and of the parents’ relationship in leading the young man comfortably and competently into their first sexual moments with a woman. Other boys don’t get that information.

Other boys have inexperienced or incommunicative fathers, or a parental relationship model which obscured the sexual component of their relationship from the child’s awareness. Or their mother was a victim of rape, maybe, or sexual assault, and they taught their son a hyper consciousness of the toxic potential of masculinity, at too early an age to make proper sense of it. Or the boys don’t have connection to the forward scouts of their generation’s sexual development in the social order, from which to vicariously glean experience or wisdom. Boys who aren't properly initiated into a healthy dynamic of sexual expressivity slowly find footing and climb their way out of the pit of adolescence, at whatever pace they can manage.

Along the way, those other boys are often punished by their peers for their inexperience, in behavioral reactions stemming directly from a culture that worships and ritualizes the competitive act. A boy who doesn’t get the girl becomes the loser, and there’s a ritual around that side of the process of winning that we don’t always talk about —a consecration of that division that occurs when the ritual of competition is performed. After all, winning doesn’t really mean so much without losers, if you think about it. So we must publicly anoint them, and often.

The children in our society grow up in a machine, which subjects them to damaging social mechanisms of ridicule and identity-limitation if they don’t demonstrate dominant personality tendencies along the way. They become acquainted with a sense of self that is informed by their lack; their failure—as early as elementary school.

For this type, Public Education is a psychic killing floor.

And that’s not just for boys, either. It occurs to me that women as well as men learn to relish in the domination of the weaker and less successful members of their gender, and their species. Young women compete against one another for prominence in the eyes of the young alpha male. And, by whatever degree of zeal with which they perform the rite, their rejection of males they deem undeserving of their affections signals, to the Alpha male, their fealty to his power. They signal their recognition, of this central fact that governs all life.

Either you’re a Winner, or a Loser.

Jim Halpert or Dwight Schrute; Abe Goodwin or Sam Tsohonis. Cain or Abel, Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau—are you getting the picture? In the foundational roots of the Bible is a premise that there must always be both. And it’s maybe the fundamental core of Western Culture.

For fuck’s sake, just the fact that we always find ourselves reducing the human culture of Earth into such grammatical binaries—Western and Eastern—speaks to the principal I’m trying to communicate.

The sexual protocols that govern the flow of human lives in our society are all predicated on this concept of Darwinian logic. Our social order is entirely built around the competition for reproduction.

Of course, primitive humanity was mystified by it; dominated, by the fact of it. Cockblinded, one might even say.

It was a very small world, and one had to expend great amounts of energy in just surviving it. Primitive humans found their social orders based on hierarchies of male dominance, relative to their ability to mate with women. Which, in primitive times, meant also their ability to physically intimidate or defeat other men, and also of course to produce food, shelter and safety.

We now live in a society where women have gradually evolved into a far greater sense of individuation, than possessed their primitive counterparts. To varying degrees, women no longer seek to be defined by the men who claim their sexual partnership. It’s a long-delayed blooming, a more complete coming-into-consciousness of their potential as individuals—which was, inevitably, originally squelched by the primitive paradigm in which we all originated, more than it was a conscious effort of primitive men to dominate an entire gender.

Of course, from the first act to repress a woman who longed for more, it became that.

Both men and women have evolved out of an extreme state of being, dominated by confusion and fear, and physical threat, to arrive at this point in time together. The original order we found was based on physical reality, alone. It started before the invention of fire.

Now, we have the knowledge and power to do anything we want. The only thing we have to fear is not fear, itself—it’s us, ourselves. And there’s only one power in humanity on which we can safely put our faith—Creativity, and it is the product of the Human Imagination. Based exclusively on both Historical anecdote and Empirical evidence, this is the most definitive trademark of a Mind that is adequately equipped for life on Earth.

We have risen out of a prehistoric state of subjugation—naked, homeless, striding barefoot through jungles! Judged on our Material virtues alone, we have no rightful place in this Nature; we have always relied on the power of Creative Thought, to produce the transformative bridges throughout our civilization’s development which have arrived us at this truly Superhuman state of living that we’ve achieved—we have risen, from a relative biological obscurity into a being that can lift itself to the stars.

We know that the power of humanity lies in its ability to imagine a better future. And yet, the majority of humans spend all our time around the act of gathering and circulating little pieces of paper that we tell ourselves symbolize our worth, just doing everything we can to cling for footing in the present moment.

We strive, in this fashion, often at the suffering of family or other forms of fulfillment, to pit ourselves against one another in our accumulation of these little pieces of paper. Then, in our national collectives, we reproduce the same act of striving. We find likely losers in the less fortunate Nations of the world, and we coerce them in their helpless states to let us bring to them our factories and jobs—then, of course, we siphon the surplus value these rigged infrastructures create into our own national economies.

Oh God, you’re just so Dominant, America! So very drenchingly sexy...

Money symbolizes more than just a person’s labor. Money is our pathway to Faith, in the true religion of humanity. It’s a religion that has no name because we don’t even see it. But we consecrate our faith in it, every time we laugh at someone else’s misfortune. Every time we ritualize the casting-out of a loser.

When we earn money we increase our potential for dominance, in the competition that is life. We all know the saying, ‘it puts food on the table’. Unless you grow what you eat in your backyard, Money feeds you. Unless you own your home outright, Money lets you sleep comfortably at night. Money gets you in the door, and Money drives you home when the work is done.

Ayn Rand put this principle forward, in bold type, in her epic rape fantasy Atlas Shrugged. The Dollar Sign was what the Society of John Galt chose as its emblem, in their hidden society of Avatar Industrialists.

I have a strange connection with Ayn Rand. It’s one of the ways I’ve learned about my penchant for willful ignorance, in my digestion of creative works. I read the Fountainhead back in high school, because this girl with whom I was in love was reading it (still am, incidentally, and always will be—not that I draw any benefit from this fact). And I’d seen other intellectual kids with whom I felt identity reading it around school, but it wasn’t one in any curriculum of which I’d been made aware. But I read both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and was deeply affected. Only, I thought they were talking about the struggle of the Artist!

Well, of course, the Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, or whatever, sponsored a College Scholarship contest, at least back in my day. They had specific questions regarding Ayn Rand’s work, about one of which they wanted the prospective applicants to write an essay. There were significant prizes, for the chosen essays. I remember thinking that was pretty cool, actually. A neat pathway for an exceptional thinker to show their merit, at that age.

But the thing about Ayn Rand, and Objectivism, is that it’s afflicted by a grave form of tunnel-vision, and that was informed by Rand’s personal experience of the Bolshevik Revolution (she was 12, in 1917)—which, even a modern Socialist is likely to attest, quickly became a network by which to disseminate a thuggish sort of brutality, upon the former beneficiaries of the Czarist Oligarchy.

Apparently there’s a degree to which Narcissistic behavior is a product of Trauma, and it seems evident that the Narcissistic shortsightedness inherent in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy is a direct byproduct of the unfortunate brutality that became of the mechanisms of Bolshevism, post-Revolution. Perhaps as a direct result, her portrayal of the dynamics of Global Commerce and Industry were childish and naïve, even in her day.

Rand spoke often of ‘Second-Handers’, which were perhaps most perfectly exemplified in the character of Peter Keating, in the Fountainhead. He profited, again and again, off of the work of the genius Howard Roark—whose singular devotion to craft and vision, and the dialogue of Cultural Narrative, really painted him in the colors of an Artist; as much Mystic as Architect, almost. In Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s community of world-movers were delivering judgment upon the Plebes of the world, their loyal customers. She painted a picture where the uprising of these Advocates for Social Consciousness (the ‘SJW’ of Rand's day, I suppose) were compromising the very vitality of these noble idealistic achievers—these god-like Creative Giants driving the heartbeat of the country’s economy, with every Taggart Coal Train they sent across the Rockies; riding on rails of Rearden Steel.

But we know today, these corporations driving the economy of the world (into an approaching brick wall, it appears from my seat), they are in reality the Second-Handers of our world. They all start out with a great idea, that comes from a great mind, of a greatly-achieving human being. But the mechanisms that have evolved in the technology of profits are designed so exclusively for short-term gains, we’re now looking at the end of life as it has been known, since we first figured out how to use a bone as a club—at least in terms of the available bounty which Nature is able to provide, any longer. By the time Amazon becomes a household name, it ends up being expressed as a curse by half the people who utter it.

Ayn Rand’s idea of economy would be reasonable, maybe, if you were playing with a plastic Little Peoples playset. It does not take into account the entire spectrum of the human experience, though. And that’s because, inherent to her worldview, is an intrinsic devotion to the act of Capitalistic Domination.

Because she wanted so badly to be a Winner.

In two hundred and fifty years, the Industrial Revolution’s Boon to Humanity has been warped, by a series of these mid-level Winners, into a Suicide Pact between Secret Lunatic Monarchs, stealing and hiding the fruits of our labors from us, even before we can pick them off the branch.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but have you ever asked yourself what the dollar sign represents, as an image? Apparently there’s some ranging speculation as to the visual etymology of the symbol. But it occurs to this visual artist that it would work very nicely as an icon—say, to warn somebody; of a serpent, in some trees.

The fact is, Money is what we put before all else. We give our lives to the acquisition of these stupid fucking pieces of paper. Yes, it’s necessary. But what I’m putting forth is that we’ve allowed its use to shape us this entire time, like addicts. It’s shaped the entire face of the human experience. But that’s only because we’ve been unconscious, so far, of the ways we’ve allowed ourselves to be manipulated by it.

When you want something in the world, it takes on gravity. When everybody wants something at the same time, it becomes immense. And what do we do with the money we collect, other than spend it on necessaries? What do we do with it other than spending it, period? We save it up. Some few of us have immense troves of the stuff, just sitting around. These supple mounds of coin; these firm, virile stacks of hard, hot cash...

We use Money to separate ourselves from what we fear—which, almost universally, is to become the Loser. And so we stratify ourselves over others, in our thinking, based on the degree of wealth that separates us—because we have to believe in the narrative we derive from it, that we are other than them.

Hey, I mean—if not, we’re only that much closer to being Losers, ourselves.

Fortunately, shifting the angle from which you investigate the phenomena makes the whole thing feel like an unconscious reaction to trauma. The trauma of competition--rooting from the original struggle for survival in the primal hostility of Nature. We ritualize the traumatic act in our reproductions of it, just like in tragicommon cases where victims of abuse become abusers, themselves.

If you’ve stayed home through the quarantine, think about how different the world has felt. Think about how many people have been sitting at home, just reflecting. I’ve been having so many epiphanies. And I keep hearing other people telling me theirs! And I keep thinking how there’s been very few times in recorded history, where this many people have all been blessed at once with so much time to themselves, to think and ponder their place in the world.

It’s what the Industrial Revolution was supposed to have provided, really! And it’s no wonder we’re still hounded by these primitive artifacts of our psychological architecture, when Life doesn’t ever slow down enough for us to get in front of any of it. We’re too busy trying to pull of a Win, every moment of our Waking Lives.

If you think about it, the whole bipartisan deadlock (Or, as I truly hope you will join me henceforth in calling it, the Coke-Pepsi-Taste-Test-Challenge) is a way that guarantees half of America at any given time is going to wear that social stain, of the Loser. It’s a huge part of what galvanizes voters’ activity in this country, often far more so than the actual platforms candidates stand on. “My team is gonna win this time, goddammit. I’m not gonna be the loser again!” It’s easy to make fun of Trump right now, as he melts into a puddle of deflated Egomania—but he’s just like every one of us, really. Just desperately clutching onto this illusion he's cultivated about himself. That he's a 'Winner'.

We are all so afraid of losing, that many times the thrill we get when we win inflates our egos to the point that we draw more pleasure from our relishing in the defeat of the one who loses. And that doesn't happen, in a game on a field. Or in a fucking arena, where two warriors enter and only one leaves. The aspect of sportsmanship is entirely removed from the rites of competition, outside of the stadium.

And we pathologically apply this dynamic of competition into every aspect of our lives. It’s everywhere, informing everything we do. It makes us resent each other, ultimately. And it serves very well the purposes of the handful of people in the world who actually own the teams.

And this worship of the power of Dominance, whatever its miniscule reflection in our own personal lives, has enabled the rise of what has maybe become the most dangerous and wanton threat to humanity, in all recorded time. Us. The US of A.

You guys, really —what makes Iraq so different from Poland? This culture of Domination we’ve raised up around ourselves, it’s a cult of Self-worship. Its how so many Christians in this country can go around blaspheming in the name of Christ every day, without dying from some sort of aneurysm brought on by sheer cognitive dissonance.

Those ones hold another power higher.

People like to say, “It’s all about the love,” but I don’t really see a lot of love in the way our society expresses itself. In fact, we seem to believe that a man who demonstrates the kind of admirable attributes that, say, Jesus Christ or Luke Skywalker demonstrated in their narratives, is actually undeserving of a woman’s love. Nice guys finish last, in sex and in sales. It’s more than a catchy quip, my friends. It’s a form of worship.

And the force being worshipped—if you’ll excuse an Atheist the Biblical reference—is Beastly.

[Editor’s note: spoilers, obviously. Also, after writing this I did see the season 2 finale and--while it was a little boring getting there (now star wars has Cylons. Woohoo exciting)--i can't deny the ending was pretty satisfying. doesn't change any of the following, though.]

TheMandalorianSeason 2 is currently airing on Disney Plus. Rosario Dawson just played Ahsoka Tano, the fan favorite character who came up in the Clone Wars cartoon series. I think it was a wonderful casting. Fucking Boba Fett has returned—perhaps the thing fans have been awaiting the most, since before the Prequel Trilogy. But, despite all the attempts at fan-service, The Mandalorian is already turning into another piece of crap.

Horrible dialogue. Every episode. Just. Fucking. Shite. I mean, seriously, what is this? Ahsoka, a Jedi servant of the Peace, refuses to care for a vulnerable innocent child Grogu, instead insisting he was safer planet-hopping with a galactic bounty hunter? Such a brilliant invention of a plot device! What writing! Then we find out Boba Fett survived the digestive tract of the sarlacc, and then apparently feared a local scarecrow sherriff—of a slighter build than Walton Goggins (and just as friendly)—andso badly that he didn’t try to retrieve his gear from him, but instead pursued a genuine Mandalorian across hyperspace to claim the gear from him, after he’d taken it from the Sherriff?

