Sunday, July 28, 2019

I'm a Little Bit Ilhan, and I'm a Little Bit Tucker Too

As something of a radical contrarian, I often feel like my life is comprised largely of coming out of an endless procession of closets, often without even realizing I'm stepping through the doorway. What? You didn't know I was a pro-life feminist? You've never heard of a libertarian socialist? I genuinely can't keep up with all the peccadillos you partisan pussies find indigestible. All in all, with this experience of casually shocking boring people, it's little wonder I took to being queer like a fish in a frying pan.

But some closet doors are heavier than others and at this hybrid moment of Republicrat hysteria, they don't get much heavier than the simple fact that I have a great deal of respect for both Ilhan Omar and Tucker Carlson, which is a bit like being a unicorn that everyone hates for a different reason. How could this be possible? Well, for one thing, I've long held a soft spot in my bleeding heart for both shocking people and, well, shocking-people. As a kid, I couldn't seem to decide whether I wanted to be Mother Teresa or Marilyn Manson when I grew up. But more than any idiosyncratic character flaw, my respect for these two highly demonized figures stems from the fact that I am and will always be an anti-imperialist above all else. And regardless of their many many flaws both Ilhan and Tucker have been fairly consistent advocates for world peace.

I never expected to like Tucker Carlson and, for the most part, I still don't. His demonization of immigrants and trans people like myself is nothing short of revolting. But like most paleocons, with Mr. Carlson you take the good with the disgusting. Regardless of how you or I may feel about the bastard's social cluelessness, you have to be pathologically apoplectic to deny his post-partisan devotion to anti-interventionism. Where Tucker's beloved pseudo-isolationist Caesar, Donald Trump, has faltered, Carlson has remained courageously resolute.

Since taking the prime time slot of pandering grope-a-holic Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson has delivered some of the most breathlessly eloquent prose in defense of peace that this country has seen since MSDNC had Phil Donahue fired for speaking out against the war in Iraq, often going against the very president he rebuilt his career on defending in the process, and it's effect appears to be profound. Donald Trump seems to have only reversed his decision to commit mass murder in Iran after a brief phone call with his favorite Fox News host. With an impetuously impressionable man-child in the Oval Office, this xenophobic, binarist dick may have literally saved lives by sticking to his guns on America's existential need to drop hers. Hate the fucker for who he is, but game recognizes game, and Tucker is looking pretty damn familiar to this tranny peacenik. Crucify me for being big enough admit it.

Perhaps the only thing more enjoyable than seeing a neocon network hijacked by a modern-day Charles Lindbergh has been watching mighty little Ilhan make those same pigfucking giants sweat. While, as an anarchist, I may find Mrs. Omar's pseudo-socialist, big-government-solves-everything approach to domestic policy nauseatingly tiresome, she has proven herself to be the Lower House's most doggedly consistent critic of empire since Ron Paul.

She has been inspiringly fearless in her near unprecedented stance against the malign influence of the Israel Lobby, braving outrageous accusations of antisemitism from her own party to tell an increasingly Hitleresque Bibi Netanyahu to go fuck himself and the president he rode in on. She's called out Democratic sacred cow Barack Obama for his own war crimes, thrown her support behind Orange-Man-Bad's empty promises to pull out of Afghanistan and Syria and has led the charge in Congress to end our countries unforgivable involvement with the Saudi genocide in Yemen. All of this, however, is just gravy on top of her ruthless televised roast of Elliot Abrams. Nothing has ever gotten my unwanted cock harder than seeing that woman make that serial-child murderer belly crawl like the gutless invertebrate he is. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to anti-imperialist revenge porn and it was fucking divine. For that alone, Ilhan Omar has earned her place in paradise just next door to Malcolm X.

So why the fuck cant these two iconoclastic peaceniks just get along? Why does Tucker feel the need to further stain his reputation by dragging a woman who stands for many of the same things he does through the mud with ludicrous, xenophobic, conspiracy theories? Why do Ilhan's devoted Twitter followers waste their precious time trolling the private residence of the one talking head daring enough to speak out against both parties insatiable lust for war? Why can't radicals just get along?

The answer essentially comes down to the kind of garden variety bigotry that the status quo has relied on for centuries to keep people serious about peace divided. For Tucker and his audience, this bigotry is pretty obvious. The world is getting browner and queerer and they can't stand the idea that becoming a white minority may be inevitable. For someone in coach like me, it's more than a little hard to feel sympathetic for a bunch of old white men in first class bellyaching about getting only one side with their Salisbury steak. Which leads me to address the less obvious form of bigotry at play here, coming from the left, which essentially amounts to a bigotry against bigotry. I know this sounds absurd, but you can't expect every social group to evolve at the same pace. Sometimes we have to pick our battles, and dead children in Yemen is just a little bit more dire than being misgendered by MAGA hat wearing hicks.

