His Name Was Ozzy and He Was Murdered by the Police

His name was Osaze Osagie, but everyone who loved him just called him Ozzy and everyone who knew him seemed to love him. He had such a peaceful way with the world around him. I rarely saw him without that gentle smile on his face. You could tell he was not like 'normal' people and not just because he was far kinder than those bestowed with that loaded label. Like me, Ozzy was different, the 'normal' world calls it mental illness. I got to know him at my local psych rehab and quickly found myself enchanted by his easy going sense of humor and borderline Zen-like demeanor. He looked like a hybrid of  Hannibal Buress and the Dalai Lama, which isn't to say he didn't have his bad days. When he did, it was well understood that he liked to be left alone, to sit quietly in another room until his calmer qualities overcame his demons. But even at his worst, Ozzy couldn't harm a fly, he might hurt himself, but no one else.

Ozzy was my friend, and two weeks ago Ozzy was murdered, the latest mentally ill person of color to be senselessly slaughtered by our increasingly trigger-happy police state. They claimed it was 'self-defense', but don't they always. There's a lot of things that are still unknown about my friend's murder and sadly many of those things will likely remain unknown, lost in the fog of a murder investigation in which the investigators are fellow murderers. But here is what we do know; Ozzy's father called the police to check in on his son's apartment after he came to believe he was off his meds and may be a threat to himself or others. The police, plural, kicked in his door and put four bullets into his fucking body. The coroner has ruled his death a homicide.

Among other dangerous weapons, the police were armed with a mental health warrant, a sheet of paper that rendered Ozzy's rights to privacy irrelevant because of his second class status as a mentally ill person. The police claim he had a knife, even if this is true, they had guns, they had tasers, they had training in dealing with mentally unstable individuals and they had him outnumbered and surrounded. They invaded his property and they shot to kill. There appears to have been little attempt to talk with Ozzy or to just give him the fucking space he needed while checking in on him. The very fact that the police were awarded the right to invade his property and call anything they did afterwards 'self-defense' is absurd. If Ozzy had a knife, he was standing his ground against a state sanctioned invasion of his basic rights as a human being. But Ozzy's rights din't fucking matter because Ozzy was mentally ill. Ozzy wasn't 'normal' like the fucking animals in blue who lynched him, so Ozzy was disposable.

This has become a tiresomely common story. Just three months into 2019 and our darling boys in blue have already slaughtered well over 200 people, a grossly disproportionate number of them are black and/or mentally ill. If you are one of the millions of Americans who suffer from an untreated mental illness in this country you are 16 times more likely to be murdered during a police interaction and 20% of the cops' victims are in crisis.

 But where is the news coverage of this unspeakable wave of mass violence? Far more people fall beneath the bullets of this country's sainted thin blue line of superpredators than that of stateless active shooters and terrorists. But where is the call to disarm the police? Where are those camera-ready children of Stoneman Douglas when the pigs slaughter a victim who doesn't look like an extra on 90210? Mentally ill people like myself are called to forfeit our Second Amendment rights nearly every day for the peace of mind of the straight world but not the badged gangsters who prey on us like fucking vultures? And naturally the law enforcement 'community' is all for this. Those pistol clutching chickenshits love nothing better than a soft and easy target. And why not? They get away with it. Every. Fucking. Time.

I don't expect justice for Ozzy anymore than I expect it for Freddie Grey or Sandra Bland or Philando Castile or Antwon Rose or any of the other innocent people wiped out by the pigs. They always get away with it, no matter how many witness', or videos, or empirical evidence comes to the public's attention because they are an institution which is by nature above the very laws they enforce. They could shoot a goddamn infant in the fucking face on live television and no one would see a day in prison because their partners in crime in the DA would make sure that they're found not guilty. Every American who has paid even a fleeting amount of attention to the police state since Rodney King has to know this hideous truth and what is being done to stop this orgy of carnage?

