Seasonal Depression and the Fallacy of White Guilt

"And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone."

-Chief Seattle

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

-Russell Means

 Goddamn, I fucking hate November. Somehow between the pagan sugar rush of Halloween and the gold-leaf grandeur of Christmas, Satan shit out thirty days of windburned misery. My depression is a year round affair, but come November, the bitch breaks violent. Everything becomes heavy, basic daily chores become acts of contrition to a vengeful god, and all the jolly people, where do they all come from? All sins considered, it seems only natural that this awful little month should be topped off by Thanksgiving, a strange celebration of American colonialism with Type 2 Diabetes. We all know it's a racist fucking holiday, that if the Indians ever actually did share a smorgasbord of carbohydrates with the pilgrims, they paid for it with more than just indigestion. But what are we not going to scream at each other over a colossal bird stuffed with a soggy loaf of bread? That would just be silly. 

The consolation this year is that the whole damn country seems to be nearly as miserable as me for a change. America is a full blown basket case. The election that never ended never did, leaving a nation of shrieking partisan imbeciles with one more reason to mow each other down in holiday traffic. We now have two sexual predators with dementia proclaiming themselves leader of the free world and our only hope for salvation from the other. Our best hope may be that the Covid plague kills them both before anyone can bomb another hospital. Precious moments like these find me pondering the people we stole this hemisphere from and thinking out loud; Jesus Christ, we fucking deserve this.

And even in the sweet psychosis of my depression fried lizard brain, I've got a point worth making. America is essentially a colossal luxury resort built on an Indian burial ground. How can any of us feign shock that this country is haunted? There was no First Thanksgiving Dinner. Not really. Just a bunch of Colonel Kurtz-ian colonial psychopaths in buckle hats, murdering tribe after tribe and fucking their daughters before they burnt them at the stake for doing long division. And the massacres never stopped. That tsunami of blood loosed from the elevator of the Santa Maria known as Manifest Destiny swept from sea to shining sea in what is still likely the most devastating holocaust in recorded history. 

But we didn't stop with the Indians. We couldn't stop. By the time this nations native people were safely tucked into their desolate reservations, mass slaughter had become a booming global industry that defined our national character. So we just kept on killing, in the verdant jungles of the Philippines and Nicaragua, and right on to the desert hell scape of the Levant. And we seriously have to wonder why we're not happy? Because mass murder is bad for you, stupid. There's a reason most mass shootings end in suicide by cop, and now we're coming at China with a Buck Knife in our hands and Helter Skelter in our eyes, daring them to pull the trigger. But do we really deserve this? Does anyone?

In order to survive my mental illness's, I've had to learn that the hardest thing to do is forgive yourself. The United States of America is a gruesome experiment not unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. A nation built on the principles of conquest is a nation built to self-destruct, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Americans, as a people, deserve to go down with this ship. As tempting as white guilt can be to indulge in, it's no more productive than seasonal depression. The harsh truth is that our dear empire is something of an orphan factory that runs on disenfranchising everyone but the very rich.

 America was built on the graves of slaves and Indians by a population comprised largely of refugees, indentured servants, and other assorted shiftless immigrants who came to this country because it was the only one that would take them. When my people came here to flee another genocide back in Ireland, we were called "white n*ggers" and treated like animals until we could prove ourselves useful by killing other poor people. We were jumped into America like a hoodlum. We can sit around and feel guilty about this shit until next November, or we can get up off our asses and try to make things right. The closest we will ever come to achieving that goal is by joining the Indians to get revenge on the empire that fucked us both and stole this country. Custer is just another word for Cromwell.

One of my heroes, the red outlaw, Russell Means, once stated that we are all Native Americans. I don't think he meant this literally but I do believe that that is the kind of mindset pale faced revolutionaries need to adopt. We need to think like the white trash paupers who joined the slave revolts to get even with their crooked creditors or the starved settlers who fled puritanical settlements to join local Indian tribes. We are all oppressed and though that oppression may be far more heinous for some than it is for others, that doesn't mean that we don't all deserve to get even, and we can only get there together. The Bidens and Trumps of this world thrived for centuries by pitting us against each other, over differences both petty and colossal, in order to distract us from the fact that we are all Native Americans now, we have all invested our blood and heritage into this soil for better or worse, and we have our masters outnumbered. Sweet Jesus, lets make like H. Rap Brown and burn this motherfucker down already.

The late great Chief Seattle once dreamed of an America drowning in the ghosts of his people. He predicted ominously that the white man would never be alone. All I'm suggesting here, all I'm asking, is what if we're all those ghosts? What if the ultimate karma for the "white man" is that his own children turn against him and embrace the ways of his enemies? As an anarchist collapsitarian, my ideal for a post-US America isn't that far removed from what this hemisphere looked like before the colonialist psychopaths in buckle hats fucked it up. A land of many non-homogenized tribes where concepts of race and gender were as fluid as the borders. A land where the earth was sacred and there was little difference between religion and environmentalism. A land where wars were small and strictly personal and slaughter was never trivialized into an industrial complex. A land like this existed once not so long ago. Why not again? Maybe we can still do it right this time, together.

I feel a little less depressed already. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Best of You by Foo Fighters

*  We Oh We by the Hidden Cameras

*  Imagine by John Lennon

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  Cosmogony by Bjork

*  Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis

*  Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush

*  The Words That Maketh Murder by PJ Harvey

*  Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

*  Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Indigo Girls

*  Keep On Rockin' In the Free World by Neil Young

Dear Orange Man Bad: An Open Letter From the Enemy of Your Enemy

 Dear Orange Man Bad,

Well, winter is coming with a vengeance and I'm guessing that you're feeling pretty bummed. I've noticed the dayglo orange has drained from your cheeks and your once histrionic tirades have taken on all the petty melodrama of a garden variety adolescent hissy fit. And who could blame you? After months of some of the finest race baiting since Willie Horton danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, after what felt like years of a vast Soros funded conspiracy of Black lesbian Bolsheviks and fire breathing Mau Mau flag desecrators coming to put their filthy Marxist fingers all over a daughter near you, even the excitable suburban soccer moms have agreed that they'd rather spend the next four years with a disintegrating fossil like Biden than the next four minutes with you. Tough blow motherfucker! And usually that would be all I have left to say to a glorified chatroom troll getting his comeuppance but, believe it or not, the two of us have something in common and I think it might just be something worth looking into.

I know what your thinking, what could you possibly have in common with me? On paper we couldn't be more different. I'm everything you despise; a BLM supporting, Marx quoting, genderqueer anarchist dyke. I "chose" to be a woman and I don't even have a pussy to grab, just a tiny limp dick like yours and a big set of those things you gave to Bibi Netanyahu for the keys to the White House. I probably disgust you, and trust me honey, the feeling is more than mutual. As far as I can tell, you've spent your whole miserable existence failing your way to the top, burning other people's money like Marlboros just to grab another pack from the taxpayer's pocket so you can buy more gaudy crap no one on earth needs and get your rocks off next to Bill Clinton with some teenage sex slave on Jeffrey Epstein's private airline. As far as I can tell, you're all the toxic byproducts of state sponsored crony capitalism poured into one disgusting lumpy orange beanbag chair and you've generally ran the White House like a call girl service for Israel and their head-chopping peace-pals in the Persian Gulf.

But you and I do have one thing in common, however unsettling it might be for either one of us to admit. We share a common enemy. Your worst enemy. Way worse than Antifa hipsters or Muslim immigrants. They're the motherfuckers who have been aiming for your ass from the Grassy Knoll from the moment you suggested maybe getting along with Putin wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. You call them the Deep State. I just call them the Establishment, and they're the ones who screwed you out of another four beautiful glorious years of White House shenanigans. They're the ones who cooked up that casserole of hopped up nonsense called Russiagate to steer your periodically Russophilic ass back onto the Cold War straight and narrow. They're the ones who've been snitching you out every 15 seconds to the fake news, making every shart you took on a peace summit a headline before you could even change your pants. They're the real enemy, Donny boy. It's all their fault. The neocon menace that has infested both parties and got Sleepy Joe elected. But I know how to get revenge, Mr. President. I know how you can get even with those sick fucks. You may have had to sweat these creeps for the last four years but I've been after them for decades and I know their Achilles heel. I know just how to make them squeal like the little piggies they are. 

It's the wars, Donny, their beautiful precious little wars. The neocons, Biden included, love those endless fucking wars more than life itself, more than you love Big Macs and forced oral sodomy. They've put years, decades of their lives, whole careers into filling every third world nation with oil and sand to the brim with barely legal GIs trying to pay for two years of city college with PTSD. They can't get enough of those fucking wars, and you seem to love them too. You've bombed the Middle East stupid over the last four years and bankrolled every mass starvation and full blown genocide the sheiks could afford to buy in backroom deals with promised golf courses among the dunes. But I know you, Donny. I know that you are way too goddamn petty for anything resembling a coherent foreign policy, and I know that there is one thing you crave more than ill-earned money, more than undivided attention, more than your hottest daughter's sweet sweet ass, and it's revenge, and all you have to do to get it, to get even with those fuckers, is to follow through with just one goddamn campaign promise and end their stupid precious wars. End them all. 

I'm not talking about this 2,500 by Christmas chicken-noodle-bullshit. If you leave even 25 GIs in any one of those countries, Biden and his buddies will have it back up to quadruple digits by Easter, and they'll blame it on you the same way you blamed every bloodbath you committed on Obama and Bush. No, Mr. President, you have to go all the way to make this sting. You have to bring home every last soldier and not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Syria, Somalia, Kuwait, and Kyrgyzstan. You have to shut down the DMZ and abandon NATO, and for once, you have every right and power to do so as Commander In Chief. Hit the cameras and announce the great withdrawal on live television, and publicly fire any official who so much as drags their feet. Fire them all. Fire the whole goddamn Pentagon and fill it with reality TV stars and washed-up pro-athletes. Make it crystal fucking clear that every firing is for peace, to end these wars this whole goddamn country despises, and if they still resist, go over the brasses heads and command the soldiers on the ground to disobey any commanding officer who tries to keep these wars burning. Most of those grunts voted for you and even more of them are sicker of these stupid fucking wars than the rest of us.

Do this Donny and the deep state will have an epic conniption. Decades of imperial statecraft flushed down the fucking toilet with your rotten pumpkin ass on the seat. Oh, it will be glorious. They will howl and sob in despair and curse your name on every news outlet. But the people will love it. They'll love you. You'll be a goddamn rock star. You might not even have to pay for consensual pussy anymore. And you will ruin Biden's presidency in the process. His team is stacked to the clouds with weapons industry wonks and neocon thinktank parasites. They paid for their wars already and they're gonna get them. But Biden will be forced to own them completely. He will have to be the asshole to send everyone back, to break up thousands of holiday family reunions just to feed the beast and make the wars forever again. If he lives through a single term, he'll lose reelection to a cheap suit filled with gerbils, shit, he may even lose to you. But you'll never know unless you pull the plug on that war machine. I still won't vote for you. I'll keep on advocating for the destruction of the whole damn government that imprisons my people for profit. But it'll take the military industrial complex years to recover from the damage, and that fact will put an evil little smirk on both of our faces, even as we prepare to duke it out.

Think about it, Orange Man Bad. It could be a beautiful Christmas.

Yours in hate eternally,

Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

*  Faith Healer by Julien Baker

*  Glorious by Adorable

*  Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

*  Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

*  I Bet On Loosing Dogs by Mitski

*  Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

*  Fight Test by Flaming Lips

*  Untitled (How Does It Feel) by D'Angelo

Why Artsakh Still Matters to American Anarchism

 The news broke like a fever last Monday night. A deal had been signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan to end the bloody month long war in Nagorno-Karabakh which had claimed the lives of thousands on both sides. This is a good thing right? How could any peace be bad? But something felt all wrong about this one. Armenia's Prime Minister announced the deal on Facebook before adding that said deal was "unbelievably painful for me and our people." The response of those Armenian people back in Yerevan was equally pained but somewhat less somber. They rioted and stormed the buildings of their government peacemakers, demanding their resignation for treason. That's because this was not a peace deal made between equal sides on an even playing ground. It was a hostage situation with one side, Azerbaijan's side, armed to the teeth and openly backed by some of the most powerful and merciless militaries in the world, who helped that nasty little gas station threaten the impoverished Armenians to concede to the demands of their tormentors on nothing short of the pains of genocide.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region had already been affectively ethnically cleansed. It's ethnic Armenian population cut in two with 90,000 of their 150,000 citizens in exile as refugees back in mainland Armenia. Shushi, the region's second largest city, had just been captured and a Second Armenian Genocide seemed terrifyingly imminent. What's more, a major player in this bloody conflict was oddly absent from the deal. The Armenian Government was poorly represented along with the Russians who had failed miserably to defend their allies. The viciously racist regime of Azerbaijan was there with their neo-Ottoman Turkish puppet masters. But what of the Republic of Artsakh? The autonomous nation they were supposedly fighting over. They were nowhere to be found. Apparently their opinion on their own fate was irrelevant to the masters of the universe, even though it was their republic being ransacked and sold off to foreign "peacekeepers."

Most Americans had never heard the words Nagorno-Karabakh before late September. Even fewer have heard of it's proper name, Artsakh. But the mountainous dark garden, as it's Russo-Azeri name alludes to, is an ethnic Armenian exclave which has struggled gallantly to maintain their autonomy from the Ottomans and their Turkic ancestors for centuries. Like many nations in the volatile Southern Caucuses, Artsakh is a mountain stronghold that breeds warriors. It had been its own autonomous republic within the Azerbaijani autonomous republic in the Soviet Union, but had been divided from the nearby Armenian autonomous republic by none other than Joseph Stalin in the 1920's in what was rumored to be a strange attempt to curry favor with the recently de-Ottoman-ized Turkish Republic, who had just murdered 1.5 million ethnic Armenians less than a decade earlier. This cruel gift clearly failed to impress, as by the early 1960's Turkey was fully in league with NATO and helping America to spark the Cuban Missile Crisis by letting them park their nuclear-tipped Jupiter Missiles in their territory and aimed at Ivan's head. This cat and mouse game between the Russians, the Turks, and the Americans would come to define both Armenia and Artsakh's fate. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh took to the streets peacefully and voted to return to Mother Armenia. Azerbaijan responded with a brutal 6 year long war that would claim the lives of tens of thousands and lead to atrocities committed by both sides. The Russians mostly just sat on their hands as the Soviet Union continued to unravel. A ceasefire was finally brokered by the Minsk Group, a ménage of malevolent meddlers consisting of France, Russia, and the United States, and the proverbial can was kicked down the road. In the meantime, the rag-tag Armenians who had fought the militarily superior Azerbaijani's to a stand still decided to take matters in their own hands. Sick of leaving their fate up to everyone but themselves, they chose to secede from the UN recognized borders of Azerbaijan and declare independence as the Republic of Artsakh. Even Armenia failed to recognize the will of their own people, but they did continue to occupy 7 districts of Azerbaijan to keep their ethnic brethren from being completely cut off from the outside world like the Gaza Strip. The two remained close to the point of even sharing Presidents over the years. Never the less, conflicts continued to spark along those contentious borders, but nothing like what erupted this fall. 

Contrary to what many would have you believe, the latest Nagorno-Karabakh war was far from spontaneous. It was barely even a war. It could be more accurately described as a siege lain by Azerbaijan at the behest of its sponsors in Turkey, the US, and Israel for two distinct geopolitical reasons. The despotic Turkish regime of Recep Erdogan sought to continue its blood spattered campaign of Ottoman revanchism which has killed thousands from Libya to Idlib. Meanwhile, their NATO handlers back in Washington along with their partners in crime in Jerusalem quietly sought to sow discord among the populace of Armenia and Azerbaijan's southern neighbors in Iran, a sanction/Covid weakened nation which including large populations of both Azeris and Armenians. The siege began in late September, but all indications point to it being planned months if not years in advance. Under the Trump Administration, Azerbaijan's US military aid exploded from $3 million in 2017 to a whopping $100 million by 2019. These are the tools used by Baku to ethnically cleanse Artsakh in 2020, along with Turkish drones and Israeli cluster bombs, not to mention US/Turkish trained Syrian jihadists.

This wasn't a war. It was a well choreographed massacre. Whole villages were hollowed out. Ancient churches were bombed. Prisoners were tortured and journalists were targeted. It was a Yankee funded campaign to strip a proud nation of it's autonomy, and that's why this tragedy should matter to anarchists, even western anarchists like me. Artsakh wasn't punished for simply being Armenian. They were punished, including by their supposed allies, for having the gall to define their own sovereignty outside of the confines of northern colonialist constructs like the UN. A Stalinist dunce like Azerbaijan's Sultan Ilham Aliyev was able to parade around with his jihad to restore his nation's UN recognized borders while he launched a second Armenian Genocide because his totalitarian farce of a government is granted more legitimacy than the democratic will of the people of Artsakh, who now find themselves held hostage by the white saviors of another UN Peacekeeping mission. These words make me sick because they have nothing to do with peace. An occupied nation can never be at peace. Is Gaza at peace? How about the Warsaw Ghetto? Fuck your statist peace. It is a stench in the nostrils of free people everywhere. 

I took this crime personally because I am a Panarchist. A school of anarchist thought that embraces localism as a far more democratic and far less imperialistic alternative to globalist internationalism. It is my belief that secession is a basic god given human right afforded to all people, and that all people have the right to voluntarily establish their own nations anywhere as long as that right is afforded to all people. Under this understanding, Stepanakert would have as much right to declare its independence from Artsakh as Artsakh has to declare independence from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan does from Russia. Tyranny thrives on size. The more massive a system is, be it a monarchy or a liberal democracy, the less truly democratic it becomes. Which leads me to the other reason Artsakh should still matter to Americans. Artsakh is our future, for better or worse.

The Soviet Union was never the mythic "Evil Empire" dreamed up by the CIA and their friends in Hollywood. But it was a superpower built on the foundation of a popular if misguided revolution and torn asunder by a monolithic gulag-warfare state. Does that sound familiar? In the final days of the Soviet Union, this massive benevolent society began to burst at the seems with divisions of every kind imaginable- territorial, cultural, religious, linguistic, economic.... In the end it didn't simply collapse, it disintegrated into 15 sovereign states and dozens of unofficial ones. This became a massive crisis, but from an anti-statist point of view it could have just as easily become an opportunity. The only truly egalitarian societies that have ever thrived have been small autonomous movements sparked in times of great crisis- Paris, Catalonia, Chiapas, Rojava, CHOP.... These are the revolutions fought without pogroms, the ones that, for however short a period of time, managed to replace tyranny, not with more tyranny, but with hope and mutual aid.

This is how we save Artsakh. This is how we save Palestine and Yemen and Kurdistan. This is how we save ourselves. We create a million Artsakh's until their are too many embers for the massive tyrants to stomp out. We become a storm of Artsakh's, disintegrating the cowards of America, Turkey, Israel, and Russia in a vat of caustic chemical voluntarism. We stop trying to be the answer for everyone and create true solidarity by being the answer for ourselves and no one else. Armenia's reliance on massive Russia betrayed them. Can you imagine if instead they could rely on Donetsk, Luhansk, Chechnya, Dagestan, and roaming tribes of Cossacks in Russia's wild and mineral rich Siberian far east? If Turkey had to contain sultanates and confederations of Alevi, Kurds, Maoists, and Shiites? If America had to do war with sovereign citizens in New Hampshire, Mormon Fundamentalists in Arizona, and Black Nationalists in Mississippi who all formed pacts with the people we kill on the other side of the world? If all Black and Brown lives mattered or else? If Artsakh has taught us anything it is that false nationalist unity is the last thing we need in an age of division. What we need is swarm solidarity.

....And all the sultan's horses and all the czar's men couldn't put globalism back together again....  

Think About it, dearest motherfuckers. It could be a beautiful crisis.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Ode To My Family by the Cranberries

*  Soda Jerk by Buffalo Tom

*  Seal My Fate by Belly

*  Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

*  B.O.B. by Outkast

*  Sister Jack by Spoon

*  L.E.S Artistes by Santigold

*  None of Your Business by Salt-N-Pepa

*  Shitty Ballet by Bleached

Trump Has Made the Left Fucking Stupid

Donald Trump has made the American left fucking stupid. I honestly can't think of a more eloquent way to put it than that. In one of histories most vicious ironies, the greatest legacy of Orange Man Bad may be that he drop kicked his enemies IQ in half to match his own. Like a Reddit troll, the Donald dared the left to overreact and then nailed them for taking the bait. The mainstream left has never fully recovered from the Reagan Revolution. They had the opportunity to take the grass roots infrastructure of McGovern and the Antiwar Movement and pivot to its natural successor, Ralph Nader, but they chose to go another way with it instead and ended up giving the Democratic Party back to the right with the Clinton Regime. 

Your regular rank and file Democrat has never been more hysterically unhinged than they are right now on the cusp of a Biden victory. Their response to an unthinkable Trump presidency has been a binge on Russophobic Cold War paranoia and an open armed embrace of the psychotic neocons in the "Intelligence Community," who saw Trump as merely a threat to brand marketability. Your average garden variety leftist now sounds like a politically correct Joe McCarthy, out to deplatform anybody who smells like borsch and questions the omnipotence of their geriatric savior-elect. Sadly, even the far left doesn't seem too far behind the caboose of this crazy train.

We've seen this recently with the exile of two of America's last great left-wing journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, to the social media outback of Substack. Both of these gentlemen were goddamn rock stars during the Bush era and rightfully so, but after just four short years of Trump hysteria they've gone from A-list muckrakers to persona non grata for the unforgivable crime of bringing up the unpleasant fact that Russiagate was a totally baseless farce cooked up by the same clowns who sold us the Iraq War. Greenwald has gone so far as to abandon the bottomless billionaire piggy bank he helped build known as The Intercept after it's editors violated his contract and refused to publish a piece for observing another unpleasant fact, that Joe Biden's son is an errant scumfuck. The left, even the far left, have responded to this blow by shrugging and saying, "Well, he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can suck it." This is the motherfucker who helped break the biggest story since Watergate with Edward Snowden, but he talks to Tucker Carlson so he can fucking suck it.

Glenn committed the cardinal sin of damaging the shit caked name of our great grey hope to destroy the great orange menace. The far left has never closed ranks behind a lesser evil the way they have with Joe Biden. From Angela Davis to Noam Chomsky to Code Pink, they've all decided that the threat of Donald Trump is so deadly that endorsing a corrupt lifelong warmonger is the only solution. On no occasion has a candidate been coddled like that racist imbecile and now that racist imbecile is our president. They kept him on ice in some Delaware bunker for the last six months except for the off coherent day when they could afford to push him over to his adoring press corps to answer questions about ice cream flavors until he called some random ass-kisser the N-word and it was time for more Geritol. This man is clearly batshit bonkers even by post-Reagan standards and no one but those morons on Fox News will say dick about it or his crackhead trust fund brat of a son. This is a dangerous ecosystem to build a presidency on. Some might argue that it's one ripe for the very fascism it supposedly defeated.

This all becomes justifiable as long as you buy into the notion that Donald Trump is an unprecedented tyrant who has brought us all to the brink of a Fourth Reich with his Alt-Right reign. Even morally responsible leftists have chosen to throw objectivity into the wood chipper based on the notion that they're doing what they have to do to save democracy. But what has Trump done to makes him any worse than any other president? When you look at the man's few actual policies, he looks pretty fucking basic. In fact, compared to the regime he followed, you know, the one Biden was actually a part of, he looks downright mild. The Obama Administration destroyed half of Africa to overthrow Gaddafi and set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State with their scheme to kill Assad in the sequel. Obama nearly quadrupled the size of the police state currently at Trump's disposal and afforded the executive office with the ability to murder random American teenagers by remote control on command. And in spite of all of Trump's race baiting bluster, Obama and Biden out-fashed the shit out of Mr. Border-wall by deporting more undocumented immigrants than any regime in modern history.

So I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something here, but where is the goddamn fire and why did we need napalm to put it out. On every single goddamn issue, Biden matches Trump on evil and frequently doubles it. When you turn off that asshole's Twitter account, Trump looks a lot like a right-wing Jimmy Carter. Half a jackass who can't seem to shoot straight at the broadside of a barn. Speaking as an anti-imperialist who puts issues of war and peace front and center, Trump's record reads like a list of failures and even a couple half-decent decisions. He helped push Saudi Arabia's war on Shiites on the Arab Peninsula to genocidal proportions (think Jimmy on East Timor) and pointlessly pushed Iran back into sanctioned poverty to please his hyper-Zionist donors, but he belly flopped big time in our own hemisphere, making Maduro more popular than ever with his half-assed cockeyed coups and overthrowing Evo Morales just to have his party comeback with a vengeance in Bolivia's recent elections. America First was always a pose but Trump has generally resisted calls within his own administration to make things way worse everywhere in the Middle East but the West Bank. How is this the next Hitler?

You want the beef? Here it is. The establishment hates a loser. That's why they hated Carter, that's why they turned on Bush during his second term and pushed forward a superficial token agent of change with Obama, and that's why they hate Trump. Trump is embarrassing. He's an openly racist imbecile that makes our daughtering empire look like a wolfpack of inbred hillbilly cannibals. The establishment clearly prefers carefully closeted racists like Biden and Obama, who can ethnically cleanse the Rio Grande with a smile and then cover up the smell of fascism with a glorified air freshener like DACA. The only thing unprecedented about Trump was that he was never supposed to happen. The same media who pretends to hyperventilate every time that asshole cracks a fart gave his ridiculous 2016 rodeo round the clock coverage because they figured their darling Hillary was a shoe-in. They badly underestimated how toxic the Clintonian brand of globalist neoliberalism had become to Rust Belt America. They blew it. They got a practical joke elected president and now they want us to unite and turn back time to when they successfully sold us eight more years of Bush as change we can believe in.

The left has taken the bait and swallowed it whole. Nobody gives a fuck about war anymore. They just want free shit. If 2020 or 2016 had been run fairly, they would have got it with Bernie. They would have gotten another drone strike progressive White House slaughtering poor people on four continents while they kept us happy with free healthcare and affordable education. And that seems to be enough for the left in this country. A Faustian Socialism that's willing to look the other way as long as the empire doesn't bring the war home like Trump did and uses the right pronouns. This is what latter day morons like Noam Chomsky think they can push Biden into, as if that strategy has ever worked before. Anyone who interferes with this casserole of delusional fantasy can now be cast off as part of some mythical Red-Brown conspiracy to hand the White House over to Putin. And that is Trump's legacy, and Biden's as well. May god have mercy on our souls.

I know, I know, your offended. Queers like Glenn Greenwald and I were built to be seen not heard. Just ignore my latest heresy and ship me off to Bolivia. If I'm to be exiled, I'd like it to at least be to a shithole country who hasn't sold off the left half of their souls to Max Boot. Gracias.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne

*  Karma Police by Radiohead

*  Crank by Catherine Wheel

*  Game Shows Touch Our Lives by the Mountain Goats

*  What Goes One by the Velvet Underground

*  Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Norman Fucking Rockwell by Lana Del Rey

*  I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

*  In the Street by Big Star

*  Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

*  Northside by Jesse Kivel

*  (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello

Democracy as Mental Illness: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Cross 2020

 It's early November in the dark heart of my Rust Belt swing state and I am getting dangerously close to the end of a very short rope. Or maybe it's a lit fuse. Attached to a dangerously explosive skull. Either way it's burning and I find myself in desperate need of drugs. Hard drugs. Schedule IV narcotics. Name brand benzodiazepines. I'm talking Valium, Xanax, Halcion, Ativan, Klonopin, Rohypnal. The kind of Halloween candy they feed senator's wives after they've learned about the fourth underage mistress. That's the good stuff. That's my poison. Two or three weirdly shaped elephant pills and I'm fucking sailing over mountains and valleys. To some corner of this fucked up country where that incessant swarm of super PAC fueled adds can't fucking find me. That's what I need now. Where the fuck did I put my pills? Take me away, Joey Ramone. I wanna be sedated.

I haven't felt this unhinged and desperate for oblivion since the first weeks of the lockdown and that shit was kid stuff compared to the last weeks of the 2020 presidential abortion. The most important election of my life, I'm told. I've been sold that bill of goods every four years for the entirety of my short and painful life and it's beginning to ring a bit hollow. Then again, there does seem to be something extra special about this years campaign season. It's never felt more unhinged. Both sides have adopted the tactics of the Manson Family to get their chosen mentally depraved scion of scumfuckery in the White House. Scrawling their names in blood across suburban doorways with subtle threats to take back America and make it heinous again. I'm starting to believe them. I can feel the fear and loathing closing in.

This post isn't about the election. It isn't about Biden or Trump. By the time you read this, one of those two rapidly disintegrating conmen will likely be our president-elect and I could honestly give five fucks and hardy shit which one it is. They're two different flavors of the same goddamn hand grenade. Cram either one in your mouth and your skull won't know the difference. No dearest motherfuckers, this is a post about America's national mental illness, election fatigue. Some fancy fuckers in white lab coats on cable news call it Election Stress Disorder, and ain't that just swell. Another clever word salad for the next installation of the DSM. America is supposedly the freest country on earth and voting is supposedly our most sacred right. Then how did this right become a mental illness? And how many sticks of Xanax do I have to down with Two-Buck-Chuck to make it go away? Four? Five? Better double it and chase it down with a shot of Robitussin.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't need this shit. I have enough mental illness' to fucking deal with. Depression, anxiety, OCD, ADD, PTSD, gender dysphoria, and all that shit is on top of Chronic Lyme Disease and the numerous Cronenbergian digestive disorders caused by the mountains of antibiotics I shoveled down in a failed attempt to murder that fucking sickness. Long story short, I'm already fucking crazy. I make Ted Kaczynski look well adjusted. I write about war crimes and state sponsored terrorism to get away from that shit. But 2020 has been stalking my dearly demented ass with three nails and a crucifix since 2019.

That's when the hopped up circus known as the Democratic National Primary began. A bottomless clown car of virtue signaling wokesters aping like Greta Thunberg on molly while downing five hundred dollar schnapps at Wall Street wine caves. They had one of everything, all vying to be first something. First woman. First Latino. First gay man. First albino epileptic to take it up the ass for the Great Satan and sell their tribe down the river with the manure of industrial grade tokenism. So many awful things to choose from. The only half descent choices were shoved to the back of the shelf like last years fruit cake. Mike Gravel was probably the only candidate running not guaranteed a seat in hell and this is probably the first time most have you have even heard about his campaign. The only sane candidate with half a chance was Tulsi Gabbard. She earned herself the honor of being slimed by every arsenic cupcake from Hillary to Joy Reid by committing treason and running a campaign McGovern might actually recognize. A Democrat who wants to get along with Russia? Well, if that ain't fascism clearly everything else already is. 

The real campaign though, the one the DNC and their friends with benefits in cable news could agree to conspire on, was how the fuck do we keep Bernie out of the White House? I could live to be a thousand and I will still never fucking understand this. In spite of his democratic socialist pose, Bernie is the most milquetoast manipulatable leftist chickenhawk since those cunts who fed Red Rosa to the Freikorps. The motherfucker has almost religiously voted for every major Democratic bill, including the fucking wars, and still managed to hang on to a shred of lefty street cred. He's perfect for the late capitalist era of this sick countries dying empire. I mean, a socialist shoveling American greatness down the Third World's throat in the name of humanitarian interventionism? That shit is genius. Rumsfeld must have been kicking himself. Even late into 2019 and early into 2020 that crusty old soup jockey and his Squad of multi-culti Manson girls looked like shoe-in's to write a hip new chapter in American imperialism. It was heady shit, but not enough to convince the old guard.

Every news station from here to Algiers either blackballed Bernie as an unrealistic radical gadfly or just straight up refused to cover his existence. Even when he was winning state after state after goddamn state, the talking heads would only mumble his name beneath their breaths like the adults on a Peanuts cartoon on Quaaludes, before becoming excitable yipping Shih Tzu's once it was time to announce which token minority flavor of the month Wall Street chose to shove money in this week. Eventually those lazy fucks just chose to fall back on that comfortable place for monsters to relax and breath known as neoliberalism with Joe Biden, gods favorite dunce. And with a little elbow grease they pushed his mummified old corpse down America's throat. Bernie did what he does best and gleefully thanked his rapists for the dazzling evening of Last House on the Left-grade shenanigans before ordering his unruly groupies to shut the fuck up and take a seat.

The one absolutely phenomenal thing about this year's soul battering election season is the blatantly one sided treatment of Old Joe. For once in their putrid existence, those neocon shock jocks on talk radio and Fox News are excruciatingly correct about the so-called liberal media. They have fallen lock, stock, and barrel behind Biden like North Korean Soldiers serving their dear leader. It's as if they all took a secret vote and decided that this year they weren't even going to play objective journalists for Halloween. Donald Trump was just too much of a threat, but a threat to what exactly? When you look at Biden and Trump on paper they are virtually identical. Mirror images of uncut white supremacy. Even their sex crimes were similar enough to be plausibly committed by the same creature. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both grabby, racist, corporate shills with staggering body counts. If anything, Biden is further to the right, criticizing our War Criminal In Chief for not dancing naked on the graves of more brown children. But Biden can sell the dance, even in the throws of late stage dementia, he can strike a pose like Reagan and read his lines off the cue card. Trump is just simply too erratic, and quite frankly, too gross.

So what was the point of all this insanity if we just end up with a slightly different flavor of war criminal? What is the point of turning this sick joke into a seizure inducing mental illness that has driven that shining city on the hill to the edge of a cliff and dared us all to jump. If they really wanted to create the elaborate illusion of a functioning democracy they could have just as easily let Bernie win with the same long term results. But maybe that's just it. Maybe democracy is the true target here. I've long held the sneaking suspicion that the primary mission behind the public school system is to turn kids off of the dangers of actual education. Send in a five year old beam of light into that mediocrity machine and by 3:00 PM she'll never read another book again without a loaded gun to her head. Maybe "American Democracy" is the same sick game of aversion therapy. Turn the very notion of an election into a glorified colonoscopy and they'll beg for fascism on bended knee.

Six sticks and a fifth deep and I think its working. I've finally learned to love Big Brother. Bring on the wars, dearest motherfuckers. I'm ready to party.

Peace, Love, & Insanity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones 

*  Vogue by Madonna

*  I Think I Would Die by Hole

*  Young American by David Bowie

*  Come On Everybody by Sid Vicious

*  Some New Kind of Kick by the Cramps

*  Last Cigarette by Dramarama

*  Too Drunk to Dream by the Magnetic Fields

*  Drug Train by the Cramps

*  Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana