Social justice has become such a loaded term in the Twenty-Teens. There was a time when only renegades gave a flying fuck about the disenfranchised. Now its been hijacked, in name only, by the state to justify its own malign existence. This leads to far too many reactionary renegades either embracing the state as a solution to the woes it perpetuates or conversely rejecting social justice out of hand. The sad reality here is that this has left many oppressed people without any legitimate advocacy outside of their own embattled tribes. The Civil Rights Movement has been twisted into a distraction from the very class issues that serve as the source of virtually all forms of bigotry and too many class warriors have written off social justice as a whole as some kind of neoliberal vanity project. But people are still fucked for more reasons than class even if class is the foreplay that makes that fucking possible.
Among so-called Social Justice Warriors, the conversation often devolves into a squabble over who gets fucked worst; The blacks or the browns? The trans of the gays? This bickering rarely serves any justifiable purpose but I'm always perplexed by the fact that no one takes the side of the most obvious winner of this dubious distinction. Across the globe, without exception, the most roundly fucked class of people on the planet are children and if that sentence makes you uncomfortable then that's a start. The fact that this obvious truth is still a total mystery to even the most obsessive compulsive SJW's only further proves the point. But really think about it, dearest motherfuckers.
Even here in the supposed civil rights bacchanalia of the West, children are afforded all the rights of pets. They are essentially the property of their adult guardians or even worse, the state, if they see fit to interfere in the oppression process. If you are beneath the sacred age of eighteen in this country, you can't vote, you can't own property, you can't work, and you have absolutely zero say in your living situation. The oppression begins at birth with the glorified genital mutilation of circumcision and, even worse, the painful and invasive surgery that defines intersex children's physical sex before they can even speak. Children are routinely conditioned to be well behaved cattle, to be seen but not heard. They are instructed to obey adults without question and do as they're told. Is it any wonder that children are the number one victims of abuse in this country with the lion share of the abuse being dolled out by the very authority figures they're groomed to obey; Parents, cops, teachers, priests.
In no place is the morally derelict treatment of children more aggressively apparent than the compulsory school system, public or private. Schooling as we know it is a mandatory prison sentence in this country. From four to eighteen, from 8:00 to 4:00, children are told what to say, what to do, where to stand, where to sit, what to think. Everything from their dress to their speech to their diet and bathroom privileges are policed by a cartel of role-crazy power-junkies who's authority stems almost exclusively from their age and the amount of money they were bilked into squirreling away on a piece of paper printed by another scholastic dictatorship. It's a gulag archipelago that trains children to memorize numbers, stand in line, and keep their fucking mouths shut, and now authoritarian do-gooders like Elizabeth Warren want to expand this abusive zombification into pre-K and quadruple the warden's salary? Fuck them. Hey Dems, leave those kids alone!
For the most part, the only people who publicly advocate for children's rights mostly just advocate to replace their parents with the state as their oppressors. They seek to curtail the sexual violation of young people by further infantilizing them with age of consent laws that deny them of the right to even have a sexuality. Rather than helping students and child laborers alike to unionize and develop their own set of labor rights, they deny them the right to work and incarcerate their education with compulsory schooling. The most prevalent argument against the true liberation of children is that they are simply not mature enough to handle the responsibilities of liberty, but what do you expect when you treat people like fucking pets? How can people speak for themselves when you sow their mouths shut. The idea that children simply aren't smart enough for their rights is nothing less than ageist bigotry propagated by adults who hold a stake in keeping a class prostrate and malleable, after all, obedient children grow up to become obedient adults.
And who am I to speak on the behalf of these kids? Just another SJW with an ax to grind? Perhaps. But I'm also the survivor of over a decade of emotional and spiritual abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church. From preschool through middle school I was taught by the adult pillars of my community in a small rural Catholic school that my gender identity was a sickness and that to express my soul truthfully would make me undeserving of god's love, much less anybody else's. I was brought up to believe my body was a filthy instrument, that I was a pervert and a freak.