This doesn't mean the left should lose its values. On the contrary, I think these values of tolerance and acceptance only benefit from finding common cause with those who stubbornly appose them. I've seen it first hand. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered hostility towards my gender identity from the right, only to see it neutralized by sharing a comradery for apposing violent globalism. I've become many a paleocon's one trans friend this way and I've gotta believe that that is a step in the right direction.

Both the far-left and the far-right have never been more visible in this country. We both appose many of the same things, namely the forever wars which have starved both our movements of the financial attention they so rightly deserve. If the radical center can find common ground in strengthening the warfare state, then why cant we on the fringe find common ground in destroying it. There will be plenty of time to claw each others eyes out over domestic policy once the troops come home. For now, I say we prioritize ending the killing. Lets build a contrarian coalition for peace.

So, yeah, dearest motherfuckers, I'm a little bit Ilhan, and god help me, I'm a little bit Tucker too. Aren't we all? Consider that closet door obliterated. I have no more room for shame when it comes to my lust for peace.



Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Hatebreeders by the Misfits
*  The KKK Took My Baby Away by the Ramones
*  Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash
*  Obsessed by Hatchie
*  Hybrid Moments by the Misfits
*  Rock 'n Roll Nigger by Marilyn Manson
*  Good Ones by Slaughter Beach, Dog
*  Rebels by Tom Petty



Dedicated in loving memory to Dino Zakarya. Another proud Muslim rebel who couldn't be bothered to follow the rules. Rest comrade, we'll carry your gun.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Smash All the Camps (Or Sympathy For Willem Van Spronsen)

I sympathize with Willem Van Spronsen. Maybe that's a bad way to start this post but it feels like the most honest way to start this post. A mentally ill anarchist, not unlike myself, Willem wanted to end his life but he wanted to end it for a cause. So he attacked an ICE detention center with pipe bombs and let the cops do the rest. I've never made my disdain for Antifa a secret, I've befriended too many right-wing anti-imperialists caught in their crossfire, but god help me, this struck me as a move in the right direction for Pacific Northwest anarchists, who have lately been far too busy bombarding alt-right imbeciles to confront our growing police state.

My sympathy is not exclusively political however. My sympathy comes from a place of very personal outrage and my outrage comes from a deeply traumatic childhood. I can usually retain a pretty jaded gonzo snark with my writing, stemming from my misanthropic drag queen sense of humor. But when you've been fucked with by role-crazy adults as a child, part of you will always be that child. So when I see kids in fucking cages, I see myself brutally misgendered in a confessional waiting for hell. And that's when I flip my proverbial shit and get downright histrionic. The only reason why I haven't gone full Kaczynski like Willem, aside from the fact that my meds are working and I generally appose initiatory violence, is because I'm usually too livid in these moments to handle anarcho-home-ec projects like IED's. I'm also probably too pissed off to write a completely lucid blog post, so this time I decided to wait a week and take a closer look at the issue of the camps.

It's very tempting to drop the lion share of the blame on a loud-mouth bully like Trump. He's certainly made the immigration issue more personal by declaring entire classes of people war criminals and encouraging his beloved gorilla juice-heads in ICE to get their Gestapo on. The harsh reality that the media has chosen to ignore however is that there is nothing particularly new about Orange-Man-Bad's persecution of pint-sized undocumented line-crossers. In fact, the bastard still comes in fourth behind the last three presidents in mass deportations. The modern militarization of the boarder actually started decades before Trump with another sanction-happy rapist named Bill Clinton (I believe the two may have met once or twice at one of Jeffrey Epstein's Pretty Baby-Eyes Wide Shut Parties) which was just one small part of his fascistic war on children, the hallmark of which was his draconian Biden-approved crime bill which essentially declared black childhood to be a felony. And this is where we meet the concentration camp question.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generally puts me to shame in the histrionics department (the bitch also looks way better in heels) but she hit the nail on the head when she had the ovaries to call our countries desert tiger-cage day-care centers concentration camps. No single race of people owns the rights to that specific genre of inhumanity. This country had concentration camps for Indians long before Germany was even Germany. A concentration camp is anywhere where large groups of people are concentrated against their will behind bars and concertina wire. You don't have to be a limp-wristed open-borders loving panarchist like me to find that concept repulsive, especially when it involves children. Ankle bracelets are cheap and locking up toddlers is terrorism. But why are we picking favorites here? When it all comes down to it, aren't all prisons concentration camps?

There are millions of people in cages across this country, more than any other country, not just in general but per capita. We make China look like fucking Burning Man for Christ's sake. And what does all this barbarism achieve? Nothing. Not rehabilitation. The American prison system is a factory that gobbles up the children our equally heinous public schools fail and spits out hardened criminals, pathologically incapable of existing anywhere but prison. It's an emotional crippling machine. Recidivism rates are through the roof and a huge portion of this countries permanent prisoners suffer from untreated mental illness. That just leaves us with some hideously arcane Hobbesian sense of frontier justice where we essentially throw people's lives away who hurt us because it makes us feel better about creating a society that makes this pain inevitable. Forgive my bluntness, but this is fucking stupid. We're kicking the dog for biting us because we kicked the dog. Maybe if our schools weren't glorified prisoner factories we would have learned that two wrongs don't make a right, two million wrongs makes a catastrophe and concentration camps are never right.

So I welcome Willem's rage, but I also welcome it to be put in the proper perspective. If you appose the camps on the boarder, you should appose their northern supermax cousins. Tribes managed to effect restorative models of justice centuries before the relatively recent invention of the modern prison. There is no reason why our communities, towns and neighborhoods can't do the same. When a society becomes too modern for mercy, it has ceased to evolve into anything worth protecting. Maybe we can get back on track by spending less time and money on violently reacting to societies ills and more time fixing them. The best way to prevent the proliferation of violence in society is to prevent child abuse. Let's start by letting them out of those goddamn cages. Until then, I will continue to have more sympathy for the Willem Van Spronsen's of this country than the comfortable state terrorists they assault. Make of that what you will.

Smash all the camps, dearest motherfuckers, from Yuma to Attica. Either we all get free or nobodies free. No justice? No peace.



Piss, Vinegar & always Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Rusty Cage by Soundgarden
*  Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon
*  Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy
*  Suedehead by Morrissey
*  Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash
*  Waiting Room by Fugazi
*  Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
*  Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash
*  Poor Poor Pitiful Me by Warren Zevon

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Nukes For Peace?

Surrounded by trigger happy Tonkinesque gunboats and drowning in debt, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made the risky decision to play the last card left in their deck; to defy the P5+1 Deal in order to save the P5+1 Deal. It's a hell of a gambit but it already has those pussies in the EU clamoring for new talks with the embattled nation. Under the circumstances, I would argue that Iran's decision to enrich Uranium past the amount allowed in the deal but still far short of anything potentially lethal isn't just tactically savvy, it's the right thing to do.

Iran offered Europe and the US everything but a weekly colonoscopy with that deal and we've given them jack shit in return for their patience. While Trump shredded the agreement in a reckless Israel-friendly hissy fit, Europe has sheepishly reneged on their promises to stand up to Orange-Man-Bad and ease their own sanctions. Their indecision isn't just an embarrassing display of geostrategic cowardice that would gag Charles de Gaulle like a gimp, it's a brazen violation of the very deal they claim to remain committed to. In this dire situation, for Iran to continue to sit on their hands, would be a betrayal of both international diplomacy and their long suffering citizenry who these values are supposed to protect.

But this move also begs a bigger and rather uncomfortable question for peaceniks like me. Could Nukes be good for peace? Just typing those words feels blasphemous on my fingertips, but history speaks for itself. Iraq and Libya both forfeited their own nuclear weapons programs for the sake of self-preservation and both ended up brutally mugged for their efforts by the world's preeminent nuclear superpower. Further more, international law on this regard, is little more than a sick fucking joke. Iran has been hounded for decades by an illegally nuclear armed Israel and the only nation to ever use one of those goddamn things while even the intelligence agencies of these very rogue states admits that this program is a total fiction. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue their own flagrantly illegal arms race while being bathed in buckets of western aid. And evil Iran should what, be the last boy-scout while they get ransacked? It clearly doesn't make any fucking difference whether they actually have the bombs or not, so why not arm up?

This has essentially become the policy of North Korea, who originally sought little more than to update their dusty moribund nuclear program for the use of hard-water power to help them weather the post-Cold War winter. When confronted by an increasingly belligerent Clinton Administration on the issue, they decided that they might as well double-down and go back to making bombs until Jimmy Carter went rogue on the White House and cobbled together a peace deal that held until Bush decided to follow in Clinton's imperial footsteps with more baseless dick-wagging and saber-rattling. North Korea simply flipped that New England hick the bird and diligently returned to their nukes, braving power both soft and hard, until being offered another equally precarious deal with our current Schizophrenic-in-Chief. North Korea didn't exactly come out of this thing unscathed. Millions of their citizens have starved beneath the weight of our crippling sanctions. But they're still standing and without the taste of Uncle Sam's cock in their mouth. So why not Iran?

This is a question the western world will have to answer as Iran has chosen a middle ground, between Iraq and Korea, to throw the ball in our court. Expecting exposed third world nations to embrace nuclear dovery runs as patronizingly hollow when all the rich countries singing Cat Stevens songs are armed to the fucking teeth. Iran has never invaded a single sovereign nation and yet its expected to play Gandhi to a gang of colonialist bloodhounds who've left rotting carcasses on nearly every continent they've ever raped with a flagpole. In what hopped up universe is this mindset anything but atrociously racist and downright rude? I still think sticking to that deal as long as they did showed the world a lot of class on Iran's part. But class wont cure kids with leukemia or keep food on the table. When it comes to Iran's nuclear weapons program, whether it ever becomes more than fictional or not, don't hate the player, hate the game.

You want peace, dearest motherfuckers? Me too. In fact I wage to bet even those dastardly Mullahs do. But the cowboy in the red, white and blue hat is gonna have to drop his pistols first. After all, he's the only one who's been caught using them.



Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Imagine by John Lennon
*  Peace Sells by Megadeth
*  Peace Train by Cat Stevens
*  Reign In Blood by Slayer
*  International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats
*  What About Us by Ministry
*  Shinny Happy People by REM
*  Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana
*  Museum of Love by Daniel Johnston
*  Andre by L7

Sunday, July 7, 2019

The Revolt Against Adulthood

Why don't you grow up, Nicky? That's the tried old refrain that never seems to get older than I do. It seems like I hear it from pretty much all the token adult figures in my life; my parents, my therapist, my government. And maybe they've got a point. I am over thirty, unemployed, painfully single and I still live at home. To be fair, I'm also certifiably mentally ill. As a slowly recovering shut-in, my lingering agoraphobia makes it damn near impossible to hold down even a part time job. But If I'm to be 100% honest to a gut-shiving fault, which is pretty much my whole shtick, my aversion to adulthood is far more complex than my inability to properly regulate good and bad stress.

 I was raised in the wrong fucking gender by an establishment of adults who I was led to believe held the mandate of god himself, the ultimate adult figure. By in large, growing up, the adults in my life were cruel, petty, two-faced zealots who had their way with my trust until it quite simply ceased to exist. There is a very firmly moralist part of me that yells at the top of her deeply closeted preteen lungs, WHY THE FUCK WOULD I EVER WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!

 I've talked about this disembodied voice before. The invisible girl who's tired of suffocating beneath the biological trappings of manhood. She wants to come out and play with matches but she's not particularly intrigued by the late capitalist banality of modern adulthood. And, in 2019, she's not alone.

It seems like I come from an entire generation of kids who are downright allergic to adulthood. We are a lost generation that has chosen in overwhelming numbers to stay single, unemployed and live at home. We also seem to be a culture that is defined by our collective nostalgia. We've somehow managed to make washed-up boy bands and thirty year old cartoons a downright viable industry. we've gathered on the Internet into rabid cults devoted to everything from anime to My Little Pony. In the process, we have also become the butt of an endless barrage of jokes from older generations for refusing to conform to what their interpretation of what adulthood is. But isn't that precisely what adulthood is? An interpretation, not unlike other equally subjective concepts like normality and sanity, of what constitutes a successful existence in a collapsing society running on fumes?

So what is an "Adult" in 2019. What earns one that cherished class distinction in the waning hours of the American Century? According to postmodern western society, an adult is someone who pays their taxes and votes for sensible centrist warmongers.

 An adult is someone who works their fingers to the fucking bone for some half-lit cubicle despot who treats them with all the respect of branded cattle.

 An adult cuts their hair and dresses like a goddamn ventriloquist dummy just to fit in with the other miserable fakes in the herd.

 An adult builds them self an oversized suburban prison cell over virgin forests with granite counter tops and cathedral ceilings on the ocean floor of a raging sea of debt.

 An adult gives into the peer pressure of competitive monogamy and pumps out two and a half kids before pushing their demons on them and punishing them for not being properly spoiled and jaded by the shining success of our empty neoliberal existence.

 An adult beats their spouse after the home team loses and then sauces them self to sleep on a cocktail of hard alcohol and sleeping pills.

 An adult is a faceless, spineless, living corpse who does as their told. And this is the "success" my generation of missing children should aspire too? Let me speak for all of us right now and tell the mincing successful adults in the room to go fuck themselves. Even the purgatory of delayed adulthood is better than the hell of their empty existence. Enjoy the Beamer and the fake tits, champ, you've earned it.

And my generation's search for something meaningful in what this toxic society deems meaningless is hardly an anomaly. Many lost generations living in moribund societies pregnant with their own demise have chose to play hide and seek among the wreckage of their ancestors. In the final days of Weimar Germany and the Roman Empire, whole generations chose to abandon the responsibility of keeping their rusted hulk states alive in favor of indulging in the fantasy of burlesque houses and post-pagan orgies. Perhaps these are more than just contractions before the miscarriage. Perhaps there is something hardwired deep into our primordial lizard brains that still thirsts for a return to the natural world when the modern one is in shambles. One only capable of sustaining life in the years before we had been so thoroughly subjugated and assimilated by those gulags of adulthood called schools and the workforce.

There was an age in which we were all children, or primitive as the condescending gatekeepers of history in the Ivy Leagues call it. Before agriculture and property and adulthood, we hunted and gathered our collective resources and spent the lion share of our time engaging each other, irrespective of age, in meaningful play. I've known some much maligned folk who continue this tradition deep in the hollers of Appalachia. They receive the same amount of disrespect from academia as our primitive ancestors and they give same amount fucks about the adult world as I do. It's easy to typecast those who embrace absurdity in absurd times, be they hillbillies or millennials, but maybe, just maybe, we're all responding to something we've been robbed of by the progress of modern adulthood. And maybe it's time we took it back.

This isn't to say that my generation has it all figured out. We just know that the world is fucked up and it doesn't have to be this way. Sadly, some of the decomposing adults are wise enough to acknowledge our discontent and shrewd enough to harness it to consolidate their own plush positions in a crumbling kingdom of shit. Ageing scions of malignant adulthood like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have offered us the faulty illusion of safety beneath their condescending guardianship. These toxic father figures have offered us a candy store of goodies like free healthcare, free tuition, great big walls and even bigger battleships to turn this desperate land into one big safe crib as long as we agree to play nice and let them rape mamma with factory farms and smart bombs.

Well, I don't know about the rest of you kids, but this is one (wo)man-child who's not falling for the stranger's candy again. I say we sneak out after dark and run amok on their wrinkled asses. I say we give the adults a taste of their own fucking medicine.

I say we stop giving the bullies our lunch money and use our would-be tax dollars to buy PlayStations, dope and electric guitars. I say we turn the census into a colossal game of Madlibs. I say we decorate every government building we can find with toilet paper and rotten eggs. I say we all show up to jury duty in blackface except the blacks who show up dressed as white powdered judges. I say we throw a gigantic water-balloon fight on the graves of Arlington with one red-nosed clown for every tombstone. I say we jam up the tailpipes of every police cruiser from Queens to Ferguson with Twinkies and bananas. I say we dose Washington's water supply with homemade moonshine. And I say we all play hooky with a nationwide collective strike and gather at the National Mall to eat fluffer-nutters, make out and play Dungeons and Dragons until the adults step down and give us back our goddamned democracy.

More importantly, I say we stop saying 'Yes mam' and 'No sir' to people who don't treat us with the respect to earn such knee-jerk platitudes. I say we take care of our parents, even if they are condescending dicks, instead of shoving them into homes. I say we tell our friends that we love them before they're gone. And I say we make those friends and family a higher priority than making money to hand over to government thieves. I say we start doing what makes us happy rather than what makes us and the government rich. I say we stop dropping bombs on people for not playing the right games. And I say we start treating all children, young and old, with the kindness and respect we wish to be treated with. No more patriarchy. No more ageism. And no more second class citizens, shamed into the conformity of adulthood. No more invisible girls.

To put it frankly, fuck adulthood, dearest motherfuckers. It's an overrated concept crafted by the dying to enslave the living. Our only responsibilities should be to each other and against the systems that divide us. Let the Nickelodean revolution begin and let it begin with me.



Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Essentially by Japanese Breakfast
*  Teenage Dirtbag by Phoebe Bridgers
*  Our Secret by Beat Happening
*  We're Going To Be Friends by the White Stripes
*  1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
*  Wake Up by Arcade Fire
*  Superbike by Jay Som
*  Come As You Are by Nirvana
*  I Go Home by Daniel Johnston
*  Drunk Walk Home by Mitski
*  In the Garage by Weezer
*  The Concept by Teenage Fanclub