It just doesn’t track, guys, and I could have told you that at fucking age 12. Aren’t you all ashamed of yourselves, for what you’ve done? Didn’t you get into this industry because of an Artistic impulse?

Honestly, it’s disturbing. Since the undeniable critical success of the Mandalorian Season 1, Longtime Lucasfilm veteran Dave Filoni has been rightfully elevated into greater proximity to the nucleus of Star Wars creative control. He’s been a part of it since the Clone Wars, and likely came up with a lot of the same feelings as have I, regarding the franchise. He’s the dude that did the work to become part of it all, though, while I was busy sidelining my artistic aspirations to do some earnestly-needed deep living with Psychedelics, Rock and Roll and a bunch of dreadlocked chicken-heads.

I did actually send in an application for an Internship with ILM, back in 2002. I’d done a couple animations, which were fairly successful first attempts, at college, but I’d not developed my craft enough at that point in any medium to have earned such an honor. And in truth it resonated deeply in me when my animation professor at Evergreen, Ruth Hayes, told us on the first day, “If you’re trying to tell your original story in animation, you need to learn to write.” So the wild living was a good choice, in that regard—it’s helped me develop a broader cultural vocabulary from which to draw in my creative work.

But if you’re interested in Star Wars, on any level, and you don’t know who Dave Filoni is—Here's a video that demonstrates his value to the franchise (its also in one of the BTS Mandalorian featurettes on Disney Plus). Filoni has a deep thematic awareness of the Star Wars storyline, and in fact seems to have evolved into an off-the-books spiritual progeny of Lucas. The Right Hand he should have always had, if instead he had to make do with the mechanical prosthetics of Kathleen Kennedy’s brand of imagination (or lack thereof). This woman, after being involved with Lucas since Raiders of The lost Ark, preferred Han Solo to Luke. So she elevated Solo’s narrative gravity by taking and nailing him to a cheap Neon Cross, and then just pushed Luke Skywalker off a cliff (Arthur, become Merlin), while he was focused on something important in the distant horizon.

I’m sorry but I’ve needed to say this for a while—that was my fucking hero, bitch.

I’m sure I’m not the only one of my generation that can say this, but I grew up with Star Wars as the platform for my understanding of Spirituality (capital S), which ultimately makes it my native Religion. My mother was a refugee from a Catholic Reform School for Girls, and an avid researcher and experimenter into various expressions of Occult Knowledge. She taught me, as a child, that if the Way of the Jedi made sense to me, then I should follow the Way of the Jedi. Believe me when I say I took her at her word.

Without a doubt Star Wars was the most inspiring and liberating thing happening in my world, as a child. It was a pathway to cosmic beauty, wisdom and achievement. I remember it was in reading through the lovely production notebook from Return of the Jedi, looking at the concept art that made up the movie’s design, that I first became seriously interested in becoming an artist. There was a universally appealing quality to it, a humanistic platform of Common Ground on which the story was told. That’s why Comparative Mythologist Joseph Campbell made such a common cause with Lucas, before he departed the Earth. It presented a fictional metaphor of such significant cultural impact that it forever changed the world to follow, and it defined (along with Tupac and Kurdt Cobain, as we matured) the moral landscape for an entire generation—of young men, if not as much young women, in the case of the first trilogy’s Era; there were some girl Star Wars fans but the action figure-oriented properties were always aimed at boys, both in marketing and social culture. And let’s be honest, there’s been an aspect of Tokenism to the casting since Lando sold out Han and Luke to the Empire. I think it’s great that John Boyega has made such a point of being out front about it. So maybe It is a bit of a stretch to call it ‘Universal’.

Anyway, the fact that Dave Filoni is becoming more involved with the Mandalorian, and then that the show seems to be getting shittier in parallel motion to that, leads me to worry that Filoni’s heart is probably needlessly breaking right now—and just in case I’m right I want him to know he should conserve his tears—for the oppressive years of Imperial Domination yet in store for Humanity.

You see, the thing is, Star Wars can’t be saved. It’s been corrupted, by the Empire. Sure, there’s still some good in it, but it’s more machine now, than art—twisted and evil.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw where this was all headed, back when George Lucas originally sold Lucasfilm to Disney for 4 Billion dollars. Their South Park episode, ‘Let Go Let Gov’, in which China had rigged the 2012 election in Obama’s favor, as quid pro quo for brokering their nation’s purchase of the Star Wars franchise—specifically because they knew Disney was going to fuck it up!—it read a bit like a sequel to the episode they did about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You remember, the one where George Lucas and Steve Spielberg anally raped Indiana Jones on screen, having tricked every American into buying tickets and watching it who grew up idolizing or adoring his adventures. They knew where this shit was heading. ‘Member?

Seriously, just indulge me a little bit here. This is far more important than it appears, at first glance.

I’m not talking about the manufactured self-importance of the overabundant Youtube consumer commentary culture currently being made available on the subject of Star Wars. Most of these folks seem to think they’re going to be called up into Disney for their loyal independent syco-fanatic promotions of the Corporate narrative. “It looks like things are about to get really, really good in the Star Wars universe, y’all,” Mike Zeroh tells you, every time. Then you go and watch the fucking new Mandalorian episode and its like they barely even phone it in, except for the mechanical aspects—the wardrobe, practical effects, makeup and CGI—the dialogue continues to hobble on with an intensifying limp, second fiddle to a vague and contrived, half-felt nostalgia for the influences on which Lucas drew in his original construction of the narrative. These are now telltale signs, of the structural failings inherent to Corporate Creative Culture.

There’s a lot of recent talk about Lucas, himself, returning to the Franchise—which could end up sort of entertaining. We’ll see. It’s not my central interest in the property, but it is an interesting side note that Lucas’s relationship to his audience became so fraught with complications over the story’s successive releases. People loved Star Wars so much, it meant so much to them personally—it’s like they forgot that George Lucas gave it to them in the first place.

You could see it happening, over the years, as his relationship to it became less and less enthusiastic. Fans acted like it was a really good thing, when the announcement of Disney’s purchase was made public. Mostly because there was finally going to be more Star Wars to watch, but also because they stupidly assumed that Disney was interested in it for the same reasons they were.

But as soon as Disney’s hands were on it a couple things changed in the Extended Universe Canon, which had been profusely developed by a wide variety of talented writers and artists. This began the fan exodus away from the franchise—in heart and soul, if not in the pocketbook yet.

In George Lucas’s version, post-Jedi, Luke fell in love. He got fucking laid! It’s one of the significant things in the Disney revamp, that they threw Mara Jade out. Disney instead preferred to portray the spiritual seeker as a bitter sexless loser. Why do structures of authority always seek to enforce this idea, that a life invested in Spirituality is a life spent alone? It’s a disgusting lie, the end result of which is to turn us away from the greater existential truths which could guide our global civilization into a more sustainable and peaceable version of itself.

Disney’s Luke Skywalker got to spend his years after saving the universe nursing a bad case of blue balls, attempting to murder one of his students, abandoning all the people he loved, and drinking blue milk straight from the alien’s tit. Irreversible damage has been done, to my most cherished world of escape, but ultimately it’s served to put a crack in the Idolatrous Monolith that is the Entertainment industry. And it’s brought to my mind a sort of final gauntlet of thoughts regarding the properties in the Disney-owned Star Wars Franchise. I’ve been keen on writing out my thoughts and feelings about them, since the Force Awakens. It’s been hard to put a finger on it, though, as there are so many moving parts. And I’m so personally attached to the storyline at this point, both consciously and unconsciously.

I think the only people who are going to really feel what I’m talking about are the people that grew up watching the original Star Wars films, in their own era. That’s not to say that youth is stupid—it’s just the only gain you achieve from aging, Perspective. I remember the absolute revelatory elation I felt when, upon picking me up from my friend Keith Jensen’s house at age 4 or 5, my mom presented me with a fresh packaged R2D2 action figure. Another time, we were both so desperate for our parents to buy one of us an AT-AT Walker toy, we ended up making one out of cardboard. I was born in 1977, the year A New Hope was released. Looking back, it was like a new era of Magic had descended upon the imaginations of human beings, and very specifically the imaginations of my generation.

It related to so many things going on in the world, too. Lucas, of course, wrote the original Star Wars as the world was recoiling into itself from the trauma of the United States’ failed and irreversibly disastrous War in Vietnam. It was an era of confusion, and disassociation. Crime began to increase significantly in our country, following the war. Drugs became dirtier, and violence between people became more brutal. It was an era of loss, after the innocence and idealism of the youth had been stress-tested past the point of structural integrity, by the forces of Domination who controlled our world.

What is Darth Vader, exactly? ‘Vader’, or maybe ‘Invader’? And this Invader works for the Empire, which dominates the galaxy into submission, as if in sublime ritualized reconstruction of reality’s material components—into a salt and pepper Mandala, so to speak, celebrating and memorializing the act of Domination by one force over another. Ask yourself, where does this rule of Dominance originate, in the world of the Living? Again, I put forth that these rites are learned and begin to be observed in society long before any civilization’s invention of fire.

Darth Vader represents the corruptive force that this principle of Domination exerts over its devotees throughout a lifespan (or, perhaps, a span of lives). His story arc speaks to the ultimate futility of sacrificing one’s nature to such synthetic impersonations of Power, of natural Order. In the end (spoiler alert), Vader elects to rise up against the roots of his own evil, all the same—In his final moments he forsakes his relationship of submission to the Emperor, the embodiment of the ‘Vader’s lifelong sublimation of dominant Force.

And so the story of Star Wars, as it was originally delivered by George Lucas—at least so far as I see it—was about the question of Force. And, in this case, I’m not talking about levitating shit with your mind. You see, George Lucas called it ‘The Force’ for a reason. At what point is it appropriate to use your personal power to fight back against an oppressor? It’s a perplexing riddle, to which we only have subjective solutions. In the interest of the present moment, it makes sense to capitulate to mild forms of Domination. In the long term, capitulation to mild forms of Domination sets a precedent for more drastic and vile expressions of the Dominating Impulse, in society. Just in case it had not yet occurred to you about the films, Lucas was actually talking about our world.

A large portion of the Baby Boomers had been traumatized by the acts perpetrated by their parents’ era of governmental foreign military policy. Lucas was one of the legion youth who were impassioned by the uprising of resistance that sprouted out of their generations’ Moral opposition to the hypocrisy of our nation. We were the Land of the Free, flying napalm over another peoples’ land to burn out the Homes of the Brave nationalists who fought against Imperial Military Occupation there—an Occupation that stretched, depending on your historical perspective on Colonial Imperialism, back to either 1945 or to 1887.

Star Wars begins with a young idealist. He’s trapped in a dead-end life, on a nowhere planet, in a galaxy dominated by fucking bastards. But he makes what he can of his reality, and he has a good heart. Thats clear from the start. But why did Lucas name him ‘Luke Skywalker’? Well, consider this: “Look, Sky Walker,” Lucas pleads with us —this was less than a decade after humans first achieved a lunar landing, remember. ‘Sky Walker’ was an emblematic moniker to choose, for this Western protagonist. I’ve been writing at least three epic science fiction/fantasy stories, since my early twenties. They might never see an audience, those older ones, as they’ve become morass-like in their dangling ends and grey areas—but I’m entirely acquainted with this type of wordplay in the invention of fantasy character names. It’s obvious, if you look at Lucas’s work. The names meant a lot to him. It was one of the ways he delivered his narrative.

And what really starts tripping you out, about art and writing (really the creative act, in general), when you commit the space in your life to truly journey into the reflective depths of these crafts and disciplines—whether or not you’re makin’ them Disney bucks for your troubles—what begins to happen is you get a little distance, and some perspective on your works, and in revisiting them with your regard you sometimes notice patterns or themes, or seeds of such things, which you didn’t even realize you were working with at the time. So, just to put to rest any suspicion in the reader that I might be assuming some sort of impossible extrasensory knowledge of Lucas’s actual intentions, allow me to explain once for the sake of mechanical efficiency that I am expressing what I feel Lucas must have intended, or if not that then what I feel the sum effect was on the culture into which his work was delivered.

So what George Lucas was telling us, with the original Star Wars trilogy, was this: “Look, Sky-Walker. Your forbears have brought you to an amazing place in the world. Through technology you have achieved what mankind previously couldn’t have even dreamed was possible. But the mechanisms by which you’ve arrived at this place are going to turn you away from the light, just like they did your father, who has become an Invader, by means of the choice he made to invest his life—ultimately, his faith—in this Empire of Domination.”

This was all being prophesied to us, essentially—in metaphor, yes, and on the Silver Screen—as most (if not all) of the Hippies, who had crashed with their bright and optimistic ideals onto the barnacled, stone fangs of American Imperialism, ended up throwing in with Reagan in the end. And why, ultimately, did these Flower Power Revolutionaries give up the fight? Well, for one, because of the country’s collective shame that the Paternal Figurehead of Jimmy Carter hadn’t proved to be a more adequate arbiter of Global Domination. And, perhaps even moreso, because of the seductive promise of wealth and security the Reagan Era politicians proclaimed was our due entitlement.

And so my parents’ generation regressed from their pathway to enlightenment. Don’t be too hard on them, though —I mean, for fuck’s sake, their kids had to be raised! If you’ve ever met a family who grew up completely off the grid, you’ll understand what I mean when I express compassion for the Boomer generation, and their crucial failure to carry the baton of Progress much at all past their college years. You kind of have to walk a Razor’s Edge, if you’re going to live a psychedelic life, and relying on drugs to do the work of personal evolution tends to end you up deeper and deeper into drugs—which often have the sum effect of leading one away from that for which one originally approached them, in the first place. The film Forrest Gump also sums it up rather nicely, in the story arc of Jenny.

Now, I don’t mean to make this essay all about wordplay, but another word choice that weighs heavily on me is the title change that Return of the Jedi underwent just before its release. Shortly enough before its theatrical debut that there was a version of the official promotional art that featured it, a word in the title of the movie had been changed.

