If Western Civilization is the Sickness, then Going Crazy Could be the Cure

 Everybody seems to be going fucking crazy lately and it seems to be going on everywhere you look, or at least everywhere they can jam a fucking news camera. 

You see mothers smothering their own children in basement rumpus rooms before slitting their wrists and hurling themselves from second story windows. You see fed up, middle management, office workers stocking the cubicles with semiautomatic battle rifles like Rambos in chinos. And you see lonely teenage losers downloading guns off the dark web so they can pop off some viral edgelord at a campus rally and get their manifesto trending on TikTok...

Yes indeedy, all sorts of motherfuckers seem to be going crazy these days in all sorts of smashingly newsworthy ways, and that seems to suit all of the supposedly sane people who make a living covering and commenting on other peoples' madness just fine. They get to dress up in designer power suits, drown themselves in gallons of flesh-colored panache, and look all goddamn concerned while they stair deep into the camera and beg 'why?' 

Why oh why in the wonderful world that they run would anyone embrace such madness and break the social contract of committing acts of mass violence without a badge or the proper government identification?

At the risk of getting canceled from the four or five places that I haven't already been cancelled from, I feel compelled as one of the crazy people being identified by these normies as an epidemic to do the unthinkable and simply ask "why not?" Seriously, fucking think about it. Just who exactly is your average American in the 21rst century?

Your average American is a compulsory monogamous/heterosexual woman subjected to just enough milquetoast liberal feminism to believe that she can and should "have it all" with "it all" being a heavily mortgaged, white picket existence in the suburbs, carting two or three screaming children to and from multiple cultish social obligations and praying she has just enough time left over to take a shit between the next Zoom meeting and burning the lasagna again for some spray-tan neanderthal who couldn't find a clitoris if it was glued to the center of his own forehead.

Your average American is a permanently terrified office rat trying to find just enough cheddar in his crowded cubicle maze to pay off the six-digit student loan that afforded him access to this supposedly middle-class internment camp, staring at a blaring computer screen for ten hours straight until the real world looks downright hallucinogenic unless it's securely pinned beneath a thin layer of glowing glass.

And your average American is a 19-year-old screen junkie fielding constant demands from role-crazy forty-year-old office rats who expect everyone under thirty to succeed like it's 1987 after voting repeatedly for deficit quadrupling candidates who made even those past paltry living standards just next door to impossible unless you turn yourself into a barely sentient human billboard on 17 different social media platforms while Slavic trolls threaten to face-rape you for not exuding the proper level of toxic masculinity determined to be sufficient by Cold War action movie standards!!

...Your average American is trapped, suffocating beneath the weight of a decaying civilization defined by the totally manufactured standards of an empire that only exists on television now. Your average American is bored, terrified, overworked, underpaid, overstimulated, heavily medicated and hopelessly in debt. Your average American is fucked; surrounded on all sides by forever wars, climate catastrophe, economic stagnation and constant adds disguised as softcore child pornography... 

So, then why the fuck shouldn't they go fucking crazy? I was raped into a lifetime of traumagenic disassociation by rabid papists as a preschooler and even I feel bad for the beige plight of the average American.

The current prevailing definition of mental illness is essentially making a violent break from mainstream reality but in 2026, mainstream reality itself is violently broken. 

The various hierarchical constructs afforded the ability to define what should or shouldn't constitute acceptable behavior in our society are pretty much all the product of the same elitist, pseudo-intellectual, enlightenment that brought us such modern miracles as the factory, the prison, the asylum, suburbia, scientific racism, artificial intelligence, freeways, smartphones, assault weapons, fracking, data centers and the nuclear bomb.

And these constructs are manned by the same professional observer class, the same fetid swamp of professors, lobbyists, shrinks, politicians and other network TV anointed talking heads who slap their hands together and bark like starving seals every time a sharply dressed man in an oval office commits a war crime in the name of humanitarianism or every time we use literal Holocaust technology and trillions of tax dollars to hurl another dozen assholes into outer space. 

This is the violence of the normal. But somehow the real crime is when one of us gets the crazy notion of committing an act of lesser savagery outside the confines of some convoluted social contract, not because it's wrong, but because the demigods of Western Civilization haven't given it their official stamp of normalcy yet.

In such a carefully scripted and heavily edited television dystopia, every act of unsanctioned violence that breaks the script becomes something of a revolutionary act but that doesn't make such happenings honorable. Insanity should be celebrated in such terminally unwell times, but the crazy can do better. We can do better than preying on each other for the intellectual delight of the "begging why" class. 

So, please, I beg you, put down your fucking phone and take a look at the asshole to your left and the asshole to your right; odds are they are both fellow lunatics who are just as bored as you, so please, don't fucking shoot them. There is so little ammunition and so many heinous shiny things to shoot it with. 

By all means, embrace the revolutionary properties of our collective madness but do so with the creativity and empathy that it deserves.

Show me the mother who trains her children how to make a Davidian sling from a Wonder Bra before setting them loose to smash all the Flock cameras on the block while she spends the next Zoom meeting masturbating with her husband's golf trophy just beneath the laptop. Show me the office rat who organizes his cubicle cellblock into one big post-apocalyptic role-playing game that restarts every time management isn't looking while collective productivity slowly slides on a level too massive to fire. And show me the 19-year-old screen junkie who can hack the grid with an iPhone and set the office LARPers free...