Black Lives Matter isn't enough, neither is Copwatch. Simply catching these crimes on video isn't preventing them from continuing at a staggering rate. Huey P. Newton had the right idea with the Black Panther Party. The police in this country are a gang and we as a community need to police them. Huey was right about arming citizens but without the digital witness of a handheld camera, every shootout could always be blamed on those nappy-headed communists. The Panthers were the right idea for the wrong time. The iPhone and the AR-15 are the perfect recipe for preventing police violence. Just ask that cracker Cliven Bundy if you don't believe me. Right or wrong, that peckerwood rancher could have easily been the victim of another Ruby Ridge. But people from across the country came with their guns and their cameras and the feds were forced to back off. Bundy may be a racist asshole but BLM could learn a thing or two from his tactical example. We all could. Maybe it's time to put the warrior in SJW.

I don't know, maybe I'm just blowing off steam here, indulging in my fantasies of revolutionary justice. Maybe that's just part of the grieving process for an armchair suburban guerrilla like me. But I have to do something, dearest motherfuckers. Ozzy was a friend of mine and he was murdered by the police. I can't just let that crime go unpunished by our sociopathic (in)justice system. I can't let my friend die in vain. As an agoraphobic anarcho-literati, my incendiary wordplay is the best I can do for him. Maybe some of you out there in dearest motherfuckerland can do more. All I really know is that I've had enough of this fucking shit. How about you?



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Doesn't Remind Me by Audioslave
*  Fuck Tha Police by NWA
*  Dancing Choose by TV On the Radio
*  And the Same by Fugazi
*  Gold Lion by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
*  People Who Died by the Jim Carroll Band
*  Cop Killer by Body Count
*  Police On My Back by the Clash
*  My War by Black Flag
*  911 is a Joke by Public Enemy
*  Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

You Can't Be Pro-Life and Pro-War

I'm a creature of sonic evolution, dearest motherfuckers. A hand grenade with Luna moth wings. It's rather ironic for a diagnosed agoraphobic but the only thing that's evolved more than my fluid gender identity is my equally fluid ideology. In thirty short years I've evolved from indentured Catholic to agnostic existentialist to Gnostic Christian witch, from juvenile anarcho-punk to Bolivarian Bolshevik tankie to panarcho-syndicalist gadfly. One thing that hasn't changed throughout this intellectual metamorphosis however is a life long devotion to the sanctity of life.

Being a far-left pro-lifer has always seemed like a contradiction to most of my ilk but it has always made perfect sense to me. Egalitarianism in all its dimensions has always been about the stewardship of the weak in humanity by the strong. I actually believe that my early pro-life values are largely responsible for informing my radicalism rather than contradicting it. In a strange bid of karma, the Catholic Church may have accidentally created this church-burning commie-pinko by instilling those values in me at an impressionable age. I guess you could say I did a reverse Dorothy Day, from devout do-gooder to bomb-throwing heretic, sunrise, sunset.

This doesn't mean that I'm on the same page with the pro-life movement at large, not by a long shot. I personally find your average pro-lifer to be a self-serving, single-minded, chauvinistic, pig-fucker with a severe penile Napoleon complex. As much as I despise the idea abortion, I've come to the hard conclusion that you can't regulate someone else's body without creating a berth for tyranny too wide for any self-respecting anarchist to tolerate. My approach to the issue has essentially become one of harm reduction. Combat abortion by making it irrelevant through the proliferation of affordable alternatives like the morning after pill. I feel that with this issue the bulk of the pro-life movement has revealed themselves to be puritanical hypocrites, more concerned with policing behavior than creating viable alternatives for desperate young women. As two thirds of a female and a feminist to boot, I find this hypocrisy to be particularly hard to swallow. You don't have to be pro-choice to recognize that a rape victim doesn't deserve to be polluted by a monster's progeny, you just have to not be a dick. A tall order for too many of my fellow pro-lifers.