The word ‘Return’ had originally been ‘Revenge’. Revenge of the Jedi.

I remember hearing that as a kid, that it originally was going to be called ‘Revenge of the Jedi’, and that either Lucas or the studio had made the decision to change it. It might have actually been an MPAA-related thing. At the time, aged 6, I thought it was a chickenshit move. Revenge sounded way cooler; had way more teeth—I mean, these are Star Warriors we’re talking about, right?! But the fact that the word ‘Revenge’ was replaced with a softer, morally innocuous ‘Return’ has achieved greater significance to me, lately.

And I have my neighborhood Barista to thank, for it.

Marc, at the Beacon Hill Victrola in Seattle, made a comment to me one day back in January or February, right before the Pandemic started. I can’t remember the genesis of our conversation but at some point he made a comment—really, sort of cynical and out-of-character for him—that pretty much everything on TV and Movies is just one big Revenge Fantasy. It kind of took me by surprise, again because he’s normally so optimistic and intentionally positive in his choice of expression when communicating with people. But also because I simply hadn’t thought of it in those terms, before.

Revenge Fantasy? We chatted on it a little further but I left the coffee shop somewhat unconvinced. Or anyway, it simply seemed to me to be an avenue of perception that was available to him—a lens through which he’d been able to perceive the world. But I’ve been considering it, ever since, and I’m in pretty firm agreement with him, now. I think we’re sublimating a primitive urge for revenge, in our lives and in our culture. I think it stems from that original primitive state of humanity, more ancient than our ability to create fire—in a time when there was yet no adequate language by which to appeal to another person’s reason, compassion or self-interest. From a people who lived under an immediate law of Domination—by nature, or by the brutality of others—acting, in dubious fear, to secure their entitlements of shelter, food and sex.

It’s expressed in the stories we lift up, and in the ways we tell them to one another. God, every Schwarzenegger movie I ever saw growing up (“If it bleeds, we can kill it”)—really, every action film—is a revenge fantasy. Tarantino has built his entire career on a genuinely disturbing knack for exploiting an audience into a state of complete moral oblivion, based on the hyperbolic devices of evil against which he juxtaposes his protagonists. Seriously, spend a few minutes and think about what Quentin gets you to feel every time you watch his movies. His fetishism of consciencelessness is an addictive opiate. His sole purpose as an artist in our society is to see how much violence you will accept as just, given the right contextual information.

See, the thing is, In a world that sublimates the act of Domination, everybody is a victim. Really, all but the Apex predators are a combination of Dominator and Dominated. It’s why passive agression has become such a popular social dysfunction—we are a people who feel impotent to change this worsening world we live in, so to varying extents we all walk around trying to figure out a solution to our tragedies, a balm for our pains. And we use the masters’ tools in order to seek out our own feeling of dominance. But if we can’t threaten physically, then we can exploit the reluctance in others to express physical anger, and dominate them socially. It’s our means of getting revenge, for our perceived Victimhood.

So why was it not ‘Revenge of the Jedi’? From the moment he returns to the family Moisture Farm, to find his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s smoldering corpses—carnage left by the very forces embodied in the father he didn’t even know he had; the paternal force of Authority, mysteriously moving the machine of the world around him: the Vader— as soon as he finds this devastated landscape, where once resided the home and dreams of his childhood, Luke Skywalker is compelled to Revenge; Capital R. It’s what drives him to abandon his pastoral life of business-as-usual, and run off on his Hero’s Journey with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Princess Leia is also out for revenge—against the Empire, for having blown up her entire home planet of Alderaan. I think George Lucas suddenly realized there was an inherent hypocrisy to the idea of a lightsaber, which sort of undermined the potency of his overall Spiritual message about Morality. I think he ran up against the limits of his metaphor, and realized something didn’t sync up in the final cut.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a degree of potency in most significant artwork of which the artist will remain unaware in the moment of its creation. I’m not going to waste time speculating as to the locus from whence these deeper layers emanate, but I think if there is a God it is one of the most audible ways in which It speaks to us.

And I’m sort of realizing, as I’m processing all these thoughts about this cherished story from my childhood, that it doesn’t really matter that this ritual dismemberment, that was the Disney Skywalker Trilogy, ended up about as meaningful as an Awesome-O 3000 production. I’m realizing that the story of Star Wars has been sacrificed on the altar of Corporate Imperialism—it’s become a cultural Martyr, of which example had to be made.

And that’s how it felt, watching Luke Skywalker die (A man in such athletic shape he’d only minutes earlier speared a marlin from 30 feet up)—he died, essentially, from meditating too hard.

Seriously, what the fuck?? It’s just like the image of Jesus nailed to a Cross—the fundamental symbolic message it delivers to the audience is “This could happen to you!”. Honestly, there’s a superficiality—an almost intrinsically materialistic preoccupation—evident in the expression of the Force as a Spiritual concept, which makes itself more and more present in the progression of the Disney Skywalker trilogy. And I think that’s the point.

‘Member Reagan’s Star Wars? ‘Member how fucked up it seemed, that the Empire was appropriating the name of this extremely anti-Imperial property, to create its own space-born weapon system—Its own Death Star, ultimately? Now I’m not saying that there’s an evil human being, sitting in a plush leather chair at Disney, making decisions on how to dismantle the culture of Resistance that makes itself perennially manifest in our Popular Entertainment Culture. I don’t believe that the Devil is an individual. It’s in the unfortunate byproducts of our bad decisions. It’s the things that happen in the wake we leave behind us, as we move through the world. And there’s an influence in the Entertainment Industry that’s made itself known, again and again. A force within this Corporate Empire which definitely does not want us to band together on Common Ground, and rise up against the Dominators who oppress the many diverse Peoples of our world.

But the fact that Disney would risk its own Financial well-being, in its effort (be it conscious or subliminal) to corrupt the inspiring message of Star Wars—the idea of the Force, and the principles of Community which extend out from that idea—that should give us hope. Of course it’s not what Disney Corporate set out to do, to ruin Star Wars. The fault lies in the arrogance of industrialists, who mistake Production for Creation. They’re impersonating art, now. Thats why they’re spending all their money creating fleshy simulacra of the hits from their Golden Era. It’s all part of this unfeeling Force in our culture, that likes us right where we are. It has been present in our lives since the first Humans. We have evolved to such a great extent, though, that it seems almost certain to me—we’re only playing this game because it was taught to us by the people who brought us here.

So I now look at the Disney Star Wars travesty as a bright revelation. A weak spot in the armor of Empire. And, to conclude, that reminds me of another story—one which you might recall enjoyed a similarly phenomenal sort of universal regard and wonder, in the 20th Century. J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Hobbit.

In the Hobbit we have Smaug (sic), the gold-hoarding Serpentine Beast who has displaced the Industrious Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain from their home. He lay for years upon years, delighting as he rolled around in all the riches that were the product of these small peoples’ long and arduous devotion, to an earnest life of work and civility. When the heroes finally return to the Lonely Mountain, and find the secret door that allows them to enter and confront Smaug, they awaken the Dragon and unleash his terrible destruction on the innocent people of Laketown.

It is ‘Bard’ who slays Smaug. He is just a normal man, and he has but one Arrow; One chance, to fell this massive beast—the living embodiment of Greed and Destruction, itself. And lo, but he spies a missing scale in the Dragon’s breast, and he sends his arrow forth, and the Terror that was Smaug falls into ruin and ceases to exist. That’s all he needed, The Bard, was one shot. One weakness that he could exploit.

I’ve always thought that was a weird name choice, Bard. I’d played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, so I always thought of a ‘bard’ as a troubador or minstrel. I remember wondering about it, when I read the book at age 11 or 12. But it occured to me recently that J.R.R. Tolkien was British, and in the English Language there is but one figure to whom we refer as ‘The Bard’, and he’s regarded by many as the greatest writer of all time—William Shakespeare, whose works were coded messages to the masses; intentionally crafted devices by which he could covertly disseminate his ideas regarding power and authority, evil and corruption.

We’ve been passing this baton across generations, stacking metaphorical revelations upon one another in unconscious code, sending messages to each other through the centuries. But Smaug is in the air now, all around us. We know its terrible shape, intimately. It’s the Corporate Leviathan, that’s threatening to destroy the world. And Disney’s unconscious desperation to dismantle the Spiritual message of George Lucas’s Star Wars was little more than a careless miscalculation, born of a deep-rooted hubris and ultimately revealing the weakness of this monstrous amalgam—this psychic embodiment of our refusal to evolve as a Civilization; the Force of Capitalistic Domination that exploits the working people of our World.

It fears our power to create, and to imagine. It fears our power to communicate with one another, through art. That is the point through which we may send our arrow home. Disney’s bleeding money, now; not even a Hulk Vs. Wolverine movie is gonna save it.

And if it bleeds, we can kill it.

There’s a lot of effort in the dialogue around November’s election to refrain from vote-shaming, and to make verbal signals indicating one’s distaste for vote-shaming. I think that’s awesome —I didn’t vote, in the 2016 General Election. I just didn’t give a fuck.

After the Democratic Primary of the same year, and the disrespect and sabotage to which Bernie Sanders was treated, I felt it was dishonest to vote as if they represented me. And I just can’t seem to get behind the Greens —who, for all their grass roots work, seem to only draw in an ivory-tower intellectual crowd who, for all their intellectual sophistication, are apparently as equally open to candidates of substance as they are to wackos like Roseanne Barr (or, you know, maybe I’m just lazy and uninformed).

Really, I think it’s important to respect the act of voting as a personal right, a privilege, and (according to some points of view) an obligation —of every individual citizen. Vote-shaming is bullying. But there’s a mentality one gets into, when one feels disaffected by one’s community, that becomes very much a binary ‘Us and Them’ way of looking at the world. I think it’s entirely natural, and understandable, and we shouldn’t take it personally. It’s Group-think.

The thing is, the problem all of us on the ‘real’ left face —all the Berniebros, the #NeverBidens, the people who are dismissed as ‘Russian Bots’ on Twitter (in some cases by national leaders)— is that, more than a specific candidate, we crave real and informative systemic change in this country, in nearly every sector. We want to revive Glass-Steagall, we want to kill Citizens United, we want to Demilitarize the national Policing culture, we want to end the United States’ campaign of Global Domination before it leads to all-out Global War.

No Democratic candidate will deliver these to us, save for in some Rainbow Unicorn Puppy vision of the future, wherein the Squad has grown into such a force as to occupy a majority of seats in the House and the Senate, and has also somehow managed not to be infiltrated by the insidious corruptive forces of Human Nature, in the process. In the context of the ever-worsening Climate Crisis and the related travesties that will continue to come with it, the Economic crisis which is sure to come on the heels of the COVID Pandemic, and all of the smoldering figurative Tinderboxes we’ve agitated across the globe over the last couple decades, it seems childishly naïve to imagine that any progress we achive in the next four years won’t be completely undermined or negated by some sort of national or global disaster —whether in happen three years, or five.

It’s almost goddamned October. This is the point at which the extreme voters start cursing the centrist voters, after weeks of listening to them pre-berate us for what they anticipate our vote will be. They’re so fucking lazy, we say —the Moderates. They only pay attention to any of it for maybe nine months, every four years. Then they come in, with their ignorant majority of votes, they start parroting the things all the mediocre corporate-friendly candidates say on TV (because that’s the only candidates the TV will air), and they blame us —the people who actually give enough fucks to be thinking about this shit day in and day out, year after year— they blame us for candidates like Donald Trump, because we wouldn’t vote for their candidate, when the time came. We had to stick to our ‘issues’ and our ‘ideals’. Really, what a bunch of children we are on the radical Left!

And, at least in the recent narrative, that’s after obvious collusion and conspiracy, between the party and the media conglomerates alike, to silence and deaden the effect of meteoric grassroots campaigns such as the Sanders one. It would be one thing, if the primary election had felt like a fair representation of the candidates’ actual appeal and following.  These Basics, these Middle-of-the-roader, Please-sir-may-I-have-another types fuck up the whole system for everybody, and expect us to apologize for it.

I know. It’s bullshit and it’s fucking stupid. But Trump is way more fucked up than Biden.

I mean, really —“Come on, Maaan!”

The Trump Presidency of his first term has achieved a kind of nightmarish gravity to it that I can only compare to a cartoon. It makes me think of the dark side of Imaginationland, in the epic three-part South Park story arc of the same name. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Pinhead and Chucky were all in a gang together. Islamic Terrorists blew up shopping malls with ManBearPig. It was just every horror you could imagine, all hanging out together in a desolate lounge, waiting for a victim to terrorize.

In our present moment we face a similar playground for nefarious evil. We face an impending Economic Crisis. The intensifying Climate Crisis is beginning to take a greater visible toll, every year. Riots are happening, because police are MURDERING UNARMED CITIZENS on a regular basis. This is not only ‘not a good time’ for someone like Trump to occupy the greatest seat of power in the world, it’s potentially the worst time in all of Human History. Julius Caesar had only a fraction of the destructive power available to him that Trump has at his command, you know? And there is a thick vein of Our Country’s blood, that seriously admires what Trump’s been doing to it.

Guys, I’m simply not ready for a fucking Civil War yet. I don’t even know how to safely use a gun, other than to not aim it at other humans unless I mean to shoot them. I’ll put up a good fight and everything but, God damn!

I think Biden’s a horrible candidate. I detest the smug, self-satisfied way he’s governed himself in this weird bunker-campaign election year we’ve seen. Every time I see his face it’s like he’s just reveling in the fact that he’s had the easiest job any presidential candidate ever had, tying down his constituents. It’s like the entire Universe is conspiring to just hand it to him. And he’s like, “Hey! This is pretty cool!” The fucking classic car ad he ran? “Could My Old Man Drive A Car?”

Oof!

He wears those aviator sunglasses around —trying to evoke Tom Cruise’s Maverick, from Top Gun, I assume. But he’s a lot more like the kid Tom Cruise played in Risky Business, partying in his underwear on his parents’ dime, hoping he gets away with it before the credits roll. How does anybody know he’s going to work for them at all, when he goes around acting like a kid on vacation in his election campaign. Every time I see him on camera he is way too happy. It’s like he’s stoked that he’s not having to do anything. It’s like he won the Lotto!

