The Grindhouse is the Opera of the Oppressed

 “My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I'm pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”

-George A. Romero

"I became a prostitute and walked the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out, I’d be continually lectured to about all the boundaries that should never be crossed...I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man."

-Virginie Despentes

Art is the most dangerous weapon in any radical's arsenal. I say this a lot, and I try to live by it with my journalism-defying gonzo prose, but no weapon is more radical than cinema. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a camera is a fully automatic assault weapon firing off a million words a second and revolutionaries have long wielded cinema at the powerful with a vengeance. 

From Luis Bunuel to Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the steps of Odessa to the Battle of Algiers, cinema's power to obstruct and redefine the zeitgeist in undeniable. It's impact so deadly that counterrevolutionary forces have invested billions perverting its power with the celluloid empire of Hollywood. But radicals persist and the Weinstein Class continues to chase their audience rather than lead them. Sadly however, many radicals do as well.

The biggest problem with radical cinema is the biggest problem with radical anything and that is a severe lack of populism. I love the latest five-hour Dogma diatribe as much as the next pretentious asshole, and I mean every word of that sentence with all my heart, but there is no denying that the avante garde pretty consistently fires its ammunition a mile above your average post-working-class door dasher's head. 

With that being said, the recipe for reaching the uninitiated masses isn't to water down the message. It's to deliver it in language too immersively visceral for anyone to ignore. Antonin Artaud once achieved this with his Theater of Cruelty, but George Romero achieved the same results much more recently with good old-fashioned blood and guts.

The American grindhouse has long been a playground for fomenting radical notions among thrill seeking proles with a few bucks to spare and a taste for something right to the point. The high-brow critics call this exploitation cinema and wag their bony fingers at such fare for indulging in spectacle and bad taste and they aren't totally wrong. 

The problem is that modern late-capitalist civilization has reduced us all to a slumbering horde of flesh-eating zombies and the spectacle of "bad taste" or transgressing our prescribed bourgeoise sensibilities is the only thing that will ever wake us. I know because it has before and not that long ago. The neon bathed grindhouses of pre-Giuliani Time Square achieved this goal with a rash of garish subcultural revolutions while Godard sold out and every new wave became assimilated into Spielbergian Hollywood dreck.

In no arena is this truer than with the genre of horror cinema which was transformed forever in 1968 with the no-budget, black-and-white, zombie shocker, Night of the Living Dead. Repulsed and possessed by raw footage of urban race riots and the Vietnam War, George Romero decided to use B-movie tropes like braindead monsters and apocalyptic crises to point out how grotesque humanity had become.

Trapped in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by the walking dead, a small cross section of everyday Americans quickly become the most dangerous monsters on screen, torn apart by petty differences like skin color and age. The movie ends with the lone surviving hero, a Black man played by Duane Jones, being gunned down by the National Guard sent to save the people already dead because they refused that Black man's help.

This movie shocked and appalled the studios and the critics but it ignited a revolution of low-budget gore fests with something dangerous to say. Shocking movies like Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre practically invented the much-maligned slasher film in an attempt to comprehend the rising tide of violence among Mayberry Americans who cheered on My Lai and Kent State but couldn't seem to grasp the fact that they had invited such demons into their white-picket Lalaland with their imperial sins.

The new American Frankenstein monsters weren't green ghouls held together with stitches and bolts. The new American Frankensteins weren't monsters at all. They were handsome young White men like Ted Bundy who killed their daughters for sport and wholesome reverends like Jim Jones slinging the Gospel with a side of spiked Kool-Aid.

Directors like Wes Craven and John Carpenter responded at the grindhouse and what walked out into the light of day and became a part of the American cultural tapestry wasn't just Michael Myers, it was Laurie Strode and the cult of the final girl. 

Much like with Romero's Living Dead, the most radical thing accomplished by the first red wave of American slasher films was to simply shift the roles cinema had assigned us. The heroes of seemingly macho murder films like Halloween and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre weren't cops or cowboys, but teenage girls who survived the sadism of perverted masculinity and lived to tell the tale.

