The Feral Spectacle of the Radical Blockbuster Movie

 "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

-Werner Herzog

The blacktop is simmering like a skillet beneath the rising heat of the dog days of summer and once again I find myself missing the movies. Not that streaming shit on your goddamn phone but the flickering flame of machine gun cellulite making a cool dark room in some suburban strip mall glow like a ghost trapped in a coal mine. Back in nineteen-ninety-something, escaping reality was still a collective experience. You and your brother and a dozen strangers that were just as bored as you getting together over dangerously over-salted butter popcorn to watch Quentin Tarantino kill just enough people to squeak by with an R rating.

It's all gone now. It's all over. Everything is digital. Everything has been separated from the fragile fingertips of another actual sentient human being by fifty-five layers of synthetic software. Hollywood is dead and Marvel buried it in an empty computer box. Everything has been reduced to a formula, from the tightly focus-group tested plot of another poorly regurgitated superhero saga of good versus evil to the computer generated, greenscreen special effects of an AI animated cartoon with the faces of A-list celebrities pasted to the action. I know I'm a bitter old soul, but it all just reeks of insincerity and inauthenticity, and sometimes I feel like the only curmudgeon under eighty who can't bear to participate in this mockery of something I once loved in the name of nostalgia.

I feel silly, bellyaching about the "good old days" of something that has always been a very contrived industry at best. If I could just truly divorce my morality from my sentimentality, I would say good riddance and welcome the destruction of another evil empire. Hollywood has always been a corporate sewer of sexual predators and military-industrial propagandists, selling a deeply mythologized interpretation of American cultural supremacy to a world held hostage by their commercial hegemony. In the light of cautious Gramscian hindsight, it really was little more than very well-made shit. But every once in a while, some mad genius with a coke habit and a dream would secure a budget for something downright revolutionary and what probably should have been just another narcotic blockbuster became a zeitgeist rattling status quo disruptor. 

2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Day of the Dead, Falling Down, American Beauty, Fight Club... The 'wait-a-fucking-minute-how-did-they-get-away-with-that' movie. Sometimes they seemed to come completely out of nowhere, from some career scoundrel who somehow tripped over prophecy on his way to the bank.

That was Terminator 2: Judgement Day in a gun shell. Nothing about that film should have been revolutionary; a bloated, over-hyped, colossal budget, sequel directed by a man who has always been more of a CEO than an artist. But that movie, James Cameron's 1991 Arnold Swartzenegger juggernaut, seems to ring a little closer to Old Testament style prophecy with every passing year. A terrifying portion of it has already come true and the rest seems to be in the process of transpiring as we speak.

Unlike the first Terminator in 1984, which seemed to be very much focused on a distant, barely tangible future, foretold by time travelers to a bewildered young waitress who would someday give birth to a robot fighting messiah, Judgement Day seemed to set its sights on the near future. Sarah Connor, former waitress and "mother of the future" had transformed herself into a luddite guerrilla, every bit as dangerous as any machine and the story Arnold Swartzenegger's new android arrived to tell was one that was already unfolding in Silicon Valley. And it is that story, told in robotic monotone which stays with me late at night, burning holes in my head bigger than any pyrotechnic magic trick.

"In three years, Cyberdine will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdine computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2014 am Eastern Time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug..."

Change the name Cyberdine to Palantir and the date to 2027 and science fiction begins to feel eerily close to documentary. The rest of the film plays out like a high-octane, Ted Kazcynski fever dream. Sarah Connor targets brilliant technophile computer researcher, Mike Dyson, only to be stopped by the son who would become messiah and his Terminator companion who get both Sarah and Dyson to realize that something far more revolutionary is needed to prevent the apocalypse and an armed assault is launched on the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 500 company.

Even what could have very easily been a cheesy ending syncs in with Industrial Society and Its Future. When the Terminator reaches a level of artificial intelligence high enough to resemble empathy, he realizes that the only truly ethical choice he can make is to destroy himself before some other clever scientist can find a way to justify his replication in reckless pursuit of power through technological advancement.

The most radical blockbusters however turn the cameras on themselves and attack the mass media as a whole and few if any other blockbuster is more radical than 1994's Natural Born Killers. Oliver Stone, already a reputable loose cannon among Hollywood elites, originally took on the Tarantino helmed script about a pair of mass murdering lovebirds who find themselves transformed into celebrities by the tabloids, with every intention of making a fairly conventional action movie. Then he began doing psychedelics and watching the news during the age of O.J. and Waco and decided to do something far more radical.

The result was essentially an arthouse movie with a blockbuster budget; a hallucinogenic journey into the dark heart of the American spectacle. Micky and Mallory Knox become two horrifically abused kids raised on television who become accomplices to the mass media who raised them to be monsters and then turned them into stars. Everything is done in the name of the parallel universe that only exists through the kaleidoscope of the commercial zeitgeist. Acts of shocking violence are interspersed with snippets of Coca-Cola commercials and flashbacks of child abuse. Or to paraphrase Guy Debord, all that was once directly murdered becomes mere representation.

Hollywood hated it for the same reason Sergio Leone once told a young Oliver Stone that they would hate Scarface, because it was about them. The most diabolical villain in a movie about serial killers is actually the tabloid "journalist", Wayne Gale, played brilliantly by a clearly drug fueled Robert Downey Jr., doing his best impersonation of Geraldo Rivera. By the end of the movie, Gale transitions effortlessly from merely covering the crimes of Micky and Mallory to actually engaging in them himself, only to be murdered by the subjects he transformed into Frankenstein spectacles. It was a step too far even for a guaranteed money-maker like Oliver Stone and it was beautiful. Hollywood never forgave him and his career never fully recovered, but Natural Born Killers continues to haunt the spectacle to this day. Its place in the zeitgeist cannot be erased.

Todd Phillips managed to perform a similar trick by hijacking the superhero genre itself with 2019's Joker, in which the titular villain of Batman fame is transformed from an insane mastermind to a shattered manchild failing to be somebody in a grim world haunted by the spectacle of glitzy talk shows and billionaire politicians. Arthur Fleck, played by a neurodivergently inspired Joaquin Pheonix, doesn't actually become the Joker. His crimes and what they come to represent to a Gotham City of lost children are the Joker. Crowds of enraged misfits in clown masks setting the city on fire.

After Arthur is transformed by this phenomenon, he echoes the warnings once delivered by Paul Goodman in his revolutionary study of late capitalist juvenile delinquency, Growing Up Absurd, during his interview with the cluelessly sadistic late night host Murray Frankin (played by Robert DeNiro),

"Have you seen what it's like out there, Mur-ray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells, shouts and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy... They think we'll all just sit there and take it like good little boys. That we won't werewolf and go wild... (Well) what do you get... When you cross... A mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?!... I'll tell you what you get!! You get what you fucking deserve!!!"