Have you looked at it this way, though? —If you don’t end up with Biden in the White House, you’ll lose the opportunity to talk about the problems within the Democratic Establishment, for the next four years. It will all get buried, by more Trump shit. Don’t believe me? just think about how far away 2016 seems, from now.

You’ll have to go through another long, drawn-out, and ultimately disappointing process representing this last one —wherein you get into escalating rounds of textual jousting on social media with people who should have the sense to see the logic in your political views, but for the life of them can’t seem to actually communicate beyond slogans and regurgitated TV talking points, enough to even process what you’re saying.

It will make you crazy, all over again. And you’ll likely have to do it against the backdrop of a different Democratic candidate than Joe Biden. Potentially, a more serious contender. You know, like what if Robert Downey Junior had never done cocaine, and he decided to be the next corporate lackey on Pennsylvania Ave? Who wouldn’t vote for fucking Iron Man?

(Note: I have no idea what RDJ’s actual political leanings are, it was just a random analogical device that occurred to me. He would make a dashing commander-in-chief, though, would he not? Probably funny as fuck, too. Ho Hum, probably a corporate shill…)

Seriously, if the radical left doesn’t have the opportunity to work against a Biden Presidency’s ill narratives, they lose control of the ball completely. At least in terms of their ability to continue a meaningful dialogue with the Moderate Left. Those moderate partisan loyalists want to think of Politicians as Ushers at Disneyland, helping us live a utopian fantasy. We know they’re more akin to carnies, running some kind of rigged game in a dingy, stained tent, with only shitty prizes to offer if you actually do win.

I mean, you’re a sucker if you play but what else are you going to do, when you’ve let carnies take over the whole fucking world?

Seriously, though, if Trump wins again the left goes back to square one in this conversation it’s been having with itself. And we’ve gone pretty deep into it, at this point. Also, if Bernie doesn’t run again in 2024, or someone like him, there won’t be the same momentum to ride on. It won’t be as fertile an environment for popular action and uprising, or even dialogue —other than further opportunities to impossibly stand in protest against the likely intensifying acts of police brutality we can expect under a two-term Trump presidency. We’re talking body counts, now, when we speak of protests in this country.

I understand that many of us see Biden and Trump both as representative of different angles of fascism —at least, in its present form. But if we don’t all vote for Biden, we might lose the ability to further elucidate to the Moderate Left exactly why he is a fascist —or, at the very least, the antithesis of a democratic candidate ‘for the people’.

And you know, just in the same way that they need us, we are dependent on them. The moderates; the Milk-Drinkers of the Left. I think it’s likely I speak for everybody alive when I say I didn’t always see the world as clearly as I do today. And I’ll probably change my mind about some things, yet, between now and the day I die —however far off that moment may be. We need to allow space in our own hearts for the people with whom we disagree to change their minds, just as much as we need to hope they have that space in their own hearts, to care enough to change —at least when it comes to things like Environmental destruction, rampant global economic injustice, perpetual war, etc, etc, et al.

I really just want this current chapter in our history to be over. I want to be able to change the channel and stop seeing his face, sneering at me from whatever screen I’m looking at. And I want to keep on hearing how Biden is a full-of-shit money-suckler, and how that fact about him alone is the central characteristic which makes him appealing, to the corporate interests governing the Democratic Establishment of today. I want us to unmask the Democrats to our neighbors in the Left, but we can’t do it if they aren’t in power.

This isn’t rocket science, people. If you think fighting against Trump’s Federales will become less costly to us over time, I think you’re fucking nuts. I object entirely to the way protestors have been treated but, at least to some extent, that’s to be expected in a Police State (not that I think we should be living in one, at all). What I’m truly frightened by is the citizen-on-citizen violence happening, and Trump has had a direct part in the incitement of it.

It seems like the original sin, in a wholly new, tangential Hatfields-and-McCoys-style feud, one that could stretch on who knows how long into the future —at least, it seems like it could stretch out indefinitely, if Trump takes the White House for another four-year ride. It’s scary, the sort of ghosts he’s resurrecting, and only so that he’ll have somebody to stand beside him on the Playground when all’s said and done. In the time he’s occupied the White House, he’s literally invited the White Power Crowd to have a national Coming-Out!

I’m super serial —vote or don’t vote; if you do vote, vote how you want— but if you’re trying to achieve something with your vote, consider implementing an intentional strategy in the way you decide to cast it.

And if you want to talk about strategizing for the undermining or overthrow of the Democratic Establishment I would suggest that you might have better odds of succeeding, if there’s a Democrat seated in the White House —especially if you can maintain the same energy you’ve managed in this Pandemic Election Cycle on a regular basis, once he’s sworn in.

In closing, I realize that George Bush won the election in 2000, and in 2004, with the entire country aware of the fact that he had a cocaine problem in his youth. So I apologize for my suggestion earlier in this writing that a Robert Downey Junior run for president would be on any level unrealistic, based on his similar background with the drug. What do you guys think? AOC vs RDJ in the 2024 DNC Primary?

You heard it here, first.

I was thrown out of a grocery store yesterday, for making issue of the fact that a vendor working to stock the shelves with tortilla chips was wearing his facemask around his neck, as opposed to the way it’s intended to be worn. Of course, this is at a time when anybody entering a store, even as a customer, is required to wear a mask inside. It’s posted on the door of every establishment that’s been lucky enough to remain open throughout the pandemic.

For most of the job, the guy was twelve inches away, at most, from the shelves he was stocking. Breathing on each bag, as he put it in its place. Maybe it was bordering on fixative paranoia, to some small extent; maybe the pandemic has pushed all of us a little past the brink, when it comes to such matters. It just bothered me.

I didn’t see why he, a subcontracted worker, should be exempt from the requirement published on walls and doors all over the store that employees and customers must both wear masks. When I asked him about it, he responded in what’s become a predictable fashion.

He turned to me. “I’m sorry, do you have a problem?” He said, in an unmistakably confrontational tone. There was no doubt he heard my question clearly.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, “But I asked you a very simple question. Are you having trouble understanding my English?” This was a budweiser-white dude, I wasn’t trying to imply anything about his actual lingual skills or national origins.

It escalated, as he doubled down on his condescending and dismissive gestures. I told him to go fuck himself, and that I was going to go and find a manager to speak to. Yes, I drew first fuck. But I found his adversarial dismissal of my rightful concerns insulting, both as a consumer and as a man.

I found an employee and expressed my frustration at the stocker’s disregard of the rule, and his insulting behavior towards me. He went to find a manager. When they returned to speak with me it became clear that she had no interest in talking to the gentleman, and turned to leave. I asked her if she was refusing to speak to the man I’d brought to her attention. She said she was going to get the owner to come and deal with it.

I had to walk by the stocker again, and now he had the mask around his mouth, but hanging so loose I could still see his lips and teeth when he talked.

When he showed up, I was on my way to check out of the store. I realized he’d come to see me, and when I explained why I’d been frustrated with the stocker’s lack of a mask and his behavior towards me, the store owner looked at me like he was waiting for me to shut up.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him.

“Okay that’s it, you’re out of here,” he ordered. Suddenly, I was the offender.

“Seriously, you’re going to throw me out because I complained that a worker wasn’t wearing their mask? I have to wear a mask. It’s a posted requirement!”

“You’re not wearing a mask,” he told me. When I clearly had a mask on my face.

He told me I was to leave and never return to the store. Which sucked because I was a regular customer, there. In fact, I remembered having helped a disabled woman who’d fallen outside the front door, on my last visit there before this one —my actual last visit, it would come to pass.

Look, I’m not gonna lie. Confrontations like this have happened to me a couple times, recently. It’s getting hard to keep my mouth shut, when I see people being blatantly disrespectful about Pandemic safety measures.

Just a day before this, I’d gone into the little mini-mart at the Chevron on Snoqualmie Pass, in Washington. I’d wanted to get some licorice to help keep me awake, after what had become a week of long-haul driving. It helps to keep your eyes open, having some sugar on a long drive. It’s tricky, though, to make it last. The smart strategy is to eat one stick of licorice and stop, until you get sleepy again. Once I get that taste, though, I normally just keep eating it till its gone. That’s just the story, between me and black licorice.

I’d been excited to find it in the candy aisle, which I’ve discovered can be something of a rarity. There’s a lot of places that stock three or four different kinds of red licorice, and no black licorice. It makes a guy feel discriminated against, honestly.

It’s a really emblematic fact of American life, that the majority prefers red licorice over black. Red licorice has always been an artificially-flavored treat, whereas black licorice actually tastes like licorice root. It’s an amazing flavor, one of the best. But, we like what we like. Seriously, though, in some stores they’ll have, like, seven different kinds of red licorice. And NO BLACK. That seems like a willful neglect, born of a personal distaste for the flavor, a gesture from which I take personal offense.

Black licorice is not only as good as red licorice, it’s actually better. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just say we live in a world where the two forms of candy were equal. If the two flavors are equal, why are we citizens forced to endure an interstate highway system, populated mostly by culinary infidels who inflict their lack of good taste on an entire population of travelers, many of whom would even be satisfied with one of the shitty boxes of the ‘Red Vines’ black licorice (see how insidious it is?). A twizzlers black licorice. And instead we see varieties of red, in every licorice-shaped product.

Anyway, this is all to say that I was in a good mood. I’d found some goddamned black licorice. Everybody in the store was wearing masks. One guy was coughing profusely underneath his, when I’d walked in. I waited for him to pay for his stuff and leave, before I even got in line. When I did, I stood behind a pleasant woman in a dress, and her two children. Then a different woman with a teenaged daughter got in line behind me. She stood uncomfortably close to me, Pandemic or no.

“Would you give me six feet of space, please?” I asked the lady.

She did her best impersonation of a bulldog, as she stuck her chin up at me, clearly resolved not to afford me the space I’d requested.

I looked at her, realizing what was happening. She was making a stand. The line moved up.

“Lady just move back a couple paces,” I said, incredulous.

“You better just move forward,” She glared and hissed at me, almost sounding like it accompanied a snub-nosed pistol aimed at my kidneys —like the tone of an enforcer, dominating their prey.

I’m sorry but this fat old redneck bitch wanted me to knock her fucking teeth out, behaving like that. In a pandemic like the one we’re working our way through, a refusal to grant that simple six feet of space amounts to a threat to my person, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the whole reason we’re supposed to observe it, yes? In all honestly I eventually ended up leaving the situation slightly frustrated with myself, that I didn’t push her onto her fat ass, there in front of everybody in the store.

“Lady get the fuck away from me,” I snarled.

“How dare you talk that way around these children!” she cried, indicating the family in front of me. Yes, she played that card.

“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” I told the mother ahead of me, “for swearing in front of your children,” I looked back at this tough old bulldog woman, “but I’m about to go and see my parents, who are nearing seventy years old, and I’m not interested in catching somebody’s germs and bringing them back and getting them fucking killed!”

The woman glared up at me, still refused to move back. At this point, I would have had to get physical with her, in order to get her off of me. It would be inappropriate of her to behave like this with another person, even if it wasn’t a pandemic. Her teenaged daughter pretended to be looking at some candy on a shelf.

“Hey, what’s going on here?!” I finally hollered up at the lady behind the till, “This woman is refusing to social distance with me, even after I’ve asked her to move!” The checker wasn’t wearing a mask, herself, although she did have a plexiglass shield between her and her customers.

“Um, ma’am, we actually are requiring everybody to give six feet of space in here,” she told the woman behind me. And she moved back, finally. I could see her daughter was somewhat familiar with the awkward situation, having probably had to go through too many experiences like this with her shitty mom as she’d grown up. I felt embarrassed for her.

When she rang me up, the woman at the till told me, “I understand what you mean, about not wanting to get your parents sick,” which sort of missed the point in my opinion, but oh well. At least she sympathized.

“I’ve just driven to California and Texas and back,” I said, “and I’m fucking sick and tired of people not taking this shit seriously. It’s fucking ridiculous, and stupid!” I looked at the bulldog lady, when I’d said it. “They’re fucking idiots,” I said, emphatic.

It was a fact. I’d driven my car from Monitor, Washington out to Los Angeles, with the first load of a two-part move, to my new apartment. The following morning I’d rented a car and drove to Lubbock, Texas, where I packed up the apartment of my friend’s daughter. She was a Grad Student with UW, who’d been doing work at Texas Tech. She’d gone out to Vermont to visit her mom for a short visit in early March, and then just stayed after the shutdown occurred. Then two moving companies had cancelled on her, after booking the move for August. So she offered me the money they were going to charge her, to go out and get it all together and drive back to Seattle with it.

This worked out for me, because I’d been trying to figure out what way would be most economical and germ-free to get back to Washington, once I’d taken my first load to Los Angeles. I’d thought about hopping a train, even, but I’m never very good at anticipating their destinations, and that could have made the journey stretch out to a dramatic and frustrating extent. As it happened, even though the total series of moves came out to somewhere around 5300 miles, it was kind of nice to get out and tour the country —a little achey without cruise control, in the Uhaul truck. And it proved to be a little dicey, as far as germs went.

There were a lot of questionable gas stations in Arizona and New Mexico, little underfunded mom & pop joints I ended up at when the tank ran down too far to ignore. They were probably shirking on surface wipe-downs and other pandemic amenity services. And all sorts of other travelers were coming in and out, often without masks.

I kept a bottle of sanitizer on me at all times, in a cargo pocket of my shorts. Any time I touched anything, I squeezed a dollop of sanitizer out on my hand.

I ended up staying for almost a week in Texas, packing up this young woman’s apartment and sorting out logistics on moving it back to Seattle —it turned out when I arrived that the Jeep she had was only a four-cylinder engine, and would be towing more than its rating, if I installed a trailer hitch and pulled even the smallest U-Haul trailer with it. So I had to rent a truck, and a towing dolly for the Jeep. It would have been upcharged furiously, if I hadn’t given a couple days on the booking, so that left me with a couple days of downtime, during which I mostly wrote, and sampled the different Tom Yum offerings at Lubbock’s Thai restaurants.

I went to Home Depot one day, to buy some boxes and packing supplies. There were signs out front, requiring masks. Then, when you went inside, numerous people were simply walking around with them around their necks, just like this jackass stocking Tortilla Chips, who got me thrown out of Grocery Outlet. Then I went to a Food King store, and it was just frightening. Nobody wearing masks, practically shoulder to shoulder congestion, at some points —and this, at a time when Texas was apparently experiencing a crazy upsurge in COVID-19 cases.

I started noticing, even in just the general style of driving, that the people of Lubbock demonstrated a sort of obstinate, aggressive stupidity in the way they behaved. It just seemed to be a theme, over and over again, in all these micromoments I experienced. Just a proud, naked entitlement, to do things the stupid way. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that, you know?

This woman at the gas station on Snoqualmie Pass made me think of Lubbock. It was like she’d been waiting all day for this standoff moment to happen, to give her a platform to announce to myself and the world that she wasn’t afraid.

Great. Don’t be afraid. That’s fine.

But if, in the middle of a pandemic, when scientists and doctors are prescribing six feet of distance as a means of preventing the virus’s spread —if, in that scenario, a person refuses to grant me that six feet of space— they are willfully obstructing my ability to practice behavior that will more surely guarantee my safety. They’re literally trying to bully other people, because they think these people following Quarantine protocols are ‘fearful’.

It’s the same obstinate insistence that the Yellow Ribbon crowd demonstrated in the beginning of the Iraq War. “Support the Troops!” was the only thing you’d ever hear come out of their mouths, in response to whatever intellectual or emotional appeal you made about the martial recitivism and moral regression our invasion of that country represented. They thought of the anti-war movement as ‘fearful’ and ‘weak’; too ‘cowardly’ to stand up to our enemies. Of course, all of us protesting the war spent a whole lot of (inevitably) wasted time, trying to explain to these people that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11, or WMDs. But it didn’t matter, and it still wouldn’t, were one to try to resuscitate that conversation with any of those people today.

They resented what they thought was our fear. They thought we were weak, for succumbing to it. They thought we were immoral, for questioning our own morality, as a nation. And it made them afraid, to observe as we allowed ourselves to experience and respond to the fear.

All these anti-maskers are creating situations —again and again, across the country— that can only add to the labor and risk required of our healthcare essential workers, who are stuck responding to COVID-19 cases, whether they like it or not. They didn’t enter the healthcare field during a pandemic. These people refusing to wear masks don’t even seem to regard these healthcare professionals as people. Or, at the very least, they certainly feel no shame about making the decision for them, of how many more COVID cases they’re going to be forced to deal with in a given week.

Sounds like a fun life, doesn’t it? Going in to work every morning, not with the stress of preparing to avoid any contact with the virus, but with the knowledge that you’ll be working directly, exclusively, with people who are actively suffering from it!

And each new headline that comes out about anti-maskers dying of the Coronavirus just streams in one ear and out the other. They aren’t even listening. They’re not even engaging with reality.

I think this is because they are actually performing a fear response, living in a fight-or-flight reaction, to the pandemic itself. These are the same people who deny climate change, who refuse to admit that the Republican Party and Democratic Party alike treat the working class like a Cash Cow, a piggy bank, a virtual living slush fund.

These are the same people who talk about smaller government and yet think governmental officials should have some sort of determinative power over citizens’ private sex lives. Who support institutional surveillance of private citizens, as a matter of normal intelligence protocol.

These people grew up in fear —fear of authority, fear of change, fear of compromise, fear of weakness, fear of vulnerability, fear of being wrong, fear of being human! And yet the only thing they know how to do, when the specter of those fears rises up again in their lives, is to shout obstinately at the other people waylaid by it.

They haven’t the courage to face fear, head on. They haven’t the courage to admit that authority is morally bankrupt, in the Oligarch state. They haven’t the courage to admit that, far worse than sending their sons and daughters to unnecessarily die in foreign wars, they’ve sent them to unnecessarily kill. These people are trying so hard to pretend like they’re brave, in not wearing their masks —they’re tough!— precisely because they are so afraid to admit the fact of their fundamental impotence, as citizens of the United States.

It’s just so much easier to find something nearby to shout at! It’s so much easier to manufacture some petulant stand-off, with one of these bleeding-heart O’Biden worshippers. How is it that these proud Americans can care so little for the way their lives impact the lives of their neighbors? How is it that ‘Liberty & Justice, for All’ is an invitation, to force upon me a greater risk of viral contraction than I’m comfortable taking? Who invited them to determine for me what feels safe and comfortable, and what doesn’t?

It’s like they think the force behind this mask and distance mumbo jumbo is some nefarious Boogeyman, which they can dispel by ritualistically taunting him. So every time they make their stand —with some innocent, plague-fearing passerby— every time, they’re staring that boogeyman in the face.

But what can you really do about a Boogeyman?

Can you hunt him down and kill him? No. The Boogeyman is a made-up character, an amalgamated construct of fear. You close the closet door, or you put on a nightlight. Or you think about something happier. That’s how you deal with the boogeyman.

And that’s what all these anti-maskers are doing —they’re running from the Boogeyman, in being assholes to their neighbors. They’re projecting their fear out at those whom they see as capitulating to it. They’re saying, “Not today, devil!”

But it’s not a devil, or a Boogeyman. It’s their neighbor. Maybe from a few cities away, yeah, but we’re all Americans. Right? I mean, it would be pretty un-American to suggest that some of us are more entitled to the identity than others.

It’s just funny to me, that there are all these horrible things happening right now, in America and the world —there’s a lot to be afraid of, in the world of 2020!— but these truck-stop Geronimos want to make their grand stand in the candy aisle of a gas station mini-mart.

I mean, really, we the working class are caught between the hammer of profit and the anvil of austerity; we are harvested like crops, across boom-and-bust cycles; we’re demoralized for our audacity to hope, as a matter of general policy; then, as thanks, we’re run through a morass of paperwork and red tape every time we need to do anything of significance in our own day-to-day lives. It’s so obvious, so transparent now, what the Neoconservatives and the Neoliberals (and whatever Trump is) all have in common —the way they use us to achieve their career aspirations, by gaming the American economy to suit the gluttonous ambitions of Corporate Lobbyists, and at the same time refuse to empower us in the pursuit of our own economic well-being.

And their answer, these anti-maskers? The moment where they feel irresistably called to action? A well-meaning neighbor simply asks that they observe the social distancing and mask-wearing requirements, which are real enough that servants of the law are currently enforcing them with citizens. That’s going to be the foe. They’re going to pick a fight with their neighbor. Because that’s how you America, goddammit.

I know most of you reading this aren’t, but I finish this essay in a direct appeal to the antimaskers, all the same:

Oh, you petulant idiots; You proud Kraft-macaroni martyrs —what kind of a pissant stand is that to make, in a world of such monotonous barbarity? There are legitimate reasons to revolt, all around us, and yet this is the moment you’ve decided is worthy of making a move? Let’s look at a couple key moments from recent history.

We were lied to by our government and national news media, so that our sons and daughters could go to a land across the planet, and kill and die in the name of global economic domination.

You found out about the lies, and said nothing.

They broke the domestic economy, and that of the world, on a massive bullshit amateur-hour sales scheme in the housing market. It broke our economy, and the world’s, and what did our bipartisan leadership do in that moment? They paid them off, for having done it to us. They put the burden of restoration, ultimately, on the backs of the people who were victims of the mortgage crisis, the American people. Nobody went to prison for it. Nothing was done to change the way the Market is being run.

And you said nothing.

You go around screaming about black people and brown people, because they’re the only people you feel comfortable blaming, because in your small, racist minds they’re the only ones who definitely aren’t in charge.

Because the thing you really fear is authority.

You fear it so fucking much, you worship it. You’re addicted to it. You can’t even think, in its presence.

It’s all tied in, you know? To your childhood, and your relationship to your parents, and the way you were in school as a kid, and the way you are in the workplace. Authority is god, the father, the president, the priest, the judge, the policeman —the System.

Because it is one of your life’s sole central concerns, to live in perpetual denial of this fear, you never accurately recognize what it is that burdens you in this life. You never look into the face of your oppressor, because you remain unwilling to admit that you’re being oppressed.

If you could stop taking every authority figure who speaks your rhetoric on their word, and admit that most men in the world —at the very least, in their professional expression— demonstrate a rich capacity for self-service, and a general disregard for their fellow human being, if you could admit this you would not feel so comfortable just trusting in the slogans and platitudes that make up the most of what these elected actors say, to gain our votes (“It was a deBATE!”).

Nobody’s better than anybody else. That’s a truth that will never die, at least as long as we all continue to. Death will find us all, when it does. It’s what we do with our life that ends up defining us. And if you make your grand stand in this life against your great nemesis, and you make it over wearing protective masks in a virus pandemic?

I’m sorry, but what?!

What about the evictions? What about the hunger? What about all the people who are suffering in other ways —my mother wasn’t able to have a necessary surgery done on her arm for months, because so many people were in the hospital with COVID. Her need was only so serious, thank God, but there must have been thousands of people who missed out on critical treatment and care, because of the fear of cross-contamination, and the general overflow of patients, when the Shutdown originally began.

You people with your proud dignity, refusing to wear your masks or social distance, you’re making this shit worse for everybody. Your stance of defiance —‘against tyranny’, some of you have said— it’s just a slap in your neighbors’ faces.

The idea that people are killing people over this shit, in some incidences that have circulated in the national news, is just perverse. It’s one of the signs that the fabric of our society is disintegrating. And by and large it seems to have consisted of these ‘unafraid-of-fear’ types, who feel it incumbent on them to shove their feeling of invulnerability so far down the throats of their neighbors that they leave behind a body count.

You people think you’re standing up for something; you think you’re rebelling against tyranny. And all while the state has consistently forsaken your earning power, your saving power, and your voting power —all at the behest and service of private interests in the financial sector, the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Big Pharma and the Healthcare and Insurance industry Mafia Families.

At what point do the truly brave and free of our country point the finger at the actual Boogeymen who are ruining it? You’re upset about the masks, and the distancing, because it’s a symbol of the shutdown. You feel like something is suspicious, about it all. The reason is because you, as a representative of the American Working Class, have a great reason to be suspicious of the governmental powers-that-be. They’ve been giving you great reasons to suspect them of conspiracy against you, for a long time. They have been conspiring against us —otherwise, how the fuck do you explain Citizens United (Among other things, to be sure)?

But you’re too afraid of it to look it in the face, so you’re lashing out at anything else you can identify as an ‘interloper’. It’s just the same sort of cowardly projection of anger that guides a person to kick the dog, when they’re angry at their spouse or their children. Or whomever. It’s uncivilized, and inhumane, and it’s an embarrassing ritual to be a part of.

I resent you, for it. For pretending that everything that’s wrong with the country is the fault of your fellow countrymen. That’s a lie, and it’s been fed to you by the people who are actually responsible —the Neo-people the American Majorities keep voting for.

So I say to you, the unpatriotic anti-maskers out there. If you love your country, you’ll quit blaming your mask-wearing neighbors for how bad everything is, and you’ll put your fucking masks on. We aren’t representatives of your fear, or servants of the forces you fear. We’re trying to keep from getting ourselves and our loved ones sick. Is that okay, with you?

Also, if you don’t start giving me six feet of space, I’m gonna start taking it from you. Don’t make me push that bitchy old lady over in the gas station —I swear to god, I’ll fucking do it.

Who’s steering this train, and where is it headed?

First off, nobody steers a train —that was a trick question. Trains run on predetermined tracks of continuous steel, called ‘rail’. You can’t ‘steer’ a train. Because of this fact, trains are actually safer than cars. For the most part, as long as dispatchers are doing their job and sorting out the traffic and the switching, the rail and the engine do everything but adjust the speed for the engineer. Apart from the speed of the engine’s travel, the only foreseeable problems would have to do with the train’s condition or the track conditions —say, for instance, an unpredictable outage of the track.

 Like, if the rails just stopped going on, at some point.

Did you know that Wall Street has been active since before the world’s first Railroad? May 1792 is the date my Google search cited as the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The Penydarren Ironworks Tramway is cited as the world’s first Railroad, founded in February 1804. The population of the United States back in 1800 was apparently just over 5,000,000. Now, its over 300,000,000.

And as the industrial revolution itself became an empire, the number of total people in the world surged. Humanity totalled just under 1 billion in 1800, but in 2020 we are approaching 8 Billion people on this rock. For further context, that’s doubled from 4 billion since the mid-70s, when I was born. 8 Billion people, consuming the resources required for the market to expand —which is only necessary because of the intrinsic feature in the design of the market, which creates opportunity for individuals to make a profit off of the commerce taking place. Apparently, to some extent anyway, there’s a bit of siphoning and inflation created by the speculative trading on concrete goods and services. According to expert analysis widely available online, though, the real drain on the economy happens in the Financial sector. Apparently it earns nearly half of all domestic corporate profits, while employing a sliver of actual human employees —many of whom do very little in terms of labor aimed towards the accumulation of said wealth.

And I know it’s all really clever, and it’s really sexy to think of an elite club of attractive people with clean, straight teeth, rolling around naked in piles of money and cocaine. But it’s ultimately all a vampiric gesture towards the workers who fuel the economy’s aspirations, and the value we are able to generate for ourselves with our labor. Especially when the companies are competing with each other to integrate policies of austerity, say, in the payroll budgets allocated for labor —how else are they going to pay for all those vaults full of cash and blow? So, in the religion of the Free Market Economy, that is our tithe to the Financial Sector —we are all toiling to inordinate degrees, undercompensated, so that a handful of doomed motherfuckers can laugh at us from atop their piles of gold.

I say ‘doomed’ because we simply have to be approaching that point of critical mass, or terminal velocity, wherein the denial on which we’ve sustained our hopes for so long can no longer endure. The Breadlines of the 21st century feel like they’re not far away at all and, if the global recession of 2008 is any indicator, it doesn’t seem like they would be confined to one set of borders. If and when we do see that sort of radically negative transformation in our lifestyle, Americans are going to enjoy the least sympathy out of any of the developed nations, when the enraged masses across the globe begin to demonstrate their ire.

