Get the Fuck Out of Afghanistan!

This is the part of the horror movie where the plot collapses beneath the weight of one too many clichés. Having already gruesomely dispatched all the more promiscuous teens, the knife wielding masked psychopath has cornered the chaste final girl in an old dilapidated farmhouse. The backdoor is seemingly wide open, but instead of making an easy and sensible, if anticlimactic, escape, the bookish antagonist takes the fucking stairs to the attic, leaving her no place left to hide from the monster stalking her. You, the audience, is left beside yourself. Your mind boggles at the hackneyed rational of a supposedly sensible heroine. You're left with no other plausible response than to yell out at the silver screen, "Get the fuck out of the house!" In 2020, this is the analogy where we as Americans find ourselves. Only we are all the final girls, the masked psychopath is a seemingly unkillable war of our own creation, and the farmhouse that we refuse to escape from is the imperial crypt called Afghanistan. If you are one of the few remaining committed anti-imperialists in this country, you find yourself on the outside of this colossal mess looking in, practically begging, "Get the fuck out of Afghanistan!"

Apparently Donald Trump, one of the dumber sluts to face off with this psycho killer of an endless war, has heard our call. Though the motherfucker has been playing footsy with the idea of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and pretty much everywhere else since before he was elected, he appears to be desperate enough for a foreign policy win in the increasingly uphill 2020 election to actually, just maybe, get out of that fucking house. After a peace deal brokered with the Taliban early this year, Trump has rapidly widdled down America's military footprint in Afghanistan from 13,000 to 8,500 troops, shutting down 5 bases and moving way ahead of his own schedule.

I'm not an imbecile. I've seen far too many American intervention slasher flicks to be gullible enough to mistake the Donald for anything but a desperate and craven opportunist. His plan is to hold off a complete withdrawal until after the election while ratcheting up the Cambodian style air war on Afghan civilians and keeping 4,000 final girls in country until May, just long enough to plausibly win the election as a pseudo-peace candidate and come up with some bullshit excuse to back out of the peace deal at the last minute. But even a jaded anarchist like me can see that it can't be underestimated how truly desperate and impulsive our feckless leader has become. He's already shit the bed on COVID, and law and order just ain't selling like it did back in '68. Trump has even hinted at the possibility of pulling all the remaining troops from the Afghan death trap before the election, and a growing number of more legit isolationists in the GOP along with a few brave Democrats are making attempts to push the motherfucker to do just that. But the pathological opportunists in the Democratic leadership are going out of their way to sabotage this effort.

In the latest National Defense Authorization Act, mighty little Ilhan Omar, the last Democrat George McGovern might have recognized as an ally, attempted to introduce an amendment that would force Trump to put up or shut up and make establishing a plan for complete withdrawal from Afghanistan a top priority. I'm not shocked that it failed, but I am physically disgusted that the amendment received twice as much support from the GOP as it did among Ilhan's own damn party. This is bigger than just election year politricks. The Democrats don't need failure in Afghanistan to kick Trump's ass, even with their Weekend at Bernie's Yankee Dixiecrat candidate. They've wisely kept that rape-y old creep on ice in the basement after finally realizing that Donald can kick his own ass all by himself. No, this is part of a growing tide of Democratic warmongering. A return to the Cold War glory of the bloodthirsty Kennedy Democrats of yore, and they got two thirds of the media in their back pocket to back them up.

The Democrats have been waging open war against Donald Trump's largely empty-handed suggestions of troop withdrawals from the beginning. Korea, Germany, Syria, every time the excitable boy in chief strikes an America First pose, the media turns it into another horseshit Putin conspiracy theory and the Democrats blindly follow with legislation to keep troops in place until the deep state rubber stamps certification that confirms said withdrawal wouldn't risk the purposely vague objectives of "American interests" and those of our terror funding allies. The latest excuse for this nonsense being vomited up by none other than Joe Biden himself is the Bountygate hoopla, Quite possibly the weakest Russiagate hoax since Christopher Steele's Fifty Shades of Gold. The asinine theory that Russia offered the Taliban bounties for the scalps of American troops in Afghanistan has been thoroughly debunked by everyone from the NSA to the Pentagon, but Biden and his trigger happy friends in the supposedly liberal media just keep repeating it as if it were absolute fact, along with the suggestion that finally getting the fuck out of Afghanistan is somehow part of the fucking conspiracy.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, it was the Democrats, in their brief post-Nixon peacenik era no less, that started this horror show. A lot of people forget that the godfather of modern Wahhabi terrorism is none other than that plainspoken dove from peanut country, Jimmy Carter, who cooked up what became known to Beltway insiders as the Afghan Trap with his creepy proto-neocon sidekick, Zbigniew Brzezinski. After a communist revolution provoked unrest among Afghanistan's ancient mountain tribes, Jimmy and Zbig decided to turn the regional upheaval into a full blown civil war so as to lure the Afghan's already economically stagnant neighbors in the Soviet Union into their own private Vietnam. Under White House direction, the Saudis rounded up the mercenary psychopaths who would eventually become Al-Qaeda and we armed, trained, and organized them in Pakistan before shipping them out to the Hindu Kush to sling dope, kill Russians, and throw acid in the faces of commie coeds who dared to leave the veil at home. And the rest is horror movie history.