This is the sermon of the active shooter, a generation of lost boys failed by a society that failed them by turning manhood into something empty and absurd to grow into.

Joker was a huge success, but Hollywood hated it as much as they did Natural Born Killers and they hated its sequel, the gonzo jukebox musical Joker: Folie a Deux even more, only this time the audience hated it too, because Philips and Pheonix explicitly decided to turn the Marvel Studio model of braindead fan service on its skull and presented Arthur Fleck as a victim of the Joker spectacle that he never really had any control over. It was a brilliantly daring gamble to make with another soulless studio's money, but its message was lost on the lost boys who just wanted to live out their phantasy of getting even with the system without every really dealing with their own symbiotic relationship with it.

Regardless, I feel like Folie a Deux was actually a nice way to leave the superhero genre; with a totally unconventional slap in the face, and maybe that's OK. Maybe Hollywood deserves to die as much as Arthur and America do. Maybe the insane matrix of market diversity brought on by streaming is far more conducive to bold artists with inconvenient visions.

But on a climate change scorched afternoon in mid-August, I still miss the movies of nineteen-ninety-something, when a dozen lost strangers could find themselves trapped in a flickering coal mine and ambushed by the collective experience of an unexpected reality two-stories tall.

What a beautiful nightmare... The feral spectacle of an industrial society with no future.

What more can I say but that's life, that's what all the people say...

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Lost Boys by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

*  Humming by Gracie Abrams

*  If You Were the Woman and I Was the Man by Cowboy Junkies

*  White Room by Cream

*  That's Life by Lady Gaga

*  Celebrity Skin by Hole

*  Rock and Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter

*  Ghost Town by the Specials

*  The Greatest by Lana Del Rey

A Transgender Gospel Against Western Civilization

 They say that the arch of history bends towards progress but as a trans person in the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself torn at the crossroads of an increasingly bewildering age. On the one hand, transgender and gender diverse people in the West have never experienced a greater level of exposure and popular acceptance. On the other hand, these same trans people, my people, have also never faced a greater threat of state sanctioned violence and outright erasure.

The Human Rights Campaign has found in recent polls that 41% of American adults report to personally know at least one person who openly identifies as transgender and another 85% of Americans claim that they accept that trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as anyone else. This includes a full 76% of Republicans and the pop-cultural zeitgeist seems to concur. 

Flipping through any random barrage of TV channels and/or streaming services, you will certainly find more than your fair share of programming presenting transgender people in a positive if exceedingly narrow light. 

With all that being said, it can be a little hard to feel the love of statistical bromides and cultural tokenism beneath the flame of a state fueled blowtorch.

The Republican Party has been on the warpath for some time now, openly seeking to annihilate all things trans for at least a decade, and the Trump Administration seems to represent the zenith of this campaign. A litany of executive orders signed by Trump since 2025 have directed the Federal Government to define gender as an immutable binary determined exclusively by a single document inked at birth while also commanding the most powerful government on earth to use every piece of regulatory and penal machinery at its disposal to erase anything and anyone who defies this edict. 

Compulsory schools have been ordered to deprive trans children of even the most basic human dignity. Prisons and juvenile detention centers have been ordered to forcibly detransition inmates in what can only be legally described as medical experimentation. And foster homes and other related youth services have been given the greenlight to use all manner of religious quackery to torment the trans youth grossly overrepresented under their so-called care.

It shouldn't take a goddamn human rights organization to tell you that this concerted campaign of forced erasure from public life qualifies as nothing less than genocide, but the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has done just that, warning that such policies and rhetoric as mentioned above match the early stages of a genocidal process based on what has been historically documented across the globe over the last century. 

How in the hell is this kind of disconnect between governance and popular sentiment even possible and how did we get to such an absurdly dichotomous place as a nation, actively seeking to eradicate a people the majority of the country shows very little outward animosity towards?

The reason for the violence is fairly simple, at least to any committed student of historical collapse. The American Empire is in the early stages of the kind of long, slow disintegration that ultimately befalls all imperial hegemons. Our nation is not only rapidly losing the faith of its own citizenry, it is losing the faith of many of its own proxies who are showing increasingly bold signs of going rogue with the barbarians at the gates. 

Traditionally, under such dyer circumstance, collapsing empires frequently appeal to small but fanatical death cults within the upper echelons of their polluted societies. For Pax-Americana under the reign of Imperator Trump this means riling up the Christo-Zionist Millenarians of the Evangelical Movement.

In order to keep this powerful minority engaged and committed to a series of increasingly pointless and unwinnable wars, the Empire needs to feed them a juicy scapegoat now and then and thus they rally the doom seekers around the spook of the evil, mincing, transgender groomer lurking in a women's room near you. 

On multiple occasions, I have seen Donald Trump cornered in the Oval Office with offensively polite questions about his abject failure to reign in a thrice decapitated third world nation in the Persian Gulf only to witness that soiled Ceasar bark incoherently about 'men in women's sports' and some conspiracy to 'trans all the children.' This rhetoric isn't for the general public; it's for a very specific moneyed faithful amongst the petite bourgeoisie. The kind of people willing to drop nukes on Gaza just to see Jesus ride back to earth on a dinosaur. 

But what of the silent tolerant majority? What happened to all that glorious acceptance we soaked up under Imperator Biden? 

Sadly, regardless of popular sentiment, it was all little more than worthless rhetorical platitudes; the desperate byproduct of a rival attempt to save the bad name of the same empire now busy erasing us. 

Every empire consists of a constant contest between competing elites. These elites tend to share virtually identical goals. They tend to struggle to protect the same institutions that empower all of them. They just don't always agree on the best strategy to do this. Some of them will even go so far as to vigorously compete for the highest position on their mountain of skulls and that is what we are witnessing here with this facetious war over trans rights.

In spite of their hollow rhetoric, the Democrats do not support Queer people. They fund the exact same prisons and compulsory school system that serve to enslave and marginalize us as their Republican rivals do. The Democrats simply seek to use the spook of 'LGBTQ tolerance' to prove that the Empire which thrashes us is capable of humanitarian inclusion. After all, how can the Devil be a monster while he's petting a kitten?

This kind of imperial inclusion has done nothing to serve my people. Quite the contrary, it has only made us appear complicit in the corruption of our tormentors. Transgender people have become associated with a morally bankrupt society by conservatives in the same fashion that many Christians have by those on the left. 

We have all become human shields in a culture war between different factions of elite imperial casualties and that is a revolting shame. Your average redneck Jesus freak cares far more about Palestine, Ohio than Jerusalem and your average tranny lunatic cares far more about the gulags of their own local wing of the Prison Industrial Complex than Putin's Russia. But we are all compelled to warfare, both with each other and the world, in the name of strikingly similar concepts of Western cultural universalism.

I myself inhabit a decidedly vexing space in this manufactured cataclysm as I happen to be something of a Christian as well as something of a transwoman. In fact, both of these disciplines are inspired by the same commitment I owe to Gnostic Sophiology and both of those seemingly divergent phenomena predate what we now know as Western Civilization. 

Christianity was just one of many schools of ancient Gnostic mysticism to spring from the battlefields of the Levant onto the streets of Rome before that Empire, the very same empire that crucified Christianity's namesake, decided to use that particular school popular among the urban Roman working class to justify their struggling empire's continued existence and endless expansion. 

In the process of assimilation, entire Gospels were purged from the Bible while others were censored and manipulated beyond recognition and from this manipulation modern Western Civilization was born.

In spite of the fact that Christ made zero reference to the third genders which existed both in Europe and the Levant during his lifetime, the newly Roman Catholic Church and its colonial Protestant progeny in England blasphemously used the name of Christ to erase all trace of any form of gender expression that existed outside the binary. 

As Christian law gelled into a single dictum across Medieval Europe, rigid gender norms were enforced that essentially rendered women into breeding stock and viewed all forms of fluidity between male and female as a threat to an order designed to reduce the womb into a glorified soldier factory to populate the battlefields of an endless crusade for more church property. 

The Enlightenment only served to reinforce this rigid gender binary by declaring that construct be a science and rendering it to a distinction that could only be determined by the state. Thus, the tyranny of the birth certificate became sanctified by liberal secularism.

The Enlightenment also fostered the rise of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide with its similar breakthroughs in scientific racism, opening the door for missionaries to erase even more ancient third genders from the face of multiple continents. Be they two spirit or hijra, they were all sentenced to the same fate as the so-called eunuchs of the Gospels; marginalization to the point of erasure. 

But both wings of the West failed and we are still here, fighting yet another wave of imperial subjugation on our own, while the elites compete over their kingdom of skulls in another pointless midterm election circus.

And here I stand with you today, during what has been declared Transgender History Month by some corporate monolith or another, as a devout Marian witch, a post-civ genderqueer anarchist, and perhaps above all else, living, spitting, hissing proof of the failures of Western Civilization in all its secular cabals and devout renditions. 

They all failed. They failed to contain the Holy Spirit beneath the jar of a single tyrannical church, and they failed to contain the human spirit beneath the jar of a manufactured gender binary, just as they have failed to contain the Axis of Resistance beneath their bombs.

My message to you, my dearest motherfuckers, and to any agent of imperial bureaucracy surveilling this screed, is that the Christo-Zionist horde is right about one thing and that is that gender outlaws like me are the bane of Western Civilization. 

To this slur I proudly shout, 'your goddamn right we are and we're here to finish the job that the third world started!' You can pass all the laws and royal edicts you want. The writing is already scrawled in Venus Extravaganza's blood all over the temple walls; your stadium church is a massive tomb of material emptiness and your empire's days of rape and honey are numbered.

Death to the old gods! Long live the ancient gods! And long live those of us compelled to transgress in their honor, for we shall inherit the ruins of a blasphemous era and bring forth a new age of tribal diversity in stiletto heels and smeared lipstick.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced this Post

*  Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash

*  Blacktop by Julien Baker

*  I Feel You by Depeche Mode

*  God by Tori Amos

*  Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

*  Drive by REM

*  Mary by Big Thief

*  Stigmata by Ministry

*  Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

*  One Caress by Depeche Mode

Who's Really Afraid of the DSA?

 So, the communists are coming again or at least so screech the doom merchants over at the GOP. Fox News is ablaze with round-the-clock, wall-to-wall coverage of the Democratic Party's fall beneath the unstoppable onslaught of the deadly DSA; a Maoist cult of ultra-woke, brown grad students just itching to open the borders and empty the suburbs into the killing fields of a terrifyingly transgender Khmer Rouge cover band. 

I'm not the communist I once was but it actually sounds pretty sexy when I write it down like that. Unfortunately, all available evidence suggests that this latest red scare is just more post-McCarthyite fan fic from an increasingly desperate Republican Party.

The recent rash of electoral victories by candidates associated with the DNC-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America are not inconsequential but they're hardly a sign of some kind of national red surge either. DSA backed candidates won three out of 26 House elections in deep red districts during New York's recent Democratic primaries along with a smattering of other recent primary wins in other liberal-progressive strongholds across the country. 

In other words, a big red nothing affecting elections that no Republican was ever going to win anyway. For Stalin's sake, their Lenin, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of the wealthiest city on earth, elected overwhelmingly by rich, white, trust-fund hipsters attempting to stamp a red star on the once brown neighborhoods they're rapidly gentrifying with luxury lofts and vegan cafes.

None of this is likely to have any effect whatsoever on flyover country but that is the target audience for a good 90% of the GOP intelligentsia's breathless coverage of what has to be the world's bougieist revolution. That's because the GOP doesn't fear the DSA. The GOP fears rogue Republicans and disenchanted independents who are growing increasingly impatient with a party held hostage by the personality cult of a now exposed Zionist pedophile and his pointless, bullshit forever-war with Iran.

Donald Trump, the monster truck Svengali who the GOP has built their entire post-neocon identity around over the last decade, is about six miles underwater with his approval ratings generally hovering somewhere south of 40%. The Republican Party's polls aren't looking much better with the equally despised Democrats looking poised to snatch up a seven-seat majority in the House.

What the fuck else are the Republicans going to run on? The Epstein Files? Their disastrous trade war with China? That other bloodbath in Ukraine that Trump promised to end on day one of his reelection 19 months ago? Nope. All they've got is a mouthy brat-pack of social media socialists to spook the elderly with.

As far as Kansas or Kentucky are concerned, the DSA is little more than a big red paper tiger. They are not coming for your guns. They are not even leaving the city limits of Gotham, Chicago and a handful of other metropolitan areas that most country folk, me included, will never step foot in. 

However, according to the left, and I'm talking about the real fucking left here; the kind of people radical enough to publish a luddite genderfuck hillbilly anarchist like yours truly; it is the Democratic Party that the DSA poses the greatest threat to. Frankly, that sounds lovely, but do they?

Dari Aliza Chevalier certainly has a few soundbites that even a grey-sexual, post-left pessimist can get horny over but there was something profoundly strange about the DSA's big takeover in the New York primaries. Those motherfuckers swept house wherever they planted the red flag, winning 9 out of the ten primaries they ran in, but not one DSA candidate even took aim at the big shots. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Governor Kathy Hochul, both dyed in the wool Wall Street Zionists, ran totally uncontested.

That's because the DSA's game has never been about revolution, it is about giving revolutionary cache to an existentially counter-revolutionary party, and this has been the long con going back to the organization's inception. 

The Democratic Socialists of America was founded in 1982 through the merger of the old left Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, led by the outspokenly pro-Zionist and anti-SDS Michael Harrington, and the more activist oriented new left New American Movement, which itself was the product of the section of the Students for a Democratic Society too limp wristed to go underground.

From the beginning, the DSA essentially carried on Harrington's old DSOC mission of realigning the far left back beneath the careful tutelage of DNC apparatchiks and AFL-CIO bureaucrats or, as Harrington put it, using the label of socialism to play "a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role" and shoot for "the left wing of the possible." 

However, since the DSA's inception, we have only seen the Democratic Party move farther to the right than we have ever believed possible while the Republican Party has essentially mutated into some crude form of cable television monarchy complete with a reality show President and a televangelist State Department.

However, since Harrington croaked and Bernie Sanders turned on a whole new generation to social democracy, the DSA has received something of a make-over. With their numbers exploding from 6,000 in 2015 to 120,000 by 2026, some hardliners in the DSA have suggested rejecting the ghost of Michael Harrington; embracing anti-Zionism and calling for a new strategy known by some as the "Dirty Break" which calls for a much more adversarial relationship with mainstream Democrats, some even going so far as to refuse to endorse Democratic presidential candidates in 2016 and 2024.

As much as I would love to believe in the authenticity of such gestures, I continue to have serious doubts. While many if not most of the DSA new blood seem to be legit in their aspirations to reign in Wall Street and the Prison Industrial Complex, the resulting careers of their organization's most successful alumni paint a very different picture.

The shining star of the DSA, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not only voted against defunding Israel's Iron Dome and for a House resolution to officially define anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, but she was also instrumental in facilitating the DNC's failed attempt to endow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with a sheen of leftist street cred, delivering a primetime speech endorsing the neoliberal odd couple at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, praising their non-existent attempts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza at a time when the death toll made possible by the pair's undying support for Israel stood somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000.

As for the DSA's other celebrity radical, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for all his fiery rhetoric, the man has hardly proven himself to be much more than a red-tinted DNC shill during his short career as mayor of the wealthiest city in human history. When he isn't busy posing with Donald Trump for glorified photo-ops, Mamdani has backed Governor Kathy Hochul's strongarm strikebreaking tactics against nurses and railroad workers while keeping the NYPD's multi-billion-dollar budget and billionaire Zionist commissioner completely intact. 

With all these sins considered, it's really little wonder that relatively few of the New Yorkers of color who haven't been chased out of the city by Mamdani's lily-white fan club couldn't be bothered to vote for the motherfucker or any motherfucker for that matter.

There are some legitimately (and beautifully) dangerous things going for the left in this country right now even if I can no longer personally bring myself to identify as a part of it. I have never seen so many brown girls with guns and Jewish kids against Israel. But I also can't just sit by silently and watch them get grifted by the oldest capitalist party on earth, the party of Jim Crow and Super Predators, the party that once included Donald Trump and Jeffry Epstein amongst its gilded donor class.

We could all do with a good red scare in this country, but it will never come from anyone dressed in a bipartisan leash. The two-party system is a rigged game at a bankrupt casino, and the DSA is just another slot machine near the exit. Do yourselves a great big goddamn favor, dearest motherfuckers, keep walking. We've got limousines to light in the parking lot.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post

*  Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

*  Revolution by the Beatles

*  Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

*  Hang With Me by Robyn

*  All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

*  Paper Planes by M.I.A.

*  Kool Thing by Sonic Youth

*  Only Acting by Kero Kero Bonita

*  Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat by Bob Dylan

*  I'll Keep It with Mine by Bettie Serveert

It's Time to Use the Strait of Hormuz to Demilitarize the Persian Gulf

 The Middle East has a serious fucking problem and any semi-sentient anti-imperialist with two brain cells to rub together can tell you that the problem isn't Iran. It's America and its dead-eyed flunkey Israel, or is it Israel and its dead-eyed flunkey America? The exact semantics of the Zionist con-job have become a tad bit murky in the Epstein era but regardless the source of the violence and chaos that has long plagued the Middle East is without a doubt a western contagion with a distinctly Wall Street heritage.

This carnage isn't exactly new, but it has taken on a severely sinister turn in recent years as the IDF has finally emerged from the metaphorical phonebooth, shredding their snappy business suite, and proudly revealing the swastika on their chest before feverishly slaughtering what's left of their longtime captives in the Gaza Strip along with their more inconvenient Arab neighbors at a downright blitzkrieg pace.  

In fact, not only has this final solution been a long time coming, it would have been downright impossible without decades of intercontinental planning and preemptive acts of mass slaughter. Auschwitz wasn't built in a day, and our current stage of the Nakba was only made possible by America's so-called War on Terror which systematically eliminated every state or non-state actor rogue enough to resist a full-blown Zionist holocaust in the Levant. 

Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Assad; all butchers who have been replaced by equally barbaric incompetents dependent on the Atlantic juggernaut that brought them to power in still simmering forever wars. None of this is a coincidence. It is all part of a very concerted and well-documented plot that Benjamin Netanyahu has been intimately involved with from the beginning.

In 1986, Bibi was still a lowly Permanent Representative to the UN when he edited a political science study called "Terrorism: How the West Can Win" in which American neocon powerbrokers like Jeane Kirpatrick and Daniel Partick Moynihan made the argument that the still largely secular Palestinian resistance movement represented a global threat to "western democracy" which they labeled "militant Islam." A threat that could only be addressed by western militaries targeting these militant's state sponsors across the region. Uncoincidentally, Likud began financing a then smalltime Muslim Brotherhood offshoot in the Gaza Strip known as Hamas around this time as well.

A decade later in 1996, another American neocon powerbroker named Richard Perle put together a policy paper for then incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which came to be known as the Clean Break Report. This document followed the same logic as the previous one but was far more explicit in its intentions, advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq with his already destroyed stash of WMDs as an excuse along with the destabilization of Syria and Lebanon through financing and facilitating debilitating sectarian proxy wars with those dastardly militant Islamists to be used as convenient errand boys.

Those two Bibi helmed documents pretty accurately laid out the last 25 years of American Israeli chaos in the Middle East like a stacked tarot deck. The only thing they didn't predict was Iran rallying the region's long disenfranchised Shia tribesmen into a high-functioning Axis of Resistance in every warzone touched by Bibi's quasi-atavistic vision of an American Zion. 

Thus, Iran has become the big-bad to Wall Street's big-bad, with the Islamic Republic successfully painted as the Antichrist in the AIPAC production of the Book of Imperial Revelations and the Donald cast as the grabby leading man tasked with eliminating this threat while the IRGC and their allies in Hezbollah and Ansar Allah appear to be the last line of defense standing between Palestine and utter oblivion. 

But are they?

The picture may look grim, but it is also not totally devoid of hope. Even with much of their leadership and infrastructure decapitated over the last several months, the skeleton crew that remains of the Islamic Republic continues to maintain a slight upper hand over their colossal foes simply by using the Strait of Hormuz to create a heavy economic price for an oil-dependent globalized economy actively colluding with American imperialism and Israeli genocide.

This is the only reason why Donald Trump pretends to play ceasefire on-and-off like a psychotic game of red-light-green-light. That rapist and his cuckholds in Tel Aviv are attempting to feign diplomacy just long enough to keep the world economy from imploding, at least until after the midterms, but those already desperate acts have been badly botched by an unexpected third party in the Persian Gulf named Oman. 

This frequently overlooked sultanate on the south-eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula has long played a very quiet role as a kind of Arabian Switzerland in the region, using its status as the oldest independent state in the Arab world complete with its own sect of Islam to serve as a rare bridge of diplomacy in the Middle East. 

The Sultanate has played a major role in brokering a variety of often unthinkable ceasefires in a very hostile neighborhood, including between Ansar Allah and Saudi Arabia as well as between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They were also instrumental in facilitating the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal that Donald Trump famously ravaged to shreds like a rabid honey badger during his first term.

However, what makes Oman downright deadly to the Yankee-Zionist menace is the simple fact that its notoriously neutral monarchy shares territorial waters with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, with the two nations 12-mile nautical territorial limits quite literally overlapping in the narrow waterway. 

Now, Oman has long advocated for these waters to remain toll-free and open to international passage but the havoc that a pair of white psychopaths like Bibi and Donald have brought to their once calm waters appears to have them second guessing this policy.

During the early chapters of the war, there were a rash of largely unconfirmed reports, both of Oman and Iran collaborating on a deal to facilitate a toll system in their shared waters that would provide the Islamic Republic with the kind of revenue they desperately need to rebuild, as well as rumors of the Trump Administration attempting to bully Oman into cutting ties with Iran altogether. 

These reports appeared to be confirmed in late May when Donald Trump literally threatened to "blow up" Oman if the notoriously peaceful nation didn't "behave", followed shortly by equally bellicose threats from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to enact "aggressive sanctions" against the Sultanate on Twitter. 

It is my strongly held belief as a semi-sentient anti-imperialist that it is not simply a toll that clearly terrifies these powerful men, it is the weaponization of bioregionalism against global conquest that could easily upend the entire fabric of the Atlantic model of neoliberal capitalism that underpins military industrial psycho-states like Israel and the US. 

If Oman and Iran can close the Strait, they can finally return the governance of the Persian Gulf back to the nations of the goddamn Persian Gulf. And after the last 25 years of Bibi's imperial War on Terror, they would be insane not to also attempt to demilitarize the region entirely, by which I mean block all traffic in and out of this waterway to any nation that shares its shores with foreign soldiers. 

This isn't to say such brinksmanship would come without great risk but, historically speaking, great risk in the name of regional populism has also invited great reward.

It was a bold move like this that brought Gamal Abdul Nasser's Egypt to the brink of nuclear oblivion when that maverick strongman nationalized the Suez Canal back in 1956. But this gambit also precipitated the collapse of British imperial influence in the region when the Crown tried and failed on multiple occasions to remove Nasser from power. 

The US ultimately had to wait for the much-beloved Colonel to drop dead before they could pay off his successor and regain control over that pivotal waterway, once again securing Israel's ability to kill more civilians with ever increasing impunity.

We stand waist deep in similarly shifting waters amidst the shallows of an American Century that has long overstayed its welcome anywhere but in a nation as diabolically cruel as Israel. In this tide, just a few unorthodox leaders on the right shores could easily play a deciding factor in the fate of millions. Houthis and Sultans and borders defined by Allah above the lesser gods of Westphalian dementia could be all it takes to redraw the map.

Here's one heretic hoping for a few small miracles.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Waiting for the Miracle by Leonard Cohen

*  The New Pollution by Beck

*  Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

*  Colors by the Tallest Man on Earth

*  The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie

*  Frank Sinatra by Cake

*  Devil's Haircut by Beck

*  Gold Soundz by Pavement

*  Dance Me to the End of Love by Leonard Cohen

*  Everything that Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno

Zionism is a White Occupied Cult

 It seems to be a tried-and-true trope even if it is a bit of a tired one for a seasoned Oliver Stone-style conspiracy enthusiast such as myself. The dreaded Zionist Occupied Government (or ZOG if your nasty) is really just a very nineties take on the ancient notion of the Jews secretly controlling everything from the banks to the claw machine at your local Chuck E. Cheese. 

Naturally, all racism aside, I've always found the notion a tad bit hard to swallow. There are clearly a number of high-ranking power brokers of Jewish descent among the Western elites and there has been for some time, but the numbers are poultry compared to nearly every other genre of honky and nobody's losing their shit over the Scotch-Irish Occupied Government. 

Gross story short; as much as I may despise Zionism along with every other school of racial supremacy, the notion of said Zionists calling the shots at the country club has always felt a bit like the tentacle wagging the Cthulhu to me, that is until recently when October 7th seemed to collide with the second Trump Administration like a wayward meteorite. 

While America continues its excruciatingly long-awaited collapse into militarily overextended post-colonial irrelevance, with a series of increasingly Yeltsin-like clown-thugs from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Donald Trump again polluting the mainstage of their plutocratic puppet theatre, Israel has turned its own private 9/11 into a license for untrammeled manifest destiny. 

In the Gaza Strip, they carried out the most blatantly unapologetic final solution since the one their ancestors endured, shrugged off the international outrage, and then just started committing a second one in Lebanon before the blood even finished congealing beneath their cuticles. All while the least selfless plutocrat on earth somehow just decides to selflessly do their dirty work in Tehran during an election year.

It's hard to be sure of just how much of what is influencing what right now, but Donald Trump is clearly acting under the influence of something stronger than his overproof ego and all the strings seem to lead back to Tel Aviv. 

While the Epstein Files have made it grotesquely clear that the Donald's own sexual predations made him an easy mark for what appears to have been a crypto-Zionist honeypot long before he crossed paths with AIPAC, even if we are to assume that Orange-Man-Bad didn't lynch himself like a marionette in the nineties with his pedophilic predilections there is still the undeniable fact that he is a desperate serial failure whose latest bout of electoral bankruptcy was paid off by a perverse coalition of Ziocon casino goons and their billionaire AI allies in Silicon Valley.

The only oligarchs who have spent more money on the Trump brand than the Adelson mafia are the tech bros in Peter Thiel's PayPal Mafia, who have also uncoincidentally turned the killing fields of the Levant into their own private testing ground for the kind of high-tech murder machinery that's putting those young guns in contention to replace the old guard of the American military industrial complex with actual goddamn robots. 

All of these factors come together to create a once improbable scenario in which Benjamin Netanyahu can tell an American strongman in his own Situation Room that if he doesn't commit midterm harikari by killing the Ayatollah himself then Israel will and they will use American troops stationed in the region as human shields to get away with it.

And this wasn't even the most blatant Zionist power grab of 2026 either. That distinction belongs to the recently proposed National Defense Authorization Act for 2027 which includes provisions that would basically merge America's federal defense apparatus with Israel's while granting a foreign nation an agent within the Pentagon and shifting congressional oversight responsibilities to the same building. 

All of which occurs while Palantir, the Thiel helmed corporation essentially tasked with running the IDF's entire AI nervous system, is also being granted contracts from Trump to create the blueprints for a plot that would put the company in charge of erasing the boundaries between virtually every federal agency from the IRS to the IDF-imbedded State Department before lumping them all into a single AI streamlined federal database.

Needless to say, the amount of access being granted to Israel and their Silicon Valley enablers by the current Trump regime is nothing less than unprecedented and as if this three-ring shit circus weren't absurd enough to be a Monty Python sketch, the whole fucking farce was made painfully possible by neo-Nazi thugs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who gave a dayglow Zionist cuck white power street cred with their macho suburban guerrilla theater. Josheph goddamn Goebbels couldn't make this shit up with a swimming pool of acid to inspire him.  

So then, if I can just catch my breath, were the antisemites in the Patriot Movement right after all? Has America become a Zionist occupied government? Not exactly, at least not in the way David Duke envisions it, but you probably have to comprehend a few little-known historical facts about Zionism before you can truly grasp this, so I beg you once again to bear with me now.

The first and perhaps most important thing you need to know is that Zionism has very little to do with Judaism or even Semitism for that matter and neither does Israel. Both the notion of the Jewish people as an ethnicity rather than a religious sect and Israel as a nation to be ruled by them are the invention of a small collection of wealthy secular Ashkenazi Jews in 19th century Central Europe. 

These men called themselves Zionists and based a large portion of their ideology on the colonialist European supremacy then vogue among antisemites in Germany and the UK. It should come as little surprise that most Jews of that era considered these pompous gangsters to be fucking lunatics, but said lunatics still managed to wedge their way into the Holy Land anyway by making friends with other European racists.

The English used Zionist extremists to subdue Arab resistance to their post-Ottoman mandate in Palestine only to see these kosher shock troops bite the hand that fed them when they grew hungry for more. What followed was an escalating series of terrorist attacks and new alliances. The Zionists of both Palestine and Germany actually worked closely with the Nazis to achieve their shared goal of removing the Jews from Europe. Their partnership only fell apart when Hitler decided that genocide was cheaper than ethnic cleansing, but even then, the Zionists managed to manipulate the horrors committed by their former allies in order to convince Holocaust survivors to jump ship.

What those shellshocked refugees boarded however was at its dark heart a white supremacist enterprise designed by Ashkenazi supremacists who actually despised the distinctly Semitic culture of the Levant and saw their nation building project as a mission to Europeanize the Orient by any means necessary and this included its native Jews whom they labeled Mizrahim and herded into West Bank ghettos to act as human shields.

This grotesque farce is rendered from sickening to downright grotesque by the preponderance of evidence compiled by Israeli intellectuals like historian Schlomo Sand and geneticist Eran Ehak suggesting that the blessed Ashkenazi are likely the ancestors of Caucasian Jewish converts with no real ancestral link to the Holy Land whatsoever. In fact, it appears that the original Jews weren't forced into European exile at all; they were converted to Islam and became the Palestinians being slaughtered by Ashkenazi white supremacists as we speak.

With all that being said, your average Zionist today isn't even a secular nonbeliever of dubious Semitic lineage; your average Zionist today is a goddamn Evangelical Christian. There are roughly 15 million Jews worldwide. Only 37% of them or 5.5 million identify as Zionists. However, somewhere between 20 and 50 million American Evangelicals identify as Christian Zionists, a lunatic apocalyptic cult that believe Jesus won't return until the Jews ethnically cleanse the Levant, at which point they will either convert or burn in hell.

The amount of influence that these psychos wield over Washington cannot be overstated. They essentially own the GOP with both the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth among the faithful. They have also long held an incredible amount of influence over Israel, with deep connections to Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party that span decades. 

In all likelihood, Israel would not be even a quarter as stark raving mad or rapaciously cruel as they are today without this influence and in many ways the Ashken-Nazis now pulling the strings on the most brazenly fascistic White House since Andrew Jackson are simply returning the favor. 

So, here we are now where we started in more ways than one. As the disintegration of Western Civilization accelerates, the weight of the empire is once again shifting. 250 years after the center of white supremacy pivoted from the Royals of Windsor to the colonialists of the New World, that vile creature is pivoting once again from the pedophiles of Washington to the colonialists of Tel Aviv by way of the technofascist opportunists of Silicon Valley. 

Regardless, the elites who run this whole fucking corpse factory remain overwhelmingly European.

The Ashkenazi supremacists are certainly giving the WASPs a run for their money when it comes to the distinctly martial art of white victimhood, but the numbers don't lie. America may or may not be a Zionist Occupied Government of sorts, but Zionism itself is just another White Occupied Cult.

So, don't bitch to me about ZOG while you give the rest of the country club a pass, because there is no defeating ZOG without first smashing WOC. Put that bumper sticker on your pickup truck and ride, you goddamn patriots. This apocalypse is giving me the fits.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  My Doorbell by the White Stripes

*  Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Last Caress by the Misfits

*  I'm Your Puppet by James & Bobby Purify

*  Videogames by Lana Del Rey

*  Sing Me Spanish Techno by the New Pornographers

*  Everyone Wants to Live Forever by Flaming Lips

*  Not by Big Thief

*  The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie

Imperial Rape Culture at the Dawn of the Israeli Century

 Nobody likes to talk about rape, but it seems morally absurd not to considering that it seems to be everywhere you look; from frat row to death row, from the Vatican to Nickelodeon, from ICE to the IDF, from Trump to Platner and back to Trump again. I know that my own abuse has rendered me a bit hypervigilant, but you don't have to have CPTSD to know which way the wind blows, and you'd have to be dangerously anesthetized from the neck up not to recognize that anyone and everyone with any modicum of power seems to be copping a feel and most of them are getting away with it.