We need to face the facts —we’ve absolutely fucked things up, for everybody.

And all you smart Economickal sciencey-types out there, with your high and mighty book-learnin’ and your big brain-thinking-type powers; I’ve got just one question: have you ever considered that a perpetual expansion of the market is physically fucking impossible, in an environment with a fixed and limited base of resources?

Of course you have, but you’ve kept ignoring the fact anyway. It’s beginning to look as if everything we’ve done abroad since the Gulf War has been in the interest of leveraging a strategic position of greater advantage, in the resource war which our government has apparently seen as inevitable, for decades now.

They’re all fucking dumbfucks, you guys —it doesn’t matter that they came from the head of the class. I literally read a tweet from Elon Musk the other day, that the future of humanity lies in the colonization of Mars. It’s like they’re unashamed now, to admit the gigantic lie they’ve been building up about our way of life all these years. They’ve conned us into going faster and faster, to generate more and more wealth for a tiny subfaction of hyper-privileged elites, even though they’ve known —likely, since the First or Second World War— that eventually we’re going to reach a cliff. One without a bridge.

The Economy of the world simply cannot go on in this way, into an eternal horizon of excess and waste. The planet can no longer sustain it! If you constantly have to find new ways to squeeze profits out of every dollar of revenue, in order to satisfy the inflating greed of investors and money-handlers, then you’re always siphoning the actual value generated by the economy —simply put, just so that the fat cat may grow fatter.

We’re approaching the moment that was past the far horizon, when the people who originally came up with this shit started doing it. 1792, people. Before the first Railroad. And, just like a railroad, we can’t turn left or right. We’re moving on a fixed path, towards the limits of the Industrial Revolution’s promise. And our leaders are too busy selling off shares of the railroad to even bother themselves about the train’s ultimate destination. The only way to change the course of the track we’re on, before we ride the train off the edge, is to figure out how to stop it long enough to reroute the tracks before we reach that cliff.

It’s kinda what’s happened during the Coronavirus, really. A stoppage; A moment to reflect. For, like, the first time in the modern era, life has been shut down to a massive degree, somewhat indefinitely. I remember in March, when we first got laid off at the 5th Avenue Theatre, in Seattle, it felt so weird —everything halting, everybody going inside. At least, if you weren’t forced to stay out and be the sacrificial service lamb, for the sakes of everybody lucky enough to suddenly be on Super-unemployment for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those fortunate souls. I feel like I’ve gotten reparations, for all my years as a starving artist. But I’m not thankful enough for all the people who have had to risk their health on the other side of a checkout line, so that I might buy food while on this extended paid leave. None of us are. I mean, really, it’s such an unfair situation. ‘Essential Workers’. They should get hazard pay from the government. At least five an hour more than their normal rate. It’s simply not fair, and I feel bad that I’ve not had to worry about it except when I’m going through their line in a grocery store.

I kept running into people in those first weeks of face-covering, though, for whom it seemed like they were discovering a new way of life. Freedom! Imagine it. And we all kept thinking, I know we all did, how weird it was to suddenly have time on our hands to think about things. How strange, to contemplate all these Americans staying home, bored out of their minds for days on end with nothing to do but think.

Or less cerebral activities. From all the stories on the news about black men being murdered senselessly by police, or hunted down and shot on camera by former police, or lynched by anonymous race-terrorists (who —let’s face it— probably also have connections to the police), or any of the random crazy shit that keeps coming up about people doing violence on other people over mask-wearing restrictions at public spaces —it’s become more obvious than ever, there’s a simmering ill will in the hearts of many Americans, aching to express itself.

But for everyone that doesn’t secretly yearn to murder other human beings, there’s been this sense throughout the whole quarantine, like, “Imagine what we could do with all this time we suddenly have…” I myself wrote, edited and self-published my first novel. And I’m halfway through the next, already! But I’m sort of like that to begin with, pathologically creating with my free time (I must admit, if I hadn’t cut out drinking a year back, the pandemic would have had a different flavor entirely).

But it was a lot more of a tangible feeling in the first weeks after I was laid off, like just a remarkable sense that life could take on such a different feel so suddenly —and yet still continue to function. Like, maybe the institutions that govern our lives have been lying to us. Like, for a really long fucking time. Maybe the only reason we don’t have any time for ourselves or our family is because we’ve consented to give it to the Money-Lenders. The Masters of Transaction. The bloated Mosquito of the Financial Sector. Just so —what?— so we can keep on mass-producing ourselves into economic oblivion?

The consumers who have gone back to listening to their music on vinyl understand, maybe better than anybody —there was a point at which things were good enough. There was a point when we didn’t plan for the obsolescence of an object we produced for sale. There was a point where we didn’t have to purchase new shit every couple years. There was a point at which the Marketplace actually addressed the needs of consumers. Now it’s treating the consumer body like a cash crop —harvesting us across boom & bust cycles, sifting the value out of our pension accounts and into the cocaine-dusted piles of cash in the Financial Sector’s inner circle sanctum. The hippies bought the lies of the Neolibs and Neocons alike, in the 70s and 80s. They’d burned out from too much drugs and free-living, and they suddenly had kids and didn’t know what the fuck to do. So they looked to their Daddies for answers, once again.

The problem is that Daddy knows how to drive, but only this train. Only on this set of tracks. Even Bernie Sanders, as visionary as he is in comparison to most of his colleagues, is locked in the context of ‘the system’. Bernie doesn’t want a new system, he wants a version of this one that works better for the people who live in it. I guess that would be fine, were the System at all amenable to the idea. I see hope in the new wave of progressives, too. Occasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Bush, Morse (Hopefully he wins his race) —these and others are all great wins for progressives, but they all seem to be stuck playing within the camp of the Democratic Party —whether you’re a Bernie supporter or not, it’s clear to all by now what the Democratic Establishment thought of Sanders’ run. Sure they toned down their direct gestures in that spirit for the 2020 primary, but only because of what had come out about 2016. It might be that we can slowly take control of the left hemisphere of the Bipolar American Political Establishment, but I think the chances are greater that some great manufactured tragedy will magically appear, that will interrupt our ability to do so. Probably something to do with the Russians, or the Chinese. Honestly, probably both. I’m really frightened right now, about the all-bets-are-off atmosphere of current American Foreign Military Policy, and it didn’t just start with Trump.

Meanwhile, every time a tragedy strikes our country, something knocks America to the ground, and these motherfuckers in the Financial sector come along and kick us in the teeth; then take our money. Then they tell us it’s for the sake of the collective, as the billionaire class rakes in more and more billions. I mean, are we watching the same story play out here, or what? This is a fucked up train we’re riding on. It’s like the sultan’s palace, at the front of the train, and only a few people to fill it. Meanwhile, on the back, we’re packed like livestock, merely there because of the potential wealth opportunities we represent.

Perhaps it’s not the system itself, but the way it’s been utilized. But it’s insulting to one’s intelligence, the way Washington works now. No laws get passed that aren’t diluted and compromised, and tainted by ryders having nothing to do with the legislation at hand. These assholes (most of them, anyway) get paid handsome salaries —essentially, to ensure that practically nothing happens that would be of use to the public they’re elected to go and serve, in the first place. They closed up shop and went on fucking Vacation —Democrats and Republicans alike— in the middle of the greatest crisis we’ve faced in maybe a century or more; when citizens’ lives are falling apart all over the country.

It seems to me that we would be better off than we currently are, if we just randomly elected every federal official into office. Like, a national jury duty, or something —but for offices of Federal Government. The process could be engineered so as to weed out obvious incompetency or conflict-of-interest; it wouldn’t have to be a total crap shoot. And if you think about it, Congress doesn’t really accomplish all that much anymore, anyway. We can’t rely on that institution, in its current state. It all comes down to which party’s in which seat, and we can’t trust either party because they’re both run by assclown sycophants wearing electric shock buttplugs —penalizing and negating the movement of either party in a direction contrary to the interests of Big Pharma, Gordon Gecko, the Lords of War, et cetera. I don’t even know how many lobby groups there are that game our democracy, in a gravely serious manner, on a regular basis. They’ve been selling us out to these fucks for so long, most of them seem to earnestly believe that’s what we’ve elected them to do! And most of the country just watches the bullshit and thinks, “I guess that’s just how democracy works when you have so many people to manage.”

Our Democratic Institution is a fucking mess, guys. I mean, can you imagine if auto manufacturers had followed the example of the American governmental system as they improved the designs of their vehicles, over the years? It would be, like, a chassis that was a Model A, with the wheels of an old Studebaker, the fenders from a 57 Chevy, and on and on and on. Just a stack of compensating countermeasures.

That’s what American democracy is —a Rube Goldberg machine, for rubes.

The dominant paradigms of our present era are leading us quickly to a point from which we simply can’t keep going on like we have. It has become physically impossible, to sustain the way of life we’ve developed. Our leaders have all this evidence, and these impressive educational backgrounds, which in conjunction should be causing them to make radical attempts to reassess the efficiency of our living systems; to begin the process of building a new foundation —if for no other reason, than to save the Planet before it dries up from Global Warming. But they aren’t trained or empowered, by any means, to recognize or declare the point at which our democracy is simply no longer functioning in a way that should be permitted to continue. We’re never going to hear any of them say it. That’s outside of the system; beyond the far horizon.

Or at least it was.

And that’s the problem, at the current moment. We’re as dumbfounded and mystified as these dumbfucks, who we keep electing to rule us —these intellectual simpletons; these walking, talking Encyclopedia CocaColicas— neither they nor we know how to deal with this problem our lifestyle has created. Nobody knows what to do about the corporate lobbyists infiltrating our living systems —literally, sapping the potential quality of life available to us as a collective. Like any good Dom they’ve convinced us that it simply had to be this way; that this was actually what we’d wanted, in the first place.

Every exponential degree of imbalance in the wealth distribution across our planet’s economy, like a ring in a tree, is an outwardly expanding testament to the enduring impact of the dominating force of will these fucking greasy-souled leeches have applied to our civilization —across generations upon generations, but in recent years to an exponential degree— as we’ve deceived ourselves into believing that the comfort and convenience we purchased with our labors were the same things as freedom and liberty.

We need to stop running our world’s economy like it was still the year 1800. We need to stop trusting cowboys and gamblers with all the fruits our labors produce. We need to swat the overgrown mosquito of the Financial Sector, once and for all. We need to stop electing charlatans and snake oil salesmen into our political bodies. We need to figure out how to reroute this train we’re all riding on.

Because it should be clear to all of us now —the tracks are out, ahead.

First, I have a confession to make: I haven’t been at the protests. I’ve been watching, proud and impressed, as you all have really put yourselves on the line over your beliefs —ultimately simple humanitarian truths, that we all have the right to peace and security in this country. We should all believe in this, who profess to love this country and its people. And, while the incidental damage to individuals’ property (where it occurred), is something only an idiot would endorse, I know that it’s predominately daytripping thugs and provocateur infiltrators perpetrating in that way.

The federal building, of course, is a perfect physical proxy for the State. A logical target of your ire, at a series of governments who’ve pretended far too long there’s something about police murdering unarmed citizens that is simply to be expected. Also legitimate are the police buildings, Municipal buildings, statues of slavers, etc. —this is your public, too, after all. I keep bringing it up in conversations online, “Remember the Rodney King beating”? In 1991, the man was savagely beaten by police after a car chase, and it was caught on video, and shared with the world. The whole nation stopped, and voiced its outrage at the wanton violence these police indulged in. It was obvious to all who witnessed it —those cops were getting something more out of it, than justice.

But Rodney King didn’t die. And now they’re killing men, women and children with impunity. All the Americans who object to these protests are simply leaning into their privilege; narcissistically deriding these dramatic gestures of emotional unrest by the protesters, because it interrupts their ability to look completely the other way, and pretend their nation isn’t a cold-blooded killer.

There was a kid at Evergreen, when I went there, who’d went nuts and posted a manifesto, then went and shot a random cop dead at a gas station in Red Bluff, CA. Andy was his name. He was the neighbor of some guys I’d played music with, when they lived in the F Stack Dorms, back in 2002. He’d decided the police state needed to end, back then; he’d decided he was ready to get some blood on his hands, too.

People that complain about the destruction of federal property need to consider the alternative targets that angry citizens, in their upset and moral alienation, could have chosen instead —to disastrous consequence.

I moved out of the Seattle house where I’d been renting a room, in the first week of May. I’d been making so much on extended unemployment, I decided the only thing to do was to sock it all away. It’s been a goal of mine for years, now, to move to Los Angeles, so I’ve built a nest egg out of the money I’ve saved. I’ve been staying rent-free in a guest house, on my parents’ property in Eastern Washington, ever since. The protesting started up a week or two after I came out here. And I haven’t been able to reconcile the risk I’d have brought on my parents, of bringing the virus back with me if I’d jaunted over for the day to take part.

So I’ve missed all the protests, so far, and honestly I’ve been sort of glad to have had an excuse. I am a total fucking shit magnet, when I’m on the scene. I cut a very attractive target, to authority. I donated a few hundred to Captain Portland’s Gofundme for medical supplies, though, and I’ve been watching the footage and participating in some proactive debate about it on Twitter. But I’m also pretty sure I haven’t missed out completely. My sense is that these protests —and the civil outrage that is fueling them— are, of course, far from over.

I felt like I should touch in about a couple things, though. Some of you are probably new to this stuff, prior to May. Others have maybe only held signs and marched, in the past. Honestly, I’ve seen some shit in my day, but I’ve never been in a situation like the protesters in Portland have dealt with. I have had 50 caliber rounds fired as warning shots over my head, though. There isn’t much a human can do, to resist that kind of violent force. I have looked down the barrel of a Tank cannon, as it leveled itself threateningly at me. I once got shot in the leg by a less lethal round. It did enough damage that I couldn’t walk for a week, without crutches.