Let's go nuts, dearest motherfuckers, but let's do it right. If Western Civilization is the real sickness, then a celebration of communal madness could be just what Gaia ordered.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Big White Cloud by John Cale

*  Kill Me by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Ever by Flipper

*  Natural High by Perfume Genius

*  Teenage Lobotomy by the Ramones

*  Lithium by Phoebe Bridgers

*  The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang

*  Never Enough by Turnstile

*  For You Too by Yo La Tengo

*  I'll Keep It with Mine by Bettie Serveert

*  Sit Down by James

No Empire Wins a Fight with a Houthi Rebel

 The shit is going down hard in Yemen right now, and it's looking a lot like war. The Saudis are making major moves, kicking off the latest escalation with a foiled airstrike on the Sanaa International Airport in July that targeted a contingency of officials with the ruling Houthi rebels returning from the Ayatollah's funeral and then responding to the Houthis subsequent blockade earlier this month with hundreds of airstrikes across Yemen. 

The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, for their part are making major moves of their own. Making heavy gains on the ground in Yemen against long-entrenched, Saudi-backed militias and launching a wave of drone and missile strikes across southwest Arabia, doing significant damage to the Saudi's pipelines and setting all manner of oil infrastructure ablaze like a thousand candles in the desert.

America isn't just getting in on the action; they seem to be orchestrating much of it from the rafters, sending in hundreds of American military "advisors" to the Holy Land, not to mention essentially micromanaging Saudi Arabia's entire air force whose fleet of American made F-15's would be about as lethal as paperweights without careful American maintenance and refueling. America also appears to have provided the match that lit this fire, greenlighting the Sanaa hit job with some lame excuse about Iranian advisors hiding in the Houthi's luggage compartment.

So, everybody appears to be playing their chosen roles in what very much looks like the beginnings of another American sponsored forever war in the Middle East but everybody but Ansar Allah appears to be dragging their feet when they aren't busy desperately trying to the stomp out the fire they started. 

The Saudis seemed to spend weeks actively pretending like none of this was even fucking happening even with blood up to their tits. After launching 121 airstrikes on Houthi territory in Yemen in one day, Saudi officials made the absurd claim that their dickless proxies inside Yemen were behind those Top Gun attacks even though it's common knowledge that those Keystone fedayeen can't even operate a hot air balloon, and even with a third of their country in flames, Riyadh continues to try to downplay the rapidly expanding carnage in the international media when they acknowledge it all.

What's even more curious is the fact that the Saudis appeared to have attempted to walk back their own poorly flubbed assault on the Sanaa International Airport all summer with Bloomberg reporting on talks between the Saudis and the Houthis held through Oman as late as August. One would not be unwise to point the finger at the Saudis' sugar daddies back in Washington, especially considering that this latest escalation not only comes at a time in which Trump is running out of options in his increasingly humiliating duel with the Houthis' allies in Tehran, but also because it comes off the heels of an American agreement to help the Saudis to establish the kind of nuclear program that we allegedly killed the Ayatollah over.

But America seems to be stumbling over its own bombs to distance themselves from the war raging in Yemen as well, with Donald Trump recently claiming to have spoken with Ansar Allah on the phone well after they retaliated against our friends in the House of Saud and then suggesting that the ceasefire he signed with the Houthi regime in 2025 was still in effect. It has also been reported by Axios that Trump had declined to provide the Saudis with direct air support even after a besieged Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman begged him personally over the phone.

None of the people who started this war seem to be the least bit interested in being seen fighting it. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that none of them really has anything substantial to gain from the violence. Once again, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which Pax-Americana and its various dependents are getting blown up or blowing shit up in a clusterfuck that only Israel stands to gain from. Lest we forget, Ansar Allah very effectively used their territorial position on the Bab el-Mandab Strait connecting the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea to put severe financial pressure on Israel and its sponsors over their genocidal operation in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu shows every sign of plotting to expand the Nakba to the Houthis' fellow Shiites in Lebanon and Syria in the near future.

However, I strongly suspect that America and Saudi Arabia's reluctance to publicly go to war with Ansar Allah is much bigger than Israel and Trump and Bibi and Jeffrey Epstein's corpse. The most powerful empire on the planet and one of their most depraved attack dogs in the Middle East appear to be afraid of a third world militia that governs a territory smaller than Massachusetts in the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. We are talking about Donald Trump and MBS here. A serial rapist and a psychopathic boy-king who takes apart his critics with power tools. What exactly are these monsters so afraid of? What is so goddamn terrifying about going toe to toe with a Houthi rebel?

To put it succinctly, these bearded Arab bad men appear to be unbreakable. The United States and Saudi Arabia have been waging total war against these motherfuckers for decades and every bomb we drop just seems to make them stronger. For nearly seven years, between 2015 and 2022, America financed and facilitated a genocidal siege against Yemen and the Saudis systematically carried it out. Thousands of tons of American made ordinances battered the ancient hillside villages and tightly populated port cities of that tiny nation while a total blockade cut the survivors off from an outside world that stood by and watched it happen with their hands in their pockets. 

Somewhere between 230,000 and 380,000 people were killed. 150,000 of them from direct acts of violence, the rest from treatable disease and famine. 70% of the dead are believed to have been children under the age of 5.

But the Houthis didn't flinch. Even beneath a driving rain of relentless bombing, they kicked the shit out of the Saudis and the best mercenaries' oil can buy on the ground, rarely giving up more than an inch of territory before taking it back. Contrary to western propaganda, their exists very little evidence of Ansar Allah receiving anything in the way of significant funding from Iran or anyone else for that matter. Nearly every weapon they wield they either lifted from dead bodies and dead regimes, or they made themselves amongst the ruins from literal garbage and the bombs that dropped on their heads.

