Sunday, May 31, 2020

Because Imperialists Rape: Anarcha-Feminism In the Ashes of the MeToo Era

The MeToo Movement died last month. It bled out slowly as it limped to the barn. It's hard to say who the triggerman was behind the coup de grace, but it wasn't Joe Biden. That derelict beast is anything but a feminist and this wound was clearly self-inflicted. My guess is the artery was severed by Nancy Pelosi during a press conference when she uttered the appalling epitaph, "Joe Biden is Joe Biden.", officially declaring the unspoken hypocrisy that certain rapists are above the law by divine right of political convenience.

Nancy is hardly the reliable feminist herself, but at that moment she appeared to be speaking for a movement that had collectively sacrificed its conscience, in some sick ritual slaughter, to the gods of partisan lesser-evilism. One by one, the majority of this grassroots movement's leadership capitulated to these gods, responding to the testimony of their fellow survivor, Tara Reade, with a shrug at best and outright character assassination at worst. Rose McGowan seemed to stand alone again in her rage and indignation, this time abandoned by her own sisters. I feel her rage. Though this is hardly the first time the movement was ambushed by white cis-gender liberals and it probably wont be the last, I have never been more ashamed to be a feminist.

My feminism is far from orthodox. How could it be? There is nothing orthodox about me. Though my birth certificate reads male, I have long known this to be a lie. I spent the first half of my childhood happily genderless as an oblivious transgender tomboy before spending the second half shell shocked by my difference when it became undeniable during the maelstrom of a very Catholic puberty. The fear of hell chased me so deep into the closet that the splinters and spider bites became infected with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Agoraphobia.

I blamed myself for years for these ailments. After all, wasn't I asking for it? But feminism, Marxism and anarchism helped me to realize that I had been the victim of Catholic Patriarchy and led me to reject any authority capable of inflicting that kind of harm on the innocent. My complicated gender identity wasn't the only thing that made me something of an outlier among fellow feminists. My own quirky leftist values were informed by a strange homegrown recipe brewed by the Catholic Worker Movement, the Consistent Life Ethic and the agrarian Anabaptist anarchism of my Amish neighbors. I remain highly critical of abortion and the glass ceiling commercialism of many Second Wave Feminists. I also feel a close bond with my ostracized sisters in the sex industry and could never quite stomach the way elitists like Gloria Steinem patronized any woman who didn't fit their First World mold of the enlightened feminist.

Naturally, these idiosyncrasies have led me to view any mass movement with a heavier dose of skepticism than most, and MeToo was no exception. While I relished the Karma of victims using the democratic hammer of social media to turn the tables on the predators who have long used the corridors of power as camouflage for their recreational violence, I also worried that a nation still inflicted with the cancer of puritanism could use such a movement to justify it's continued sexual repression and I wasn't wrong. Though I have yet to see an obviously innocent man pilloried by this movement, I have observed its malign influence on workplace politics, where any form of sexual expression amongst the proles has been outlawed as taboo. I have also never been entirely comfortable with the trial by Twitter approach to any crime. This bodes the million dollar question of do I believe all women?

Well, I can tell you dearest motherfuckers, without a shadow of a doubt, that I believe Tara Reade for the same reasons I believe Juanita Broaddrick, Christine Blasey Ford, and Donald Trump's bevy of accusers. I believe women who accuse political predators of sexual predation because as an anarcha-feminist I know that hierarchies of any kind, be they religious, corporate, judicial, or governmental, are structures built on an architecture of exploitation. I believe Tara Reade for the same reason I would believe any credible woman who accused Ted Bundy of assaulting her, because anyone capable of murdering 40 women is more than capable of "lesser" acts of brutality. The same goes for anyone capable of 40,000 or 400,000 murders as the Bidens and the Clintons of this world are guilty of, with their casually cruel policies in the Middle East.

Do you really think that's a coincidence? That men capable of ordering drone strikes the way you or I order a fucking pizza might suffer from similar forms of sociopathic depravity in their private lives? Why do you think Jeffrey Epstein was so popular with Democrats and Republicans alike? Why do you think nearly every president from Kennedy to Reagan has nearly as many accusers as they do wars under their belts? Because Imperialists rape, in the Mekong Delta or the country club. They are predators by the very nature of their chosen careers, and you don't just turn that kind of entitled violence off when you head home from the office in the evening.