Many of these stories were rife with sexist tropes but what isn't in American culture? The important thing wasn't just that their films convinced white male audiences to identify with women being preyed on by other white men, it was a sense of catharsis given to millions of women and girls who lived in terror beneath a culture that had long rendered them voiceless and invisible prey, walking through poorly lit parking garages with their keys clutched tightly between their fingers.

It is not a coincidence that the horror movie genre has a significantly larger female audience than the often equally violent action film genre. It is also not a coincidence that the most radical among these films continue to be condemned by mainstream society as the most unforgivably offensive films committed to celluloid.

I speak of the so-called rape/revenge genre long reviled by pedophile coddling critics who unironically seem to have a much easier time identifying with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski than a girl with a gun and a man on her back. These stories go back to Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring but exploded out of the 1970s with the early films of Wes Craven like Last House on the Left and the Hills Have Eyes. 

These early revenge sagas largely delt with family retribution and the fine line between conventional society and unhinged savagery, but the template would eventually evolve into a story arc where a female victim of sexual violence becomes the protagonist of the narrative by surviving the unsurvivable and confronting their abusers directly without the aid or even the permission of a matriarchal legal system.

As a transgender victim childhood sexual abuse, I found my pain validated in these supposedly exploitative stories of explicit sexual violence and I also found myself in the ferocious eyes of many different kinds of survivors, from the daughter of a rape victim who gave birth to her child in prison after slaying one of her attackers in Lady Snowblood to a mute molestation survivor sold into sexual slavery in Thriller: A Cruel Picture.

These movies and others like them were banned by supposedly progressive social democracies across Europe and protested by second wave feminist gadflies but their impact as well as the impact of slasher films and splatter flicks more generally has slowly come full circle and flooded the arthouse as well as the matinee with buckets of blood.

This high artistic reproach to shock cinema began in the late nineties and early 2000s with an equally reviled wave of boldly transgressive cinema in Europe labeled the New French Extremity by its appalled detractors. These films, modern classics like Irreversible, Trouble Every Day and Romance, became notorious for pushing the envelope on the acceptable amount of sex, violence, and sexual violence allowed in ostensibly arthouse films, but many of them were defined by intimate explorations of femininity and sexuality using the storybook of the American grindhouse, and many of its directors were women.

Thus, you had sex worker turned feminist academic Virginie Despentes' and porn star Coralie Trinh Thi's 2000 shocker Baise-Moi (French for 'Fuck Me'), based on Despentes' novel of the same name, in which not only are the protagonists brutally abused sex workers, but they carry out their revenge using the sexual violence of their attackers against largely random men before ending up drowning in a bottomless abyss of nihilism as the camera lingers with an unflinchingly sadistic female gaze.

It was a shocking and downright repulsive spectacle, but it was necessary to kick down the door for women and other marginalized genders by daring to weaponize horror cinema. 

Directors like Julia Ducournau who has boldly explored the outer limits of the female body with Cronenbergian masterpieces like 2016's Raw and 2021's Titane, and Coraline Fargeat, whose explicitly feminist rape/revenge masterwork, Revenge (2017), set the stage for her 2023 Academy Award nominated indictment on showbiz sexism, The Substance, which also gleefully toyed with its own monster movie campiness like a grindhouse drag show. All a part of a much larger revolution uniting the arthouse with the grindhouse while giving Marvel a run for its money.

I can't help but to believe that George Romero and Virgine Despentes are owed a debt of gratitude for creating a market for horror movies as far-out and downright avante garde as Begonia, Mandy, Antichrist, Skinamarink, and Backrooms, not to mention opening up the playing field for distinctly Queer directors like Jane Schoenbrun and Rose Glass, telling our stories, drenched in our blood, on the grindhouse walls. But we can go so much further. We can break the rest of the rules too.

For at the end of the day, this blog post itself is a rape/revenge story. One in which the raped doesn't just include Catholic transgirls but Palestinian women and Zaydi children. One in which revenge means bringing the gore of the American Empire home and using it to convert passive observers into fully engaged participants forced to choose between the predators who rule them and the final girls who can castrate the powerful and leave them bleeding in a ditch with a little help from a sympathetic audience no longer afforded the privilege of standing by until the credits roll.

Let the seas run red with the blood of the unavenged. Let the undead revolt and inherit the earth. It's time to tell the stories they don't want you to here and this time you can't just tell yourself 'It's only a movie' because this time it's right outside your door.

Be afraid, dearest motherfuckers, be very afraid.

Blood, Guts, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

*  Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

*  You Have Killed Me by Morrissey

*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

*  I Blame Myself by Sky Ferreira

*  Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

*  Rape Me by Nirvana

*  Oblivion by Grimes

*  Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

*  Jennifer's Body by Hole

*  Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Yeule

The Queer Optimism of Post-Apocalyptic Survivalism

 Not to complain, but I have kind of a lot of shit on my mind lately and sometimes the shit is almost more than I can bare. This isn't a flex, but I am a genderfuck hick struggling to organize a rural Queer revolution in the same microscopic Pennsyltucky town where I was raped and bullied into developing five dissociative personalities just to carry the weight. 

As if that weren't enough, I now run a youth group which is quite literally in the shadow of the church where I was molested, counseling other Queer kids who have been tormented by their own parents for failing to live up to some other fucking church's expectations, all while the people I love more than life itself in my own found family struggle to eke out an existence defined by poverty and discrimination.

I do it all because I love it and I love this place and I love those people, but between the heartache and the flashbacks and the house fires and the switching and the trips to battered women's shelters with kids who call me mom and the executive office assisted transgender genocide running roughshod through the already vile compulsory school system, I am pathologically exhausted and dangling by a thread at the end of my rope.

It is in downright soul crushing times like these that the little things become lifesaving. I speak as a learned student of several years of intensive trauma therapy when I say that self-care is a martial art when you are this fucked up. I have my chocolate and my candles and my dreary lesbian rock music but, as bizarre as it might sound, when all feels fucked, I prep, and I'm not talking about HIV. When I say I prep, I mean I prep like a millenarian militia fiend with tits during the run-up to Y2K. 

I joyfully and peacefully prepare myself for a coming apocalypse. I peruse the breeder-laden aisles of Rural King and Tractor Supply for hatchets, machetes, and hunting knives. I do up my bedroom like a Hot Topic curated remake of Straw Dogs. I window-shop army surplus sites for concertina wire, sandbags, and MREs. I study the different kinds of earth homes most capable of repelling a prolonged armed assault in the hills of Appalachia. And amidst all this doom and gloom and camouflage, I find peace or at least something vaguely resembling it.

Some of this I am well aware is very much traumagenic. When the people you are supposed to trust most both literally and figuratively fuck you at such an impressionable age, you spend the rest of your life finding a place in every room to sit where you can put your back to the wall and keep your eye on the exits. 

However, some of this is actually shockingly pedestrian when you think about it. Doomsday prepping has become something of a booming cottage industry in the west, and it shows this time of year with the very mainstream fixation with all things zombie apocalypse. Suburban housewives get decked out in matching tactical gear, binge watch The Walking Dead and gleefully indulge in daylight phantasies of nesting with assault weapons in a world rendered stateless by flesh eating ghouls.

On a similar but far more troubling note, our elites are very much in on the hobby as well. The wealthiest men on earth are snatching up rural acreage in places like New Zealand and Hawaii's Big Island where they are digging out colossal subterranean castles stocked with enough provisions to last a decade and enough firepower to take on the militaries of most mid-size nations, that is when they're not busy shooting huge chunks of their ill-gotten fortunes into outer space, inspired by hopped up, ketamine induced fever dreams of space colonization amidst celestial bodies they have yet to rape blind and dumb with their corporate behemoths.