For a very long time I remained in denial over my trauma for the simple fact that, unlike many other victims of the Church and adult institutions like it, no one laid a finger on me. But they didn't need to. They saved themselves the trouble by locking me alone in a closet and supplying me with all the weapons I needed to destroy myself. I still don't trust adults and I still don't believe anyone who tells me that they love me. If therapy has taught me anything its that there are many ways to break a child. When you tell an emotionally damaged nine year old that they're going to burn in hell forever, the trauma is virtually identical as a child who's been threatened with murder by an adult. I still have scars you can't see. They will never heal.
When you're a survivor of child abuse, part of you will always be that child. When I look real hard in the mirror I can still see that desperately trapped nine year old girl behind the scars, only now she's not scared anymore, she's pissed. She's out for blood, for the scalp of every teacher and priest who violates children with impunity, and every ageist bureaucrat, right up to the Pope himself, who pays lip service to their rights while keeping them in chains. Until children are truly emancipated and given the same rights afforded to any other citizen, they will continue to be fodder for such corrosive institutions, and adults will remain complicit in their subjugation.
Check your privilege SJW's. Your children are the niggers of the earth and the whip is in your hands. If this post makes you uncomfortable, then that's a start.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Another Brick In the Wall (Part 2) by Pink Floyd
* Been a Son by Nirvana
* War by Sinead O'Connor
* Violet by Hole
* In the Garage by Weezer
* Bullet With Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins
* Decorated Lawns by Julien Baker
* Sin by Nine Inch Nails
* Stupid Girl by Garbage
* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Zionists are the Most Precious Snowflakes
Well, dearest motherfuckers, apparently I'm an anti-Semite. I know! I had know idea either. But if being a mild mannered critic of Israel like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar makes you a rabid anti-Semite then color me Adolf fucking Eichmann because there is nothing mild about me. Being an openly anti-Zionist drag queen pretty much makes that biologically impossible. When a state walls in an entire group of people based solely on race and then systematically starves them to death, I call that fucking genocide regardless of which end of the rifle the chosen people happen to be on. Pardon me all over the goddamn place for having a color blind moral compass. But apparently that's all it takes because Zionists are the most precious snowflakes.
I say Zionists because Jews have nothing to do with this. A Jew is a member of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. A Zionist is a Jewish supremacist who believes Israel should be a fascist satellite of American imperialism and many of them aren't even Jews. But apparently these revanchist goyum have been awarded the Jehovah given right to proclaim anyone who doesn't agree with their insane foreign policy or the apartheid regime illegally occupying Palestine to be a stark raving, goose-stepping anti-Semite. And based on the limp-wristed, half-assed, back-peddling, Israel critics in the DNC that they've stapled this red scarlet letter to, a flaming, unapologetic, Israel-basher like me is all but guaranteed to make their voluminous shit-list. Good riddance. They can kiss the queerest part of my ass.
The most ridiculous thing about this kind of smear is that I couldn't be farther from an anti-Semite if I tried. I love Jews. Aside from the fact that my favorite celebrity fantasy is to be Mila Kunis going down on Natalie Portman in Black Swan, most of my heroes are pipe-hitting members of the tribe; Jesus Christ, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Murray Rothbard, Murray Bookchin, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg. All of them heretics, mind you, but that's part of the Jewish tradition and a very big part of the reason why the Jews have been traditionally despised by powerful people.
This is also why Zionism itself is really the antithesis of the Jewish tradition. The Jews have always been a rootless nomadic race of free thinkers with no devotion to blood and soil but instead a deep seated culture of rebellion against all forms of unjust authority even within their own communities. In fact, most of what I know about Israel's criminal history comes from the Jews who continue to serve as the number one critics of that foul state that disgraces their proud lineage in their name; Israel Shahak, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Gilad Atzmon, Uri Avnery. Most of the biggest names in the anti-Zionist movement are Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors horrified by the spectacle of seeing their own people falling prey to the same kind of reactionary racism that put them and their kin on one way trains to Poland.
But even these sages of historical wisdom aren't safe from the fury of the Zionist snowflakes. They're mugged of their identity, black balled as "self-loathing Jews", and chased out of universities by torchlight, much like their ancestors in the Third Reich. No one is safe from the influence of the Israel Lobby, especially not women of color who seem to get nailed the hardest, double points if they happen to be Muslims. This is no coincidence. You see, Zionism has nothing to do with opposing anti-Semitism, real or imagined. In it's current post-colonial rendition, Zionism has become a sociopolitical force devoted to replacing Jews as the West's scapegoat of choice with their Semitic cousins, the Palestinians, and anybody who looks or prays like them by proxy.