Speaking as an anarchist, I strongly believe that it is precisely that power which is the defining factor here and it's a factor that most mainstream feminists conveniently ignore as they aim high for the glass ceiling. American capitalism is and has always been a colonialist enterprise built on a foundation of conquest, and sexual violence has been at the cornerstone of military conquest going back to the Golden Horde.

So, it should come as little surprise that rape was the favored tool of the western civilizers who built the Pax-American leviathan, from the sainted Catholic Conquistadors who turned the "New World" into a chattel brothel by sexually trafficking the women and children of every tribal nation they "discovered" to our blessed Founding Fathers who used the routine defilement of their own slaves to keep their plantations in line.

Today, this fine tradition of predatorial manifest destiny continues perhaps most brazenly with our client state of Israel's conspiracy to remake the Middle East in their own decidedly European image while their American masters continue to hemorrhage international influence with levels of unhinged debauchery that put Caligula to shame. 

In the shadow of the Epstein Files, a series of leaks have been unleashed from inside Israel's Sde Telman Military Base, transformed into the nation's largest prison camp during the latest stage of Gaza's final solution, exposing a dirty IDF secret that Palestinian activists have been talking about for decades. 

It turns out that sexual violence has been a downright routine tactic used by Israel's Zionist gestapo against the Palestinian people for decades, to the degree that entire generations of young men and women inside Gaza and the West Bank carry scars that occasionally mutate into the kind of black rage and suicidal nihilism that tore through 21 kibbutzim on October 7th.

The response to this revelation from the Israeli public has been one of shock and outrage; shock that anyone cares and outrage over the arrest of a handful of baby-faced IDF rapists by the Israeli government to save face on a world stage that has grown weary of their barbarism. Crowds of Israeli citizens, including elected members of the Knesset stormed Sde Telman and other glorified rape camps, not in defense of the victims but in defense of the predators, demanding the immediate release and reinstatement of men caught on tape savaging restrained detainees with jagged foreign objects.

This is what real rape culture looks like. It isn't merely a culture of permissiveness towards downright routine sexual violence; it is a culture of permissiveness towards the carnal whims of institutional power itself and I for one believe that the only way to truly grasp this evil is to grasp the nature of rape itself.

Studies based on the firsthand accounts of both victims and offenders alike show that the act of rape is an act of power above all else; a crime of violence, degradation, control and intimidation. In other words, rape is a very visceral form of governance. A means of extreme biological authoritarianism.

This is why pretty much every category of marginalized people experience far greater rates of sexual violence than the general public, this is why children of every gender are raped by predominantly heterosexual predators, and this is why male prisoners are frequently raped by equally heterosexual correctional officers. These aren't acts of sexual excess or blips on the radar. This is institutional power taken to its natural conclusion. The Conquistadors understood this and the IDF does as well. Sexual violence on a massive and systemic level is the most effective way to break resistant communities and turn the pieces left behind into compliant, pliable citizenry.

This is also why an overwhelming percentage of powerful men can be connected to credible accusations of sexual assault. It is not a coincidence that Israel uses the very rape culture it participates in not just to violate captive Arabs but to get away with it as well. Jeffrey Epstein was revealed to be suspected by our own Federal Bureau of Investigations of being an Israeli intelligence asset right around the time one of his former wingmen, current president Donald J. Trump, launched a war pretty much guaranteed to fail in Iran, a war which blew the doors wide open for Israel's longtime goal of raping and pillaging their northern neighbors in Lebanon.

This isn't a conspiracy. This isn't a cabal of adrenochrome slurping ghouls in Mardi Gras masks. This is what happens when entire institutions of power are built on a foundation of sexual degradation. This is what happens when generations of children are carefully groomed from a young age never to tell anyone these institutions deem to be a trusted adult 'no.' This is what happens when the state is allowed to create an 'allowed' class in order to maintain their monopoly on the use of force. 

Parents are allowed. Cops are allowed. Priests are allowed. Politicians are allowed. White men in crisp uniforms with shiny medallions pinned to their barrel chests are allowed. Allowed to tax, allowed to detain, allowed to defile...

Five of our last seven presidents are accused sexual predators because they were allowed. 250 goddamn years of My Lai massacres and Abu Ghraib photo-ops told them that the most powerful man on earth is allowed to violate whatever or whoever the fuck he wants. After all, none other than Thomas Jefferson has been pretty much proven to have fucked the people he called property and isn't he some kind of a goddamn American hero?

I am an anti-imperialist and an anarchist for the same reason that I am a committed feminist. Because when I was a child, two men granted the authority of demigods by the Catholic Church raped me in the upstairs bedroom of a smalltown rectory. Their uniforms and the institutions they represented told them and many others like them that they were allowed access to every square inch of a screaming five-year-old girl just like the uniforms of the IDF tell young virile Europeans that they are allowed access to every square inch of "the Orient."

I stand with their victims shouting, 'no means no!' with battered fists raised high. 

No means no more conquest of anyone's indigenous soil. No means no more prisons where the color of your uniform designates the predator from the prey. No means no more hallowed institutions where predators hide like serpents in the heat of the limelight. No means no more broken fucking childhoods, yours or mine. No means no more empires, no more kings, no more gods and masters, no more rapists and the states that empower them.

No means no, and no means fuck you I won't do what you tell me.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine

*  Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

*  Smack My Bitch Up by the Prodigy

*  Lasting Friend by Samia

*  Dethroned Emperor by Celtic Frost

*  Dicknail by Hole

*  Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

*  Family Man by Nitzer Ebb

*  My War by Black Flag

 

Dear Amerika: A Desperate Plea from a Bastard Daughter

 Dear Amerika,

It's me Nicky. You know, the genderfuck gonzo raconteur with all the knives in her purse.

Or perhaps you know me by my Indian name; That-Bitch.

That bitch with all the unsolicited opinions.

That bitch with the prick beneath her macramé skirt.

That bitch who never learned to shut the fuck up.

Even after eleven years in a parochial gulag the size of a Canal Street sweatshop.

That bitch that all the priests took turns on behind the rectory.

That bitch who vomited up obscenities in between their rancid cocks.

That bitch that the Vatican smashed into a dozen dissociative dykes with razor blades strapped to their thighs.

That bitch who never stood for the Pledge of Allegiance.

That bitch who never learned to wait her turn.

That bitch who wasn't really going to burn the school down, I swear it.

That bitch with all the drawings of men with big guns and no faces.

That bitch who just wanted to know what the inside of the girl's room looked like, honest.

That bitch who had too many sluts for friends that she never tried to fuck.

That bitch who took all the pills and read all the banned books and never tried and only lip-synced the hymns and went crazy after graduation and didn't leave the house for a decade and only came out to Queer the children and arm them to the teeth and still isn't trying.

You know, that bitch with the dirty pink hair. Yeah, that's the one.  

But this letter isn't really about me. This letter is about you, Amerika.

You and your big fucking day. Your 250th birthday.

Where has all the time gone?

Where did all the Indians go?

Where have all the flowers gone?

It seems like just yesterday you were lynching Turtle Island with your training bra and just look at you now!

You have become such a handsome and heinous colossus over the centuries.

How many bases is it now? In how many countries?

Please accept my sincerest condolences for your recent spate of failed regime changes.

You can't win them all.

And hey, you still got to kill most of their children. 

That was always your favorite part after all, wasn't it?

Kicking back in the iron bosom of some floating steel archipelago loaded with led.

Firing off million-dollar phallic ordinances into elementary school playgrounds and then shrugging it all off with, "Who me? Couldn't be."

Remember My Lai? Remember Ludlow? Remember Hiroshima?

Remember East Timor, Kent State, Attica, Fallujah, Watts, Waco, Belgrade, Ruby Ridge, Cobbs Creek, Grenada and Wounded Knee?

So many good times.

So many schoolyards littered with bright brass shells that twinkled like stardust beneath a blood moon.

So many tiny caskets wrapped like Christmas presents in foreign flags and soiled ten-dollar bills.  

So many lonesome burial grounds on windswept plateaus.

Verdant gardens of juvenile ghosts, forgotten but not lost, buried but not dead.

Where did all those good times go?

Maybe they're being paid back to you in squadrons of exploding paper planes thrown by starving heretics with broken fingers.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be glib.

But I didn't invent karma either.

That was some other some-bitch with six arms and sixty personalities.

I really am sorry about Donald Trump.

I know that isn't the knight in white shining armor you always dreamt of carrying you across the Rubicon and molesting you to climax on a bed of pilfered coins and thorned roses.

It must be so disappointing realizing that you've peaked in the stubby arms of a bronzer-greased pedophile whispering the words to elevator music in your ear while he gently grabs you by the pussy.

It must be tragic knowing that this is how it ends.

Not with a Reich or a crown or Camelot or even Disneyland.

But with a monster truck rally over the ruins of Ozymandias.

With your Zionist dauphins waiting in the cheap seats with loaded Carcano's.

Ready and willing to bum rush the show like you did to your royal masters 250 years ago.

Oh, you were so ravishing back in those days.

Those good old days.

Those all-or-nothing days.

When every slave master with a musket and a powdered whig was a revolutionary waxing philosophic about rights and liberty and democracy for some.

When a cabal of handsome young English aristocrats decided to ditch the King, go rogue, and declare themselves to be a nation.

When empires became colonies, colonies became republics, and republics became empires.

Everything seemed possible and nothing but unvanquished soil lied ahead.

But none of it was ever really real. Even you must realize that by now.

It was a phantasy. The grandiose fever dreams of a virile master race.

It was always temporary.

It was always just a matter of time before we became the Redcoats and some other dream team of sexy upstart psychopaths with jagged smiles pulled some train on us the way we've been pulling a train on the rest of the world for a quarter of a millennia.

But we'll always have the lies.

The mythology we fell for beneath the hellish glow of rockets' red glare over the baseball stadium.

The pilgrims and the noble savages and the grateful freemen.

Honest Abe and Manifest Destiny and the Good War.

The shining city on the hill and the responsibility to protect and the indispensable nation blowing up the world one sandbox at a time.

For freedom and feminism and Coca-Cola and apple pie and capitalism and shopping malls and Marlboros and Hollywood and Haliburton and Raytheon and Boeing and Bed, Bath & Beyond.

But I didn't type up this rant just to kick dirt in your eye, Amerika. Honestly, I didn't.

In fact, in spite of it all, in spite of all the horror and slavery and genocide and graveyards packed with tiny caskets, I still love you Amerika. Or at least part of me does.

I loved getting shitfaced on moonshine and losing what was left of my innocence to colored girls in the backs of stollen Cadillacs at the drive-in movie theater.

I loved dancing alone in my mother's sundress to my father's Nancy Sinatra records.

I loved rolling joints laced with angel dust in the women's room at CBGBs with Debbie Harry and Patti Smith.

I loved gangsta rap and gun shows and doing the twist.

I loved shooting tin cans and dropping acid and speeding through the desert after midnight.

I loved getting high and breaking all your stupid fucking rules.

I loved Bacon's Rebellion and Stonewall and the Seminole Nation and Max's Kansas City and the Factory and the Sunset Strip and the Forty-Deuce.

I loved Thomas Paine and Lucy Parsons and Abby Hoffman and Little Richard and Malcolm X and Judy Garland and Wendy O. Williams and Allen Ginsberg and Russell Means.

I loved you, Amerika, in all your filthy naked glory.

But enough is enough, and 250 years is enough.

So, I wrote you a letter, Amerika.

I wrote you this letter.

To ask you to stop.

To stop dropping bombs on Third World villages.

To stop raping children like prisoners in compulsory schools.

To stop raping prisoners like children in your glorified concentration camps.

To stop building robots that kill.

To stop building robots that anything.

To stop drawing ungovernable borders in the fucking desert.

To stop paying Israel to replace you when you're gone.

But most of all just to fucking stop.

I love you Amerika, but the world can't take another 250 days of this shit, let alone another 250 years. 

If you love me, if you've ever loved any of us, impeach everyone, defund everything, hand your nukes over to Palestine and your guns to the homeless.

Because this country, this world, and That-Bitch desperately needs you to die.

Peace, Love and Empathy,

Your bastard daughter,

Nicky Reid

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Soliloquy

*  Awful by Hole

*  Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger

*  Cherry Bomb by the Runaways

*  Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta by Ghetto Boys

*  There Won't Be Many Coming Home by Roy Orbison

*  Sex Bomb by Flipper

*  Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) by Nancy Sinatra

*  Cop Killer by Body Count

*  Dreaming by Blondie

*  Dive by Nirvana

*  The End by the Doors

*  Venice Bitch by Lana Del Rey

*  American Music by Violent Femmes