So far it’s been pretty ugly, the State’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests. But if the wanton, enthusiastic orgy of police violence that has surrounded these protests is any indicator, there’s a strong likelihood that things will get worse before they get better, for Americans seeking to demonstrate their upset with our government.

There are basically two things I wanted to talk about here. One is tactics, and the other is self-care.

My first direct action was a bit of a doozy. In 2003, me and another guy blocked traffic on the Fourth Ave Bridge in Olympia, WA, and we set about demolishing our own cars with sledge hammers and and awls, in protest of the Iraq War —at the time, the invasion was just over two weeks from beginning. Honestly, our action didn’t get the attention it deserved. We’d posted a manifesto online, and sent out press releases to local news outlets, the night before, but there was barely any coverage in the news following our action that day. My sister said she’d seen footage on a news station, but I never did. Our camera guy forgot to press record, so the only real witnesses other than the cops who eventually showed up and arrested us were the cars that snuck through the small gap we’d left between ours. I think one city bus came through, too.

There was a poetry to this action —we were disarming ourselves, in the war for oil. You think people are afraid of radicalism and property damage now? Back then, everything was being run by white-haired naysayers, who stole the mics from the youth at almost every chance. Every time somebody wanted to seriously fuck something up, a host of more experienced elders would swoop in and either talk the person down, or convince their peers they were dangerous.

But we’d found a way around that, by damaging our own property!

There was a creative quality to the action, which led the minds of those considering it down a path of anticipated logical thought —about why we’d done this; about what we’d meant to say, in doing it. Creativity is so fucking powerful, guys. It needs to be a part of what’s happening. I don’t know how one should protest cops gunning down unarmed citizens in a ‘Creative’ way. And I’m not criticizing what’s been going on, in the least. But for things to keep going —without incurring greater personal harm from Police and Federales, and thus alienating the people watching from home— I believe Creativity is going to be a necessarily central component.

The Yes Men were masters of using Creativity in their actions. If you are not familiar with the Yes Men’s work, it’s really inspiring stuff. They used the internet, and many officials’ effective idiocy with it, to constantly subvert imperialism and colonialism where they saw it. They had a website that looked exactly like George Bush’s website, and people would mistakenly reach out to them, when they meant to talk to George. They were able to infiltrate, in this spirit of subversion, all sorts of closed-door events, and turn the camera on these evil actors within the global culture of politics and economics, while they made them look like fucking assholes —if not absolute monsters. They released a film, the Yes Men, in 2004. It’s fun to watch, and inspiring.

Again, I don’t know what shape this should take, in the present set of circumstances, but Creative strategies —looking at the act of protest as spectacle; performance art— this is going to captivate the hearts and minds of people sitting home and watching. There is an unavoidable component of branding to any popular resistance, and many of these people watching are on the fence, moreso than they realize. That image from the Vietnam war, of a hippie girl placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle, or the recent photo of the naked yogi, sitting on the street and opening her legs at the police —these were Creative acts, that subverted the narrative in play. And they stuck, in the imaginations of those watching from home.

Three days before the US invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza. We were classmates, at Evergreen. I’d been acquainted with her since the year prior, mostly only talked to her at a couple of protests. But I was swept away on the wave of grief and outrage that spilled out of that moment, in Olympia and around the world. I went to the West Bank as an activist with ISM, myself, in July of that year. I stayed for two months and a little change. Honestly I’d have stayed as long as possible, if I hadn’t run out of shekels. I had to get back to the US and finish college, too, but the feeling I had when I was there made it seem like I’d never truly been alive, before. I didn’t want to let go of that.

I got shot in the leg, in the first action we did. High Velocity, close proximity, direct instead of richocheted; from a less-lethal round. We’d come as internationals to march in front and help the Palestinians to break through a gate in the Apartheid Wall, which had cut off the local farmers of Berqin from access to their crops. This was, of course, a general feature of the Wall, as it was constructed intentionally to violate the demarcations of the Green Line. It’s one of Israel’s favorite things to do to Palestinians, to take their land. It almost seems like it amuses them, when you talk about it with a Zionist; like they’re proud of how well they control the game.

As soon as I’d made it out of the hospital in the northern West Bank town of Jenin (where they’d treated me for free, as they treat all victims of the Israeli Occupation Forces), I called my girlfriend. She was in Montreal, at the oldest Ashram in the Western Hemisphere, learning to be a yoga teacher. She told me she wanted me to come home. I’d thought that was extremely unsupportive of her, and that I’d come to spend two months. I wasn’t about to run home with my tail between my legs, like a fucking coward. She’d said something about me being in ‘the bad reality’, which felt so fucking cheap and entitled to hear from her. Then I wrote a poem by the same name and shared it with my email list. It wasn’t very generous towards her, in its content.

We ended up breaking up, over that poem. I remember the night, well. it was the last light of day, and there was an Israeli incursion happening in Jenin. The ISM activists tended to stay with Palestinian host families, as a means of interacting more directly with their culture and lifestyle, but Jenin had just been ravaged the year prior, in Operation: Defensive Shield (look it up), to the extent that no outsiders were trusted well enough to be granted that sort of relationship. So we’d all stayed together in a rented flat, in an apartment building.

I was on the roof of our building, watching Tanks and APCs roll through the streets below us. Machine guns were exchanging fire in different clashes, throughout the town. And I was on the phone with the girl I’d thought I was finally going to make a real commitment with, listening to her break up with me. It was the only thing I could feel, in that moment, the severing in my heart, as I reckoned with the fact that the person who’d been filling me up with support and love just retracted it. Like that.

I’ve never felt so small, as I did in that moment. Standing on a rooftop, in a literal war zone, searing with the emotion of my loss —that my girlfriend had broken up with me.

It was something I couldn’t respond to any other way, even though I knew in the moment how frivolous my pain was, in contrast to the pain going on around me, on all sides. I remember later that night was the first time I’d heard a tank fire its cannon. It was the loudest fucking thing I’d ever heard. It broke the night in two —just a shot from up on a hill, aimed a couple hundred feet over the city. No real target. Just a further gesture to intimidate and harass the occupants of this broken city —strong and proud, though its people yet remained. I went to sleep that night, shedding tears for her.

The rest of that summer I just started trying to fuck every woman I met. I got laid a lot, but I got really toxic eventually. We weren’t even supposed to have sex with each other, as activists with ISM. It was considered a potential hazard to the group’s cohesion, if we did. I started smoking a lot of weed there, too. Another thing we weren’t supposed to do, and which we’d agreed in coming that we wouldn’t. I’d been trying to cope with my broken heart, which was only exacerbated by the breakup. I was already heartbroken, about the world in general.

I didn’t see it until years later —I’m really only unpacking a lot of it now, honestly— but I started spiraling down into some intense narcissistic behavior, which affected the relationships I made with other activists during my time there, and ended up becoming a problem for my community in Olympia, too, once I’d returned. It was like I’d distilled my person into these raw elements; refined and purified my soul. That’s how I felt inside, anyway. Outside, to others, it was like these bare wires, arcing and popping electric when they touched one another. I was a fucking mess.

Things just started stacking. I kept fucking up, with women. I kept feeling further and further disconnected from my community. Part of the problem was I just kept reaching out to the wrong people, for love. Well, actually it was sex I was reaching for; every time I encountered somebody, back then, who demonstrated a potential for emotional connection, I fucking bolted. I basically broke down, over the next year or so, and my community turned their backs on me.

In some ways, I feel the experience was necessary for me, to sort out some of these untouched problem areas in my psychological makeup. But in other ways, I realize that the love and connection I’d felt in the activist community was somewhat conditional. Nobody would talk to me, about what they were seeing. They were just sick of me and wanted me to go away. These people, who had practically egged me on into this volatile self-endangering lifestyle, they didn’t want anything to do with helping me figure out what was going wrong. The best I got was ‘go see a therapist’. Being broke, and unable to trust anybody, it was sort of a bullshit piece of advice. Many of the people I was inspired by —in going over to the west bank, or in demolishing my car— had been professors, at my college. And when shit got ugly, the best I got was a ‘buh-bye’.

I think I was suffering from PTSD, to some extent, but I think I also had a sort of latent or muted narcissism that had become inflated by the things I experienced, by the feelings I’d cultivated in my heart. I hadn’t anticipated the psychological burden I’d invited into myself, in my engagement with the world as a direct activist. Even though I remember, at least once, telling God when I was on Acid, that I invited the pain of the world inside of me. Like a ritual of cosmic self-sacrifice.

In retrospect, yeah —I’m pretty sure the dude heard me, and took me up on my offer.

I have a propensity for self-aggrandizement, and I’ve been learning lately that my parents both demonstrated patterns of emotional narcissism in the way they treated me as a kid. I don’t think it was ever going to go any different for me, but I have a hard time believing that it was just my specific makeup that created the problems inside me. I’m pretty certain this kind of internal downward-spiraling can happen to anybody.

So I wanted to make sure you all had this in your heads, as the feds retreat from the cities, and the protests recede. And it’s okay, if they recede. You guys have done a LOT, this summer. Don’t stop working for justice. Don’t stop fighting the power. But be really fucking mindful of your selves. Be careful, with each other. And keep an eye on the trail you leave behind you. It’s the areas in life we don’t watch closely, where we project our shadow most. It can do a lot of damage, to a person’s life and their community.

Don’t hold it in, and don’t try to fix it yourself, if you’re having problems with people after all this shit has gone down. Find some people you can talk to. Talk about what you’re feeling, about what’s going on inside you. And listen to people, if they tell you that you’re being fucked up. They’re probably right, at least on some level. And it’s okay, if you’re fucked up. There’s been a government-sponsored force, seeing that it happens; working to fuck you up for months now.

I hope to see you all out there, at some point. I’m doing what I can, in the meantime, to be effective in writing about it all. I don’t know where any of this is heading, but it’s really good to know there’s such a huge mass of conscientious humans out there, objecting to the barbarism our country has gravitated towards, since 9-11; that it’s now turning, on its own people.

Please lean into creative strategies as a way of subverting the attempts of authority to reframe the movement to your countrymen, as something dangerous. And please take care of your selves, and your hearts.

And try to be there for each other, if you can. Everybody’s going to be a little broken, after this shit.

Dear Bernie,

I heard, from a little bird, that you actually like to say ‘fuck’ a lot. Or anyways, I heard you said it while waiting to go onstage during a rally at the Showbox, back in 2016 or 2017. I won’t say the exact quote, as it could hurt somebody’s feelings, but it made me smile to hear you’d said such a thing —just like most of the other things I hear you say tend to do.

There’s one thing I’ve been waiting to hear you speak on, though, and I’m worried that I might never end up hearing your perspective on the matter.

I know that the important thing right now is to get Trump out. I know this, and I’m committed to it. That said, I’ve been screaming about ‘fucking democrats’ since they cockblocked Kucinich, in 2004.

I was a delegate for you in the 2016 primary, against my political instincts. From the moment I’d heard you were running under Big Blue, I’d had my concerns.

But I got behind you, man. Even though there was a sense among many of my similarly-minded peers in the deep left, that Bernie Sanders was a fucking Sheepdog; that he was only there to herd the progressive fringe back towards Clinton.

I’d considered the possibility, of course, that the accusation was true —but I got behind you, anyway. I couldn’t resist the breathtaking truths you were speaking. You were saying the things we all thought we’d never get to hear a politician ever say. You cared about Us. And then, what happened happened.

But what happened, actually?

I don’t recall having ever been presented with a frank conversation by you, about the facts of what went down in the 2016 Democratic Primary. Did I miss something? Donna Brazile came out and said it. I’m pretty sure Jeff Weaver said it, again and again —but I don’t feel like I’ve heard you say it, Bernie. And I think everybody that voted for you in that primary knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Now it’s 2020. Somehow, your massive momentum vanished into thin air, according to the voting booths (as presented to us by Mainstream Media —sure, call me paranoid. We all have good reason to be). I guess it’s possible that you didn’t have the staying power, even though you seemed to surge on a massive wave of enthusiastic populist support. But I think, again, the people who voted for you in the primary all saw the same thing.

Somehow, at the same time that the entire world had been stricken with the Coronavirus, and the USA in particular was beginning to show serious signs of extreme vulnerability —when every factor in the present atmosphere was underlining the importance of each and every one of the ideological foundations of your Presidential campaign— somehow, Joe Biden soared into an overwhelming lead.

And then later you told us that you’d met with Biden, and that he was gonna be the next best thing —much of your platform would be incorporated into his (If I’ve gotten that wrong in some semantic way, forgive me; I think it’s fair to say, I’ve got the gist of it). Suddenly, the democrats are already taking Medicare For All off the table. They’re turning around on the legalization of Cannabis, even. At a time when —let’s face it— we could use the extra money. It’s looking to all of us who supported you like the establishment left has realized that we have no choice.

And we don’t. I know it. I railed against people who insisted that I had to vote for Clinton, in 2016. “Fuck them,” I said, and, “Precedents are far more important than Presidents, at this point in American politics.” I was wrong, but only because there was no way for any of us to know what a charicature of Narcissism Trump would prove to be.

So, yeah. Knowingly committing myself to voluntary Stockholm Syndrome, over here. But I have no illusions. The ones actually holding me hostage are the Democrats. As soon as they realized they had us in the bag, they began shedding the façade of pretense around issues of progressive change, favoring instead the promotion of a narrative that somehow they actually supported anarchist groups; that they actually gave a fuck, about cops killing unarmed citizens. That sympathetic performance was good for a week of twitter ratings, I guess.

Look, Bernie, we all know that Biden will be less dangerous than Trump. That’s not something you need to lock down, with us.

What all of us who supported you in the Primaries are concerned about is the way that the DNC and Mainstream Media undeniably screwed you out of fair coverage —and, honestly, who knows what else.

I can’t say for sure what all happened, because you still haven’t told us.

Bernie, the idea that we can’t be supportive of Biden with our votes, and yet also constructively critical of the Democratic Party, is an insult to your constituents’ intelligence.

I would say, in fact, that your silence on the matter of unfair play in the Democratic Primary is doing more to alienate potential Biden voters, than would a frank and penetrating discussion about the ways the system proved to be rigged, both times you tried to run. How are we supposed to ever work against that factor, if we aren’t guided into a salient understanding of it?