As out of touch as such corporate creatures may be with the life of your average American plebian, they do have access to the kind of intel most doomers can only dream of and if they're running scared it shouldn't be construed as anything less than recognition at the highest levels that the odds are stacked heavily against even the most privileged earthlings in recorded history.

Of course, you shouldn't require a billionaire with Q-clearance to tell you which way the wind blows and the evidence that humanity's days of plenty are numbered are littered all around us. The tea leaves are the size of Renaissance tableaus. As Pax-Americana's global influence wanes, the most powerful nations on earth are embracing increasingly robust military-police states, turning every last sector of law enforcement into tactically armored paramilitaries with orders from on high to shoot anything that moves and shoot to kill. 

Partisan politics are largely defined by publicized targets but whether the prescribed threat to western civilization is antifa or militias or neo-Nazis or undocumented migrants, the solution is always the same; more power in fewer hands and bigger guns in those hands. 

So, why not the rest of us? Why not the peasants trapped between the treads of a thousand tanks? Especially marginalized groups like mine who are already fighting for our lives every single day. Black, brown, and/or Queer folk have more reason to prep than the rest of the country combined, so let's get started while we still can.

Some will likely argue that this mentality is deeply unhealthy regardless of the competition, and some will (and have) suggested that I do something a little more positive with whatever time I have left on this terraformed cannonball we call a planet. However, I would argue that when you consider the actual science behind our increasingly precarious situation, you would be dense not to come to the conclusion that investing in any model of future society, even one of the Mad-Maxian variety, is nothing short of optimistic.

While massive data centers sprout like mushrooms and artificial intelligence rapidly approaches a very sociopathic form of sentience, while the Pentagon streamlines the Executive Office's access to so-called tactical nuclear warheads, and NATO corners Russia in Kaliningrad, carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase at a clip even faster than most of the world's top climate scientists predicted while the planet just gets hotter and hotter.

Westphalia's supposed solution to this predicament is to bet the farm on colossal infrastructure projects like the "Green New Deal", but such massive programs not only empower many of the same globalist institutions that brought us to this point, they rely on a convoluted plot to replace one colossal superstructure totally reliant on fossil fuels with another colossal superstructure completely reliant on the equally corporate monopolized, big green energy industry without diminishing western civilization's high-tech global footprint an inch.

Even if this great green leap forward doesn't end in another huge fucking Ponzi scheme of corporate welfare and no-bid contracts, the level of infrastructure required to replace fossil fuels would require a construction project that would burn through enough fossil fuels to melt the ice caps and kill the rainforest in the process.

The sad and sorry fact is that aside from some kind of massive psychedelic tryptamine fueled spiritual awakening, the best hope we have of any human beings surviving this tropical shit storm is collapse. The corporate class pushing their automated police state too fast, too soon, and literally melting the grid as the ocean gobbles up their precious metropolises like gilded pills.

So, I prep, and you should too, especially if you're a member of a marginalized tribe like mine because Kali knows, we have already been set up to be the first ones to die for straight white cis bros' sins. But this needn't be all doom and gloom. The fact that most of the rugged individualist preppers on the right never seem to grasp is that the strongest defense against apocalyptic turmoil is small, intimate, self-sufficient communities.

Thus, when the world is getting me down, I focus on doing everything I can to protect the people I love and that goes way beyond stockpiles and boobytraps. That is about forging homesteads and mutual aid societies and non-profit community centers and a Queer tribal consciousness among the battered and beautiful people who make me feel safe even when the sky is falling.

If I can build something local that gets my people just a little bit closer to being truly independent from the global, then all that fear and loathing I wrestle with daily feels just a little bit lighter.

So, when the world breaks my heart, I prep. But I'm not just prepping for doomsday, I'm prepping for the day after because there is no fate but the one we make.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals

*  Tokyo by Julien Baker

*  Human Behavior by Bjork

*  Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers

* The Bends by Radiohead

*  Safari by the Breeders

* (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by Devo

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Supernaut by 1000 Homo DJs

How the Shahed Drone Became the New AK-47

 Every once in a while, human beings invent a machine that changes everything and more often than anyone would like to admit, that change seems to be for the worse. For every vibrator there seems to be at least 16 smart bombs and even the vibrators are made in the same factories that produce the bombs, often with child labor and toxic run-off. 