By the time Israel began its latest genocidal onslaught in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis were a well-honed guerrilla machine fully capable of going on the offensive. After launching a blockade of their own in the Red Sea in solidarity with fellow genocide victims, America decided to get involved directly, first with Biden's Operation Prosperity Garden in 2024 and then with a much more merciless bombing spree under Donald Trump. 

Another 250+ civilians were slaughtered, but the Houthis simply expanded the Red Sea blockade and shut the entire waterway down. Within months Trump was signing a ceasefire with these proud pirates even as they continued nail the Israeli targets we had supposedly been bombing Yemen to protect.

This winning streak has continued into the latest Saudi confrontation which the Houthis have merely used as an excuse to pick up more territory in the nation they run. Within a week of Saudi Arabia's first mass bombing spree since 2022, Ansar Allah has made significant gains in capturing what little of the Red Sea coastline they hadn't taken already, laying siege to the strategic port city of Mocha along with several islands in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. 

Seeing the writing on the temple walls written in the blood of cowards, Israel seems to be stepping up their involvement behind the scenes, but it can only get worse for them from here as they are already stretched far too thin killing other people's children closer to home and their MAGA golem is currently drowning in two feet of water in another strait one desert over.

So, what is it? What is the big secret that makes the Houthi rebels harder to kill than werewolves on angel dust? Simply put, they are not a state, they are a movement, a tribal culture defined by local resistance to global superpowers whose roots in their rugged region go back to antiquity. The modern Houthi movement is a Zaydi revivalist subculture formed by the Al-Houthi clan who can trace their lineage back to the foundation of that branch of Shia Islam which emerged in the 8th century to confront the rule of the massive Umayyad Caliphate.

Zaydism would go on to form the foundation of political and cultural life in the rugged northern highlands of Yemen for nearly a millennium with its imams fiercely resisting integration into the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Local tribal rule was only interrupted by the foundation of the northern Yemen Arab Republic in 1962 which very quickly became a hub for genocidal Salafi extremists and the western oilmen who love them, but the Zaydis persisted and under Houthi spiritual guidance, they crushed the local chapter of Al-Qaeda before overturning two Saudi/American backed dictators in a row. And the rest is history.

And history is the key to comprehending this movement, not politics. No empire, state or army can crush a movement whose history predates empires, states and armies. The Houthis cannot be removed from the land because they belong to the land and not vice versa. There's is a culture determined by localism and bioregional spirituality above praxis or dogma and that is how you survive an empire.

I can't help but to feel like we can all learn from this example, like Ansar Allah is our era's equivalent to the Seminole Nation or the Zaporizhian Sich. This may not be traditional anarchism, but what exactly is traditional anarchism? Some one-horse union regurgitating the religiosity of a few dead white Russians? Give me an unbowed tribe with an inextinguishable fire over the campus flavor of the 19th century any day. I'm a Queer hillbilly. My people want justice in the holler right now and Zaydi Muslims are the only tribe getting it in 2026. 

Maybe it's time we all started fighting back like a Houthi rebel.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Stutter by Elastica

*  Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges

*  Shove by L7

*  Dot Dash by Wire

*  Search & Destroy by Iggy & the Stooges

*  Waiting Room by Fugazi

*  The Boys are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  Son of a Gun by Nirvana

Trump May Indeed be the Worst President in American History and Maybe That's Not All Bad

 It has kind of become an exhausted trope at this point, the often-screeched mantra of "Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of mankind!" I've been hearing it ad nauseum from across the 9th aisle of hell going back well before that dayglow rapist was even elected for the first time in 2016. I'm not totally unsympathetic to the notion. Donald Trump is clearly a loathsome, bottom feeding, nepo-baby with a growing body count, but originally, the loudest complainers all seemed to be the last people on earth who should have been casting stones in any given direction- Neocon Never-Trumpers who mostly just seemed cheesed off that Trump preferred attempting to build casinos in Pyongyang to a Second Korean War and vain shitlibs who bitched about the concentration camps at the border six months after their hero, Barack Obama, built them.  

The most insulting thing to me during the Donald's turbulent first term in office was the fact that most of the loudest complaints from most of the loudest complainers seemed to be overwhelmingly cosmetic in nature. Centrist shills humiliated by a motor-mouthed neanderthal who made their precious empire look tacky with his self-indulgent hissy-fits and poorly planned political hooliganism, all ending in a diabetic boomer riot at the Capitol which Manuel Noriega could have planned better at the ass end of a Contra crack binge. The whole spectacle honestly felt like a really bad joke that Trump's more high-profile critics deserved to be the butt of, but then 2026 happened and the joke got scary.

Trump seems to be devoting his second term almost entirely to making every exhausted trope ever hurled in his general direction seem timid compared to the real thing. Unlike in 2016, this sick asshole seems to have come out of the gates with both an agenda and the institutional backing to make it happen. In less than two years he has affectively created his own poorly trained private paramilitario within the federal government vis a vis the Orange Guard that is now ICE, turned the genocide in Gaza into an internationally recognized conspiracy to build a Zionist Sandals resort on the Red Sea, and followed Netanyahu into a forever catastrophe in the Persian Gulf that seems to be spreading like VD in a Mar-a-Lago kiddie pool.

Now, you can say whatever the fuck you want about Hillary or Kamala but no half-sentient homosapien can roll their eyes at that screeched mantra anymore. "Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of mankind" now plays like something Merry Clayton should have howled after "Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away!!"

