AMERIKA!: The Horror Story

 No one seems to be quite sure where this creature first lurked from. What foul crypt lays claim to the title of the beast's cradle? Most trembling fingers point towards Europe, to the land of Caligula and Vlad Tepes. In a haunted stammer they say Rome, Athens, London. But there is evidence of it's existence going back thousands of years and stretching from the peaks of the Andes to the shores of the Orient. Perhaps it has always been with us. Perhaps it clawed its way from the loins of our darkest nightmares. From the fevered visions of landless peasants who in their weakness starved and thirsted for unspeakable power. A thousand whispers screaming 'more' like a howling wind. We may never know, and if we did, we may very well wish we hadn't. But regardless of the womb of such a wicked force for human havoc, whether it gestated beneath the English thrown or nursed itself upon Vatican wine, its name stands tall and unobscured. The beast called Imperialism. It's shadow stretches across the entirety of this savage planet. But today it stands tallest, perhaps taller than it ever has before, upon the shoulders of purple mountains majesty and the graves of Wounded Knee. Today, imperialism is pronounced AMERIKA!

Empire's deadliest incarnation was born from the deeds of self-righteous wicked men. This thing that would someday colonize the earth was a colony itself. The great empires of Europe had sent their deadliest killers to the stony shores of the New World in search of treasure to plunder. They found a strange new hemisphere ripe for rape and honey. The English soon established the colonies that would serve host to a new Rome. They had no idea what evil they had unleashed. Centuries of savagery, of genocide and slavery, had created an insatiable hunger in the men who would be declared this new nation's founding fathers. They wanted more. They wanted so much more. And they weren't content to share their spoils with the Queen. They wanted their own crown. London realized that their greed had given birth to a monster more wicked than their wildest dreams. Terrified, they rushed to pull the plug on their Amerikan murder machine, but it was already too late. After attempting to hobble it's march to power by curtailing the slave trade and granting recognition to the Indian Nations still standing on it's frontier, the Founding Fathers launched a successful coup against their English overlords and declared the fitful farce a revolution. These psychopaths perverted the name of democracy much the way Rome and England had Christianity, and used its hollowed out title to justify the greatest killing spree in the history of mankind. 

Possessed by the demons of Manifest Destiny, Amerika wasted precious little time after defeating their English masters on anything remotely resembling peace. There was simply too much killing to do, too many brown bodies to throttle and mutilate with steam howling trains and cackling Gatling guns. Amerika spread like a disease from sea too shining sea, smashing anything that stood in its way. It chased the remaining European empires from its continent and slaughtered entire races of indigenous people in a holocaust that would one day inspire Hitler. But the North American continent wasn't enough. Nothing was. Once the empire had tasted flesh, its hunger became insatiable. It took the southern half of it's hemisphere with gunboats and caudillos, and cast its chains across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines where the Indian massacres continued. When given the opportunity to take Europe in the waning days of the empires that birthed it, Amerika jumped like a jackal at the opportunities afforded it by two world wars. At the end of the Second, devices capable of annihilating entire nations in seconds were constructed and dropped on the shattered shoulders of a crippled and surrendering Japanese Empire that dared to fondle our slaves in their seas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a message to the world, all your empires are now ours. The Amerikan Empire wanted to make it crystal clear. There was a new killer on the loose. No one was safe and nothing was sacred.

The last 80 years have essentially been one never-ending world war launched by a beast addicted to conquest. Bodies stacked higher than the skyscrapers they financed as Manifest Destiny went global. Bridges and dikes were demolished in Korea. A monsoon of napalm and Agent Orange drowned Indochina. Highways of death were paved across the deserts of the Persian Gulf. Bloody coups, depraved dictators, and merciless death squads proliferated at our fingertips across the darker nations of the Third World we created to feed the First. An empire unlike any the world had ever seen was unleashed, stretching its massive claws to every corner of the earth. Rome looked like Disneyworld in Washington's gargantuan midnight shadow, and we the people all became complicit in its never-ending crime spree, even as it imprisoned us as well.

All across Amerika and the other First World quisling nations where the dollar reigned supreme, a massive and impossibly elaborate prison was constructed, only it wasn't built with concrete walls, armed towers, and concertina wire. It was built with gaudy McMansions, mile-high skyscrapers, and name-brand pharmaceuticals. The people of the First World were given two choices, they could comply with the great Amerikan imperial machine and live high as a kite in gilded cages decorated with the jewels of the Third World, or we could join them in the gulags and ghettos often found within walking distance of palaces and shopping malls. We were given a choice to wake and suffer or sleep and dream. Many chose to sleep, but their slumber didn't last long. In all it's glorious bloodshed, our dear empire failed to recognize that it too was bleeding out.

Empires never last because endless expansion is simply unsustainable. Eventually every imperial beast, no matter how fearsome, comes to rely on carefully coddled colonies to run it's global ship and those very colonies have a long wicked history of devouring their hosts once they've had a taste of the gore of the good life. London, Madrid, and Lisbon were all done in by their fabulous Amerikan Frankenstein. As Amerika stretches itself razor thin trying to gobble the coming Eurasian Century in it's cradle, its own Frankensteins are beginning to feast upon its buckling limbs. Our colonial outposts in Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Ankara have become vicious little circles of despair in their own right and those circles are rapidly expanding. Meanwhile, China has taken full advantage of our greed and now stands to economically surpass us. All the gunboats in the South China Sea can't stymy the growth of this great red dragon clothed with the sun, and the gilded bars of NATO and the EU are beginning to rust. 

With an insane clown in the White House and a senile one on his way to save our delusional plutocracy, the image of exceptionalism that our master class has carefully constructed is coming undone. As the palaces burn, the ghettos expand, and the shopping malls are abandoned, the choices seem frightfully clear to any horror story buff willing to open their eyes. We can either give the monster what it wants, our very souls, and wait for nuclear Armageddon in the prison cell of the empire's attic. Or we can live to fight another day and get the fuck out of that haunted house by revolting against the imperial two-party monstrosity that built it upon Indian burial grounds, not merely at the ballot box, but in the streets paved with skulls. We must all become the Indians now and embrace the ghosts of our past to exorcise the demons that hold our future over the flames.

The choice is yours, dearest motherfuckers, but I can't be a prisoner of this imperial slasher flick anymore. If you want me, you can find me in the streets manically battling demons, yours and mine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Babies On Fire by Brian Eno

*  Piggies by the Beatles

*  God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols

*  I'm Afraid of Americans by David Bowie & Trent Reznor

*  The Land of Rape & Honey by Ministry

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  Killer In the Streets by the Raveonettes

*  Butcher Baby by the Plasmatics

*  Wake Up by Arcade Fire

*  My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) by Neil Young