Some of these machines are worse than bad. Some of them are downright monstrous. Technological Frankenstein monsters that seem to advance mercilessly while their proud human parents devolve in their wake. The steam engine that powered Manifest Destiny.  The atom bomb that erased entire cities. That government tracking device that keeps going off in your pocket.

In the 21rst century, the modern world has become a Frankenstein empire with a thousand terrible new machines produced per minute as resources dwindle and the emotional wellbeing of entire generations crashes with the bombs. We call this progress, but what it really amounts to is slavery in exchange for convenience. The problem isn't even really the devices themselves, but rather the fact that human beings seem to take less and less moral inventory with every new device produced. Nobody stops to ask the simple question of 'Is this good for me? Do I need this? Does anyone really need this?' before pressing 'except' on their computer screen.

The end result is a brave new world where life is cheap and oppression is downright affordable. Prisons pop up like mushrooms. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. And there are more drones in the sky than monarch butterflies. But hey, now I can buy chicken nuggets with my phone!

The only bright side to this strangely convenient dystopia is that with the mass production of quite literally everything, resistance becomes as cheap as oppression. A 13-year-old autistic kid in Bishkek can shut down the factory giving her asthma with one of those phones it produces. A widowed mother of six in the African Sahel can evade sanctions with crypto currency and buy insulin on the dark web. In the best-case scenarios, entire populations find the opportunity to play the monster on the cheap and get even with the Frankenstein Empire, at least for a minute.

And so, once upon a time, there was a starving Siberian hick named Mikhail Kalashnikov who grew up tinkering with rusty tractors and ancient hunting rifles. After serving in the Red Army during the Second World War as a tank commander and getting wounded in the Battle of Bryansk, Mikhail used his largely self-taught engineering skills to design a combat rifle based on the Sturmgewehr 44 brought over by the Nazis who turned the Soviet Union into a colossal graveyard of scorched villages and ruined cities. 

This machine would become what is now known as the AK-47. It was reliable even under the harshest conditions, so easy to operate that even a novice dirt farmer could wield it with deadly efficiency, but above all else, it was cheap and easy to produce. So much so that soon every communist country under contract with Stalin was producing their own version and soon so were many of the people that they oppressed.

The AK-47 has a fearsome reputation in the west and for good reason but across the Third World it has become a symbol of resistance. If the Winchester is the gun that won the west, then the Kalashnikov is the gun that liberated Africa and Southeast Asia. It was this Soviet Frankenstein machine that allowed many peasants to even the playing field with their conquistadors and this included Pashtun farmers and Chechnyan militiamen going toe to toe with the remnants of Mikhail's Red Army. 

Now, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in countries like the Congo and Somalia, you can buy Kalashnikov's monster from a back-alley counterfeiter for as low as six dollars or the price of a chicken or a sack of grain, meanwhile Hezbollah fights genocide beneath a flag marked by the silhouette of the rifle they fight it with.

Of course, there are still plenty of evil people who wield this machine as well. Hell, the IDF still carries the IMI Galil, an assault rifle largely based on the Kalashnikov model. But there is no denying that the AK-47 changed the way that wars are fought and helped give rise to the specter of the Third World guerrilla as a force to be reckoned with. Today we are seeing a similar revolution in technological mutation transpiring across the Middle East with Iran's Shahed drone.

Much like the AK-47, this was a device produced by a nation under siege using the guts of their enemies' devices as a model. Iran's drone program goes back to the American financed Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s that brought another revolutionary government in its infancy to the brink of extinction, but most of the biggest breakthroughs in Iran's drone program came after 2011 when an IRGC cyber warfare unit managed to hack a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 being operated in Iranian airspace by the CIA, using GPS signals and communication jamming technology to force the multi-million dollar machine to land largely intact. 