With Israel, Jews have been simultaneously domesticated with European style nationalism and made pawns too useful to simply serve as tools to justify the police state. Muslims have taken their place and fear is the grease that makes this demonic swap possible. In the days before the Holocaust, Zionists were widely recognized by most Jews as extremist wack-jobs. The notion of a homeland was more spiritual than political. The horrors of the Holocaust however provided Zionists, many of whom were actually early collaborators with the Nazis, with the perfect historical weapon to beat their traumatized brethren into embracing an archetype completely contrary to their tribal character.
I have long argued that this is the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust. That that revolutionary tribe of stateless heretics who were so dangerous to the system that they're annihilation was required before some cunt could take over the world, have been manipulated into becoming the new Nazis. Terrorizing and silencing dissenters. Removing their commentary from the zeitgeist so they don't have to waste the matches burning them. And using a totally innocent tribe of stateless people as convenient scapegoats for building a racial supremacist empire on their shallow graves.
But, hey, what the hell do I know? You don't have to listen to me, dearest motherfuckers. I'm just another jew-loving anti-Semite, so my opinion doesn't fucking matter anymore. Funny how that works.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
* The Lord's Favorite by Iceage
* Sometime Around Midnight by The Airborne Toxic Event
* Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan
* Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys
* Love, Love, Love by the Mountain Goats
* When You Were Young by the Killers
* Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin
* Radio Radio by Elvis Costello
I say Zionists because Jews have nothing to do with this. A Jew is a member of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. A Zionist is a Jewish supremacist who believes Israel should be a fascist satellite of American imperialism and many of them aren't even Jews. But apparently these revanchist goyum have been awarded the Jehovah given right to proclaim anyone who doesn't agree with their insane foreign policy or the apartheid regime illegally occupying Palestine to be a stark raving, goose-stepping anti-Semite. And based on the limp-wristed, half-assed, back-peddling, Israel critics in the DNC that they've stapled this red scarlet letter to, a flaming, unapologetic, Israel-basher like me is all but guaranteed to make their voluminous shit-list. Good riddance. They can kiss the queerest part of my ass.
The most ridiculous thing about this kind of smear is that I couldn't be farther from an anti-Semite if I tried. I love Jews. Aside from the fact that my favorite celebrity fantasy is to be Mila Kunis going down on Natalie Portman in Black Swan, most of my heroes are pipe-hitting members of the tribe; Jesus Christ, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Murray Rothbard, Murray Bookchin, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg. All of them heretics, mind you, but that's part of the Jewish tradition and a very big part of the reason why the Jews have been traditionally despised by powerful people.
This is also why Zionism itself is really the antithesis of the Jewish tradition. The Jews have always been a rootless nomadic race of free thinkers with no devotion to blood and soil but instead a deep seated culture of rebellion against all forms of unjust authority even within their own communities. In fact, most of what I know about Israel's criminal history comes from the Jews who continue to serve as the number one critics of that foul state that disgraces their proud lineage in their name; Israel Shahak, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Gilad Atzmon, Uri Avnery. Most of the biggest names in the anti-Zionist movement are Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors horrified by the spectacle of seeing their own people falling prey to the same kind of reactionary racism that put them and their kin on one way trains to Poland.
But even these sages of historical wisdom aren't safe from the fury of the Zionist snowflakes. They're mugged of their identity, black balled as "self-loathing Jews", and chased out of universities by torchlight, much like their ancestors in the Third Reich. No one is safe from the influence of the Israel Lobby, especially not women of color who seem to get nailed the hardest, double points if they happen to be Muslims. This is no coincidence. You see, Zionism has nothing to do with opposing anti-Semitism, real or imagined. In it's current post-colonial rendition, Zionism has become a sociopolitical force devoted to replacing Jews as the West's scapegoat of choice with their Semitic cousins, the Palestinians, and anybody who looks or prays like them by proxy.
With Israel, Jews have been simultaneously domesticated with European style nationalism and made pawns too useful to simply serve as tools to justify the police state. Muslims have taken their place and fear is the grease that makes this demonic swap possible. In the days before the Holocaust, Zionists were widely recognized by most Jews as extremist wack-jobs. The notion of a homeland was more spiritual than political. The horrors of the Holocaust however provided Zionists, many of whom were actually early collaborators with the Nazis, with the perfect historical weapon to beat their traumatized brethren into embracing an archetype completely contrary to their tribal character.
I have long argued that this is the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust. That that revolutionary tribe of stateless heretics who were so dangerous to the system that they're annihilation was required before some cunt could take over the world, have been manipulated into becoming the new Nazis. Terrorizing and silencing dissenters. Removing their commentary from the zeitgeist so they don't have to waste the matches burning them. And using a totally innocent tribe of stateless people as convenient scapegoats for building a racial supremacist empire on their shallow graves.
But, hey, what the hell do I know? You don't have to listen to me, dearest motherfuckers. I'm just another jew-loving anti-Semite, so my opinion doesn't fucking matter anymore. Funny how that works.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
* The Lord's Favorite by Iceage
* Sometime Around Midnight by The Airborne Toxic Event
* Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan
* Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys
* Love, Love, Love by the Mountain Goats
* When You Were Young by the Killers
* Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin
* Radio Radio by Elvis Costello
Sunday, February 10, 2019
The Councils Before Maduro!
Venezuela is fucked up. A nation hanging from the edge of a cliff by its broken and bloody fingernails. Thick noxious clouds of acrid black smoke gather around the capital of Caracas as the bodies continue to stack up. There is all out chaos in the streets as warring clans of half-starved people open fire on each other indiscriminately. The sides are ill-defined. There seem to be leftists, soldiers and cops in uniform on both ends of the melee. The government of Nicholas Maduro rounds up scores of hellions, holding the ones who don't get shot in the streets indefinitely in unknown locations. Meanwhile the western vaunted opposition launches full blown terrorist attacks, killing scores of soldiers and civilians alike. There are no clean hands in this fist fight. Everyone has lowered their standards of human decency to meet the standards of their nations new era of depravity. Few things are clear here. The streets and social media alike are awash with rumors and hearsay. One thing that is clear is that we're not in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela anymore. The once robust egalitarian experiment of Bolivarianism has devolved into violent statist hell and this was the point.
Venezuela is fucked up because its been fucked up, subjected to a concerted campaign of economic sabotage that started long before Maduro's absurd Dengist market socialist reforms. The United States launched this campaign through its numerous tentacles, public and private, in response to a democratic revolution that also began long before Hugo Chavez became its benevolent figure head. Under this relentlessly oppressive regime of crippling sanctions and monetary manipulation, a nation state of any kind would crumble beneath the pressure. Just add the constant threat of coup de tats and a return to the western sanctioned petro-fascism of past decades and even the most egalitarian experiments will take on increasingly statist and authoritarian policies to protect their revolution and the people it serves. The cruel irony being that by taking these desperate measures they adopt the very same attributes they're attempting to stave off in the name of a revolution that these very trends betray. An almost operatic tragedy of the commons.
This is America's preferred prescription for the troublesome ailment of radical leftism. In its purest forms, all strains of this red plague, be they Marxism, socialism, anarchism, even communism, are inherently anti-statist by nature. Class exists due to the construct of difference; race, gender, sex, religion or any other jerry-rigged category the establishment can conjure up to justify it's aristocratic difference when the only real difference is 'who has the gold?' Regardless of intent, the very existence of the state precludes difference based on the governments monopoly on the use of force. This means that the American superstate's best defense against the spread of stateless leftism is to violently push these movements to adopt increasingly statist policies upon the threat of total annihilation. Venezuela is far from the first. America has been at this game both at home and abroad for some time.
The Russian Revolution was originally a quite diverse and inclusive movement that included everything from anarchists to left-wing nationalists before America and its putrid World War Allies infected the barely formed Soviet Union with tens of thousands of invading dough-boys to assist the Czarist death squads in carrying out their White Terror. Even organizations like Nestor Makhno's Ukrainian anarchist Black Army, who had committed themselves to collaborating with the Bolsheviks against the Whites, ended up caught in the crossfire as the Soviet experiment descended into Atlantist manufactured chaos. The end result was that a deeply traumatized population returned to the perceived security of Czarism in the form of Josef Stalin, dooming the Soviets to the same fate as the Romanovs.
Fidel Castro appeared to have every intention of holding free elections before we mined Cuba's harbors and fouled their crops. The Black Panther Party were the most effective civil rights movement in the country before the siege mentality developed by Cointelpro caused them to splinter and adopt increasingly criminal behavior as a doomed survival mechanism. The poor people of Nicaragua only agreed to vote out their liberators in the Sandinista government after over a decade of living in an endless horror movie directed by Ronald Reagan's favorite coke fiends in the Contras. And Chile underwent a near identical campaign of economic sabotage and CIA skulduggery as Venezuela, ending in the suicide of President Salvador Allende, a man who championed an early form of E-democracy long before the foundation of the first Pirate Party, and his replacement with one of the most savage dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere. What do you think will happen to Venezuela if it to falls prey to America's brand of third world "democracy"?
People often forget that the Bolivarian Revolution didn't begin with Chavez. It began with the establishment of the Barrio Assembly of Caracas in 1991, a decentralized network of autonomous communal councils that bare more resemblance to Catalonia than Cuba. With Chavez's encouragement, these communes spread across the countries poorest favelas and villages, empowering millions to take a direct role in their own governance. This is the side of the revolution that America fears most and if they can convince Maduro to crack down on these rebellious experiments then they will have won, regardless of whether or not they get their golden boy Guaido to play Kid Pinochet.
For this reason, the key objective of all those inspired by the Bolivarian Revolution shouldn't be to pick sides between two thugs but to support the Councils, regardless of who takes the reigns. They can kill a thousand Allendes but they are utterly powerless against the authority of a people with no need for authority and they know it. The people created Chavez. America's war on the people created both Maduro and Guaido. But only the people can keep the revolution alive. And we can only truly support them by keeping America on a leash and putting the Councils before Maduro.
Si se puede, dearest motherfuckers. Keep yourselves alive.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen
* It's All Over Now by The Cranberries
* Reign In Blood by Slayer
* Wave of Mutilation by Kristin Hersh
* I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys
* Number of the Beast by Zwan
* Search and Destroy by the Stooges
* Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden
Venezuela is fucked up because its been fucked up, subjected to a concerted campaign of economic sabotage that started long before Maduro's absurd Dengist market socialist reforms. The United States launched this campaign through its numerous tentacles, public and private, in response to a democratic revolution that also began long before Hugo Chavez became its benevolent figure head. Under this relentlessly oppressive regime of crippling sanctions and monetary manipulation, a nation state of any kind would crumble beneath the pressure. Just add the constant threat of coup de tats and a return to the western sanctioned petro-fascism of past decades and even the most egalitarian experiments will take on increasingly statist and authoritarian policies to protect their revolution and the people it serves. The cruel irony being that by taking these desperate measures they adopt the very same attributes they're attempting to stave off in the name of a revolution that these very trends betray. An almost operatic tragedy of the commons.
This is America's preferred prescription for the troublesome ailment of radical leftism. In its purest forms, all strains of this red plague, be they Marxism, socialism, anarchism, even communism, are inherently anti-statist by nature. Class exists due to the construct of difference; race, gender, sex, religion or any other jerry-rigged category the establishment can conjure up to justify it's aristocratic difference when the only real difference is 'who has the gold?' Regardless of intent, the very existence of the state precludes difference based on the governments monopoly on the use of force. This means that the American superstate's best defense against the spread of stateless leftism is to violently push these movements to adopt increasingly statist policies upon the threat of total annihilation. Venezuela is far from the first. America has been at this game both at home and abroad for some time.
The Russian Revolution was originally a quite diverse and inclusive movement that included everything from anarchists to left-wing nationalists before America and its putrid World War Allies infected the barely formed Soviet Union with tens of thousands of invading dough-boys to assist the Czarist death squads in carrying out their White Terror. Even organizations like Nestor Makhno's Ukrainian anarchist Black Army, who had committed themselves to collaborating with the Bolsheviks against the Whites, ended up caught in the crossfire as the Soviet experiment descended into Atlantist manufactured chaos. The end result was that a deeply traumatized population returned to the perceived security of Czarism in the form of Josef Stalin, dooming the Soviets to the same fate as the Romanovs.
Fidel Castro appeared to have every intention of holding free elections before we mined Cuba's harbors and fouled their crops. The Black Panther Party were the most effective civil rights movement in the country before the siege mentality developed by Cointelpro caused them to splinter and adopt increasingly criminal behavior as a doomed survival mechanism. The poor people of Nicaragua only agreed to vote out their liberators in the Sandinista government after over a decade of living in an endless horror movie directed by Ronald Reagan's favorite coke fiends in the Contras. And Chile underwent a near identical campaign of economic sabotage and CIA skulduggery as Venezuela, ending in the suicide of President Salvador Allende, a man who championed an early form of E-democracy long before the foundation of the first Pirate Party, and his replacement with one of the most savage dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere. What do you think will happen to Venezuela if it to falls prey to America's brand of third world "democracy"?
People often forget that the Bolivarian Revolution didn't begin with Chavez. It began with the establishment of the Barrio Assembly of Caracas in 1991, a decentralized network of autonomous communal councils that bare more resemblance to Catalonia than Cuba. With Chavez's encouragement, these communes spread across the countries poorest favelas and villages, empowering millions to take a direct role in their own governance. This is the side of the revolution that America fears most and if they can convince Maduro to crack down on these rebellious experiments then they will have won, regardless of whether or not they get their golden boy Guaido to play Kid Pinochet.
For this reason, the key objective of all those inspired by the Bolivarian Revolution shouldn't be to pick sides between two thugs but to support the Councils, regardless of who takes the reigns. They can kill a thousand Allendes but they are utterly powerless against the authority of a people with no need for authority and they know it. The people created Chavez. America's war on the people created both Maduro and Guaido. But only the people can keep the revolution alive. And we can only truly support them by keeping America on a leash and putting the Councils before Maduro.
Si se puede, dearest motherfuckers. Keep yourselves alive.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
* Keep Yourself Alive by Queen
* It's All Over Now by The Cranberries
* Reign In Blood by Slayer
* Wave of Mutilation by Kristin Hersh
* I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys
* Number of the Beast by Zwan
* Search and Destroy by the Stooges
* Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden
Sunday, February 3, 2019
A Few Thoughts About Another Goddamn Shooting
I had every intention of writing a polemic on the American Empire's latest shit show in Venezuela this week, another erudite contemplation on the sour virtues of imperialism in some violent dirt floor theater, time zones away from my small town tranny middle class existence. But this week violence came to visit me through the all too common place spectacle of the active shooter situation. It's so fucking cliche that I bite my tongue just saying it out loud but you really do feel like that's a problem that happens somewhere else but not here.
'Here' for me is Central Pennsylvania, in the foothills of Appalachia where the Rust-Belt gives way to Amish country. It's an area where the most heinous thing on the evening news is typically some meth-pocked trailer urchin shaking his girlfriend's baby to sleep or maybe the latest round of kids coming public about their sexual debasement at the hands of Penn State or the Catholic Church. But last week was different. Last week an angry young veteran came to a Ramada Inn bar with a gun and his girlfriend. He only left with one in his hand. After badly wounding his lover and brutally murdering two innocent bystanders, the 21 year old killer raced off in his Mazda only to crash it at an intersection in front of my grandmother's nursing home. In a daze, he stumbled away on foot and murdered an 84 year old man next door before turning his weapon on himself and blowing his own face off.
For what? Four people dead, another grievously injured. And why? Nobody seems quite sure. We may never be. The shooter had a common story. White, middle class, no record aside from a recent DUI that may have put his hopes for a future in the military and law enforcement in jeopardy. Always a quiet kid, no violence, no broken home, no tour overseas. What possesses such a human being to obliterate himself and everyone around him? What is the source of this hidden vein of black rage that could only come to the surface in a irruption of senseless savagery?
I'm not some reactionary ninny looking for a simple solution to a traumatic experience in a thick government envelope. I have always believed very strongly in the right to bear arms. I am not currently a gun owner but I grew up in an area where an AR-15 was a tool to put supper on the table when the factories fucked off to sweatshopland. I'm also a Marxist and an anarchist who believes that tools like firearms are necessary to secure truly democratic societies. As long as there are assault weapons, proletariat's will require them to remain sovereign. So I'm not about to hand over the proverbial gun safe to the feds. Last time I checked, their body count was far higher than the gross domestic product of this nations booming industry of rampage killers. If anything, I'm more likely to start window shopping for affordable revolvers now than ever. Charter Arms still makes a cheap and sturdy maniac reducer, don't they?
But this does nothing to answer the fundamental what-the-fuck? of this tiny slice of blood spattered American pie. The harsh reality is that, regardless of your view on the Second Amendment, these active shooter tragedies are becoming so common that they're quite literally coming to a Ramada Inn near you. What makes this fact even stranger is that violence over all in this country has dropped to near all time lows. There appears to be zero correlation between the meteoric rise of the mass shooter and gun regulations. These events continued to metastasize during the last Assault Weapons Ban. Columbine was committed primarily with weapons that would be legal in San Francisco, let alone Middle America. So why then do these bloodbath continue to spread? On this, much like Venezuela, I can only speculate.
The rise in these events may not correlate with gun laws but they do correlate pretty devastatingly with two other often overlooked trends; The rise of the 24/7 news circus and the fall of the American Empire. At a time when Americans have never been less certain about the economic prospects of their future, at a time when social media has made us simultaneously more visible and more socially isolated, the mass media has created a cottage industry out of crisis porn, shamelessly covering every last gruesome detail in real time of tragedies that they shamelessly pimp out like Hollywood blockbusters while slyly pontificating on the price of one of the last amendments left relatively unmolested by the police state.
Who was this guy? Who are all of these guys? White, middle class, the strong silent type. A poster child for the American experience. A lonely, disenfranchised, and quite frankly endangered class of people. Just wealthy enough to feel the full impact stemming from the collapse of American primacy but not wealthy enough to cushion the blow with Wall Street Voodoo. Marginal people like me are use to being the proverbial faggot or nigger but not these wholesome all American boys, and they're not taking it very well. These are the same guys voting for demagogues like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and for the same reasons they pull that trigger. They're scared, they're desperate, and they just want someone to look at them for five goddamn minutes before they blow up the world.
As tempting as it may be, we need to fight the urge to vilify and dehumanize these post-modern Frankenstein monsters. At the end of the day, they have become victims of the same system that once rewarded them with privilege. They're one of us now and their energy is wasted on the pointless nihilism of random violence, both physical and electoral. I talk a lot on this blog about the amazing possibilities provided to us by a post-empire world and I stand by these dreams because they keep me going. But this is the flip side of collapse. Karl Marx once mused that violence is the midwife of any society pregnant with a new one. I guess you can call these mass shootings contractions. As a derelict society tares apart at the seems, the best thing we can do is put down the goddamn cellphone, tare up some clean bed sheets and do our damnedest to foster a nest where the new one can be nurtured by the better angels of our nature rather than the tabloid orphanage of what passes for journalism in these all or nothing days.
It's not too late, dearest motherfuckers. It never is. Divided we self-destruct. United we are heavy.
Peace, Love, & Mercy- CH
Donations to this tragedy's lone survivor and her family can be sent to https://www.gofundme.com/support-nicole-abrino. Increase the peace. Nostrovia.
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* (Whats So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello
* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses
* The Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth
* Ballad of Big Nothing by Julien Baker
* Dancing On My Own by Robyn
* Bloodbuzz Ohio by the National
* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio
* Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen
'Here' for me is Central Pennsylvania, in the foothills of Appalachia where the Rust-Belt gives way to Amish country. It's an area where the most heinous thing on the evening news is typically some meth-pocked trailer urchin shaking his girlfriend's baby to sleep or maybe the latest round of kids coming public about their sexual debasement at the hands of Penn State or the Catholic Church. But last week was different. Last week an angry young veteran came to a Ramada Inn bar with a gun and his girlfriend. He only left with one in his hand. After badly wounding his lover and brutally murdering two innocent bystanders, the 21 year old killer raced off in his Mazda only to crash it at an intersection in front of my grandmother's nursing home. In a daze, he stumbled away on foot and murdered an 84 year old man next door before turning his weapon on himself and blowing his own face off.
For what? Four people dead, another grievously injured. And why? Nobody seems quite sure. We may never be. The shooter had a common story. White, middle class, no record aside from a recent DUI that may have put his hopes for a future in the military and law enforcement in jeopardy. Always a quiet kid, no violence, no broken home, no tour overseas. What possesses such a human being to obliterate himself and everyone around him? What is the source of this hidden vein of black rage that could only come to the surface in a irruption of senseless savagery?
I'm not some reactionary ninny looking for a simple solution to a traumatic experience in a thick government envelope. I have always believed very strongly in the right to bear arms. I am not currently a gun owner but I grew up in an area where an AR-15 was a tool to put supper on the table when the factories fucked off to sweatshopland. I'm also a Marxist and an anarchist who believes that tools like firearms are necessary to secure truly democratic societies. As long as there are assault weapons, proletariat's will require them to remain sovereign. So I'm not about to hand over the proverbial gun safe to the feds. Last time I checked, their body count was far higher than the gross domestic product of this nations booming industry of rampage killers. If anything, I'm more likely to start window shopping for affordable revolvers now than ever. Charter Arms still makes a cheap and sturdy maniac reducer, don't they?
But this does nothing to answer the fundamental what-the-fuck? of this tiny slice of blood spattered American pie. The harsh reality is that, regardless of your view on the Second Amendment, these active shooter tragedies are becoming so common that they're quite literally coming to a Ramada Inn near you. What makes this fact even stranger is that violence over all in this country has dropped to near all time lows. There appears to be zero correlation between the meteoric rise of the mass shooter and gun regulations. These events continued to metastasize during the last Assault Weapons Ban. Columbine was committed primarily with weapons that would be legal in San Francisco, let alone Middle America. So why then do these bloodbath continue to spread? On this, much like Venezuela, I can only speculate.
The rise in these events may not correlate with gun laws but they do correlate pretty devastatingly with two other often overlooked trends; The rise of the 24/7 news circus and the fall of the American Empire. At a time when Americans have never been less certain about the economic prospects of their future, at a time when social media has made us simultaneously more visible and more socially isolated, the mass media has created a cottage industry out of crisis porn, shamelessly covering every last gruesome detail in real time of tragedies that they shamelessly pimp out like Hollywood blockbusters while slyly pontificating on the price of one of the last amendments left relatively unmolested by the police state.
Who was this guy? Who are all of these guys? White, middle class, the strong silent type. A poster child for the American experience. A lonely, disenfranchised, and quite frankly endangered class of people. Just wealthy enough to feel the full impact stemming from the collapse of American primacy but not wealthy enough to cushion the blow with Wall Street Voodoo. Marginal people like me are use to being the proverbial faggot or nigger but not these wholesome all American boys, and they're not taking it very well. These are the same guys voting for demagogues like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and for the same reasons they pull that trigger. They're scared, they're desperate, and they just want someone to look at them for five goddamn minutes before they blow up the world.
As tempting as it may be, we need to fight the urge to vilify and dehumanize these post-modern Frankenstein monsters. At the end of the day, they have become victims of the same system that once rewarded them with privilege. They're one of us now and their energy is wasted on the pointless nihilism of random violence, both physical and electoral. I talk a lot on this blog about the amazing possibilities provided to us by a post-empire world and I stand by these dreams because they keep me going. But this is the flip side of collapse. Karl Marx once mused that violence is the midwife of any society pregnant with a new one. I guess you can call these mass shootings contractions. As a derelict society tares apart at the seems, the best thing we can do is put down the goddamn cellphone, tare up some clean bed sheets and do our damnedest to foster a nest where the new one can be nurtured by the better angels of our nature rather than the tabloid orphanage of what passes for journalism in these all or nothing days.
It's not too late, dearest motherfuckers. It never is. Divided we self-destruct. United we are heavy.
Peace, Love, & Mercy- CH
Donations to this tragedy's lone survivor and her family can be sent to https://www.gofundme.com/support-nicole-abrino. Increase the peace. Nostrovia.
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* (Whats So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello
* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses
* The Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth
* Ballad of Big Nothing by Julien Baker
* Dancing On My Own by Robyn
* Bloodbuzz Ohio by the National
* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio
* Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen
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