However, all increasingly based hysteria aside, is the Donald in fact the worst president in American history? He certainly seems to be breaking his back trying but there is some very stiff competition, and I'm not convinced that the majority of the navel gazing wonk class are using the proper criteria for judgement. When too many people talk about the worst president in American history, the focus always seems to veer heavily towards dysfunction and scandal. Nixon ransacking the Oval Office like a feral werepig gagging on a fist full of ludes while J. Edna lines up the dudes....

But all of this cracked reasoning negates the simple fact that what we seem to be asking for here is what amounts to a functional conductor for a killing machine. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question of who really did more damage; a man like Nixon who inadvertently exposed American power for the sickness it has always been with his lecherous antics, or JFK who started many of the policies Nixon drove off a cliff and died looking like a sexy hero with his big brains all over the Grassy knoll doing so? 

The first Trump administration was about as functional as a five-alarm zoo fire, but he seemed to do as much damage to America's totally undeserved reputation as he did to migrants and Muslims. Barack Obama on the other hand out-deported Trump hand over fist, killed way more fucking Muslims, and essentially built the drones and border camps that made the Oval Office the idiot-proofed death arcade that Trump recklessly molested in his first term like a drunken priest in a candy shop. 

The worst thing that Barack Obama achieved however, was making American power look like a friendly investment on the world stage again while he murdered teenagers in Yemen and validated neo-Nazis in the Donbass. Quite frankly, just like Kennedy, he made evil sexy.

With that being said, Trump's return seems to have taken the imperial experiment of executive theater to weird new depths of existential horror. Trump Two seems to be defined simultaneously by both Nixonian dysfunction and Camelot grade mass destruction. While the federal police state rapidly expands and flexes like Bane on Godzilla hormones, the imperial circus circles the drain with a pocket full of shells in the Strait of Hormuz beneath the looming shadow of Jeffrey Epstein's swinging corpse. 

The best explanation I can conjure up for such a cataclysmic display of vulgar power and abject nihilism is that in this terminal stage of the Spenglerian Kali Yuga, the elites themselves have become as desperate for salvation as the hicks out here in MAGA country.

China's military may still pale in comparison to the American juggernaut but no military on earth can stop the inevitable rise of the Eurasian Century. As Beijing competes with Pax Americana in markets across the developing world and hones its global infrastructure with its various Belt and Road projects, international surveys from Pew to the Council on Foreign Relations show China's favorability even among many traditional American allies growing while disenfranchisement with NATO's new cold war slowly creeps deeper and deeper into the Central European hinterlands. All while Washington's military might seems to be sinking in the quicksand of twelve too many forever wars.

The best hope for continued western hegemony in times of epic national debt and soul-crushing war fatigue seems to rest on the fearsome shoulders of Artificial Intelligence and this is precisely the industry that has given Donald Trump the institutional cache he lacked during his first term. AI Sith Lord Elon Musk essentially bought MAGA for about $300 million dollars in 2024 and while the pearl-clutching liberal atmosphere that still pervades sections of Silicon Valley has necessitated Musk to very publicly distance himself from his rented ginger Frankenstein, the funds keep going out unabated, with Elon's America Pac slated to shovel another 100 to $120 million dollars to the GOP for the 2026 midterm cycle alone. 

MAGA shares a similarly slight-of-hand relationship with Elon's mentor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who publicly distanced himself from Trump after hemorrhaging influence in California over his then unprecedented support for the ass in 2016 but has quietly entered the backdoor to Trump's inner circle regardless by pushing another one of his dauphins, ex-tech bro JD Vance, into the vice presidency. The evidence of this influence is written in dollar signs. Thiel's own personal Skynet, AI giant Palantir has received over $113 million dollars in contracts from the Trump Administration since 2024 even before being rewarded with a landmark 10-year/$10-billion-dollar software agreement with the Pentagon, all of which hinges upon the data-mining conglomerate consolidating America's bloated police-warfare state using the awesome powers of AI.

Our new tech overlords needed to bet on a lunatic like Trump to do this because their massive overhaul threatens to shrink the manpower of the deep state exponentially, but the arms industry can't afford not to be on board, however begrudgingly, what with China eyeing the same killer robots and the rise of cheap drone technology affording Shiite fedayeen the ability to punk American battleships like teenagers tipping over cattle in the boonies. Needless to say, all this is bad, but it gets worse before it gets better.

As America begins to look more and more like late-Weimar era Germany with every passing executive order, the tech bros behind Trump Two are making their long-term goals a matter of public record. Palantir has recently published a manifesto across social media, openly calling on Pax-Americana to use AI-enhanced weaponry to ensure the west's continued dominance across the globe and Thiel himself quite openly advocates for America to model itself after Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore and usher in the reign of a kind of techno-monarchy governed for efficiency over democracy and technology over humanity.

The only good news here is perhaps the most obvious. These sick fucks are betting the farm on a belligerent child molester who now seems to embody everybody's definition of the worst president in American history. These new elites and the old ones they conspire with are in a mad rush to save a sinking ship with dangerously new and unstable technology. The amount of data centers they are practically tripping over each other's jackboots to build, which represent only a fraction of the raw power it will take to essentially automize the biggest empire in human history, is quite simply unsustainable. 

In an era of dwindling reservoirs and rolling blackouts, when these mega machines suck the last aquafer dry, they will literally melt and take the whole fucking grid down with them.

So, this is how it ends, dearest motherfuckers, but this is also how it begins because when the last Ceasar chokes to death on the ashes of charred microchips and child pornography, those of us who have prepared ourselves and are preparing ourselves for a stateless, post-civilization existence will be there to build something new and old on the ruins. It won't be easy but that doesn't mean that it can't be fun. Afterall, here's where we get the opportunity to make it right.

And round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away towards a new horizon....

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

*  Beef Bologna by Fear

*  Birth in Reverse by St. Vincent

*  Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

*  Say Something by James

*  Lump by Presidents of the United States

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Bulls On Parade by Rage Against the Machine

*  Aneurysm by Nirvana

*  Frank Sinatra by Cake

The Nuclear Family is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

 It's hard to believe but it's coming on three years now since I recovered the last tranche of horrific trauma memories stored in my subconscious from a childhood held hostage by the Catholic Church. It took a dedicated team of dissociative identities just to keep that story a secret for thirty years and it took embracing those identities and the gender identity that they concealed to survive the whole truth and the whole truth is that I was a terrified five-year-old trans girl whose parents were too busy hustling for the American dream to hear her dysphoric outbursts. They chose to pawn me off to a local Catholic preschool instead where a pair of priests used my desperate confusion as an opportunity to have a good time before convincing me that all the adults were in on it.

My tumultuous gender transition coupled with parts work therapy broke the story, but once it was out, there was no going back. Every week is still a struggle laden with violent flashbacks, chronic exhaustion, and multiple personalities dealing with the existential tragedy of a life lived in the shadows of more lies than the five of us can count. We barely survived the last thirty-six months, and we may not have if we didn't find a way to turn all this trauma into something constructive. The alters and I have done this by reaching out to other Queer kids trying to survive the same conservative rural community that nearly killed me. So, when I'm not busy writing, switching or bushwacking through hours of trauma therapy, I facilitate a Queer youth group at a local volunteer bookstore.

The kids that I work with have saved my life in more ways than I can count but they have also brought my trauma into the perspective of a big picture that is quite abominable both in its nature and its magnitude. The despicable truth is that at least two-thirds of these kids have been abused too. At least half of that lot have been molested and in nearly every single case the culprit was the supposedly sacred nuclear family. Far from the popular notion of the Queer as a threat to traditional family values, "traditional family values" serve Queer kids up to sexual predators like a short order cook at a cannibal cafe.

The story generally goes that the parents never listen. They get burned out trying to go it alone in the petty hierarchy of suburban monotony. Things fall apart and some stepparent is introduced to maintain the illusion of domestic normalcy or maybe the unhappy couple stick it out in misery and stick their kid with some uncle or some neighbor or some priest. Some trusted figure who they barely know through the white picket cell of the American nightmare. 

The Queer kids stick out on the predatory radar because we don't fit into this Norman Rockwell menagerie of strict gender norms and heteronormative expectations and that scares us before we even understand why. The parents work too hard to notice we're terrified. Someone close by does however and we become some sadistic straight man's broken toy.

I see it over and over and over again and it's fucking infuriating. The only thing worse than this suburban assembly line of sexual degradation is "the parents." Not just yours and mine but the entire reactionary peanut gallery who adopts that identity to justify their dominion over the convoluted construct that they have turned childhood into. "The parents" want "the children", theirs and yours, to be sheltered from all knowledge about their rapidly changing bodies. "The parents" who think they know more about those bodies than "the children" who live in them... "The parents" who want "the children" to be shrink-wrapped in some charade of biblical innocence, kept docile and quiet and clean, like anatomically correct Kewpie dolls... 

"The parents" who prep "the children" for rape with this crap. "The parents" who refuse to believe "the children" when they tell them what Uncle Ned or Neighbor Ted did. "The Parents" who disown "the children" when they change pronouns and attempt to define themselves outside of their parents' stifling expectations. "The parents" who think that I'm the fucking groomer because I am the one adult who believes their children and arms them with the kind of knowledge that can save them from becoming just another grim statistic. 

Frankly, with all due respect, fuck "the parents." There are days when I wish I could round them all up, tie them together to the same tree, and beat their lizard brains out with an aluminum baseball bat.

I am so fucking tired of hearing self-proclaimed conservatives bitch and moan about the threat people like me pose to the nuclear family. What is so fucking sacred about the nuclear fucking family? This is a totally modern construct devoid of anything even remotely resembling traditional family values. The notion of family as two married adults with two children in one house in the suburbs is actually a violent and relatively recent break from thousands of years of multi-generational village life in which small, tight knit, rural communities raised their children collectively. 

In fact, the nuclear family as we currently understand it is largely a construct of early twentieth century progressive academia who saw suburbia as the model for a carefully planned society built on the backs of economically efficient prisoners, with the nuclear family serving largely as the perfect means to organize each three-bedroom jail cell.

The notion of the single-parent household or the stepparent household as some kind of deviation from this mold is also false. These are generally attempts by people fractured beneath the pressure of suburban nuclear family imprisonment to rebuild something resembling that ideal of a self-contained, heteronormative, mandatory monogamous existence even after being battered by this abusive lifestyle, as is the contrivance of the two-father/two-mother gay household. The nuclear family itself is the problem, regardless of who plays the roles. 

Frankly, the very notion that any four people should be going it alone on a quarter-acre plot, isolated from any legitimate form of community greater than mass on Sunday or Uncle Ned babysitting on date night is a very modern sickness that begs for a cure.