Even then, smug western analysts doubted the Islamic Republic could duplicate such advanced first world technology, but Iran pretty easily reverse engineered their enemies' toy and made it the basis for a machine that now threatens American dominance across the Middle East and beyond. 

Most Shahed drones are what is known as loitering munitions, which are essentially remote-control Kamikaze planes. They are cheap and relatively simple to produce in mass by necessity. They were developed under heavy sanctions from largely commercially available parts smuggled in piecemeal from Poland, Japan, Turkey, India, Vietnam and dozens of other countries, then put together in small factories built underground, just beneath the reach of IDF bombs. 

It is precisely the poverty of the Shahed's production however that has allowed it to haunt the skies over the American Empire in the Persian Gulf. 

Your average American air-to-air missile or ground-based interceptor used to defend American bases in the region generally runs somewhere between $400,000 and $1.2 million dollars to produce. Your average Shahed drone costs about $20,000 bucks. The result of this equation is a massive munitions gap. After hurling heaps of cheap American knockoffs at our bases and the quisling emirates that cloister them for just a few months, Washington has run dangerously low on the weapons we use to hold the world hostage while Iran just keeps producing more and more drones from the ruins.

This is how a nation with virtually no navy or air force left standing sent American forces packing, abandoning many of their bases across the Gulf with their tails between their legs. A recent Pentagon Inspector General Report puts the total cost of Trump's war for Israel in Iran at about $38 billion dollars and warns of near unprecedented strategic munitions shortfalls and resupply bottlenecks.

And just like the Kalashnikov, the Shahed is spreading. Yemen's Houthi rebels are currently holding their own against the heavily armed and US backed Saudis in a conflict that Donald Trump appears to be afraid to enter openly. It is widely reported with little evidence that the Houthis entire drone fleet is essentially a gift for the IRGC, but all actually available evidence cries bullshit on this claim. 

It is undeniable that the Houthis are certainly using the Shahed blueprint and they appear to have been supplied with some Iranian guidance systems but everything else appears to be the kind of cheap commercial swag from the Chinese market available to any low-rent Austin hobby shop, split up and smuggled across multiple shipping containers to evade imperial embargos. 

The Houthis have also smuggled in earthmoving machinery and ventilation equipment necessary for underground manufacturing and why not? This is how Iran built a drone industry from the ruins of their own American proxy war. Why buy fish when fishing rods are twice as cheap? The Houthis have expanded their industry to largely indigenous designs and other Shia militias appear to be following in their footsteps, but the Axis of Resistance would be wise not to get cocky. After all, those who kill by the drone die by the drone.

While Iran licenses Russia to build their own Shaheds to kill civilians in Ukraine, Ukraine has torn a page from Iran's playbook and has used the wreckage to make their own knockoffs, now being used to kill civilians in Russia, and the US is too; reverse engineering the reverse engineered and improved Shahed and declaring the resulting Frankenclone the LUCAS drone, and round and round we go.

This is the law of Frankenstein. The fruit of progress. Every new monster creates a template for the next new monster and once the monster is out of the grave, there is no putting it back in, especially when you can download the blueprint to build your own on 4chan. Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gadafi would tell you if they could, they were both buried with half a mag of Soviet ammo weighing down their caskets.

It is likely inevitable now that lonely teenage lunatics in Akron, Ohio will build a Shahed of their own in their stepdad's basement. I can only urge them to consider the data center two towns over as a target instead of the children's hospital down the street and pray to Kali that the grid goes down before it can take us all down with it.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced this Post

*  Supernaut by Black Sabbath

*  Gimme Gimme Gimme by Black Flag

*  Paranoid Android by Radiohead

*  Raw Power by the Stooges

*  Cars by Gary Numan

*  Animal Nitrate by Suede

*  Iron Man by Black Sabbath

*  Beauty and the Beast by David Bowie

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  Search & Destroy by the Stooges

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