The MeToo Movement was built on the assumption that this kind of cross-over violence was partisan in nature. That only openly sexist conservatives were capable of such evil. They couldn't handle the stone cold reality that Democrats were just as capable for the same reason people can't seem to handle the reality that Democrats are war mongers too. Because nobody, not even aggressive iconoclasts like me, wants to believe that there are no good guys. But the truth is, that among the powerful, good guys will always be in the minority because power itself is the problem. Women and children and men too (and everything beyond and between) will continue to be viewed from on high as prey until that power is destroyed, not through an election or even an online movement, but through a motherfucking revolution, like the kind brewing in the streets of cities across this fine empire as we speak.

Enough is enough, dearest motherfuckers. Let that fire burn. For all of us living beneath a cruel master's knee. Fight the real enemy. Fight the powers at be.



Peace, Love, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Drunken Butterfly by Sonic Youth
*  Only Women Bleed by Alice Cooper
*  Asking For It by Hole
*  Rock n Roll Nigger by Patti Smith
*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill
*  Your Dog by Soccer Mommy
*  Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos
*  Woman is the Nigger of the World by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
*  Kool Thing by Sonic Youth
*  Fight the Power by Public Enemy

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Proudhon v. Facebook: A Mutualist Solution to Cyber Tyranny

I'm pretty sure this place use to be a democracy. Not America. Contrary to what Broadway may have told you, even our saintly Founding Fathers were little more than racist neocons in pantaloons. I'm talking about the fucking internet. The Anarchist's American Dream. A brave new world wrestled from the savages of the military industrial complex who birthed it and wilded into a stateless candy land of endless possibilities by fuzzy little daydream believers like Steve Wozniak and Richard Stallman. The place that gave us Linux and Anonymous and Napster. That land of a million possibilities where no kink was left without a chatroom and a 12 year old hacker in Ethiopia could take down the American Federal Government just for the lulz. That glorious pirate utopia of  temporary autonomous zones foretold by Hakim Bey, where only censorship was taboo and any lunatic with a Commodore could say whatever the fuck they wanted about the latest twat in the White House and the only recourse was to bitch and troll. Even a confirmed Luddite like myself couldn't help but to look upon this satanic majesty and swell with pride at the seemingly inevitable supremacy of raw chaos.

Those memories are still so fresh in my mind but they seem quite quaint now. Much like the Wild West, those bad old all-or-nothing days seem to have given way to the scourge of untrammeled crony capitalism. Social media sites which once braved the criticism of the normies and Karens of the straight world have become colossal bureaucratic monstrosities, operating in tandem with America's deep state to censor our blessed digital commons in the name of national security and combatting whatever the powers at be deem to be fake news. Facebook has taken the lead in this Orwellian jihad, unleashing a beige wave of crypto-fascist algorithms to flush out what they call "Coordinated inauthentic behavior" or CIB. In this latest purge, they have proudly published monthly reports announcing the extrajudicial destruction of some 46 pages, 91 accounts, and 2 groups, all of which we are promised with scant evidence are operations of Kremlin sponsored skullduggery. A crime that could be better summed up as being an upstart news source with views that don't support the western values of blind globalism and "humanitarian" regime change.

And so it goes, as Nick Lowe once sang, where it's goin' no one knows. But I have a bad feeling that the big Stalinesque show trials of Slavic friendly news sites like Southfront and Newsfront are just the tip of a very censorious iceberg. Since the mainstream media let their lust for ratings get an embarrassing imbecile like Trump elected, they've doubled down on the Russiagate fairy tale they tell themselves in the mirror to get to sleep every night and rained down a four year shitstorm on the hardworking muckrakers of the Fifth Estate like myself. You can't seem to so much as fart in the wrong direction on platforms like Facebook without getting a thirty day ban for one lame excuse or another. These seemingly insignificant acts of knee-jerk censorship can be devastating to little blogs like mine that have grown to depend on social media and the implied democracy it was once built on. The most tragic thing for a politically incorrect commie like me is to see my own comrades become savage little Eichmann's of the status quo and relish in this toxic culture of censorship in the name of social justice and supposedly anti-fascist deplatforming.

It has become a dreadfully common spectacle to see cliques of self-proclaimed anarchists circle the wagons and snitch out political incorrectness to the proper authorities on places like Twitter. What's worse is they seem to have convinced themselves that they are performing their anarchist duty by ratting out Nazi scum, and sure, it begins with disgusting Alt-Right creeps, who's non-existent honor I wont even attempt to defend even though I will be lynched defending their rights, but soon everyone who disagrees with the herd becomes a target and any transgression becomes an excuse to have them eliminated until we're left with anarcho-communists trolling primitivists and libertarians just to provoke a response that they can report to Big Brother.

Their excuse is that it doesn't count as censorship if it's not approved by the state, which is patently absurd. We are anarchists for Kropotkin's sake, we don't even believe in the state, which only leaves private and public governments, like the ones we form every day, to regulate human rights. If we don't selfishly uphold the principle of free speech as an anarchist principle, even for the sick cunts who hate us, then who will? It's this kind of reactionary violent mob mentality that gives anarchism a bad name. We can do better than this. If I can bare the weight of having skinheads threaten to rape me for being a transfeminist, then surely a bunch of macho Antifa street fighters can bare having their feelings hurt by MAGA morons without telling the teacher on them. Fight your own battles. Call out the cunts for being cunts. But if we become the censors of unpopular opinion, we won't be smashing the state so much as replacing it.

However, this issue is really much bigger than free speech and I'm frankly a little shocked that I seem to be the first leftist to notice. On the one hand, this is very much a labor issue in the Marxian tradition. These are multi-billion dollar companies getting filthy fucking rich off our creative labor. Nobody goes to Facebook to hang out with bougie nuevo-creepazoids like Mark Zuckerberg. We the dweebs are the keyboard laborers in this strange new economy. Not being paid is one thing, but not being afforded any sense of ownership over the means of our production and handing over total control to a faceless class of cyber-managers should piss off any self-respecting lefty worth their weight in agit-prop. And then there is the issue of property rights.

When it comes to politics, I'm all over the left hemisphere of the map, taking direction from everyone from Che Guevara to Benjamin Tucker. But when it comes to property, I tend to look to an underrated 19th Century French philosopher named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an old pen pal of Karl's who was the first bomb-chucking motherfucker to proudly proclaim himself an anarchist. Pierre was also the founding father of mutualism, a school of libertarian socialism that preaches that ownership should be based primarily on occupation or possession, over management. The idea is that if you occupy a space and work that land, then the fruits of that labor belong to you and you alone. If this space is occupied by many inhabitants, say like an apartment or a social media site, then the only democratic way to operate it is cooperatively. There can be a negotiated association fee paid for basic upkeep, which the add revenue we drive on social media platforms more than covers, but any other capitulation amounts to little more than a surrender to slumlordism and shouldn't be tolerated by any self-respecting anarchist.

In an age when more and more of our lives have become digital, the new commons exists largely online and this once promising utopia has become a dystopian company town. It was we the proletariat geeks who built the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. I say we either take them back or abandon them to the same fate as ghost towns like Myspace. Anarchists need to take a stand against all authoritarian hierarchies in our lives, not just the totalitarian regimes of Washington and Wall Street, but the ones in Silicon Valley as well. These are our spaces and censorship of one should be treated as censorship to all. Bloggers of the world unite and take over!



Peace, Love, Solidarity & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  So It Goes by Nick Lowe
*  Surface Envy by Sleater-Kinney
*  Come As You Are by Nirvana
*  Rise Above by Black Flag
*  For An Old Kentucky Anarchist by the Orphans
*  Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus by the Strokes
*  Big Ideas by LCD Soundsystem
*  Anyone Can Play Guitar by Midwife
*  Margin Walker by Fugazi
*  Thriving by Diet Cig
*  1905 by the Tallest Man On Earth


Sunday, May 17, 2020

The New New Cold War is Pretty Much the Old New Cold War

Remember when the Russians were coming? It seems like just last week Vladimir Putin was whistling the Soviet National Anthem just around every corner of main street. After the colossal clusterfuck of Hillary 2016, you couldn't swing a dead cat in a news room without hitting another crafty Kremlin conspiracy. Those shifty almond-eyed bastards were the secret sauce behind everything that gave neoliberals heartburn; MAGA, Black Lives Matter, Wikileaks, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Sasquatch, Tulsi Gabbard, Colin Kaepernick, the female orgasm. They were behind it all! Putin was everywhere, like Elvis Presley in a Mojo Nixon song, and he was always up to something new, some dastardly new conspiracy to corrupt our precious bodily fluids that only Rachel Maddow and six permanently anonymous intelligence experts could save us from. Donald Trump was constantly on the brink of impeachment for pissing on a Russian prostitute dressed as Abe Lincoln and wrapped in the Constitution or some such noise. It made sense in the moment, I swear it did! It was a new day in Imperial America, a whole new Cold War was upon us, and Adam Schiff would lead us to the promise land like a liberal Joe McCarthy on a gallant white stead.

Now, Russiagate just feels so two-thousand-and-late. Schiff has been outed by his own lazy paperwork as a libelous scumfuck just a few lies and a sex crime short of the Donald himself, and Rachel Maddow's soaring calls to action against the Kremlin menace have taken on the sea-sick patina of Alex Jones in a sporty pant suit. Even the devil himself, Vladimir Putin doesn't seem so scary anymore. So he declares himself president-for-life and has a few more American sponsored journalists tossed in the dreaded Lubyanka, what else is on? The New Cold War is old news. In post-Covid America, the New New Cold War is where it's at. Who needs those vodka-soaked Russkies when you have the Chinese! (Gong bangs in background) A super sneaky, disease spewing people who's currency is actually worth more than double-ply toilet paper, which is worth slightly more than the Dollar. Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo have hit the ground spewing with a torrential cavalcade of convoluted race-baiting accusations and innuendo about China's devilish double-dealings, from the bat labs of Wuhan to the rocks of the South China Sea, and Joe Biden and the New York Times aren't far behind them. Rather than taking the high road for once and denying this bullshit as an excuse for Trump to cover his orange ass on his derelict response to Covid-19, old grabby Joe has taken his usual route, bashing Trump in swing state commercials for not being stupid enough on China. Joe, they promise, could be way more stupid, and somehow, I don't doubt that for a second.

But as a post-tankie war nerd, I'm left scratching my head. Those cretins in the deep state put so much elbow grease into creating a narrative that the Soviet Union was rising from the grave like a red star bedazzled Babadook that they were willing to impeach one of their own just because he suggested that Vladimir Putin might not be the next Hitler. But now their willing to just roll over and let Trump have his new bone. I'd say we're probably just about thirty days from Tucker Carlson giving John Brennan a hummer on live television while he belches about Chinese hackers and our God-given right to protect the freedom of other people's seas. As best as I can explain the meticulous madness of these fucking vultures, I would suggest that my dearest motherfuckers take a closer look at the original Cold War, and you'll find that not much has really changed at all. The scapegoats have shifted but the target remains the same.

Contrary to the the Marvel sponsored Captain America mythology of the Evil Empire, the Old Cold War was never about the godless evils of communism. It didn't even really have that much to do with Russian influence, at least not empirically. Russia has always been a crafty but rickety excuse for a superpower. Truth be told, our countries own propaganda is really the only reason half the world took that tin-plated petrol state seriously to begin with. The true target always was and always will be that geostrategic phantom known as Eurasia. If you want to know what really keeps neocons and their neoliberal siblings up at night, it's the indisputable fact that a united Eurasian economy that brings together the collective power of Europe and the Orient would crush the Dollar like the toilet paper tiger it is and bury the American Century in its own dust. The moment the Eurozone can get NATO off its ass and realize that the future rises from the east, is the moment the American imperial dream dies a rather quick and anti-climactic death.

Russia has long been the target of choice for the simple reason that it's the weakest link in the chain. The motherland is the land bridge that brings two continents together, and with the advent of the October Uprising in 1917, America was giftwrapped a perfect theater for instability. The real Cold War began before the First World War had even ended, when the US and it's sundry allies sent fresh bodies from the trenches to help the Czar's death squads traumatize the newly Soviet countryside with the White Terror, and that terror never stopped. I was done with those dastardly Bolsheviks the day I read about Kronstadt, but god only knows what kind of republican experiment Lenin and his boys might have cooked up if their new nation hadn't been born in a bathtub of blood. The Russian people likely never would have welcomed another Czar in the form of Stalin, or Putin for that matter, if they weren't so damn shell-shocked by American sponsored savagery that they were desperate for any iron man with a Slavic name to save them.

Russia was the perfect enemy because they projected that air of Orthodox stoicism, even while they were crippled and hemorrhaging. But China has always been the true target, the massive competition for Europe's hand in imperial matrimony. With the worth of Russia's only cash cow, petrol, spiraling and a new depression exploding from the economic bubble that the Coronavirus burst, America has quite simply run out of time to scapegoat anything but the real deal. Steve Bannon knows it, and his imperial wonk nemesis Bill Kristol knows it too. Evil or not, those twisted fuckers know a thing or two about the deep state's long game and the long game is either China goes down or America excepts its Karmic fate as their debt ridden bitch. Either way, why should an anti-imperialist anarchist like me give a shit? They are all bloodthirsty statist scum after all.

Well, I'll tell you why. For two reasons. The first is the simple fact that I am an American and I feel it is my divine duty as an anti-authoritarian pissant to piss off and smash the authority I live beneath. I'll leave China to those cyber-punks in Hong Kong or some genderfuck Uighur with a decidedly Oriental manifesto in her burka. That's not my lane. The second reason is the basic strategic fact that as fucked up and debt ridden as it is, America is still the world's only truly unipolar superpower. China may look scary from a distance but as I pointed out above, they are a huge country who can barely handle keeping their own police state from falling to shambles beneath their own weight. China's best hope for dominance rests in partnership above competition. A Eurasian Century would be multipolar by nature and any anarchist worth a shit can tell you, Balkanize and conquer is where it's at.

So meet the New New Cold War, dearest motherfuckers, same as the Old New Cold War. Call me a contrarian cunt, but I'll be agitating for America's demise in any damn cold war. That's what I do. Now bring me Tucker Carlson. I've been waiting for an opportunity to work those tranny-bashing kidneys for long enough.


Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Chinese Rocks by Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers
*  Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who
*  Possibly by Clairo
*  No Surprises by Radiohead
*  Bang a Gong (Get it On) by T. Rex
*  Venus As a Boy by Bjork
*  Vietnamese Baby by New York Dolls
*  Iron Man by Black Sabbath
*  See No Evil by Television
*  Boris by the Melvins
*  China Girl by Iggy Pop

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Democracy 2020!: Pick Your Favorite Pussy Grabber

Good morning dearest motherfuckers, it is spring time in this the plague besotted year of our lord Satan, twenty-hundred-and-twenty, and both major party candidates for the highest office of the greatest democracy imperialism can buy are confirmed geriatric sexual predators. There exists no other way to describe the painfully hilarious absurdity of our nation's ascent into the stinky rafters of its own proverbial asshole. Webster, Oxford, Gore Vidal, and a childhood of blaxploitation cinema have failed to develop in me a drag queen's tongue sharp enough to sum up this nation's plight in the heat of the Kali Yuga better than the simple, painful, basic fact that our most cherished plutocratic ritual has been quite literally rendered to a game of Pick-Your-Favorite-Rapist. After centuries of the finest and most flowery propaganda that genocide can afford. After decades upon decades of shining cities on the hill and America, the indispensable nation, the exceptional hammer of global humanitarian benevolence, Trump vs Biden is the punch line to the sickest joke the devil ever wrote.

If Mr. Biden were simply another Clintonian pussy grabber to rival Slick Willy's orange nationalist dauphin, that would be totally within the realm of normal Beltway hypocrisy, but Biden's crimes aren't relegated simply to his sexual perversions. The man has built a lackluster career on chauvinistic patriarchal pandering, race-baiting tough-on-crime macho posturing, and almost sociopathically casual war-mongering. He blew up the Middle East, scape-goated inner city black youth, verbally scolded Anita Hill, and finger fucked anything with a vagina's hair that came within groping distance on live television, all with time to spare to cut fat checks from Raytheon and play squash with Strom Thurmond. To wrap it up like a neat severed limb, Joe Biden is Donald fucking Trump without the bronzer.

And this is the guy? Really? This. Is. The guy? After four years of exhaustive progressive plastic surgery to lift the face of a neoliberal party hapless enough to hand the White House to the dumbest human being on the fucking planet, after four years of Scandinavian posing, virtue signaling, AOC worshipping, pussy-hat wearing, pseudo-socialist "Revolution", our uber-PC saviors in the "Resistance"; a cultish clique of reverse social media trolls who will have you "deplatformed" and properly lynched for the micro-aggressive ableist bigotry of calling your fucking math homework 'stupid', have passed up a completely viable fraud like Bernie to throw their weight behind the Grand Wizard of pussy grabbing? If this wasn't real life, I could swear in sixteen languages that it was a George Carlin sketch.

The Democrats are finished. They are beyond fucked. Fucked is what they were when they blamed Putin for their failure to push Hillary down America's throat a second time. This is a whole different level of shitting the bed. Nancy Pelosi has become the Orson Wells of fecal incontinence and "Joe Biden is Joe Biden" is her Citizen Kane of filth. The only life left in the party is still childishly trying to think of ways to convince Bernie to unbreak their heart as he's relegated himself back to his natural habitat of fluffing Beltway rape-stars in a Che Guevara t-shirt. Feel that Bern and take thirty days of antibiotics. Biden's homies in the black and brown community are so desperate to avoid his gospel choir pandering that they're openly considering voting for the nativist birther who wants to ship them all back to the shithole countries he thinks they came from. Speaking as a contrarian faggot, I get it. At least the Donald will call you a spear-chucking dog-faced lesbian to your face before sexually molesting your children. Then again, Alzheimer's makes Trumps of us all.

This is the rotten fruit of lesser evilism. These are the ends that justify the means. When you cut corners and reduce your so-called democracy to a two-party shell game where any depravity is permissible as long as it's just slightly less depraved than the other guy, this is what you get. A race to the bottom of the toilet bowl where the only salvation is getting flushed. This is what happens to empires as they reach their apex. The illusions they once relied on to keep the populace docile become as scripted and perverse as a Jerry Springer sketch, and the Caligula class becomes exposed for the sick fucking animals that they've always been. Welcome to the Epstein-era of our waning empire. You best keep hording that antibacterial soap, you're gonna need a lot of it.

So that's it, dearest motherfuckers, the American dream is officially a wet nightmare. Nothing left to do but pick up a rifle and head for the courthouse, unless you wanna play Pin the Crown On the Rapist. Personally, I'd rather vote for Justin Amash or even Jesse Ventura, but lets hope it doesn't come to that.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  $10 Dollar Bill by Cop Shoot Cop
*  Lump by the Presidents of the United States of America
*  I'm Ready by Royal Trux
*  Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks
*  Kool Thing by Sonic Youth
*  Surrender by Cheap Trick
*  Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy
*  Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy
*  Good Bad Times by Hinds
* Just by Radiohead

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 7: What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Washington and Beijing?

As the smoke slowly settles on the bucolic hills of my farmland community and many others, the Coronavirus nightmare may be far from over but the worst of it appears to be in the rearview mirror of the pickup. The worst also appears to be far less horrific than the self-appointed television experts had predicted, at least in the parts of the country already skeptical of such institutions, further dredging the chasm of trust between us simpleton country folk and the metropolitan slumlords who always seem to know better. Maybe if we had taken a page from Sweden and displayed a little more trust in our citizenry...  Nah, never mind such strategically fruitless distractions. Never mind the swelling police state behind the curtain. The important thing now is who do we blame? What monster of the week do we scapegoat to keep people from asking the annoying questions about transparent democracy and honest journalism?

After a good zeitgeist rattling catastrophe, America, like all propaganda-weaned state-subsistent sheople, loves a good boogeyman to blame for a complicated mess. The right in this country, now represented by not one, but two rapists headlining both major parties thanks in part to Coronavirus, has stuck to the tried and true strategy of blaming the filthy foreigner. Clearly, bark Jurassic candidates Trump and Biden on opposing commercials, this plague was brought to us by that fearsome red dragon clothed in the sun called China. Aha! Communism, an oldie but a goodie. And these syphilitic oligarchs aren't without a grain of truth, however blunt they may have rendered it with their nursing home grade racism. This thing did creep out of a city with a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. The kind built curiously with US funding to keep up with Uncle Sam's post-anthrax lust for black death. But 'the brown guy did it!' still feels more than a little played out in this day and age, like some white suburban bluebeard in Salt Lake City wailing that the Dominican drifter is responsible for the blood on his Brigham Young sweater.

What's left of the Quixotic left after Bernie's latest screw-job has taken an admirably more thoughtful approach by laying the blame on a boogey with some actual fucking teeth; capitalism. But even their wails, that if only we had single-payer like, say China, none of this shit would have happened, falls a little bit flat. I know, I've been hanging out with too many libertarians again, drown me later, but I think the creature most responsible for this latest late-capitalist disaster is something far more ancient and complex. The errant decadence of soulless state-sanctioned crony-capitalism is but one symptom of it's malevolent presence, as is the bureaucratic industrial nightmare that has become of my old friend communism. I speak of a beast far more insidious than any one political ideology. What great poets have referred to as Moloch, Ozymandias, that rough beast which slouches towards Washington and Beijing to be born.

I speak of the rough beast who has disintegrated the earth's atmosphere and poisoned her oceans with mountains of plastic. I speak of the rough beast who created borders and prisons to contain the poor, and shitty trade deals and global banking monstrosities to free the worst ambitions of the rich. I speak of the rough beast who built a bomb that could wipe out all of mankind simply to prove it could, before unleashing its demonic fury upon another filthy foreign populace even after it had already surrendered, just to brag to the neighbors about its power. I speak of the rough beast who turned war itself into a competitive sport between industries far greater than the nations they razed. I speak of the rough beast who's death-belching smoke stacks stained the skies of Europe black while Ludd raged bravely if vainly against its twisting gears. I speak of the rough beast that brought us the progressive horrors of capitalism, communism, imperialism, globalism, and commercialism. That devious rough beast who first whispered in the savage's ear to drop his heavy spear and plant seeds in the soil that would grow property and all the genres of slavery that came with it.

The rough beast I speak of is modernism, the bane of humanities devolution that continues to be marketed as some kind of progress even as it destroys us all. The same malevolent force which has driven us from our rightful communities and into the raw isolation of the suburbs, where food only grows on box stores. We were warned, by sages on every side of an aisle reduced to two by the binary violence of the left-right paradigm. Christ, Mohammed, Marx, Malthus, Spengler, Heidegger, and Marcuse all warned us in their own languages. Lovecraft wrote stories, Blake made paintings, and the aforementioned Ginsberg, Shelley, and Yeats all wrote poems to warn us of the storm we reaped and reap we did. More current thinkers like John Zerzan, his enemy Murray Bookchin, and Kirkpatrick Sale were practically laughed out of academia for repeating such treasonous suggestions. Dear old Professor Kaczynski felt compelled to leave his hovel and speak with bombs just to be heard. But even bombs fell on deaf ears.

Will we listen now? Now that this thing has slithered out of labs and wet markets to bite us in the night. Now that the seas are rising and the soil is carcinogenic. Will we finally realize that any species that cannot evolve at the pace of its own technology is in fact inviting a kind of suicidal devolution with the same devices? Even if we do, it is woefully likely that our "solution" will only deepen the problem. A globalist disease cannot be cured by world governance. A statist disease cannot be cured by an involuntary police state dressed in the clothing of full spectrum social welfare. The only hope we have left of even surviving this battle is retreat. Retreat to localism, agrarianism, communalism, tribalism, voluntaryism and mutual aid. A return to the verdant bosom of our scarred ancestral farmlands. I peer out my window, and even as the smoke in the distance settles, the only sign of hope my senses can grasp is the sound of chirping birds. Could this really be spring?

Take care of yourselves, dearest motherfucker. And take care of each other. If you don't, no one else will. Catch you on the next wave.



Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack: Songs to Hum and Sing at the End of the Earth

*  Human Behavior by Bjork
*  Honey Bucket by the Melvins
*  The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
*  Sex Bomb by Flipper
*  The Bends by Radiohead
*  Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins
*  The Universal by Blur
*  Ohm by Yo La Tengo
*  Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
*  War Pigs by Black Sabbath
*  Cheerleader by St. Vincent
*  Violence by Grimes & i_o