Child abuse very rarely comes in the form of some snaggle-toothed drifter in a rusty white panel van on the edge of town. One-third of all recorded child sex abuse cases involve a family member and another 59% involve a close family acquaintance. However, it is also widely accepted among those who study such abuse that the massive majority of the abused never tell another living soul and we know from those who have that one of the main reasons they didn't tell sooner is the fear of being isolated from an already socioeconomically isolated family.

We also know that multiple studies have shown us that Queer kids who don't fit into the suburban nuclear ideal, especially trans kids, are far more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse. In cases like the Catholic Church, these statistics become something of a macabre cottage industry. In a sense, western society has affectively turned compulsory conformity into a vehicle for sexual trafficking. Well, enough is enough.

The more radical fragments of the Queer community have the right idea. We are recreating our own version of the traditional tribal village with multi-household, multi-generational, found families in which kids have the choice between a dozen elders for advice and overworked and under-fucked couples have the option of taking on a third or a fourth partner to share the burden. Where children aren't just raised by entire communities but are afforded the ability to participate in them as equals. Where every loose Uncle Ned has at least six genderqueer aunties to answer to. That is what truly conservative family values look like.

With that being said, I'm an anarchist and I don't believe in enforcing my lifestyle on anyone else. So, by all means, go ahead and practice your creepy, rape-vibe, nuclear family. Just keep it the hell away from my kids.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Wendell Berry. Not just one of the 'good ones' but one of the best ones and a straight cis-dude who taught me how to be a rebel in the sticks.

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Home by David Byrne & Brian Eno

*  Victim of Love by Erasure

*  Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

*  I Kill Children by Dead Kennedys

*  Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

*  Cake and Sodomy by Marilyn Manson

*  Minor Threat by Minor Threat

*  Say Something by James

*  Been a Son by Nirvana

*  Chains of Love by Erasure

*  Baby's on Fire by Brian Eno

The Decline of Western Imperial Mythology in the Persian Gulf

 In case you haven't noticed, things are going pretty bad for Donald Trump in the Middle East lately and they just keep getting worse. At the behest of his Zionist masters who have played that child molester like one of his own victims, Imperator Trump has dumped the entire weight of the greatest military industrial killing machine in recorded history into the Persian Gulf over the last six months. 

We're talking 50,000 troops, multiple carrier strike groups with dozens of guided missile destroyers and warships, not to mention the iron ring of high-powered air and missile assets already encircling the Mullahs in the region, all firing off in a collective chorus of mass destruction. One great big, colossal, coordinated bombing bonanza that began with the assassination of the Ayatollah and most of his ranking henchmen and has continued right down to civilian overpasses and elementary schools. With all of this mayhem adding up to just over 13,000 targets and over 3,400 dead, nearly half of which appear to be civilians.

And yet it is Donald Trump begging for mercy at the peace table right now while Iran smokes a cigarette and cracks its knuckles. The Donald is desperate to have the world believe anything otherwise but his desperation reeks even louder than his squealing bravado. While his Administration has fallen back on amplifying already existing economic sanctions and declaring this to be unprecedented escalation, there are signs of massive military retreat in the Persian Gulf unlike anything we've ever seen, with many of the colossal American bases in the region already battered to ruble and largely abandoned.

Meanwhile, key stockpiles of the advanced ordinances once used to protect these citadels of American exceptionalism are dwindling, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies reporting that nearly half of the empire's stash of THAAD interceptors are long gone along with 60% of Patriot air defense missiles and nearly all of our ATACMS and precision strike missiles. All used to bomb the shit out of an impoverished enemy that just keeps fucking coming. 

In fact, US intelligence assessments indicate that Iran still retains roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpiles and mobile launchers, stashed away in crude but impenetrable underground mountain bases that have sustained months of bombardment with little lasting impact. Iran has also regained access to many of its damaged launch sites and appears to be producing new drones at a shocking rate. 

Far from being the picture of decimated defeat that Donald Trump keeps painting on Truth Social, if anything, these motherfuckers seem to be just getting started. In fact, if I didn't know better, I could swear that those bloodied Mullahs were toying with the orange bastard, inviting him back to the peace table and then shooting holes in another tanker in the Strait of Hormuz the moment that feckless egomaniac starts taking a victory lap for ending a bloodbath he started.

Stories have even escaped the Situation Room of the soiled, dayglow Ceasar shrieking at his own advisors like a petulant toddler, demanding loyal goons like Pete Hegseth to pull more missiles out of their asses and "sweep the leg" like the cheesy 80s movie bad boys they play on Fox News.

How in Lucifer's black dick can any of this be possible? The Trump junta may be packed with slack-jawed meatball heroes but anybody who has read a lick of vintage Rothbard or pre-Eppstein Chomsky can tell you that the imperial deep state which any given administration represents on TV has been thoroughly idiot-proofed for just such an episode. 

Donald Trump has certainly made a huge mess, but he also appears to be receiving plenty of help from the same kind of State Department insiders who effortlessly foiled his novel attempts to build casinos in North Korea during his first term. 

No, this is something far more significant than one fools folly. America as a whole has overextended itself in the Middle East on one too many occasions and exposed the fact that their domination in the region is built on little more than a convoluted house of cards. Not that this is anything new.

Any first-year student of Machiavelli can tell you that power itself is largely dependent on mythology and illusion. The only thing Trump did in the Middle Eastern theater was allow his desperate hubris to expose the authoritarian charade that has shackled the Middle East to one western radiator after another for over a century. 

Basically, to break it down, under the influence of Jeffrey Epstein's ghost and a borderline hysterical pathological ego, Trump took the empire's long plot to unravel the Islamic Revolution and pushed it too far, too fast, too soon, awarding a very sly enemy the opportunity to expose a hemorrhaging empire's filthy tricks as little more than outdated old wives tales.

Perhaps, the most brazen exposure has been that of the myth that American military might is the best insurance that any iron sheik can buy. This is the lie that has allowed the US and the British before us to maintain an outsized presence in a region that rightfully despises us, rent free, going back to Sykes-Picot. All blown to bits by little more than exploding toy airplanes.

The American military has assets across no fewer than eight countries in the Middle East, and Iran has pelted them all with a steel hailstorm of Shahed drones, not only striking dozens of bases and military installations but refineries, pipelines, luxury hotels, glimmering skyscrapers and other empty western crap promised to the greediest tribes in the desert in exchange for letting us turn the ground Mohamed walked on into a glorified parking lot for Reaper drones and Apache helicopters. 

In the process, Iran has successfully displayed the fact that not only is a military based a thousand miles away incapable of defending its proxies from a sustained local assault but that their very presence makes these countries viable targets for any force not dependent on their largesse.

Now those iron sheiks have to explain to their freshly battered subjects why it's in their best interest to continue doing the bidding of a Christian-Zionist behemoth while the skyline burns brightly behind a shattered bazaar.

What's even more damming is that Iran's stand against western imperium actually exposes the myth that an iron sheik is even necessary at all. The traditional Westphalian nation state and the brand of centralized, hyper-territorial despotism that comes with it is largely a European contagion and Donald Trump isn't wrong about his success in eliminating that disease in its Iranian incarnation. Iran lost not only its Supreme Leader during the first 24 hours of the American-Israeli bombardment but it lost the lion share of his regime's infrastructure along with him. 

And yet the Iranian people still stand united in a concerted display of resistance, and they do so thanks largely to the "Mosaic" defense doctrine developed by the Islamic Guards that relies heavily on a decentralized fighting force deeply integrated with civilian Basij paramilitary units working in tandem with other militias across the region.

No one seems to want to say it out loud but this model of largely stateless martial governance, practiced by Mohammed himself and centuries of his heirs before western colonization, is the default form of governance in every section of the Islamic world too secluded to be governed centrally. 

It's far from utopia but it's a hell of a lot more humane than iron sheiks and ayatollahs, and now it has been proven to be a hell of lot more effective too. This may not be anarchism but coupled with a distinct distaste for any form of colonialism, it could very easily become a gateway drug to something similar enough to empower it.

This highly decentralized method of regional resistance is also shattering the greatest myth the west has ever spun. The myth of globalist liberal universalism. The contrived notion that a highly centralized form of global state capitalism isn't simply superior to a thousand local traditions; it's inevitable, is being battered to shards by a single third world army shutting down a waterway the size of Lake Havasu. 

In other words, a raggedy bunch of peasant fighters have taken a globally integrated economy by the hojos and you can too for the low, low price of a small squadron of rusty fishing boats and a few generations of knowledge regarding your local bioregion.

This exposes the oldest myth that every empire traffics in. The delusion that their sheer size alone is a strength rather than a weakness. But if Rome depends on a network of thousands of bridges to function, then burning down just one in just the right spot can bring the whole machine to its knees, especially when every motherfucker with a match in walking distance of another bridge can see you do it live on TikTok.

And so, things are going pretty bad for Donald Trump in the Middle East lately and that bad juju appears to be spreading. The EU has its eye on commandeering NATO as Trump threatens not to fund their favored proxy war in Ukraine if they won't bail him out of Iran while half the former Eastern Bloc has their eye on Euroskeptic neutrality as their economies take the brunt of another war ignited by bankers in Brussels. 

Things are actually looking pretty fucking bad for the west in general, and maybe that's not such a bad thing for anyone living in the shadow of an imperial overpass.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  The National Anthem by Radiohead

*  The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang

*  Fur Elise by Blondshell

*  Go with the Flow by Queens of the Stone Age

*  I Kill Children by Dead Kennedys

*  Bring on the Dancing Horse by Echo & the Bunnymen

*  The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave by Butthole Surfers

*  Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

*  Actor Out of Work by St. Vincent

*  Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads

Have Flock Cameras Awakened a Sleeping Luddite Giant?

 They are watching us, everywhere, all the time. Big government, big tech, the NSA, Blackrock, Oracle, Palantir... The thousand tentacled data Cthulhu known collectively as the surveillance state... 

"They" are everywhere. They are all the time. And they are watching. Listening. Recording. Compiling. Filing. Bearing witness to our everything. Constantly. 

They are tracking you. They are tracking all of us. Sifting through our emails. Keeping tabs on our movements with those fancy fucking phones they keep pushing on us every few years. Following your car home with actual fucking robots. And using artificial intelligence to make it all run just smoothly enough to crush you before they crush themselves beneath the feral gods they have so recklessly birthed upon a sleeping world.

Roll your eyes and scoff but you know I'm right. People like me used to be "crazy" but now we're just inconvenient. 1984 is now and it gets worse every day while you scroll through Pornhub on your iPhone and try not to think about it. We can't pretend like we don't know anymore. Not after Edward Snowden. Not after Chelsea Manning. Not after Julian Assange and Virginia Giuffre and Wikileaks and the Epstein Files. We quite simply know too goddamn much to go back now. We know "they" know and they know we know.