But even this slut-shaming foot-shootout doesn't rank as the greatest hypocrisy among the mainstream pro-life movement. That foul honor belongs to their blase attitude towards the mountains of dead children created by their sacred war machine. A quick glance at the voting records of the Bible Belt faithful on recent bills regarding America's bloodbaths in Yemen and Afghanistan reveal this revolting hypocrisy in stark black and white. There are exceptions to this moral lapse, namely Rand Paul, a pro-life Republican who has been more consistent than most Democrats in his opposition to those desert holocausts. But by and large, the Republican corps of the pro-life movement in Washington has shown a totally callous indifference to our nation's booming dead baby industry in the Middle East, provided that those tiny bodies are brown and Muslim. 50 thousand children have starved to death in Yemen in 2017 alone as a result of Saudi Arabia's American sponsored blockade. Thousands more languish in the biggest Cholera outbreak in modern history. And where, in the name of god, is the fucking outrage?

Where is the outrage from my fellow pro-lifers on this merciless forever war on children? Where are all the marches of church going folk brandishing garish pictures of emaciated Zaydi corpses? Why aren't the radicals blitzing the Saudi and Emirati embassies with buttaric acid stink bombs? Why aren't the tongue-speaking pastors chaining themselves to the doors Las Vegas drone arcades? Nothing! Their silence would be deafening if it weren't chimed out by their lifelong representatives on the Hill screaming like banshees for more bombs, more drones, more war, more dead babies. And these are the leaders of a movement committed to the sanctity of life? The keynote speakers at a yearly rally for life, along with their suddenly pro-life president who probably had a back-alley hanger-jockey on speed dial for the undocumented maids he molested.

This is a travesty of epic proportions, dearest motherfuckers. Either life is sacred or its not. You don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to call Planned Parenthood a terrorist organization one week, then ship guns to Saudi butchers the next. The only pro-life policy that makes any goddamn sense is a consistent one. That doesn't just mean an end to abortion, but an end to the death penalty, drone strikes, sanctions, the slaughter of unarmed people of color and all the various industrial complexes that keep this toxic empire's culture of death alive and well. You can't be pro-life and pro-war. Even a contrarian Mothra like me can see that as plain as Godzilla's green ass. Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers could too. It's high time the rest of you crusaders woke the fuck up. No more dead babies. Not in wombs or tombs.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



In loving memory of Osaze Osagie. My friend. My brother. The latest mentally ill person of color shot dead in his home by our trigger happy police state. You pigs made a big fucking mistake this time. You made this personal. I wont sleep until the killing stops, by any means necessary.



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Rise Up with Fists by Jenny Lewis
*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill
*  Zebra by Beach House
*  All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
*  Drown by Smashing Pumpkins
*  War Pigs by Black Sabbath
*  Atmosphere by Joy Division
*  Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine
*  Riders In the Storm by the Doors
*  The Cutter by Echo & the Bunnymen
*  Bellyache by Echobelly
*  Penny Royal Tea by Nirvana
*  Down by the Water by PJ Harvey

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: Requiem for a Fictional Party

Do you remember the Democrats, dearest motherfuckers? Not the neoliberal, gutter capitalist, Clintonista kind or even Bernie's brand of drone-strike socialists, but the peace loving hippie kind. The doves who tried to end the Cold War and marched against the draft and stuck flowers in the barrels of National Guard rifles. The liberal lions who took on the war machine, who made love not war, who couldn't hug their children with nuclear arms, and braved the perils of grassy knolls and brainwashed Arabs to bring just one ounce of sanity to Capitol Hill. Sure they were corny and preachy and a little grabby in cocktail party coatrooms but they had character and cojones and conviction. What ever happened to those liberals, before their bleeding hearts were eaten whole by those nasty neos? Where have all the flowers gone? Tell me, dearest motherfuckers, do you remember the Democrats?

Yeah, me neither, and here comes another one of my famously merciless reality checks. With the exception of few fantastic McGovern hiccups, they never actually fucking existed. The Democrats have always been a war party, even back when the Republicans were still Lindbergh worshiping isolationists. Don't get me wrong, the Dems were always big on that Feed the World-style, Kumbaya charity shit, but there chief staple was usually more white phosphorous than whole grain granola. Both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam; all started by Democrats. Even the Republican crusades in the Persian Gulf initially passed with broad Democratic support and lingered into holocausts with broad Democratic indifference. Much like the Republicans relationship with putting America first, the Democrats only get in touch with their hippie-dippie side when it serves their partisan needs, with Yemen as your latest rule-proving exception.

Lately, though, it seems to be getting worse. Since the Sixties, the Dems have at least generally payed lip service to ideas like detente and diplomacy, particularly atop their ivory soap boxes of the legacy media. But if you turn on NPR or CNN these days, you would be forgiven for believing you were interrupting a less than clandestine meeting of the John Birch Society. According to such bleeding brains as Rachel Maddow and Wolf Blitzer, Vladimir Putin is responsible for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to the ravages of climate change. Donald Trump makes the rare intelligent decision to simply meet up with Kim Jong-un for pho and playful banter and he's appeasing the Axis of Evil. John Bolton throws a monkey-wrench into the goddamn thing and suddenly he's the latest neocon "adult" to be proclaimed a progressive folk saint. The Donald firebombs an orphanage in Crimea and he finally becomes a "real" president. OK, I made the last one up, but these are some sick sick fucks.

Certainly, some of this hysteria is the result of Trumpsanity, a kind of geopolitical lupus that causes opponents of Trump's oh so special brand of slap-dash fascism to attempt to try to out-fasc their nemesis. We certainly see this with the frighteningly broad progressive support for the epic purge of free expression on social media. I personally suspect that the only reason they haven't gotten me yet is because gagging a confirmed tranny is technically still a hate crime in the SJW handbook.

But much of this Orwellian aping is actually a return home for most Dems, like chickens to the roost. As I said above, this kind of guns and butter uber-statism is an integral part of the DNC's DNA. Only now they've resorted to hijacking the good name of socialism in a perverted attempt to lure today's debt besodden youth into Chuck and Nancy's windowless van with promises of puppies and free tuition. With the brilliant exception of that glorious hijab-clad boss-bitch, Ilhan the Great (my second favorite bitch after Miss Chelsea Manning), most of the new "revolutionaries" of the Lower House don't seem to see world peace as a priority for their lukewarm insurrection. This creates a serious dilemma that goes well beyond the question ideological purity.

Not to sound like my asshole 12th grade econ teacher, but there really is no such thing as a free lunch. People like Bernie and AOC want to hand the government the keys to every major industry from Facebook to Big Pharma but don't propose anything in the way of the kind of major government cuts that would make this morally questionable endeavor economically doable. They bandy about the reputation of Scandinavia's social democracies without acknowledging the fact that the only reason these nations can afford their level of cradle to grave welfare is that they don't fight any goddamn wars. Many of them barely have standing armies.

Sweden prospered during the heat of the Cold War because their maverick PM, Olof Palme, rejected this imperial pissing match entirely and embraced neutrality and detente. This is how he fed and clothed his nation. As an anarchist, I find that level of even altruistic government intrusion to be suspect, but I've always admired the late Prime Minister for his consistent conviction. This was a man so devoted to the concept of pacifism that he had his citizens trained in non-violent resistance in case of a Soviet Invasion. Olof Palme was a socialist. The embattled Jeremy Corbyn is a socialist. I don't know what the hell Bernie and his pets are but they dishonor the title of socialism greatly by using it to demand that America gets more stuff while we carpet bomb the rest of the globe in the name of diplomacy.

America doesn't have a major modern peace party, at least not a consistent one, and we never really have. All we really have are myths that paint warmongers like FDR and JFK in the heroic colors of comic book superheroes. But these are simply lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night, safe from the long forgotten screams of Dresden and Da Nang. The point has been made that you cant lead a revolution in a counter-revolutionary party. Good point, but I would take that observation a step further and suggest that you can't lead a revolution in a counter-revolutionary government. This is why true socialists like Ilhan Omar and Jeremy Corbyn will always get crushed by there own while wolves in doves clothing like Bernie get sainted by the system they pretend to reject. Even a real life saint like dear Olof couldn't save his top-down government from sinking back into the malaise of crony-capitalist austerity once some mystery bastard put a NATO bullet in his back on the way home from the cinema.

You don't vote for a revolution, dearest motherfuckers, and it can't be given to you by some politician or party. You have to fight for it. You have to take it. You have to reject partisan mythology and plant those flowers with your own two hands, even if it means getting those hands dirty. Better dirty hands in the garden of peace than a dirty conscience in a lesser war party. And so I invite you to say farewell to those fictional Democrats, but don't mourn them. Sometimes dreams burn down. It's good for the soil.



Peace, Love & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Peter, Paul and Mary
*  Stay Useless by Cloud Nothings
*  Dreams Burn Down by Ride
*  Children of the Revolution by T. Rex
*  Rise Above by Black Flag
*  For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield
*  Backwater by Meat Puppets
*  Halfway Home by Broken Social Scene
*  Under a Rock by Waxahatchee

Uniting the Fringe Against the Center

Watching the news lately, you get the impression that the world is being ripped in two by the scourge of the far-right and the far-left. Populism they call it. Warring tribes in a binary war for the soul of the free world. In the US, Our dear orange Pericles is scheming mightily to manipulate the already unconstitutional powers of executive privilege to follow through with his promise to militarize the commons at the boarder. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is in virtual upheaval over how to contain a 5-foot-2 congresswoman for making the "antisemitic" observation that perhaps Israel has too much influence over Washington while the rest of the party keep McCarthyism alive with their own Russophobic "tropes".

Across Europe and many other parts of the world, you here a similar tale of the populist left and/or the populist right going too far in one direction or the other, many times both simultaneously in an act of sociopolitical fission. You also hear a great collective wail from the established order who still maintain control over the press and the permanent government, lamenting the untimely demise of globalism and an ill-defined sense of pragmatism among the holy Neos, both liberal and conservative. These heavily microphoned scions of the status quo would have you believe that the world was in perfect harmony before the 2008 financial crash that they and their order precipitated with the bipartisan pillage of the world's financial resources. In times like these the Ivy League appointed intellectual hierarchy of corporate thinktankland like to blow the dust off that old time honored canard of Jean-Pierre Faye's Horseshoe Theory. The idea that, when push comes to shove, the far-right and the far-left are like two ends of a horseshoe, nearly meeting each other ideologically in the middle.

Being a militant contrarian panarchist, I have some very mixed feelings about this philosophy. On the one hand, there is a part of me that wants to embrace this radical panic. I've long contended that dismantling the police-warfare state is an effort best left to a collaboration between the radical left and the libertarian right that today's wave of populists pretend to represent. On the other hand, the entire left-right spectrum strikes me as inherently reductionist and almost childishly over simplistic. Just like gender and sexuality, politics and philosophy are far too complex to be reduced to such bipolar classifications. I prefer to think of this sociopolitical zeitgeist as a circle, rather than the brutish horseshoe.

It's hard for any well studied student of history to deny that certain elements of the far-right and far-left have a great deal of under-explored common ground. As a post-Marxist social anarchist who prizes anti-imperialism and freedom of speech above all else, I find myself in agreement with paleolibertarians like Ron Paul far more often than I do milquetoast progressives like Elizabeth Warren. This isn't because Ron and me have near identical values, far from it. It's because we both exist on the outer ring of the sociopolitical circle, with the established order at the center. We exist on what is commonly referred to as the fringe of society, a renegade outback populated by misfits as far-flung as Christian patriots and genderfuck evangelists. Considering the current state of society; endless foreign interventions, two-party gang warfare, economic cannibalism, this maligned outsider status no longer feels like a pejorative. Anarchists, socialists, paleos and libertarians stand far enough from ground zero of the mainstream political circle to recognize the source of these problems and it isn't us.

With all the dewy eyed hymns being sung by the aging patriarchs of the Fourth Estate, you would be forgiven for forgetting that the most grotesque foibles of the West have almost exclusively been the byproducts of the triumph of bipartisan centrism. Vietnam, Iraq, NAFTA, CAFTA, the War on Drugs, the Prison Industrial Complex, all the poisoned fruits of cooperation among neoliberals and neoconservatives on the center-left and center-right, respectively. The chaos of our current era is the result of the rule of the very system Time Magazine and CNN propose as a solution. Barking populist demagogues like Bernie and Trump aren't solutions either. With the desperate top-bottom statist overreach of border walls and corporatist green new deals, these are the bastard children of a system that they're using extreme measures to preserve. These men are opportunistic pied pipers leading well intentioned fringeists back into the never-never-land of centrist purgatory. Their siren songs should be ignored at all cost by anyone thirsty for truly substantial change.

The only real change that swamp creatures like Trump and Bernie truly represent is a division within their circle on how to best preserve it. These populist squabbles may be the contractions of this systems long overdue miscarriage. But they could use a little help from the abortion clinics of the fringe. If the malignant center could achieve such heights of mass destruction working together than why not the disparate forces who reject its hegemony? Why are we wasting perfectly good Molotov cocktails on each other when the cop cars are wide open between us? We need to take note of our priorities. If you are determined to reign in the police state and snuff out the fires of eternal warfare, then I say that you're my ally, regardless of what you think of my gender identity or how to provide people with adequate healthcare. I honestly believe that there are good kids both in Antifa and MAGA hats who would agree with this sentiment if they weren't so damn distracted by their preferred cults of personality and the scapegoats they conjure. We need to get these kids woke enough to look across the center and realize that a true revolution can never be waged from within it.

The center had their turn, dearest motherfuckers. They shit the bed and I for one have no intention of cleaning it alone. Fuck the center and unite the fringe.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Times Like These by Foo Fighters
*  Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads
*  Aneurysm by Nirvana
*  Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
*  Muzzle by Smashing Pumpkins
*  Ahead by Wire
*  Here It Comes by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
*  The Middle by Jimmy Eat World
*  Working Class Hero by John Lennon
*  Train In Vain by the Clash

Redefining the 'N' Word

Jimi Hendrix was a n*gga

Jesus Christ and grandma, too

Jackson Pollock was a nigga

Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga

Nigga, nigga, nigga

Outside of society, they're waitin' for me

Outside of society, if you're looking

That's where you'll find me

Outside of society, they're waitin' for me

Outside of society

-Rock n Roll Nigger, Patti Smith

Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.

-Swear to tell the truth, Lenny Bruce

I grew up in a pretty close minded community, where the word inappropriate was tossed around a lot to excuse generally totalitarian behavior to young children with common sense. Don't stand for the Pledge? That's inappropriate. Don't kneel for Father Diddlesmore's fiftieth homily? That's inappropriate. Don't maintain traditional gender performance? That's inappropriate. Speak up for yourself? That's inappropriate. Saying a lot of things was inappropriate and I've always had a lot to say. Me and my big mouth were consistently inappropriate, but try as they might, all the rapacious priests and ruler stroking nuns in Pennsylvania couldn't contain the feisty inner bitch that hid in my mouth until she was ready to come out. So I guess it should come as little surprise to anyone that once I finally lapsed from that putrid pederast factory, I assumed freedom of speech as my new religion, with malcontents like Patti Smith and Lenny Bruce as my saints.

I have plenty of contrarian positions, I can't even stick to one gender for more than five minutes, but there are two positions on which I am downright dogmatic, and that's my total objection to war and censorship. As a thesaurus groping gonzo autodidact, my love for words is practically a sexual fetish; big words, small words, "good" words, "bad" words, I pretty much use them all. I'm pretty sure that I've called Donald Trump a cunt at least once a day since his inauguration, and I'm pretty proud of that guesstimation. But if there is one word that affords me more grief than any other, it's the word that only needs one letter. The word that begins and many times ends with the letter N. I don't use it often in my work but when I do it seems to upset people.

And it should. Nigger is a word with a lot of vile baggage and should never be taken lightly. It was created with the express purpose of dehumanizing and degrading an entire continent's worth of people so as to make it just that much easier for pale skinned oligarchs to justify their wholesale slaughter and enslavement. Over time the word has evolved, as many words do, and been righteously repossessed by its very victims as a term of endearment and comradery, though many black people continue to disdain its use even within their own community. As a general rule of thumb, I try not to say things about people that I wouldn't be comfortable saying to their face and since I don't feel comfortable dropping the N-bomb around my handful of black friends here in Trump Country, I generally avoid saying it. So why then do I occasionally find myself using it in my writing?

I wont lie to you, dearest motherfuckers, that's not my style, a part of it is provocation. Nigger is a word so visceral that it commands attention like few others, and as a muckraking journalist who writes primarily to incite, it can be an indispensable weapon. The catch is that I almost exclusively use the word to incite white people. Unlike the childish provocations of the Alt-Right, I use words like nigger and faggot with the intention of bringing poor people together rather than segregating them against each other. The best example of this, the one that always stands out in my mind, was something I wrote years ago in response to the racially primed chaos of Charlottesville. Sickened by the spectacle of poor people brutalizing other poor people while President Cuntface and his finger wagging enablers in the legacy media used their pain to push their own divisive agendas, the best advice I could shore up for both ends of the melee is that we are all niggers and faggots in the eyes of the One Percent. Like my patron saints, Patti and Lenny, I sought to redefine these words to fit the turbulence of the times. As a queer person, I sought to welcome even the very whitest of trash to embrace their new status as veritable faggots in the growing ranks of a post-empire proletariat, rather than clinging to a rapidly diminishing sense of privilege.

But who am I as a "White" person to invite people that happen to share my shade to embrace their symbolic niggerdom? Well, for one thing, I don't identify as white. When I walk into your average local honky-tonk, the people there, my supposed people, don't see one of their own. They don't see white, they see tranny and they see faggot and this has been the case long before I came out. Even as an essentially genderless child, people, most of them white, could smell the queer on me. Oswald Spengler himself, one of the brighter bulbs of nationalist thought, observed that race wasn't defined by the blood and soil that the nitwits who often bandy about his name prize, race is about common culture and values, and queerness is defined by a total rejection of puritanical, white, Anglo-Saxon values. So when people ask me what race I am, I tell them queer.

Even when people press me about my ethnicity, I don't answer white, I answer Irish Catholic, a race of people who weren't even considered white by their European neighbors for most of their existence. In fact, when they first came to this country during the famines, they were regularly derided by the white Protestant class as white niggers, a term still in regular circulation among Ulster Loyalists in occupied Northern Ireland. The Micks only became white when they embraced the very culture and values that I'm biologically programmed as a queer person to reject. In the eyes of the white establishment, a faggot is little more than a squishy pink nigger and a pauper is only as white as their devotion to the company line.

So does this mean I'm "allowed" to say the dreaded 'N'. No, in a free society we should all be free to say whatever the fuck we want and define ourselves how ever the fuck we want. History be damned, there are no bad and good words. Language isn't a science, it's an art that shifts over time with culture. I can't know what it's like to here that word as a black person, but I can definitely relate to being made to feel like the white man's bitch and I have a feeling that a growing class of increasingly poor white people can relate. If I can convince these deplorables that they are niggers and faggots too and that their liberation as well as ours rests in the wholesale rejection of their own waning privilege, then White Supremacy is truly, finally, fucked.

If that's inappropriate, then so be it. You'll have to forgive me of my trespasses, dearest motherfuckers. After all, I am a faggot. Inappropriate is part of our culture.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Rock n Roll Nigger by Patti Smith

*  Express Yourself by NWA

*  Los Angeles by X

*  The Underside of Power by Algiers

*  Woman is the Nigger of the World by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

*  Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio

*  Rock n Roll Nigger by Marilyn Manson

*  List of Demands (Reparations) by Saul Williams

*  Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

*  Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello

*  Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry