It's The Decline Of The West As We Know it (And I Feel Fine)

Somewhere in the swamps of Washington, deep in the white pillared bowels of the imperial Camelot we call the White House, there lurks a vile and twisted nocturnal beast pacing the dimly lit hallways manically like a rabid jungle cat in heat. It's hide; nicotine orange. It's main; a mangled shock of strawberry blonde straw. It subsists on a steady diet of processed meat, caffeine, and garbage television. Alone, it binges and purges a barrage of toxic black bile in barely legible bursts of social media vitriol. Making petty threats against both states and the stateless. Bragging of the mythical superiority of its weapons and its organs. Gripping its Blackberry like Gilles de Rais with the throat of a child. Tiny knuckles mercilessly slamming into the machine, greasing its matte black gears with an oily slick of French fried slime and beet red blood. Its handlers, a decrepit coven of rapidly decomposing old generals who've created a thousand battle fields that they've never stepped foot on, tread lightly on fractured egg shells, taking care not to disturb the ravenous animal left in their charge by a desperate Electoral College. Together they plot in the shadows of the American Century, planning wars that will never come, dreaming of triumphant victories that will never be, rapping wistfully of past glories that they're brittle hearts ache to relive. Their lives are all but over. Their empire is crumbling while they struggle in vain to keep a leash on the thing they call president.

America the beautiful has never looked so ugly. That shining city on the hill has never looked so dim. After a year in the Oval Office, orange supremacist and reality TV rapist Donald J. Trump has presided over an imperial city in chaos. A Roman inferno the likes of which the world has not witnessed since Nero's last concerto. The world order is rapidly unraveling. Faith in the specter of liberal democracy has never been lower. Dullards who once looked to Uncle Sam for guidance now look else ware or inwards. Meanwhile the Chinese dragon rises triumphantly from its slumber, flexing its wings audaciously like a creature from a Lovecraftian nightmare. Its humble neighbors look upon this creature not with fear but with hope. The decline of the West is finally upon us. And while the moneyed literati of the Beltway think tanks screech with terror, I have never slept better. It's the end of the world as we know it, dearest motherfuckers. And I feel fine.

Trump's America is nothing new. Its always been there. Always. All of it; the casual racism, the bombastic threats of unparalleled ultraviolence, the daily degradation of women for nothing more profound than pure sport. America has always been ugly. The only difference now is that the whole world can see our sins. Donald Trump, in his childlike ignorance, has done nothing more than rip the mask of sanity from Lady Liberty's face, revealing the disgusting rapacious harpy that has always hid just beneath the surface. Rather than waxing poetic about America's god given duty to protect liberty across the globe through glossy acts of humanitarian tyranny, Trump has resorted to reducing these platitudes to their bassist meanings- blurting out expletives about America's colonial charges and making schoolyard threats of nuclear annihilation like a sixth grade sociopath. The result? The world finally sees this country for the cruel and bombastic empire its always been and I say good fucking riddance. Rip the veil off and let the necrosis of the American Century begin.

Trump is a monster, a pathologically deranged malignant narcissist in the tradition of Richard Nixon and Caligula. But he's also a moronic train wreck. A slave to his own desperate thirst for attention with a complete inability to commit himself to anything even resembling a strategy more complex than a plot to eat a second Big Mac. Under his watch, the Pentagon has squandered numerous opportunities for international terrorism across the globe do to the folly of their own disorganized hubris. In nowhere is this fantastic reality more undeniably apparent than on the Korean Peninsula, where Trump's manic tough talk of nuclear holocaust has inadvertently driven the two warring tribes of that once great nation together to seek peace beneath the guidance of Moscow and Beijing while America stands by powerless to obstruct it. The closest thing to a successful imperial venture that the administration who couldn't shoot straight has managed to achieve is that ugly little genocide in Yemen which is rapidly devolving into the House of Saud's own well deserved Vietnam.

The American Empire finally appears to be on its last legs, with China just strong enough to accomplish a coup-de-grace but not strong enough to keep it's own people under it's thumb, let alone the world. We are entering a rare moment of opportunity here, dearest motherfuckers, between the collapse of one empire and the rise of another. It is here that the historic dialectic presents us with a fleeting moment of revolutionary opportunity. A moment when the specter of the state becomes visibly weaker than the people it controls. I see these days of black smoke and crumbling marble not with the dread of our establishment mandarins but with the hopes of a patient revolutionary finally presented with an opportunity to achieve the unparalleled greatness of a truly stateless society.

The time is now, dearest motherfuckers, for us to construct a whole new world atop the ashes of the old. There is no time to waste on the frivolity of reforming a hopelessly broken system. We must abandon the state as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and create a resilient panarchic regalia of grand alternatives; collectives, communes, mutual aid societies, autonomous zones both temporary and permanent, syndicates and councils and pirate utopias. In the eternal words of that great American mystic, Timothy Leary- It is time to turn on, tune in and drop out.

It's the decline of the West as we know it, dearest motherfuckers, and I feel fine.



Peace, Love and Empathy- CH



Soundtrack: Songs for a joyful apocalypse.

* What A Time To Be Alive By Superchunk
* It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) By REM
* Everyone Wants To Live Forever By The Flaming Lips
* Dance Yourself Clean By LCD Soundsystem
* Here Comes Your Man By The Pixies
* Crash Years By The New Pornographers
* Surf Wax America By Weezer
* Freedom! '90 By George Michael
* Malibu By Hole
* Entitlement Crew By The Hold Steady