America's longest war didn't even begin in 2002. It began in 1978, and Democrats have played a key roll in that Himalayan bloodbath from the first drop. Guess there's no reason that should stop now. But final girls in both parties and beyond have had enough. Polls have shown that 57% of Americans support a complete withdrawal from that imperial sand trap that has claimed countless war sluts going back to Alexander the Great, and a whopping 69% of veterans want to get the fuck out of that house. This silent majority needs to make itself heard. We need to make it clear that any president who doesn't end this horror show once and for all isn't worth the paper ballots are printed on, even if that means voting third party or for no one at all. Our votes are for sale, and the price is endless war. Pay up or fuck off.

We can't afford to mince words on this one, dearest motherfuckers. Join me in the theater of democracy shouting "Get the Fuck Out of Afghanistan!" at the top of our lungs. Enough is enough and I've had it. Haven't you?

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.

*  Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

*  Under the Table by Fiona Apple

*  Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

*  Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

*  Time After Time by Iron & Wine

*  Last Caress by the Misfits

*  Give Peace a Chance by the Plastic Ono Band

*  Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Hey Joe by Patti Smith

*  If I Had an Exorcism by the Melvins

Our Enemy, Law and Order

Law and order. Just the sound of those three words sets my teeth on edge. Together they form a verbal menage a trois that quite possibly amounts to the three ugliest words in the English lexicon. It brings to mind dreadful images of everything my wild anarchist heart reviles. It conjures up everything I despise, everything I've sworn to die fighting. Law and order is rules and hierarchies and boundaries. It's borders and courts and prisons packed full of shackled renegades. It's cops and judges and prosecutors and priests and ties and condoms and dental dams and neatly pressed uniforms and carefully gendered haircuts and Kamala fucking Harris. It's schools full of well behaved children, television sets governed by the paternal censorship of weaponized banality, bedrooms free from the glories of sin. It's clean streets, carcinogenic manicured lawns, and jackbooted PTA's slut shaming bouffant haired single mothers. It's that motherfucker who coughs real fucking loud at the IHOP when you try to light a cigarette at 3 in the goddamn mourning. It's that shrill church lady that gives you the stanky eyeball at the bus stop when you're trying to lez out with your girlfriend. In a sentence, law and order is fascism, American style, and it's where that human landmine, Donald Trump, finally found his fucking groove.

Took him long enough. For the past three years and change, The Donald has been the flatulent leader of an administration who couldn't shoot straight, a disheveled coalition of bickering swamp critters struggling to stand on an oil slick of their own greasy shit, and I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I've rather enjoyed the shitshow. After eight years of Barack Obama masterfully pimping out the rusty old Sherman tank of our satanic military industrial complex as a tool for totalitarian humanitarianism and waxing sociopathic about the imperial duty to protect like a milk chocolate Ted Bundy in dad jeans at an international auto show, it's been a nice change of pace to see our dreaded Donald rip off that mask of sanity while he maniacally debases himself like Multiple Migs on a bender. But all bad things turn lethal to those who wait, and Orange-Man-Bad appears to have finally truly broken bad with his post-George Floyd Nixonian revivals, like that gunpowder and Vaseline bacchanalia at Mount Rushmore. 