We know about digital Demogorgons like PRISM, collecting a quadrillion gigabytes of raw data a second from every message you ever sent your grandmother on Facebook and every cat video you ever liked on YouTube and shoving it all into a bottomless silo in the Utah desert for later analysis when you become flagged as a terrorist threat by some backroom rubberstamp court. We know that the Trump Administration that Elon Musk paid for is making that once impossible task of full spectrum surveillance a reality with executive orders giving ambitious AI juggernauts like Palantir a license to use their constantly evolving software to centralize federal databases across agencies into a single monolithic panopticon. 

And we know that those same companies and that same technology is being used to make drones semi-sentient murder machines capable of choosing their own targets and deciding if they live or die.

We all know all of these things, but we keep our heads down and pretend we don't every fucking day because we have doctor's appointments and dead-end jobs and three-hour commutes to fuck with and what the fuck can we do anyway. Learned helplessness and antisocial exhaustion are the midwives of every dystopia. That is until a Flock camera uses your "Proud Parents of a 'D' Student' bumper sticker to give you a three-hundred-dollar ticket for banging a U-turn in the 7-Eleven parking lot and the Anti-Flock Wars begin.

For those of you lucky enough not to know, Flock is one of a dozen or so companies polluting America's blacktop purgatory with Automated License Plate Recognition Cameras or ALPRs. You've probably seen them around without even knowing it. Big black poles in the center divide with a solar panel on top. Those things are surveillance cameras, but they do way more than just read plates. They use AI algorithms to catalogue the make, model, license plate, color and scratches on every car that passes by, without a warrant or even probable cause, and then uploads that information to a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can peruse at will with few regulations and very little oversight.

Flock alone has over 120,000 cameras with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states and those things, those Ballardian erections have been used and abused by everyone from overzealous ICE agents to knuckle-dragging wife-beaters in blue. If this pisses you off then you're not alone. Over the last year, a movement spanning the great divide between left and right in this country has exploded into a wild rash of direct actions against the machines that surround us. Across the country, legions of anti-Flocking vigilantes have been busy cutting down poles, spray-painting lenses and smashing solar panels. The results speak for themselves.

Those of you sitting back in your papasan chairs, flexing like Ghandi (sexist creep that he is), rattling off the mantra of "violence solves nothing", should check in with the more than 80 cities rushing to cancel their Flock contracts like Penthouse Forum subscriptions before the villagers can run out of surveillance scarecrows to torch and turn their ire on city hall.

Flock themselves seem to be running scared. Announcing all manner of new changes and regulations that promise to reign in the cyber-stalkers in blue and give local departments more control over who they share their little caches of your information with. Even if this were true, the company is basically telling us all to chill out and leave it up to your neighborhood bully with a badge to keep your secrets. However, the reality is that the sheer mass of data we are fucking with here makes controlling it impossible for anyone but the kind of AI data mining companies killing children in Gaza right now.

San Jose's network of 479 Flock cameras alone has been revealed to have been searched nearly 2.5 million times by God knows who in just 6 months with an average of over 15,000 searches a day. We are essentially being told to calm down because Barney Fife will police YouTube sized surveillance traffic responsibly. Fuck off. That kind of boundless spyware is a weapon against basic human dignity in anyone's hands, and it is only a matter of time before creeps like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk figure out a way to monopolize the swarm and integrate it into their brave new surveillance state.

As far as I'm concerned, this means war, but this is precisely the kind of war that we need to galvanize the pissed-off masses beneath the kind of green populism necessary for mankind to confront civilization. The working poor and the traumatized lumpenproletariat need a tangible threat to wake them from their state-facilitated stasis and Flock is just the tip of the spear. Your average worker lives a thousand miles from the nearest operational factory, but they are enslaved by the highway around the clock, every day. ALPRs have affectively turned license plates into government mandated tracking devices, and they are using them to milk DoorDash servants already bled dry by gas prices shot sky high from the cannon of another goddamn forever war.

This was precisely the kind of climate that ignited the Luddite Rebellion of early 19th century England. Already suffering beneath the heavy economic tumult of the Napoleonic Wars, the long struggling peasant class of Northern England was pushed too far when factories began introducing early forms of automation to circumvent basic standard labor practices. The workers went ballistic, dressing in drag and proclaiming themselves to be the "Sister of Ludd" before going on a rampage of theatrical vandalism, destroying the machines that sought to enslave them. It would take military force to suppress them but that was in simpler times. In a savage ironic twist, the kind of technology the Crown killed to keep going has given a new generation of luddites access to things like ghost guns, drones and power tools.

Why not now? Why not here? How much dignity do we have left to spare? How many empty election cycles do we have to cringe through before we start fighting forever wars over the food and water that the fumes of the war machine have turned into dwindling resources? 

To be perfectly clear, I oppose initiatory violence, but these are not people that we're fighting. They are machines and they are powered by massive data centers that consume more resources than small cities while remaining virtually unmanned. These are things that destroy people. Maybe it's time for more people to throw the second punch and destroy these things before they destroy us all.

And if that fucking child molester in the White House wants to sic his toy soldiers on a new generation of heavily armed luddites, we'll throw the fourth and fifth punch too, but that's on him.

Down with all kings but King Ludd!

Peace, Love & Anarchy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  N.W.O. by Ministry

*  1984 by David Bowie

*  Genesis by Grimes

*  Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

*  Our Lips are Sealed by the Go Gos

*  Violently Happy by Bjork

*  Down In It by Nine Inch Nails

*  Digital Witness by St. Vincent

*  Violence by Grimes

*  The Universal by Blur

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 celluloid 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