The fact is, I don’t know for sure that I can trust you. I don’t know how deep your ties to the Democratic party run. All I know for sure is that every time I let myself believe in a politician I end up feeling humiliated over it. Why do you feel you can’t discuss the matter with us, Bernie? Did you sign an NDA, or something? If so, why? Do you think we’re so stupid that, when confronted with the facts of deep corruption in the DNC, we’ll decide to vote for Trump? The guy’s gotta go —it’s not a question, at this point.

Talking to us about this stuff will make it easier to trust the direction in which you’re encouraging us to go, with our votes. Talking about it will begin a conversation about 2024, 4 years ahead of time. It will give us something to look forward to, as we hold our breath and vote for a representative of systemic corruption, who mostly only qualifies because he happens not to also be a Neon Mussolini.

So what about it, old man? Are you gonna step up and talk to us, about this? Because it feels to me like you’re just glad to be out of the running. I want to know, once and for all Bernie. Are you a fucking sheepdog, or what?

It’s why the government and intelligence agencies go to such great effort to protect us from all life’s more complicated and nuanced truths, as the family attempts to blaze a clean and moral path on the trajectory of exploitation and brutality we must maintain, in order to preserve the culture of decadent excess that best conditions consumers’ participation in the perpetual expansion of the global economy —perched, though it may be, on the listing pre-Mesozoic brontosaurus of late-era Free Market Capitalism.

The current President of the United States has given me more doubts about my Atheism than almost anything I’ve experienced in life, as an adult. I mean it’s just so perfect, the way Donald Trump reflects back at us all of the stupidity and resentment, all the orphaned ire, of the America of our present era.

I’ve caught myself wondering if it wasn’t some kind of trickster god —a Loki, or a Coyote, wearing Donald Trump’s skin. He appeals to both sides of the American partisan divide, really —for one side, he embodies the things they hate about the Others, their politically conservative countrymen; for the other, he’s the perfect tool with which they can get under the skin of the Others whom they hate, the liberals.

We made him President, but before that we simply made him. We fed him, over time. We put him on television, and we watched him on television —or, if not him, some other accomplished con-man showing off his trophies to Robin Leach, on an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. The point is, Donald Trump is the achieved epitomic apex of most of America’s decisions, at least since the 1980s.

I’m 43. In my generation, most of our Daddies taught us that money was what was most important. Conceivably, we’d find people and causes in life we might someday hold more dear, but money is the foundation of life in America —you simply have to have it, to live well. I remember growing up as a kid, in the 80s , and seeing Donald Trump as a sort of impressive figure. A symbol, of aspiration and achievement. Of course, Kurt Cobain came along in the 90s and changed all of that, for most of us who were watching.

The President is a father figure. He’s our Daddy. And the way Daddy behaves in the world matters, because many of us take cues from him, on how to behave ourselves —many of us crave a submissive relationship to authority, as it releases us from the obligation to think and act on our own, in a world where facts and morality are often complicated to ascertain.

My father wasn’t the best Daddy. His dad was sort of a monster, though, so he really didn’t have much guidance. Except from, like, Leave it to Beaver and shit. I’m guessing there are a lot of you from my generation who know exactly what I’m talking about, when I say that. I often wonder what my generation looks like to the children we’ve brought up, who are now coming of age into a world of gross, bald-faced injustice; who are perpetually judged and harrassed for their antisocial addiction to screens and entertainment, when we mostly raised to be that way in the first place. We must seem so full of shit, to these kids.

It’s always seemed to me like we’re all working out the riddled wounds and curses of our ancestors, as the people of earth evolve towards (hopefully) a more balanced and humane style of living, and loving. I often think of Abraham, in the Old Testament. I try to think about what kind of a man it would be, who would cast out a son whom he’d raised from birth —just because he got a different one, from a woman he loved more. And, then, what did he do with that ‘chosen’ son?

Oh, yeah. He led him up to a hill, to sacrifice him with an axe to the voices in his head. What the fuck kind of alcoholic tweaker piece of shit was Abraham, anyway? I mean, my God!

But we speak of the ‘Abrahamic’ faiths as if there were something about this lunatic sadist child-abuser that were somehow sacred, as if this legacy were worthy of preserving. And then in the New Testament, Jesus —the prototypical Nice Guy— gets nailed up to a cross, for telling people not to hurt one another. Well, I guess it was more for saying the Priests in the Temple of the Money Lenders were hypocrites. Whatever the analysis, his message didn’t become ‘Gospel’ until it had been canonized, almost four centuries later.

And intrinsic to the narrative of Christianity is a mysterious trinity —no, not the one you immediately assumed. Not the father, the son, and the glory hole. I’m talking about Cain & Abel, Isaac & Ishmael, and Jacob & Esau. These three pairs of siblings, etched like a psychic lexicon into the brains of every child raised on the bible —or, simply, raised in a culture wherein the Christian narrative is culturally predominate— they make ambiguous in the mind of the reader these acts and gestures of brutality and indignity, rendered from the one brother to the other —although to Isaac’s credit I guess he was an infant, when Ishmael was cast out. And he was powerless, due to his blindness, to deliver judgment unto Jacob for his fraudulent acts.

I believe there’s a desensitization that happens in the mind, when a person reads these passages. I think the sustained dissonance these stories evoke, between one’s sense of right & wrong, sort of grant the mind permission to differentiate between the self and the other. At the very least, the text seems to be constructed in such a way that renders ambiguous the morality of the narrative it describes.  

The characters in the Old Testament are presented to us as the very first people, or the children or the childrens’ children of the very first people. Or, whatever. We plant these seeds, these stories, in the minds of our children —religious and secular families alike, in many cases— and we tell them don’t worry, it will make more sense as you age. Then it just sorta sinks in, over a lifelong series of weekly brainwashing sessions, wherein the monotonous verbage induces a gravitational boredom not unlike a hypnotic state, in which these platitudes and justifications are presented to us as if they were some holy foundation on which one should live.

Simply because they came before us.

I’d like to propose something crazy. I’d like to propose that, as a global civilization in the 21st century —really, still at the dawn of our ability to even ascertain the fact of whether or not we’re alone in the universe— I’d like to propose that we could imagine a better starting point from which to orient the youth of our planet; towards a future more secure, more abundant, more fertile and rewarding. And I think we could do a lot better in our management of the resources that give us so much comfort and meaning throughout our lives here, as we work up to that future in the present moment. I think these goals would be extremely rational, and doable, if we could only stop pretending that our parents were God.

So, who’s your Daddy?

What does that phrase even mean? And why in the fuck is there a sexual connotation to it? Many of us, if not most, look for a Daddy to guide us through almost every situation, in life. We look to celebrities as our Daddies, we look to Journalists as our Daddies, we look to priests, cops, and politicians as our Daddies. Pretty much anybody whose words we trust without question, is our Daddy.

It were as if there was an inherent addiction in the human psyche, to subjugation by figures of Authority.

We’re so baffled by the apparent ill will, of all these people we’ve lifted up into positions of power. Bush led us into twenty years of war, over lies, and the country said, “I’m sure Daddy knows who the bad guys are.” Obama sold us out to Wall Street, and the majority said, “I’m sure Daddy knows what’s best for the economy.” Cops are killing unarmed citizens in the streets, with a frequency that makes the act almost a Meme, and America says, “I’m sure Daddy was just being careful.” ICE starts separating spanish-speaking children from their parents, and locking them in cages —America winces, “well, Daddy says he’s trying, to get them out of those cages.”

And Trump, well, shit. I guess, in all fairness, I have to say this — “At least Daddy’s finally being honest about himself…”

I love my life, and I do endeavor to make the best of whatever place I live in —but do I feel a particular allegiance to the nation where I live, when I already pay my admission with taxes? Fuck that. Especially when I know what an Abrahamic piece of shit my country is —shitting on every global neighbor’s door, diddling their daughters; and then smiling when everybody has to come to your barbecue, because you’re the only one that can afford food.

Fuck the Daddies’ United States of America.

We can be better than this. There’s no reason we can’t divorce ourselves from what preceded us, to whatever degree we feel appropriate. At our current realization, we’re as far from heroic as a nation can be, in the impact we have on the world around us. We’ve spent the last two decades decimating the economies, infrastructures and countless innocent lives within a series of Islamic countries, on the other side of the planet.

And now there’s Daddies on both sides of the Coke-Pepsi Taste Test Challenge (the ‘Cans and ‘Crats) telling us that we need to fear Russia again, and China. But I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with the radically humanistic agendas put forth by a certain Socialist Senator from Vermont.

We started out nearly four hundred years ago, building an economy on the beautiful backs of enslaved Africans. Now we’re spending most of our time turning our heads back and forth, from one screen to another; distracting ourselves, from the knowledge that our Daddies have been slowy working to turn the entire world of brown people outside our borders into our indentured servants, to sate the Free Market’s insistent need for expansion.

It’s Beastly, I tell you.

 Jesus Christ died because he offended the corrupt priests of his day —just, like, the ones where he lived. He went into the temple and he fucked up all the money lenders’ shit, and they all got mad, and they went to the Centurions and they were like, “Fuck this guy —he’s gotta go!”

Right? That’s what Jesus died for, right?

And the Romans sanctioned it, because he was ultimately causing a riot, which the Romans saw as a treasonous disruption of their ‘Peace’. But his world, Jesus, was actually a pretty small one. Back then, the Jews were mostly in the fertile crescent (if I’m not mistaken). Sure, the Imperial power of Rome implied a great and tumultuous civilization in neighboring lands, but the estimated world population in the year 1 A.D. is between 200 and 400 million.

The world has grown drastically, since Christ’s time.

 Flash forward to now. Think of how many Trump people out there, elevating this puffed-up orange roll of privilege with their faith, holding him up as their shepherd —just think how many of those people consider themselves followers of Christ! It’s brutally absurd, and frightening in what it reveals about the concept of religious fellowship in the 21st century.

Because it’s as if these people were aware that Christ was just a story. By aligning themselves with Trump, they reveal that their faith is not so much an article of heartfelt identity as it is a form of membership dues —and their saying of the words, and their attending the rituals, bought them entry into this social order of which they wanted to be part.

But they’re so dislocated from Christ, now, there’s no point in pretending —they’re siding with the fucking Centurions, every time!

So who is your Daddy, then?

If you belong to the Christian faith, and you don’t even recognize the face of Christ, when you see it —in a leper, say, or in a prostitute or a homeless man; or a muslim child, or a parent embracing that child in an attempt to protect her, from the blast of a drone strike— if you’ve lost all respect for the Martyr, but you’re still going to church? What exactly are you doing, with your Sundays?

It’s not like it just suddenly got this way, either. Like, we haven’t just stumbled into some weird existential pothole. Hitler and the Nazis, who exterminated Jews, because they deemed them so inherently disagreeable in nature, identified as ‘Christians’. Even though, as we know, Jesus Christ was himself a Jew. The Inquisition, The Rape and Pillage of the Indigenous Americas —almost all the way down the line, in moments when brutal acts were performed by one human or group of humans against another in western history, they were done in the name of Christ. At least, from the perspectives of the perpetrators.

When you look at it all from this angle, the tradition of Christianity feels like some perverse brainwashing tool, meant to create questions in the minds of the meek, about the dubious morality often expressed in the acts of the powerful. Like a pre-wired failsafe which cripples the morally upright from action, just long enough so that the morally reprehensible may sneak through the moment undetected, and dominate reality into the shape it desires.

It’s all very, very sexy, this act of Domination —don’t you think?

It’s like all of Christianity is this long con, started by the fucking money lenders. They’re holding up crosses, now —these crosses, with little sculpted Jesuses on them; nails through his hands, and all blood and thorns and tears, reminding us that —just like Jesus— this could happen to you, too.

It’s like, codified into the larger story, is a discouragement to humans from seeking to emulate the virtuous qualities that were inherent to the acts of Jesus. It’s underlined by the story of Lucifer, the angel who sought to be as good as God —and was made into a hellish example, for his misstep.

Even if you aren’t duped into going to church every week, so that somebody else can tell you what it is to be a good person, you still have to wade through this shit, everywhere you go in this country. God presides over the beginning of every school day in every classroom that utters the Pledge of Allegiance. God is present in every cash transaction made between people in America, on our currency. How fucked up is that, if you’re Jesus? The fucking moneylenders had him crucified, and now they’re stamping their coin with his name!

Honestly, every time a Christian person allows in their heart for the blood of Christ to absolve them of their sins, I think they’re just driving more nails into the poor guy. That poor, poor man —two thousand years later, and we’re still just happily nailing him to that bloody fucking cross.

I wish people would just leave Jesus alone. He only wanted us to be good to each other, and now everyone gets together and recites his sacred words, and then they all go around doing horrible things to other people in his name! It’s like they’re smearing the face of the messiah in a pile of dogshit.

I mean, how could you?!

Really —how can a self-identifying Christian even feel okay about paying taxes, to a country that routinely bombs other countries in the name of Global Domination? We go in and facilitate coups, we assassinate cultural and political figures; we blow up entire residential blocks, full of innocents, for the sake of maybe hitting one ‘legitimate’ human target —You all know as well as I do that American foreign military policy is a dirty, dirty business. As American citizens, each of us has a direct hand in every brutal act done by our military, to every innocent soul abroad.

So many ‘Christians’ will spend their precious free time harassing and shaming unfortunate young mothers, who haven’t the means to provide for a child, for terminating their pregnancies before the life has come into the world. And then they’ll stand by and cheer as their country’s military unleashes modern warfare on a countless number of lives, in some faraway and practically third-world community —we make sure now, as policy, that they’re already completely crippled in infrastructure, before we grow the balls to actually show up anywhere in number. That’s called governmental draft-dodging.

Christians like to say that Satan is the great deceiver. Well, I’m pretty certain now he’s been deceiving Christians since the first Easter Sunday. I’m done pretending there’s room for both of us to be right. You’re fucking wrong.

And you worship a different god than you realize.

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Also I just self published my first novel on Amazon (I know, ick). It's basically a live autopsy of my ongoing sadness. On weed.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DHY3H73