I love holiday traditions, dearest motherfuckers, and every year since I started this blog several years ago, I've welcomed in the new year by compiling a short list of the few people on this goddess forsaken rock who actually managed the small miracle of not sucking, or at least not sucking much, this year. Naturally, it's usually a pretty weird fucking list because, generally speaking, you have to be pretty fucking weird to earn the respect of a pretty fucking weird ass bitch like me. This year is no exception. It's a regular rogues gallery of contrarian fire-starters and Molotov chucking iconoclasts like myself. You won't like all of em. Hell, I don't even like all of em. But if I've done my job right, and you're not a total fucking asshole, you'll at least respect them begrudgingly. So here's a dastardly dozen (give or take) dearest motherfuckers who actually don't suck. With one telltale finger in the air, I solute them.
Mike Gravel- The only oxygenarian bitch who should have taken the White House by storm, crazy Old Man Gravel, ex-Alaskan Governor, bitter old coot and lifelong evangelist for direct democracy, ran for all but a hot second this year. But what a fucking second! The last true anti-interventionist in my soiled former party, Gravel blitzed the DNC like Don Quixote on Geritol, with a guerrilla campaign that literally consisted of a handful of rag-tag college stoners using their spare pot money to make Mike the libertarian socialist Bernie. And they might just have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling adults in the suicidally self-assure Democratic establishment, who used their arcane debate regulations to fuck the old bastard out of a platform. Fuck it. Best laid plans. Thanks for the memories, Mike. We'll build you a monument after the revolution. And, once again, thanks Geritol.
Joaquin Phoenix- Hollywood has long been a fucking wasteland for anything even mildly resembling the dangers of unfiltered creativity. But every once and a while, someone, somehow sneaks something truly subversive passed the censors and into the theaters, and the normies lose their proverbial shit. There hasn't been a blockbuster as teemingly incendiary as this year's Joker since Oliver Stone's psychedelic opus, Natural Born Killers, and the maniacal performance of Joaquin Phoenix is the number one reason why. Like Woody Harrelson's Mickey Knox, Joaquin hijacks that silver screen for 2+ hours of riving anarchy as Arthur Fleck aka the Joker.
His emaciated corpse, swollen with the aching pain and unrelenting darkness of a perpetually ignored, mentally disturbed misfit, eking out a meager existence in the crumbling urban oligarchy of Gotham City, Phoenix embodies this very non-fictional class of ugly American, not simply because he is an incredible performer, but because he is one of us. He is one of the broken. Phoenix has wrestled publicly with his demons for decades and has regularly lashed out against our toxic mass media for exploiting the pain of him and his family. Joker was his ultimate revenge. When he put that bullet in Robert De Niro's yammering skull, he was putting a bullet in every twisted vulture who feasted on his brother's corpse as it convulsed on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room. He pulled that trigger for all of us freaks and made the only kind of artistic statement this country seems to occasionally comprehend, a plea for help written in blood. I hope I'm not the only one who's attention he gripped, but I thank him for the heroic effort either way.
Chelsea Manning- Chelsea makes this list pretty much every fucking year because Chelsea is my hero pretty much every fucking year. Let's face it, yours truly aside, there just aren't that many transgender anti-imperialist superheroes to go around and I don't think we can count on the convoluted cunts at Marvel to fill that void. But we can count on Chelsea. We can count on Chelsea to disclose and expose the criminal behavior of the empire for which it stands. We can count on Chelsea to stand up to the colossal bullies of the police state while looking damn fine doing it. And we can count on Chelsea to go to prison, over and over and over again, forever, because she is one bad ass bitch who doesn't snitch on her comrades and will never stand down to the state. Chelsea is the anti-Mayor-Pete, a real queer's queer, and you cissy cunts are gonna need a bigger prison to bury her under if you ever want to shut her up. Start building now while your disintegrating currency can still afford the bricks.
Ilhan Omar- Nobody saw her coming. The Democrats welcomed the opportunity for a photo-op with the first veiled Muslim congresswoman. How could they resist. But they weren't prepared for this tiny black hurricane from Minnesota to be anything more than a stock character in their neoliberal multi-culti sitcom. They fucked up big. Not since the improbable reign of Ron Paul has Washington seen a more consistent opponent of the military industrial complex. And we have never seen a more virulent and brazenly unapologetic anti-Zionist. Both parties have hilariously lost their fucking minds trying to demonize and contain her. Both parties have failed, miserably. And smug cynics like myself have kicked up our Doc Martin's to enjoy the show. Her absolutely brutal public shaming of Elliot Abrams for his disgusting career of butchering babies between the raindrops might just be the hottest performance of sadomasochism ever recorded. It certainly made the top of my spank-bank. Don't let the hijab fool you. Ilhan Omar is Uncle Sam's dominatrix and the only safety word is peace. Peace!! PEACE!!! Let's just hope her uncharacteristically stupid vote on the Patriot Act isn't a sign of mercy.
Lana Del Rey- "Do you love me or do you not? You said one thing and now you're saying the other." I have always found it painfully ironic that Lana Del Rey, the queen of summertime sadness, is the only artist on the radio that doesn't make me want to paint the walls with my fucking brains. Go figure, right. You can take the goth girl out of the closet, dot dot dot. But this year, Lana really outdid herself. The scrumptiously titled Norman Fucking Rockwell! isn't just, by far, the greatest album of the year, it's the greatest album in at least a generation. A haunting, timeless monument to existential heartbreak and listless nostalgia that defines these strange times we exist in, in ways that the finest works of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed did for their eras. Lush epics like "Venice Bitch" and the aforementioned "Love Is A Butterfly" make Lana's place as the voice of a very lost generation a forgone conclusion, and the fact that she achieved this monolithic artistic feat while remaining a formidable presence in a typically saccharine mainstream zeitgeist is nothing short of a miracle. Lana Del Rey is basically Morrissey with a vagina, which pretty much makes her god.
Muqtada al-Sadr & Raid Jahid Fahmi- Good guys are hard to come by in the Middle East. It's a land of martyrs, lesser evils and best case scenarios, and that's on a good day. It should come as little surprise, especially to a jaded anarchist like me, that in no public arena is this ugly reality more real than the sewers of politics. Which is what makes the Sairoon Alliance so goddamn refreshing. The unorthodox coalition of Shia firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr's Sadrists and Raid Fahmi's now near Jurassic Iraqi Communist Party first made waves last year when they took Baghdad's parliament by storm, winning a thin but pivotal majority of 54 seats, on the promise to stick it to outside political influence from both Washington and Tehran alike. But these populist usurpers didn't truly come into their own until this years uprising against Iraq's American sponsored institutional corruption. While the military shot kids in the streets, Muqtada took to the airwaves and social media to call for the resignation of the entire goddamn government, while Fahmi's ethnically and chronologically diverse Communists took to the streets, playing a leading roll in the riots. The last time we saw an alliance of Islamists and Leftists like this, the Shah ended up crashing on Jimmy Carter's couch. The Mullahs better check themselves. It's coming back around again.
Joshua Frank- Editors are a decidedly cunty clique. The good Dr. Hunter Thompson knew this intimately well, which is why he gave that grabby yuppie sell-out, Jann Wenner, mescaline fueled hell every chance he got. I haven't fared much better myself. I've got a real nasty rep for flipping the fuck out on my editors and Josh at CounterPunch is no exception. The difference is the motherfucker was actually big enough to forgive my flippant bitchiness and gave me a platform for my own brand of genderfuck gonzo weirdness anyway on my favorite website. We still but heads here and there, I have too many spooky fascist friends and Josh seems to have a soft spot for those drama queens in Antifa, but he doesn't appear to suffer from that dickish god complex that most editors can't seem to shake. That alone earns him a place on this list. Thanks Josh. You better fucking publish this one!
Tulsi Gabbard- In a seemingly endless year of knee-jerk hyper-partisan "Resistance", a contrarian bitch like Tulsi was as sexy to my soar eyes as a church arsonist. Just watching the Democrats shit themselves trying to figure out what the fuck to do with her made an otherwise dismal election season livable. Her Apache knife job on that police-state pride-poseur, Kamala Harris, was something savagely beautiful to behold. If you put the television on mute and listened very carefully, you could hear a cell-block of my T-girls back in Pelican Bay cheering like savages at the Thunderdome as Tulsi twisted the knife. The warden spent the last lonesome days of her doomed campaign bleeding out while her hopeless admirers in the MSM worked overtime to slide the bitch a shiv. It was a fools errand, and one that was delightful to watch. Buttigieg is next. Pay close attention to the Granite State. Tulsi's blade remains thirsty. Live free or die swinging, shorty. More than one cell-block has your back.
Troy Southgate- As a lifelong leftist and a longtime left-anarchist, I've heard all the dreadful horror stories about Troy Southgate and his National Anarchist Movement, and I believed most of them. That Troy is a racist, a fascist, a devious infiltrator out to infect the anarchist movement with the various venereal diseases indigenous to the Alt-Right. According to the Goofy Gillis chapter of the movement, NAM falls somewhere between ISIS and NAMBLA on the scale of unspeakable ideological heresy. But after actually getting to know Troy and his odd movement through my work at Attack the System, I can honestly tell you that I was, and much of the left still is, completely full of shit. Troy has gone miles out of his way to support my work, not because he agrees with it, quite the contrary, because he, like any true anarchist, respects a broad diversity of opinion. He's gone to bat for me on more than a few occasions, often taking on the better half of his own base to defend my incendiary rants calling for everything from Queer Nationalism to open borders to the end of the very concept of whiteness as we know it. Troy exemplifies the meaning of the word solidarity. You can say whatever you want about the bastard. He certainly has a colorful rap-sheet. But you best not say it where I can hear it, unless you want this leftist tranny to cut you a dozen new assholes with my balisong. But, shit, I've heard of kinkier fantasies, so be my guest and make my day.
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi- For an anti-imperialist war nerd like me, the feel good story of the year has been the under-expected triumph of the Houthi rebels, lead by one Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. After half a decade of blitzkrieg blanket bombing, forced starvation, mercenary death squads, cholera outbreaks and hundreds of thousands slaughtered in what can only be described as an American-backed Saudi genocide, Abdul-Malik's Houthi rebels have managed to turn the tables on two of the most powerful fighting forces on the planet, armed with little more than fury, heart, tenacity, homemade drones and WW1 era rifles. At this time last year, the entire Zaydi tribe of Shia Muslims looked to be on the brink of extinction. Now they're calling the fucking shots, with the Wahhabi shieks cowering to the peace table they once spat on, when they're not too busy cutting each other's throats, and the Trump Administration bashfully walking back their attempts to have these anti-colonialist freedom fighters declared terrorists.
The war is far from over, but the Houthis have already won. The haggard mountain renegades are the Vietcong of the Arab Peninsula, and 2019 is their 1968, the tipping point where a gush of their enemies blood has drawn a crimson line in the sand. The Saudis and their handlers must now decide whether or not to cross the River Tet. If they do, they can effectively double the bodybags coming home to Riyadh and kiss their position as a regional powerhouse goodbye. In a world of thieves groveling in the darkness of their own design, the man who stands the tallest is a holy man with a gun and a mission to slay the giants who prey upon the weak. Every revolutionary from Hiroshima to Happy Valley can learn something from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi's example. The impossible is very possible when we refuse to except anything less.
Fight on, dearest motherfuckers. Let 2020 be all of our 1968's. Let a new era of revolutionary consciousness begin and let it begin with you. For if you too refuse to suck, you too can win like a Houthi, battered but unbowed.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; theme song for people who don't suck
* Mike Gravel- Queen Bitch by David Bowie
* Joaquin Phoenix- The Future by Leonard Cohen
* Chelsea Manning- Surface Envy by Sleater-Kinney
* Ihan Omar- Man-Size by PJ Harvey
* Lana Del Rey- Mariners Apartment Complex by Lana Del Rey
* Muqtada al-Sadr and Raid Jahid Fahmi- Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
* Joshua Frank- I'll Stick Around by Foo Fighters
* Tulsi Gabbard- I Wont Back Down by Tom Petty
* Troy Southgate- Suedhead by Morrissey
* Abdul-Malik al-Houthi- Paper Planes by MIA
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
(Happy Christmas) Forever War Is Over: If You Want It....
So this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, and a new one just begun.
I've always loved this season but I've never been much for Christmas carols. The new ones are moronic garbage and the old churchy ones tend to depress the shit out of me. Too many ugly memories of being a differently gendered dirty secret in a harsh Catholic climate. Too many old wounds. Some still haven't healed. Some probably never will.
Since I'm in the confessional kinda mood, I might as well admit that I've never been completely sold on the apparent sanctity of The Beatles either. They're not a bad band, the hype just always felt a touch contrived to me. To be perfectly honest with you, they always struck me as a glorified boy band before they dropped acid, and even then they always sounded second fiddle to The Rolling Stones shambolic heroin blues.
But I've always loved John Lennon. I spent about 15 minutes as a teenage hippie between Goth and punk, and John and those fantastic Yippies are the only two relics that remain. I've also always loved Yoko. I felt that she brought the best out of John, artistically, politically and spiritually, not to mention being a brilliant provocateur in her own right. For this she was naturally rewarded with the brand of chauvinistic racism and sexism that often creeped just beneath the hippie veneer. And it was John and Yoko who created the one Christmas carol I truly cherish outside of the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) didn't begin as a hit song. It began as part of an avante garde guerrilla marketing campaign to coincide with John and Yoko's '69 Bed-ins. Billboards across 12 major cities worldwide were decorated with the simple message "WAR IS OVER: If you want it- Happy Christmas from John and Yoko." Two years later this message was set to the traditional English ballad "Skewball" and accompanied by the Harlem Community Choir. It was a deceptively radical message for mainstream radio, even in the peace and love era. In 1971 the war was far from over. There were still millions of bodies to be buried beneath blankets of napalm and Agent Orange. What John and Yoko were conjuring wasn't a Utopian fantasy but a simple Christmas wish. Happy Christmas, in the name of god, cant this wicked war be over? It can. If you want it. And today, nearly half a century later, that wish seems more cruelly unfulfilled than ever.
I'm a transgender lesbian with Lyme disease and agoraphobia, there are millions of things I want for Christmas; a vagina, a woman who can see me as just that even without one, a cure, a world without screaming highways and fluorescent bathed Walmart's to hyperventilate in. But I'd give up all of that and more, I'd give anything just to see an end to America's endless imperial campaign of forever wars. Wars without end. Wars without mercy. So this Christmas, I wish for peace, and I invite you to wish with me. Maybe together, god will hear our plea.
I wish we'd stop starving impoverished nations into submission with the financial terrorism of sanctions, from Venezuela to Korea. I wish we'd stop building toxic bases and blacksites on beautiful islands like Diego Garcia, Jeju and Ryukyu, polluting their pristine beaches and mowing down their children in the streets with heavy machinery. I wish we'd stop propping up the most despicable despots on earth since Hitler, from Rwanda to Bahrain. I wish we'd stop overthrowing democracies that fail to be convenient to our hegemony. I wish we would stop fueling and wantonly engaging in genocides, taking part in the erasure of beautiful, brave, brilliant people like the Zaydis, the Timorese, the Chagossians, the Baharna and the West Papuans. I wish the killing fields would bloom with flowers instead of flesh and blood. I wish we'd stop keeping the lights on in Israel, while that Frankenstein creature we helped birth rapidly becomes a gruesome doppelganger of the Third Reich we use to justify it. And I wish we'd just tell the Zionists to fuck off. The Wahhabists too, while we're at it.
And I wish we'd leave Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Korea and Germany, but Afghanistan most of all. Those mountains that have known nothing but war since Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski began building an army of jihadist mercenaries to provoke a Soviet invasion several years after Happy Xmas (War Is Over) hit the airwaves. Those mountains that carry no memory of a world before the dopelords and warlords and rapists and pederasts who we so covetously protect. Those mountains, so tall, deep, dark and mysterious that no white man could ever possibly comprehend them. It's 2019, dearest motherfuckers, and I wish the forever wars were over. But that wish wont come true until we realize that it's up to us and not some divine savior to overthrow the Scroogian Empire that fuels them.
And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun, the near and the dear ones, the old and the young.
Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band
* You Cant Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones
* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello
* Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis
* Revolution by the Beatles
* Dear Prudence by Siouxsie & the Banshees
* Here It Comes by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers
* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground
* Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by the Polyphonic Spree
I've always loved this season but I've never been much for Christmas carols. The new ones are moronic garbage and the old churchy ones tend to depress the shit out of me. Too many ugly memories of being a differently gendered dirty secret in a harsh Catholic climate. Too many old wounds. Some still haven't healed. Some probably never will.
Since I'm in the confessional kinda mood, I might as well admit that I've never been completely sold on the apparent sanctity of The Beatles either. They're not a bad band, the hype just always felt a touch contrived to me. To be perfectly honest with you, they always struck me as a glorified boy band before they dropped acid, and even then they always sounded second fiddle to The Rolling Stones shambolic heroin blues.
But I've always loved John Lennon. I spent about 15 minutes as a teenage hippie between Goth and punk, and John and those fantastic Yippies are the only two relics that remain. I've also always loved Yoko. I felt that she brought the best out of John, artistically, politically and spiritually, not to mention being a brilliant provocateur in her own right. For this she was naturally rewarded with the brand of chauvinistic racism and sexism that often creeped just beneath the hippie veneer. And it was John and Yoko who created the one Christmas carol I truly cherish outside of the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) didn't begin as a hit song. It began as part of an avante garde guerrilla marketing campaign to coincide with John and Yoko's '69 Bed-ins. Billboards across 12 major cities worldwide were decorated with the simple message "WAR IS OVER: If you want it- Happy Christmas from John and Yoko." Two years later this message was set to the traditional English ballad "Skewball" and accompanied by the Harlem Community Choir. It was a deceptively radical message for mainstream radio, even in the peace and love era. In 1971 the war was far from over. There were still millions of bodies to be buried beneath blankets of napalm and Agent Orange. What John and Yoko were conjuring wasn't a Utopian fantasy but a simple Christmas wish. Happy Christmas, in the name of god, cant this wicked war be over? It can. If you want it. And today, nearly half a century later, that wish seems more cruelly unfulfilled than ever.
I'm a transgender lesbian with Lyme disease and agoraphobia, there are millions of things I want for Christmas; a vagina, a woman who can see me as just that even without one, a cure, a world without screaming highways and fluorescent bathed Walmart's to hyperventilate in. But I'd give up all of that and more, I'd give anything just to see an end to America's endless imperial campaign of forever wars. Wars without end. Wars without mercy. So this Christmas, I wish for peace, and I invite you to wish with me. Maybe together, god will hear our plea.
I wish we'd stop starving impoverished nations into submission with the financial terrorism of sanctions, from Venezuela to Korea. I wish we'd stop building toxic bases and blacksites on beautiful islands like Diego Garcia, Jeju and Ryukyu, polluting their pristine beaches and mowing down their children in the streets with heavy machinery. I wish we'd stop propping up the most despicable despots on earth since Hitler, from Rwanda to Bahrain. I wish we'd stop overthrowing democracies that fail to be convenient to our hegemony. I wish we would stop fueling and wantonly engaging in genocides, taking part in the erasure of beautiful, brave, brilliant people like the Zaydis, the Timorese, the Chagossians, the Baharna and the West Papuans. I wish the killing fields would bloom with flowers instead of flesh and blood. I wish we'd stop keeping the lights on in Israel, while that Frankenstein creature we helped birth rapidly becomes a gruesome doppelganger of the Third Reich we use to justify it. And I wish we'd just tell the Zionists to fuck off. The Wahhabists too, while we're at it.
And I wish we'd leave Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Korea and Germany, but Afghanistan most of all. Those mountains that have known nothing but war since Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski began building an army of jihadist mercenaries to provoke a Soviet invasion several years after Happy Xmas (War Is Over) hit the airwaves. Those mountains that carry no memory of a world before the dopelords and warlords and rapists and pederasts who we so covetously protect. Those mountains, so tall, deep, dark and mysterious that no white man could ever possibly comprehend them. It's 2019, dearest motherfuckers, and I wish the forever wars were over. But that wish wont come true until we realize that it's up to us and not some divine savior to overthrow the Scroogian Empire that fuels them.
And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun, the near and the dear ones, the old and the young.
Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band
* You Cant Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones
* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello
* Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis
* Revolution by the Beatles
* Dear Prudence by Siouxsie & the Banshees
* Here It Comes by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers
* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground
* Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by the Polyphonic Spree
Sunday, December 15, 2019
The Panarchist Solution to a World Divided
In these days of epic collapse, with the established order rapidly disintegrating before our very eyes, mankind seems to be tearing apart at the seems and resorting to the bipolar extremes of the far-left and the far-right. And why the hell not? Poor people across the globe have grown weary of the false promises and bald faced lies of the so-called moderates. The one thing the warring camps of extremes seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is an epic wash. A rigged shell game that only pays out to the house, and now the house is on fire.
So we witness the spectacle of populism on both the left and the right. Record numbers of young people embracing the once tainted label of socialism while the kind of xenophobic nativism which was once only uttered in hushed tones at the far corners of church potlucks has now become mainstream fodder, openly brandished like Hermann Goering's revolver. These are the times that we live in but we've seen them before. Whenever empires crumble and the fixed markets of state capitalism find themselves in peril. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves divided on the opposite ends of the barracks. Stalinists and Brown Shirts. Antifa and the Alt-right. It's times like these when the call of Samuel L. Jackson's prophetic DJ in Spike Lee's classic dissection of urban upheaval, Do the Right Thing, rings like tinnitus through my eardrums. "Can we live together?! Together, can we live?!!" I've spent my life in search of an answer to that existential question. I believe I'm getting closer.
I've always found myself on the far-left end of the barracks, even while the proletariat was still drunk on the delusions of progress that came with a first black president and Apple Store commodity fetishism. I discovered Marx young and Chomsky shortly after. I spent the lion share of my teens flirting with a caraselle of Libertarian Socialist ideologies, Chomsky's Syndicalism, Red Rosa's Council Communism, Subcomandante Marcos' Zapatizmo. All set to a hard driving soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer and Zack de la Rocha.
By my late adolescence, I found myself under the spell of more statist genres of leftism, brought on by the unexpected revival of Bolivarianism in Hugo's Venezuela and Evo's Bolivia. I eventually came to embrace Third World Communism as a bulwark against Northern attacks on these democratic social experiments. I came to see Fidel Castro's harshly undemocratic measures to protect the Cuban Revolution in the wake of Kennedy's terrorist campaign against it as the only solution to imperialism. But my appetite for history wouldn't allow me to hold on to that delusion for very long. Upon further studies, I came to the conclusion that the state itself was the cancer and it mattered little how benevolent its managers were. It was always a wicked contraption designed to oppress before it self-destructs. I turned back to anarchism but contradictions continued to haunt me.
The biggest problem with nearly every school of leftism is its almost messianic assumption that mankind can be united in internationalist harmony beneath the banner of a single way. As much as I may believe that my own brand of Post-Marxist Syndicalism is the ideal model for a truly democratic society, I had trouble convincing myself that someday mankind would reach a singular collective consciousness and fall in love with the guild. Frankly, as an anti-imperialist, I've always been uneasy with these sort of notions of internationalism.
Assuming that some 19th century factory workers in industrial Western Europe had all the answers for my friendly neighborhood primitivists in the Amish community, let alone the tribes of Borneo or the Kalahari, just smacks bitchingly of colonialism. With a world so beautifully complex, how could there ever be just one way? This seemed like the same trap that lead our Founding Fathers to set the stage for the neoliberal hellhole of global capitalism, only ours was an egalitarian Manifest Destiny. I believed very strongly in the ideals of Murray Bookchin and Rudolph Rocker, but these contradictions kept me from seeing even my own anarchism as anything more than a distant pipe dream. That is, until I discovered the philosophy of Panarchy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about anarchism is that it is defined by the absence of government. Such notions are patently absurd. Governments have, do and always will exist. A government is any gathering of individuals brought together to make collective decisions. Technically speaking, three stoned roommates debating over pizza topping is a government. Anarchy is defined by the absence of the state, a permanent government micromanaged by a class of professional politicians, be they corporate board members, congressmen or monarchs. The very existence of this managerial class is what makes a simple government a state. Anarchy, in all its forms, seeks to abolish this hierarchy and replace it with an entirely civilian government. Panarchy is the recognition that in our world, in this diverse cultural landscape known as mankind, there is no singular answer to the scourge of the state. Anarchy can only exist outside of manifestos and punk rock venues when it is free to take on any form, regardless of adjectives, as long as it does so voluntarily and free from force.
Globalism has brought on nothing but colossal super-states. The tyranny of bigness, big government, big business, big race, big religion. This problem cannot be solved by hijacking these systems and rebranding them as internationalism. The only valid solution to this mass tyranny is localism and that's precisely what Panarchy embraces, the idea that government can only succeed on the same grounds as any other relationship, through reversible contracts between consenting parties committed to voluntaryism and non-aggression above all else. These could be mutual aid societies, autonomous communes, democratic syndicates, tribal orders, a quilt-work of endless Utopian experiments competing peacefully for their citizenry's patronage with individuals free to opt out and collectives free to succeed at anytime. Ideally, these governments would exist like social clubs with benefits, completely untethered by geography. Making it entirely possible for six stateless nations to exist on a single square block.
What's the catch, you ask? And there is always a catch. The catch is that freedom of society exists under the same parameters as freedom of speech. Panarchy doesn't just protect the societies you like, it protects the societies you hate. Under the grand contract of a confederal constitution, people would be free to build societies based around any ideology as long as they remained peaceful and voluntary. That means societies based on Mutualism, Syndicalism, Capitalism and Communism. But that also more than likely means peaceful nations governed by ideologies like Religious Fundamentalism, Geographic Integralism and even Racial Separatism. Allowing such societies to exist does not mean condoning them anymore than freedom of speech means condoning hate speech. It's a matter of excepting the reality that true liberty means respecting the decisions of others, however misguided, to live voluntarily however they damn well please, provided they do so peacefully, much like my clannish Amish neighbors who peacefully coexist with wicked English trannies like me.
This philosophy runs anathema to the current culture of both the far-left and the far-right, who both seem to define themselves by their guttural opposition to the others very existence. But I see this catch as the solution to a proletariat that will always remain divided across complex cultural lines. When they lack the nifty shield of persecuted victim-hood, the Fascist right tends to lose its appeal to the masses. Every time one of those goosestepping pricks gets hammered by Antifa, there book sales go through the fucking ceiling. I have to believe in the Kropotkinite theory that free mutual aid leads left towards true egalitarian evolution. When free to compete peacefully, the more malignant fear-based cultures will dwindle while the open communal ones will thrive. The beauty is that the far-right is free to believe the very same thing about my Queer Syndicalist Tribe. They get the opportunity to prove me wrong just as I do them, but the both of us will be too small to waste our energy on combat. Micro-nations make any form of sustained warfare an act of mutually assured destruction. Coexistence becomes the only sustainable way to exist.
And this is how I believe we can live together, Communists, Nationalists, melting pots and Isolationists, together we can live. Behind every apocalypse hides an opportunity for Utopia. The Panarchist says why not a thousand? Why not? Tis the season after all....
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Fight the Power by Public Enemy
* Shell Game by Bright Eyes
* That's When I Reach For My Revolver by Mission of Burma
* California Sky by Billy Bragg & Wilco
* Times Like These by Foo Fighters
* Should I Stay or Should I Go by the Clash
* People Of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine
* Stay With Me by the Faces
* Shoplifters of the World Unite by the Smiths
* Private World by New York Dolls
So we witness the spectacle of populism on both the left and the right. Record numbers of young people embracing the once tainted label of socialism while the kind of xenophobic nativism which was once only uttered in hushed tones at the far corners of church potlucks has now become mainstream fodder, openly brandished like Hermann Goering's revolver. These are the times that we live in but we've seen them before. Whenever empires crumble and the fixed markets of state capitalism find themselves in peril. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves divided on the opposite ends of the barracks. Stalinists and Brown Shirts. Antifa and the Alt-right. It's times like these when the call of Samuel L. Jackson's prophetic DJ in Spike Lee's classic dissection of urban upheaval, Do the Right Thing, rings like tinnitus through my eardrums. "Can we live together?! Together, can we live?!!" I've spent my life in search of an answer to that existential question. I believe I'm getting closer.
I've always found myself on the far-left end of the barracks, even while the proletariat was still drunk on the delusions of progress that came with a first black president and Apple Store commodity fetishism. I discovered Marx young and Chomsky shortly after. I spent the lion share of my teens flirting with a caraselle of Libertarian Socialist ideologies, Chomsky's Syndicalism, Red Rosa's Council Communism, Subcomandante Marcos' Zapatizmo. All set to a hard driving soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer and Zack de la Rocha.
By my late adolescence, I found myself under the spell of more statist genres of leftism, brought on by the unexpected revival of Bolivarianism in Hugo's Venezuela and Evo's Bolivia. I eventually came to embrace Third World Communism as a bulwark against Northern attacks on these democratic social experiments. I came to see Fidel Castro's harshly undemocratic measures to protect the Cuban Revolution in the wake of Kennedy's terrorist campaign against it as the only solution to imperialism. But my appetite for history wouldn't allow me to hold on to that delusion for very long. Upon further studies, I came to the conclusion that the state itself was the cancer and it mattered little how benevolent its managers were. It was always a wicked contraption designed to oppress before it self-destructs. I turned back to anarchism but contradictions continued to haunt me.
The biggest problem with nearly every school of leftism is its almost messianic assumption that mankind can be united in internationalist harmony beneath the banner of a single way. As much as I may believe that my own brand of Post-Marxist Syndicalism is the ideal model for a truly democratic society, I had trouble convincing myself that someday mankind would reach a singular collective consciousness and fall in love with the guild. Frankly, as an anti-imperialist, I've always been uneasy with these sort of notions of internationalism.
Assuming that some 19th century factory workers in industrial Western Europe had all the answers for my friendly neighborhood primitivists in the Amish community, let alone the tribes of Borneo or the Kalahari, just smacks bitchingly of colonialism. With a world so beautifully complex, how could there ever be just one way? This seemed like the same trap that lead our Founding Fathers to set the stage for the neoliberal hellhole of global capitalism, only ours was an egalitarian Manifest Destiny. I believed very strongly in the ideals of Murray Bookchin and Rudolph Rocker, but these contradictions kept me from seeing even my own anarchism as anything more than a distant pipe dream. That is, until I discovered the philosophy of Panarchy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about anarchism is that it is defined by the absence of government. Such notions are patently absurd. Governments have, do and always will exist. A government is any gathering of individuals brought together to make collective decisions. Technically speaking, three stoned roommates debating over pizza topping is a government. Anarchy is defined by the absence of the state, a permanent government micromanaged by a class of professional politicians, be they corporate board members, congressmen or monarchs. The very existence of this managerial class is what makes a simple government a state. Anarchy, in all its forms, seeks to abolish this hierarchy and replace it with an entirely civilian government. Panarchy is the recognition that in our world, in this diverse cultural landscape known as mankind, there is no singular answer to the scourge of the state. Anarchy can only exist outside of manifestos and punk rock venues when it is free to take on any form, regardless of adjectives, as long as it does so voluntarily and free from force.
Globalism has brought on nothing but colossal super-states. The tyranny of bigness, big government, big business, big race, big religion. This problem cannot be solved by hijacking these systems and rebranding them as internationalism. The only valid solution to this mass tyranny is localism and that's precisely what Panarchy embraces, the idea that government can only succeed on the same grounds as any other relationship, through reversible contracts between consenting parties committed to voluntaryism and non-aggression above all else. These could be mutual aid societies, autonomous communes, democratic syndicates, tribal orders, a quilt-work of endless Utopian experiments competing peacefully for their citizenry's patronage with individuals free to opt out and collectives free to succeed at anytime. Ideally, these governments would exist like social clubs with benefits, completely untethered by geography. Making it entirely possible for six stateless nations to exist on a single square block.
What's the catch, you ask? And there is always a catch. The catch is that freedom of society exists under the same parameters as freedom of speech. Panarchy doesn't just protect the societies you like, it protects the societies you hate. Under the grand contract of a confederal constitution, people would be free to build societies based around any ideology as long as they remained peaceful and voluntary. That means societies based on Mutualism, Syndicalism, Capitalism and Communism. But that also more than likely means peaceful nations governed by ideologies like Religious Fundamentalism, Geographic Integralism and even Racial Separatism. Allowing such societies to exist does not mean condoning them anymore than freedom of speech means condoning hate speech. It's a matter of excepting the reality that true liberty means respecting the decisions of others, however misguided, to live voluntarily however they damn well please, provided they do so peacefully, much like my clannish Amish neighbors who peacefully coexist with wicked English trannies like me.
This philosophy runs anathema to the current culture of both the far-left and the far-right, who both seem to define themselves by their guttural opposition to the others very existence. But I see this catch as the solution to a proletariat that will always remain divided across complex cultural lines. When they lack the nifty shield of persecuted victim-hood, the Fascist right tends to lose its appeal to the masses. Every time one of those goosestepping pricks gets hammered by Antifa, there book sales go through the fucking ceiling. I have to believe in the Kropotkinite theory that free mutual aid leads left towards true egalitarian evolution. When free to compete peacefully, the more malignant fear-based cultures will dwindle while the open communal ones will thrive. The beauty is that the far-right is free to believe the very same thing about my Queer Syndicalist Tribe. They get the opportunity to prove me wrong just as I do them, but the both of us will be too small to waste our energy on combat. Micro-nations make any form of sustained warfare an act of mutually assured destruction. Coexistence becomes the only sustainable way to exist.
And this is how I believe we can live together, Communists, Nationalists, melting pots and Isolationists, together we can live. Behind every apocalypse hides an opportunity for Utopia. The Panarchist says why not a thousand? Why not? Tis the season after all....
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Fight the Power by Public Enemy
* Shell Game by Bright Eyes
* That's When I Reach For My Revolver by Mission of Burma
* California Sky by Billy Bragg & Wilco
* Times Like These by Foo Fighters
* Should I Stay or Should I Go by the Clash
* People Of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine
* Stay With Me by the Faces
* Shoplifters of the World Unite by the Smiths
* Private World by New York Dolls
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Sorry Lefties, Your Impeachment is Bullshit
The ongoing impeachment of one Donald J. Trump is bullshit. There, I said it and I'll say it again just to make sure you heard me right. This impeachment is fucking bullshit, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. I don't care if this makes me a bad leftist or a bad libertarian or whatever, its the stone cold honest truth and I stand by it.
The left has poured so much of their identity into apposing Trump for the very sake of apposing Trump that they've lost all touch with reality. Their entire identity has become as defined by this moronic ass-wipe as his unblinking supporters. The Resistance has become a mirror image of what they despise, a pack of hyperventilating paranoid deplorables who have lost themselves 5 miles up their own asshole after crashing the Hybrid in their own fucking shit. They're a bunch of inconsolable babies and they desperately need a good slap on the ass to clear their throats.
This isn't to say I'm defending Trump. Not by a long shot. If it were up to me, he'd be in shackles at the Hague, answering for the cold-blooded murder of little Nora al-Awlaki and his putrid children's concentration camps on the border. Trump can burn in hell. What I hate is this Ukrainegate nonsense. Just like Russiagate, it's little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and second-hand gossip being trafficked by the only class of people more deplorable than Trump. What's worse is that the entire spectacle is so obviously a complete and total farce designed to self-destruct just in time for that other complete and total farce known as the 2020 Election.
The Democrats know full well that this media circus will die on the vine once it reaches the GOP packed Senate, but they also know that it will drive the campaign conversation away from anything mildly resembling the radical change that their loverboys Joe Biden and Mayor Pete have zero intention of delivering on, while keeping the irate electorate distracted by empty partisan shit-slinging. This suits Trump just fine as well. He gets to play the anti-authoritarian martyr that Middle America relates too, even while he robs them blind and sends their sons and daughters to die in a dusty oilfield.
As for the facts, I've been looking and they're few and far between. It certainly appears that Trump was conducting something sleazy in Ukraine but, for all the bitching about our president's conspiracy theories, that is essentially that what the foundation of Trump's accuser's arguments amount to, a colossal labyrinth of state sponsored conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory that Russia interfered with our elections in any meaningful way based on the accusations of our notoriously corrupt intelligence community, who continues to deny the American people access to their sources. The conspiracy theory that Russia is at war with Ukraine, rather than simply providing aid to ethnic Russian rebels defending their independence. The conspiracy theory that Ukraine itself is anything but a glorified NATO rump state governed very poorly by a grab-bag of neoliberal banksters and openly Russophobic neo-Nazis.
This has been the corn in the gigantic shit that Adam Schiff's squad of disgruntled spooks has pushed out on congress over the last few weeks, and these are the people trying to convince us that they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Trump committed impeachable offenses. Pardon me all over the place for being less than convinced by a group of people who are clearly as divorced from reality as the president we both despise. Who am I supposed to believe, the scumbag or the scumbag? Maybe I should just plead the Fifth.
This problem is bigger than Trump though. The biggest problem lies in the fallacy of the system itself. Our bespectacled law professors pontificate on high from their ivory towers about the existential threat to our democracy, but what democracy? The little man in the White House didn't even win the popular vote and the Articles of Impeachment written by our Founding Fathers are left so vague that you could make a half-decent argument that the Donald's comb-over constitutes an impeachable offense. The truth is, that every president since at least Wilson has been guilty as sin of high crimes and misdemeanors and the earlier ones are guilty of far worse.
Funny how these stately constitutionalists don't seem to possess the same moral outrage towards Thomas Jefferson's rape of his child property as they do for Trump's quid pro quo. Noam Chomsky accurately pointed out that every single man who's ever occupied the Oval Office would be hanged if held to the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunals. Why only draw the line with Trump? And why do so without the democratic cache of a popular referendum? Will Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi really be a step in the right direction? Or is this really about those missiles Mr. Schiff wants to unload on Ukraine for his sponsors in the military industrial complex?
This country needs more than an impeachment, dearest motherfuckers. It needs democracy, real fucking democracy of the direct and Bookchinite variety, and I don't think we'll get it with anything less than a revolution, a real fucking revolution of the proletariat and Shays variety. Sorry fellow lefties, but your precious little impeachment is bullshit. Get over it.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Dreams by Fleetwood Mac
* Tommy From the Eighties by Beach Slang
* Carrot Rope by Pavement
* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads
* U-Mass by the Pixies
* The Big Payback by James Brown
* Her Own Heart by Hatchie
* Policy of Truth by Depeche Mode
The left has poured so much of their identity into apposing Trump for the very sake of apposing Trump that they've lost all touch with reality. Their entire identity has become as defined by this moronic ass-wipe as his unblinking supporters. The Resistance has become a mirror image of what they despise, a pack of hyperventilating paranoid deplorables who have lost themselves 5 miles up their own asshole after crashing the Hybrid in their own fucking shit. They're a bunch of inconsolable babies and they desperately need a good slap on the ass to clear their throats.
This isn't to say I'm defending Trump. Not by a long shot. If it were up to me, he'd be in shackles at the Hague, answering for the cold-blooded murder of little Nora al-Awlaki and his putrid children's concentration camps on the border. Trump can burn in hell. What I hate is this Ukrainegate nonsense. Just like Russiagate, it's little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and second-hand gossip being trafficked by the only class of people more deplorable than Trump. What's worse is that the entire spectacle is so obviously a complete and total farce designed to self-destruct just in time for that other complete and total farce known as the 2020 Election.
The Democrats know full well that this media circus will die on the vine once it reaches the GOP packed Senate, but they also know that it will drive the campaign conversation away from anything mildly resembling the radical change that their loverboys Joe Biden and Mayor Pete have zero intention of delivering on, while keeping the irate electorate distracted by empty partisan shit-slinging. This suits Trump just fine as well. He gets to play the anti-authoritarian martyr that Middle America relates too, even while he robs them blind and sends their sons and daughters to die in a dusty oilfield.
As for the facts, I've been looking and they're few and far between. It certainly appears that Trump was conducting something sleazy in Ukraine but, for all the bitching about our president's conspiracy theories, that is essentially that what the foundation of Trump's accuser's arguments amount to, a colossal labyrinth of state sponsored conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory that Russia interfered with our elections in any meaningful way based on the accusations of our notoriously corrupt intelligence community, who continues to deny the American people access to their sources. The conspiracy theory that Russia is at war with Ukraine, rather than simply providing aid to ethnic Russian rebels defending their independence. The conspiracy theory that Ukraine itself is anything but a glorified NATO rump state governed very poorly by a grab-bag of neoliberal banksters and openly Russophobic neo-Nazis.
This has been the corn in the gigantic shit that Adam Schiff's squad of disgruntled spooks has pushed out on congress over the last few weeks, and these are the people trying to convince us that they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Trump committed impeachable offenses. Pardon me all over the place for being less than convinced by a group of people who are clearly as divorced from reality as the president we both despise. Who am I supposed to believe, the scumbag or the scumbag? Maybe I should just plead the Fifth.
This problem is bigger than Trump though. The biggest problem lies in the fallacy of the system itself. Our bespectacled law professors pontificate on high from their ivory towers about the existential threat to our democracy, but what democracy? The little man in the White House didn't even win the popular vote and the Articles of Impeachment written by our Founding Fathers are left so vague that you could make a half-decent argument that the Donald's comb-over constitutes an impeachable offense. The truth is, that every president since at least Wilson has been guilty as sin of high crimes and misdemeanors and the earlier ones are guilty of far worse.
Funny how these stately constitutionalists don't seem to possess the same moral outrage towards Thomas Jefferson's rape of his child property as they do for Trump's quid pro quo. Noam Chomsky accurately pointed out that every single man who's ever occupied the Oval Office would be hanged if held to the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunals. Why only draw the line with Trump? And why do so without the democratic cache of a popular referendum? Will Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi really be a step in the right direction? Or is this really about those missiles Mr. Schiff wants to unload on Ukraine for his sponsors in the military industrial complex?
This country needs more than an impeachment, dearest motherfuckers. It needs democracy, real fucking democracy of the direct and Bookchinite variety, and I don't think we'll get it with anything less than a revolution, a real fucking revolution of the proletariat and Shays variety. Sorry fellow lefties, but your precious little impeachment is bullshit. Get over it.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Dreams by Fleetwood Mac
* Tommy From the Eighties by Beach Slang
* Carrot Rope by Pavement
* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads
* U-Mass by the Pixies
* The Big Payback by James Brown
* Her Own Heart by Hatchie
* Policy of Truth by Depeche Mode
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard and the Slow Death of the Democratic Delusion
As a practice, I despise both major parties with a passion usually reserved for religious zealotry. But I'm not ashamed, even as a lifelong leftist, to admit that I hate the Democrats most of all. In fact, it's precisely because I'm a leftist that I hate the Democrats most of all. The only thing worse than a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires is a racist horde of war hungry zillionaires who try to pass them selves off as the high handed voice of egalitarianism. It's like having Strom Thurmond throw on a Rasta wig and wax poetic about how he understands why the n*ggers feel cold and the slum's got so much soul (compliments to Jello Biafra). It doesn't exactly make me feel better that I use to be a member of that limp-wristed blackface fraternity.
But it was 2008, the scoundrels of the Bush junta were on their way out the revolving door to cushy no-show jobs in the defense industry and there was one candidate left in that party that I still believed in, and I'm not talking about Joe Lieberman's designated black dauphin. Dennis Kucinich was the last of a dying breed. He seemed to have stepped out from a different era, like the long lost munchkin lovechild of George McGovern and Joan Baez. He didn't just want peace, he wanted revenge against the war machine; 50% cuts in defense spending, shuttering all foreign bases, Nuremberg Tribunals for the retreating Bush junta. He didn't have a chance in hell and I didn't give a shit. He was on a crusade that was bigger than any election, and I was willing to swallow my vomit and leave the Green Party to join him.
I look at the ten clown car pileup that is the 2020 Democratic primaries and there is no Dennis Kucinich to be found. Just a multicultural graveyard of hyper-statist partisan corpses. For five fucking minutes we had Mike Gravel's beautiful crusty old ass, but the glorified carnies who rig the debates quickly erased all signs of his existence until his shallow well ran dry. What we have now is a contest largely between two separate but equally deceptive cliques of creeps. The "Moderates" or, as I call them, the Obama Revivalists, and the "Revolutionaries" who are really little more than blood and butter social democrats (to quote the late Dr. Thompson, "You people voted for Humphrey... and you killed Jesus!)
The Obama Revivalists have to be the most comically delusional conglomeration of convoluted cunts since Obama himself sold half my generation on an 8 year extension of the Bush regime with Hopelandic gobbledygook lifted straight from a Chicken Noodle Soup paperback he found at the airport. The basic pitch of these neoliberal imbeciles, who only the Clinton News Network would have the gal to call "Realists", can be summed up by Cher's tattooed ass on a battleship, 'If we could just turn back time. If we could just find a way...' They seem to all suffer under the grand-mal delusion that all of America's woes began in February 2017, and just 8 more years of Obama (or 24 of Bush) can cure the American Empire of an authoritarian collapse that has been a longtime coming. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom. Voting for one of these mass media approved Obama Revivalists would be the equivalent of treating a brain tumor with a shotgun blow to the head.
Until very recently, the leader of this pack was Joe Biden, quite possibly the only human being with half a pulse who's more corrupt than the woman who softballed Trump the keys to the White House in the first place. Joe Biden is also incredibly the one candidate, aside from maybe that crypto-fascist Muppet, Michael Bloomberg (you know him from his commercials, where he struggles gallantly to suck his own balls), who might actually be worse than Orange-Man-Bad himself. This toxic sarcophagus has spent more than half a century proving that he is every bit as sexist, racist and homophobic as Trump and at least three times as violent. His grubby finger prints are all over at least four of America's smoldering forever wars and Grandpa Munster's appetite for destruction is still Cracker Barrel hardy. All I can say, speaking as a hypochondriac who's lost three out of four grandparents to dementia, is thank god for Alzheimer's. If Biden hadn't finally lost his remaining crackers on his third sojourn to Pennsylvania Avenue, we might be staring down the barrel of what a Hillary Clinton White House might look like with a shorter shriveled man-clit.
Unfortunately for mankind, the Obama Revivalists still have Mayor Pete in their back pocket, another token minority wind-up doll full of half-baked meaningless innuendo and absolutely zero concrete policy positions whatsoever. This seems to be the Democrats new ace in the hole. They can't sell mild mannered Republicans with black friends like the Clinton's and Amy Klobuchar as Democrats anymore, so they give woke young people the opportunity to vote for the first name-a-minority for president, so they can pat themselves on the back for being progressive, even when they're essentially just voting for Humphrey with butt-stuff. Speaking as a queer anarchist, I don't particularly want to see any of my people in the White House, and I sure as fuck don't want the first one to be a trigger happy Wall Street sock puppet. I now know why the caged Cornel West sings. But I wasn't raised on R&B, so I'll be howling like Courtney fucking Love on a bender if that little police state twink wins.
This leaves us with the so called "Revolutionaries", led by the mighty morphing Menshevik, Bernie Sanders. And I can't think of a better example of why you should never trust a social democrat, aside from Red Rosa's mangled corpse, than old Bernie. For starters, as the asshole has finally fessed up himself, this is not a man who comes from the Norman Thomas/Eugene Debs school of socialism. Bernie is LBJ with a bris. In addition to his audacious social welfare schemes, Bernie has also supported every war crime ever committed by a Democratic president, from Slick Willie's scandal diverting NATO ransacking of the Slavic world's last functioning social democracy in Yugoslavia, to Obama and Hillary's insane campaign to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi with Surge-hardened Jihadists, which led to the collapse of half a fucking continent. This isn't so much because Bernie is pro-war, but rather, like most social democrats, he's a team playing coward above all else. Don't be fooled by his Independent credentials. That's just a costume he puts on to ply the populists back home in Vermont. When it comes to the DNC, Bernie is Charlie fucking Hustle. His 2016 revolution was a fluke. He never had anymore intention of beating Hillary than Trump did. He was in it to herd wayward Obamaites away from third party temptation. But Bernie, like everyone else, underestimated how much sane Americans despise Hillary Clinton.
I hate Bernie but I've always had a soft spot for his supporters. The Sandernistas gave Hillary holy fucking hell every step of the way and might have even put that corpse in the White House if the Democratic Party hadn't gone out of its way to screw him at every turn; Overturned primary results, anti-Semitic disinformation, blatant charter violations, missing ballots. The only one who cheated in the 2016 circus was Hillary, and Bernie stood by like the two-bit chickenshit that he is, with his mouth shut and his hands in his pockets, while the kids who sweat blood for him got reamed like Andy Dufresne by the party he serves above all else. And then, as if that weren't enough to earn his place in hell, he takes his rightful spot at Madame Secretaries feet like a neutered Cocker Spaniel for the remainder of the election. I respect the hell out of the Sandernistas, but my respect for their fearful leader is clinically non-existent. And Elizabeth Warren is even worse. A lifelong prophet for the virtues of Reaganomics who discovered her inner leftist, just like her inner Indian, just in time for the weather to change on America's appetite for laissez-faire anal rape. The woman has no positions, only poses. Which is why most of her Paul-Krugman-meets-Walter-White progressive alchemy falls apart under even minimal water pressure.
The only wild card in this election season, the only upstart who provokes a twinge of hope in the dark heart of a bitter pessimist like me, has been the verbally ultra-violent antics of Tulsi Gabbard. Regardless of how you may feel about her checkered past, you'd have to be more comatose than Biden and Bernie not to at least get a chubby from her cold-blooded lady-in-white routine, taking the stage like Lady Snowblood to decapitate the DNC's preferred Kumbaya vibe, launching kamikaze attacks on establishment darlings like Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete. The media and their DNC mandarins have gone out of their way to smear Tulsi as having some spooky Kremlinite ulterior motive, but I'm beginning to suspect that her true loyalties remain on the other end of that debate stage.
Tulsi was the ultimate Sandernista back in 2016. She was the one member of his campaign willing to call out the Democrats for their crooked bullshit, taking a switch to that bitch Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even resigning from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC in protest to put Bernie's name forward at the 2016 National Convention, well after Bernie himself had rolled over. This time, I suspect she decided to take her Shogun-like loyalty to the next level, running herself in a desperate attempt to light a fire beneath Bernie's pussy ass and going after his major competition like Luca fucking Brasi. The bitch is a class act. I like her. I like her a lot. But she suffers under the same painful delusions as many of her fellow Sandernistas. Even if she manages to spill enough blood to get Bernie nominated, it won't change the fact that the man is a coward, and his balls belong to the DNC, who will never in a million years green-light a legit antiwar VP or Secretary of State like Tulsi or her comrades on the better half of the Squad. The best case scenario is another decade of Bush/Clinton policies obscured behind a pseudo-socialist veneer. In other words, Lenin Moreno for gringos. No thank you.
I love Tulsi, and I love the weird conglomeration of left and right wing renegades who have coalesced around her campaign even more. These freaks are my people, my dearest motherfuckers, and I wear that Tulsi 2020 bumper sticker with pride for them. But Tulsi ain't no Dennis Kucinich. Those short-lived days of bread and roses are long gone. In this toxic climate of a new Cold War, which Democrats peddle like Goldwater Girls in heat, even the parties fringe has become another tool of the establishment. I left the Democratic Party because I saw this coming back in 2016. And I recently made the strange choice to join the Libertarian Party as a quasi-Marxian syndicalist because I've come to the conclusion that the only way to change this beast is to tare it down Sinn Fein style, by any means necessary, with the bullet and the ballot box. I cock my gauge for peace as the storm clouds gather.... Bring it on. I'm ready.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedy's
* Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon
* Unsatisfied by the Replacements
* I Think That I Would Die by Hole
* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus
* Party Hard by Andrew WK
* The Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* Cheated Hearts by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young
* Common People by Pulp
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* You Don't Know What Love is (You Just Do What You're Told) by the White Stripes
* Smile Like You Mean It by the Killers
But it was 2008, the scoundrels of the Bush junta were on their way out the revolving door to cushy no-show jobs in the defense industry and there was one candidate left in that party that I still believed in, and I'm not talking about Joe Lieberman's designated black dauphin. Dennis Kucinich was the last of a dying breed. He seemed to have stepped out from a different era, like the long lost munchkin lovechild of George McGovern and Joan Baez. He didn't just want peace, he wanted revenge against the war machine; 50% cuts in defense spending, shuttering all foreign bases, Nuremberg Tribunals for the retreating Bush junta. He didn't have a chance in hell and I didn't give a shit. He was on a crusade that was bigger than any election, and I was willing to swallow my vomit and leave the Green Party to join him.
I look at the ten clown car pileup that is the 2020 Democratic primaries and there is no Dennis Kucinich to be found. Just a multicultural graveyard of hyper-statist partisan corpses. For five fucking minutes we had Mike Gravel's beautiful crusty old ass, but the glorified carnies who rig the debates quickly erased all signs of his existence until his shallow well ran dry. What we have now is a contest largely between two separate but equally deceptive cliques of creeps. The "Moderates" or, as I call them, the Obama Revivalists, and the "Revolutionaries" who are really little more than blood and butter social democrats (to quote the late Dr. Thompson, "You people voted for Humphrey... and you killed Jesus!)
The Obama Revivalists have to be the most comically delusional conglomeration of convoluted cunts since Obama himself sold half my generation on an 8 year extension of the Bush regime with Hopelandic gobbledygook lifted straight from a Chicken Noodle Soup paperback he found at the airport. The basic pitch of these neoliberal imbeciles, who only the Clinton News Network would have the gal to call "Realists", can be summed up by Cher's tattooed ass on a battleship, 'If we could just turn back time. If we could just find a way...' They seem to all suffer under the grand-mal delusion that all of America's woes began in February 2017, and just 8 more years of Obama (or 24 of Bush) can cure the American Empire of an authoritarian collapse that has been a longtime coming. Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom. Voting for one of these mass media approved Obama Revivalists would be the equivalent of treating a brain tumor with a shotgun blow to the head.
Until very recently, the leader of this pack was Joe Biden, quite possibly the only human being with half a pulse who's more corrupt than the woman who softballed Trump the keys to the White House in the first place. Joe Biden is also incredibly the one candidate, aside from maybe that crypto-fascist Muppet, Michael Bloomberg (you know him from his commercials, where he struggles gallantly to suck his own balls), who might actually be worse than Orange-Man-Bad himself. This toxic sarcophagus has spent more than half a century proving that he is every bit as sexist, racist and homophobic as Trump and at least three times as violent. His grubby finger prints are all over at least four of America's smoldering forever wars and Grandpa Munster's appetite for destruction is still Cracker Barrel hardy. All I can say, speaking as a hypochondriac who's lost three out of four grandparents to dementia, is thank god for Alzheimer's. If Biden hadn't finally lost his remaining crackers on his third sojourn to Pennsylvania Avenue, we might be staring down the barrel of what a Hillary Clinton White House might look like with a shorter shriveled man-clit.
Unfortunately for mankind, the Obama Revivalists still have Mayor Pete in their back pocket, another token minority wind-up doll full of half-baked meaningless innuendo and absolutely zero concrete policy positions whatsoever. This seems to be the Democrats new ace in the hole. They can't sell mild mannered Republicans with black friends like the Clinton's and Amy Klobuchar as Democrats anymore, so they give woke young people the opportunity to vote for the first name-a-minority for president, so they can pat themselves on the back for being progressive, even when they're essentially just voting for Humphrey with butt-stuff. Speaking as a queer anarchist, I don't particularly want to see any of my people in the White House, and I sure as fuck don't want the first one to be a trigger happy Wall Street sock puppet. I now know why the caged Cornel West sings. But I wasn't raised on R&B, so I'll be howling like Courtney fucking Love on a bender if that little police state twink wins.
This leaves us with the so called "Revolutionaries", led by the mighty morphing Menshevik, Bernie Sanders. And I can't think of a better example of why you should never trust a social democrat, aside from Red Rosa's mangled corpse, than old Bernie. For starters, as the asshole has finally fessed up himself, this is not a man who comes from the Norman Thomas/Eugene Debs school of socialism. Bernie is LBJ with a bris. In addition to his audacious social welfare schemes, Bernie has also supported every war crime ever committed by a Democratic president, from Slick Willie's scandal diverting NATO ransacking of the Slavic world's last functioning social democracy in Yugoslavia, to Obama and Hillary's insane campaign to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi with Surge-hardened Jihadists, which led to the collapse of half a fucking continent. This isn't so much because Bernie is pro-war, but rather, like most social democrats, he's a team playing coward above all else. Don't be fooled by his Independent credentials. That's just a costume he puts on to ply the populists back home in Vermont. When it comes to the DNC, Bernie is Charlie fucking Hustle. His 2016 revolution was a fluke. He never had anymore intention of beating Hillary than Trump did. He was in it to herd wayward Obamaites away from third party temptation. But Bernie, like everyone else, underestimated how much sane Americans despise Hillary Clinton.
I hate Bernie but I've always had a soft spot for his supporters. The Sandernistas gave Hillary holy fucking hell every step of the way and might have even put that corpse in the White House if the Democratic Party hadn't gone out of its way to screw him at every turn; Overturned primary results, anti-Semitic disinformation, blatant charter violations, missing ballots. The only one who cheated in the 2016 circus was Hillary, and Bernie stood by like the two-bit chickenshit that he is, with his mouth shut and his hands in his pockets, while the kids who sweat blood for him got reamed like Andy Dufresne by the party he serves above all else. And then, as if that weren't enough to earn his place in hell, he takes his rightful spot at Madame Secretaries feet like a neutered Cocker Spaniel for the remainder of the election. I respect the hell out of the Sandernistas, but my respect for their fearful leader is clinically non-existent. And Elizabeth Warren is even worse. A lifelong prophet for the virtues of Reaganomics who discovered her inner leftist, just like her inner Indian, just in time for the weather to change on America's appetite for laissez-faire anal rape. The woman has no positions, only poses. Which is why most of her Paul-Krugman-meets-Walter-White progressive alchemy falls apart under even minimal water pressure.
The only wild card in this election season, the only upstart who provokes a twinge of hope in the dark heart of a bitter pessimist like me, has been the verbally ultra-violent antics of Tulsi Gabbard. Regardless of how you may feel about her checkered past, you'd have to be more comatose than Biden and Bernie not to at least get a chubby from her cold-blooded lady-in-white routine, taking the stage like Lady Snowblood to decapitate the DNC's preferred Kumbaya vibe, launching kamikaze attacks on establishment darlings like Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete. The media and their DNC mandarins have gone out of their way to smear Tulsi as having some spooky Kremlinite ulterior motive, but I'm beginning to suspect that her true loyalties remain on the other end of that debate stage.
Tulsi was the ultimate Sandernista back in 2016. She was the one member of his campaign willing to call out the Democrats for their crooked bullshit, taking a switch to that bitch Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even resigning from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC in protest to put Bernie's name forward at the 2016 National Convention, well after Bernie himself had rolled over. This time, I suspect she decided to take her Shogun-like loyalty to the next level, running herself in a desperate attempt to light a fire beneath Bernie's pussy ass and going after his major competition like Luca fucking Brasi. The bitch is a class act. I like her. I like her a lot. But she suffers under the same painful delusions as many of her fellow Sandernistas. Even if she manages to spill enough blood to get Bernie nominated, it won't change the fact that the man is a coward, and his balls belong to the DNC, who will never in a million years green-light a legit antiwar VP or Secretary of State like Tulsi or her comrades on the better half of the Squad. The best case scenario is another decade of Bush/Clinton policies obscured behind a pseudo-socialist veneer. In other words, Lenin Moreno for gringos. No thank you.
I love Tulsi, and I love the weird conglomeration of left and right wing renegades who have coalesced around her campaign even more. These freaks are my people, my dearest motherfuckers, and I wear that Tulsi 2020 bumper sticker with pride for them. But Tulsi ain't no Dennis Kucinich. Those short-lived days of bread and roses are long gone. In this toxic climate of a new Cold War, which Democrats peddle like Goldwater Girls in heat, even the parties fringe has become another tool of the establishment. I left the Democratic Party because I saw this coming back in 2016. And I recently made the strange choice to join the Libertarian Party as a quasi-Marxian syndicalist because I've come to the conclusion that the only way to change this beast is to tare it down Sinn Fein style, by any means necessary, with the bullet and the ballot box. I cock my gauge for peace as the storm clouds gather.... Bring it on. I'm ready.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedy's
* Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon
* Unsatisfied by the Replacements
* I Think That I Would Die by Hole
* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus
* Party Hard by Andrew WK
* The Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* Cheated Hearts by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young
* Common People by Pulp
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* You Don't Know What Love is (You Just Do What You're Told) by the White Stripes
* Smile Like You Mean It by the Killers
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)