According to the Donald and his desperate fan club on every nursing home's favorite news hole, Fox, we live in grave and dire times of epic chaos and proletarian lawlessness. Dangerously under policed minorities and their anarchist acolytes (Hi!) stalk the streets looking for old white ladies to molest and statues to desecrate. We're just about three seconds and a forty ounce away from burning down your local church or worse, the Chick-Fil-A. These new Nixonians have made a particularly lively field day out of a recent rash of violent street crimes hitting black neighborhoods in cities like Chicago and Atlanta. "This is what happens!" they screech piously as they beat their Bibles like leather-bound cocks, "This is what happens when you even think about defunding the police! This is what happens in a world without law and order!!"  

Well, on that note, please allow me a moment to clear my throat. No, you cane-shaking Archie Bunker bigots, this is not what happens when poor people refuse to kick up to your darling muscle-bound lover-boys in that vaunted shake-down society known as the police. This is what fucking happens when poor people can't breath beneath the weight of a regime that is threatening the world with nuclear apocalypse and environmental devastation. This is what happens in a country that allows a plague to ravage just enough of the proletariat to scare the rest of us into gleefully complying with a quarantine police state that pushes us all to the brink of poverty and agoraphobic insanity. This is exactly what happens when law and order is let loose on the poor like a rabid dog at a Christmas feast. Of coarse people are going to get violent. They're going to get reckless and hurt themselves and their communities because they've been rendered nihilistic and powerless to hurt anyone who really deserves it. We've seen this very special episode of Amerikkka before. This shit ain't new, it's just a re-run of the last days of rage.

We saw this shit under the original Nixon regime. Karl Marx once said that violence is the midwife of any society pregnant with a new one. I would argue that this kind of tragic poor-on-poor people violence is the miscarried afterbirth of any desperate society denied a new one. America came very close to a real revolution back in the late sixties and early seventies. Revolutionary consciousness, the kind that provides the raw critical mass for a spontaneous uprising to gestate into a popular revolution, became so loud that you could hear it roar from the acid orgies of the Haight to the police riots of post-DNC Chicago. Members of organizations like the Weather Underground could blow up the Capitol, bust out Timothy Leary, and live quite openly among the houseboat dwelling faggots of the San Francisco Bay, knowing full well that anyone who ever wanted to get invited to another happening again wouldn't dare rat them out. America was woke, dangerously woke. So woke that fugitives and convicts became bigger than most rock stars. Every cop's daughter had a Free Huey poster on her wall. And then it all came crashing down.

Nixon and Hoover and Cointelpro and CHAOS and Helter Skelter came crashing down. The kids had dared to defy their imperial curfew in the sixties, and in the seventies, the hounds were let loose. What followed was two decades of the kind of hopeless violence used by counter-revolutionary creatures like Trump's opponent, Joe Biden, to build the current police state that the George Floyd Uprisings fearlessly challenged. Without the cataclysmic catharsis of revolution, there was nothing left but empty nihilism for people desperate to be heard to resort to, and this desperate crime wave  was exploited by the powers who made this sordid end inevitable by doubling down on a failed society with law and order. 

Contrary to popular fiction, poor people aren't anymore violent than anybody else in this empire. The rich just export their lust for blood to the ghettos and the Third World. While pissed off black kids set their tenements on fire in 1968, the grey-flannel Eisenhower class enjoyed a stiff highball while they watched the rotten fruit of their campaign donations ripen on the napalm soaked streets of Da Nang from the comfort of their suburban living rooms. Upper-middle-class Trump and Biden supporters don't have to spray their quiet street corners with bullets when they can afford to pay the police state to do it for them at home and abroad. This is how America's market place of perpetual violence sustains itself.

I know this is politically incorrect, what else is new, but oppressed people have every right to their rage. It's the only logical response to an age of imperial madness. But in order for this rage to reward us with anything but convenient excuses for more American style fascism, we need to stay focused. We need to unite beneath our common banner of post-colonial poverty and not allow the Donald Trumps, Joe Bidens and Dick Nixons of this world to divide us along any color lines, be they black and white, or red and blue. Poor people who seek absolute liberty must unite against our common enemy, that bastard lie called law and order, for this is the true source of all our violent turmoil. First justice, then peace.

Justice, Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  All the Rage Back Home by Interpol

*  Harper Valley P.T.A. by Jeannie C. Riley

*  Kiss With a Fist by Florence and the Machine

*  Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones

*  Ray of Sunshine by Go Sailor

*  For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield

*  Sabotage by Beastie Boys

*  Easier Said by Sunflower Bean

*  Police On My Back by The Clash

*  Where To Start by Bully

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

Antifa Punks and Boogaloo Bois: A Tale of Two Scapegoats

It was the kind of story that always seems to fly just beneath the radar. You probably missed it. I nearly did. Somewhere between the Pride parades and the Fourth of July, while the country was busy hyperventilating over the latest Coronavirus spike and I was busy scrubbing the glitter and gunpowder from my crack, a memo from Attorney General and Melvin Purvis impersonator William Barr was published by those fine parasites at the Washington Post. In this memo, Barr directed the Justice Department to form a task force devoted to combating the vague scourge of "Anti-Government Extremists." The task force was to be led by a junta of state attorneys and would gather information on individuals and organizations deemed to be a threat by the same Attorney General who brought us Ruby Ridge. 

This information would then be shared with a wider junta of local Floyd stranglers in order to help those heroes in blue to better combat the amorphous boogeyman known as the anti-government extremist, a species that could easily include anyone and everyone from Black Lives Matter to your local Mennonite co-op. The language of this thing sent shivers down my spine. To a subcultural history fiend like myself it was hard to ignore the similarities between the language of Barr's witch-hunt memo and the Nixonian double-speak of J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro, the notorious FBI pogrom that worked with local law enforcement to combat the similarly vague threats to democracy posed by the likes of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party. Cointelpro began as a filthy little memo that ended in a veritable dirty war waged by glorified death squads with badges, stoking violence between competing radicals and assassinating them themselves when poison pen letters failed to produce the desired body count. With Trump's law and order jihad in fool bloom, I fear that we could very well be ramping up to a bloody sequel to J. Edna's love letter to the Third Reich, and anti-government extremists like myself could easily find our smoked and shimmering ass-cracks in the crosshairs.

The most novel thing about this underreported scoop, aside from its creepy parallels to one of the federal government's darker chapters, was the fact that only two movements were singled out by Barr's memo, and both were movements that I had personally held rather low opinions of until recent events led me to reconsider what I thought I knew about them, the seemingly diametrically apposed leftists of Antifa and the conservative Boogaloo Bois. Both groups have been roundly vilified by mainstream commentators on both sides of the aisle rendering them convenient scapegoats in partisan food fights. According to Fox News, Antifa is a bloodthirsty pirate army second only to Black Lives Matter in their pathological hatred for the nuclear family and traditional democratic values. And according to Roger Ailes' neo-McCarthyite doppelgangers over at CNN and MSNBC, Boogaloo represents pretty much the same damn thing. The ironic thing is that, once again, in their downright flamboyant ignorance, they're both kind of right, but my own ignorance needed to be confronted before I could see the revolution for the mob.

My bigotry towards the Antifa movement has been building for years and comes from my own personal interactions with some of its lesser partisans online. I have always considered myself to be devoutly antifascist and antiracist. I despise bigotry of all kinds and, as a trans person in a Trump Country hicktown, I've been given a front row seat to just how hideous preconceived notions can be. But that hasn't stopped me from forming ill-informed preconceived notions of my own. Antifa likes to trace its roots back to the street fights of Weimar Germany, but the reality is that their shallow roots lead largely to the same Hardcore Punk scene that offered me a soundtrack to my own rebellious youth.

In the late Seventies and Eighties, punk kids grew tired of having neo-Nazi lunkheads invade their spaces so they could beat the shit out of anyone they could ambush and outnumber. So their victims formed their own street fighting paramilitary operations to confront these bullies and defend those who couldn't. But what began as a movement for collective self-defense quickly devolved into the same kind of macho violence they had originally sought to confront. Soon Antifa gangs were gathering pissed off white boys from the same testosterone kiddy pool as the White Power Movement and mirroring their squadist invasion tactics by attacking Nazi punks at their own venues, creating a veritable cottage industry for toxic masculinity in cities across the Heartland and the Pacific-Northwest.

That being said, all of this mayhem was no skin off my ass. Jock on jock violence seemed like a pretty victimless crime to me. That changed when Antifa began to develop into a movement dedicated to combating perceived political incorrectness on campuses and social media sites. Before this, my only major beef with the movement was that they wasted their energy on small fish in countercultural skinhead ghettos while fascism thrived unchallenged in America's rapidly expanding police-warfare state, but soon this very criticism made me a target of Antifa's cultish online trolls who hold the dogmatic belief that all those who appose or even simply criticize Antifa are automatically fascists themselves.

I've had cis-hetero white boys bash me for my perceived lack of wokeness until they realized that I was one of the minorities they supposedly and paternally protect, at which point I was subjected to the even more insulting 'You-poor-baby' treatment, as if having libertarian leanings within my gender identity rendered me to automatic victim status and only their strong tattooed arms could save me. These experiences were sickening and demeaning and led me to cast off the whole Antifa lot as a bunch of disingenuous poseurs serving the status quo by acting as its shock troops against Alt-Right shock jocks and principled free speech absolutists alike, and I don't believe that leftists like myself and, more recently, Noam Chomsky were wrong to make this conclusion, but George Floyd changed everything.

After that televised lynching I became shocked to witness members of Antifa putting their bricks where their mouths were and finally unleashing some of that apish machismo on the real source of fascism in this country. Sure Antifa had tussled with cops before but this was different. The cops would throttle peaceful protestors by day and Antifa would hold them accountable by night, smashing their tax funded toys and burning down their clubhouses. It was during this upheaval that I began to receive a trickle of support from Antifa members for my own screeds in defense of the George Floyd Uprisings. We still exchanged words on issues like free speech and the Non-Aggression Principle, but their was no longer any argument on the fact that we were both on the same side. It was also during this time of turbulence that I came to a startlingly similar conclusion about William Barr's other scapegoats, the much loathed Boogaloo Bois. 

Like most of America, I knew virtually nothing about Boogaloo other than the mainstream media's narrative that painted them variously as either armed Alt-Right race warriors or some kind of revival of the Nineties Militia Movement. While the Alt-Right grossed me out and bored me to tears with their childish shock tactics, I've long carried the same sympathies for the Militia Movement held by fellow left-wing iconoclasts like Alex Cockburn and Gore Vidal, and unlike most of my fellow millennial leftists, my militantly idiosyncratic views have developed me a following among weirdos on both the right as well as the left. So I decided to go straight to the horse's mouth and figure these armed lunatics out for myself. I sent a simple message out on Twitter, asking my more conservative followers to explain the Boogaloo to me. Was this a race war thing or just armed hillbilly cosplay? The response frankly shocked me. A few dozen reposts later, I found myself a left-wing T-Grrrrl engaged in a 48 hour long viral conversation with several hundred self-proclaimed Boogaloo Bois and their sympathizers. The cross section I encountered was unsurprisingly concerned first and foremost with gun rights and then, in a close second, with combatting the expanding police state in this country, the same menace Antifa has been battling in the streets and I've been battling on my blog.  

The Boogs I encountered were militantly non-partisan and tended to lean toward the Ron Paul wing of the Libertarian Movement, but not one of them, not a single solitary troll in the racial cesspool of social media, endorsed a race war or any form of bigotry whatsoever. In fact, the number one butt of their jokes seemed to be the well publicized handful of white nationalists who ham-fistedly attempted to infiltrate and co-opt the movement. What struck me most about these well-armed bros, and I'm sure this sentence will piss off quite literally everyone, was how similar they were to the Antifa punks I've encountered. Both movements are comprised largely of middle class white males who were sick of the empty promises of both major parties and their corporate handlers and sought to take matters in their own hands to create a far less authoritarian society by any means necessary. Both groups had their flaws and their differences, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I seem to have far more in common with the gun-toting free speech absolutists in the Boogaloo set, but both movements serve as a much needed decentralized threat to the status quo of the state, and this, along with the fact that both groups also ally themselves with the more radical aims of Black Lives Matter, is precisely why the Trump Administration seeks to hang them both from the same noose.

My suggestion is détente, not just between Antifa punks and Boogaloo Bois, but between all radicals who agree to appose bigotry of all kinds while prioritizing the destruction of it's source in the American police-warfare state. We can agree to disagree on pretty much everything else but we need to stand united against the enemy that now quite openly seeks all of our destruction. The original Cointelpro succeeded because it managed to pit a wide variety of radicals against each other, from Black nationalists to white Maoists. If us "Anti-Government Extremists" are going to survive round two, we must learn from their mistakes and stand united against our common foe, the fascist regime of the American Empire. 

Think about it, dearest motherfuckers. It could be groovy.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  Tommy In The 80s by Beach Slang

*  Surrender by Cheap Trick

*  The American Ruse by the MC5

*  No One Else by Weezer

*  Left of the Dial by the Replacements

*  Pinhead by the Ramones

*  Sequestered In Memphis by the Hold Steady

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello

*  Surface Envy by Sleater-Kinney

The Stonewall Blues (Still Dreaming of a Queer Nation)

I should be such a happy Queer, shouldn't I? At least that's what I'm told. After all, aren't all the other Queer folks just so goddamn happy? The ones on TV certainly appear to be, and even the ones I know seem to agree that shit's getting better and I suppose in many respects it is. Then why do I find myself feeling like a genderfuck Charlie Brown every July, once the parades have gone home? This year's Pride Month seemed particularly festive, even with the much hyped specter of COVID lurking just behind every glory hole. After all, 2020 marked the 5th year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to essentially legalize gay marriage across all 50 states and the 5th year anniversary of the Democrats pretending they were for it all along. It also marked another landmark decision from the Supreme Court this year to recognize that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually applies to us. Yet, whenever people ask me about these winds of change, my response always leaves them flummoxed and disjointed, like they expect me to slap my hands together like an excited seal and my refusal to perform as expected makes me jaded, ungrateful, contrarian, and a bunch of other adjectives which give people a very PC way to accuse me of being a bad Queer. 

So what do I tell them? Do I tell them that I resent going to a bunch of cis-het 1 percenters in robes, hat in hand, to beg for rights that I feel they have no right to grant or deny? Do I reiterate again what it means to be a Queer anarchist and a minority at the mercy of the same people who got rich at Wall Street law firms while my people were nearly wiped out by a plague nobody straight but Liz Taylor could be bothered to give a fuck about? Do I tell them that the plaintiffs in this latest Supreme Court case were all Queer people who managed to pass for long enough to get hired before getting fired? Do I tell them that out gender non-conforming Queers such as myself never even get through the front door? That we get denied job after job after job for totally legal but conveniently non-specified reasons? Reasons we all know without ever being said? Do I really have to point out that this is the reason that nearly sixty years after the original Civil Right's Act, black and brown people are still grossly unemployed and underpaid? Do I have to explain to them that no top-down legal system can ever equalize the playing field between labor and management? That we require radical trade unions and general strikes to make shit like that happen? Do I explain to them the ideas of Rudolf Rocker before or after the theory of Judith Butler? Do I inform them that state marriage is a patriarchal and puritanical relic with its roots in conjugal subjugation? Do I tell them that Queer people have been engaged in various forms of marriage forever without ever seeking the approval of the state that went out of its way to outlaw our existence before adopting us as some kind of  domesticated mascot for the neoliberal experiment? Do I explain to them that there are forms of Queer love far too radical for any state to ever even be capable of recognizing? Do I tell them that I'm far more concerned with poor transwomen of color being raped and tortured in the guts of the prison industrial complex that's more powerful than ever than a few glorified photo-ops for white gender conforming upper-middle class Queers to enjoy? I could tell them all those things and more, and I suppose I just did, but it would still be beside the point. The real reason for my yearly post-Pride malaise would still remain obscured.

I suppose that the best way to explain where I'm coming from is to explain that there are essentially two major schools of civil rights activism, the Martin Luther King kind, seeking social justice by peacefully reforming a devilish system and integrating its past victims to the society that had refused them equality, and the Malcolm X brand of civil rights, that realizes that the system itself has always been the problem and that integration into such a system is a form of cultural assimilation which erases proud traditions of resistance to its subjugation. You could apply these two schools of thought to nearly any civil rights struggle, and I'm sure that it will surprise exactly zero of my dearest motherfuckers that this faggot has always been a little more Malcolm X than MLK. It's not that I have anything against Doctor King. Allah knows Malcolm himself respected the shit out of the motherfucker, even when he was pissing him off. But the hard knocks reality is that some of us choose not to play nice with the master class but a lot of us never really had that option to begin with. Malcolm was triple fucked, not just Black, but a Muslim and an ex-con to boot. He had no White Jesus to cuddle with, to keep the bigots chill. He only had two hard fists and a fast mouth to keep him alive, and many Queers like me find ourselves in similar yet undeniably different positions. For some of us, assimilation is just not an option and it never has been.

Being part of the straight world was never an option for me. Even before I knew what Queer was I didn't pass. I grew up being treated as a horribly unwelcome presence by grown adults from a very young age. I never walked into a single classroom where I felt welcome. I was always treated as something strange and dangerous for reasons I could never comprehend. It was as if others could smell the difference on me long before any of us could put our finger on what it was. It's really little wonder looking back now that in an overwhelmingly white community my earliest friends were a half-Thai bastard crossbreed and an adopted Black hillbilly. It wasn't like we were looking for each other, but like all the adults staring at us, we knew that we were different, and that together we felt safe. I ended up looking to people of color for inspiration growing up, especially Black people. In the Nineties, the perception of Black people in rural America was that they were still dangerous but that this danger was precisely what made them so fucking cool. For an unsuccessfully closeted kid who inspired his grade school teachers to regularly convene meetings with parents on how to deal with me, watching a bunch of flashy dangerous Black people getting rich telling normal white folk to go fuck themselves was kind of inspiring. My favorite childhood hero was Dennis Rodman, who wore whatever the fuck he wanted, kicked ass on the court, and fucked the hottest chicks in town. I didn't realize it at the time, but in his own odd way, The Worm was like my first lesbian roll model. He was basically Storme DeLarverie with a slightly longer clit.

In my teens, I became enamored with the Black revolutionaries of the Sixties and Seventies. Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Fred Hampton, Kuwasi Balagoon, all fighting "the Man", freaking him out, resisting inclusion to create a better, darker, realer America from the ashes of the one they promised to burn to the ground. I was enthralled, and still struggling with my gender identity and the post traumatic stress disorder of being treated like a dangerous circus freak as a child, I was pissed off too. I shared their anger intimately. All the people they frightened looked a lot like the people who were frightened of me; the cops, the priests, the teachers. When I heard H. Rap Brown call out, "If America Doesn't come around, we're gonna burn it down!" I wanted to stand up and shout. By the time I finally realized that I was a gender non-conforming dyke trapped in a male's body, I was done with whiteness. Queer sisters like Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major showed me how to strut and veteran race-traitor Noel Ignatiev offered me a way out with his rejection of the white social construct. I never once felt like the majority of the people I grew up with and I was hellbent to make Queer my race and to make it every bit as radical as my teenage heroes made theirs. 

So what does that make me? A Queer Nationalist? In a stateless sort of way, I suppose it does, which is likely the reason why a degenerate commie dyke like me finds herself something of a fellow traveler of the stateless conservatives in the National Anarchist Movement. But I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a separatist. I may reject the poison gift of melting pot assimilation but I still have plenty of good breeder friends, some I'd go so far as to call family. And as a lifelong libidinous race mixer who's been chasing Asian and Latina cis-girls for as long as I knew they existed, the idea of any form of segregation, however voluntary, has never really sat right with me. I prefer autonomy. Something akin to the Amish, only with more glitter and some gunpowder to defend it with.

This is why Pride Month brings me down. Because I still dream of a Queer Autonomous Zone, a Bookchinite confederacy of blinking syndicalist red light republics dotting the abandoned Rust Belt towns of the Great Lakes, providing refugees, runaways and throwaways of all ages and ethnicities from across the Bible Belt and Middle America with a nation where gender and sexuality are as fluid as the water at our backs. Where you can wake up every day and ask yourself, "Who do I want to be today and how do I want to be it?" A nation where sex work is seen as both an artform and a trade to be revered and protected by guilds of proud empowered whores. Where people choose their own damn families and build their homes however the hell they want, with three mommies, three daddies and six overage foster kids, or just a couple of leather-clad daddies and a gimp on a leash out back. A nation where bathrooms are only segregated by the sex people can or can't have in them rather than the sex on some government birth certificate. A nation where discrimination is handled case by case by truly democratic trade unions as quickly as it occurs. A nation where children are treated as equals and don't have to grow up so terrified of the mysteries of their own bodies that they spend the rest of their painful lives getting even with adults through angry blog posts like this. 

That's the fucking nation I dream of, dearest motherfuckers, and it hasn't got a goddamn thing to do with America. Can Brett fucking Kavanaugh make that dream a reality? Yeah, I didn't think so. Now hand me that Molotov cocktail next to my tiara, this fucking queen has work to do.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  Oh Sweet Nothing by the Velvet Underground

*  Without You by Perfume Genius

*  Celebrity Skin by Hole

*  Lola by the Raincoats

*  Get Your Gun by Marilyn Manson

*  Wave of Mutilation by Kristen Hersh

*  Perfect Day by Lou Reed

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground