Trans Butch Blues: Notes from a New Lesbian Underground

 Boys are loud and rambunctious. Girls are quiet, meek and well behaved. Boys get dirty, climb trees and scrape their knees. Girls stay neat and clean. Boys are husky growing lads. Girls are thin, dainty creatures who must be careful to watch their weight. Boys fight back with swinging fists. Girls sit back and take the abuse. This is but a Whitman's Sampler of the kind of binary bullshit that our chauvinistic society has used for ages to demolish the self-esteem of an entire gender. 

You hear it every fucking day, even in our self-congratulating woke society. They all point at the busted glass ceiling and wait for applause but the only women with anything even resembling power in this country are the ones who murder like men with the poise and dignity of Mary Crocker in a Chanel pant suit. Boys still wear blue, and girls are still defined by their approval regardless of what they wear. The result isn't just less pay and less agency, it's a sickeningly disproportionate rate of self-abuse, depression, eating disorders and suicide. The patriarchy still kills little girls who don't perform on key, and I should know. I may have been raised male but that didn't stop the unwritten laws of the patriarchy from stealing my childhood and teaching me how to destroy myself.

You hear the same Hallmark transgender story from the mainstream zeitgeist over and over again. You can practically recite the lyrics like a song. "She knew she was really a girl in a boy's body from day one. She dreamed of wearing pink dresses and playing with dolls and dating boys and she breathed fairy dust and she quietly farted sparkles and rainbows and blah blah blah..." If I have to listen to that Oprah-approved trans-female narrative one more time, I swear to Kali that I'm going to jam my head in the nearest Easybake Oven. This may be some trans girl's story but it sure as shit wasn't mine. I didn't grow up in some convoluted Lisa Frank fairytale. I was a weird little kid who dressed in black and grew up obsessed with pro-wrestling, heavy metal music and horror movies. There was nothing pink and frilly telling me that I was a girl, so I just assumed I was boy, but it never felt right.

I had plenty of male friends early on, but I never felt like one of them and when I was surrounded by them at Cub Scout meetings and sleepovers, I never felt more alien. As I got older those gross feelings of otherness became increasingly hard for me or anyone else to ignore. There was always something wrong with the Reid boy. Something not quite right. The adults seemed to pick up on it first. Every few years my conservative Catholic school would hold a secret convention among the concerned teachers and parents to discuss what should be done with me and my bewilderingly 'other' ways. They never came up with a proper plot, but they made their disdain painfully well-known through snickers and stares and it wasn't long before their children followed suit and all those male friends became taunting hecklers one by one, repeating what they had overheard at the dinner table.

I heard the word faggot a lot growing up, but I never quite fit the bill. Truth be told, I have been attracted to girls for as long as I can remember. In fact, I found them to be downright fascinating. I didn't dare to even speak to one until after I had already been thoroughly ostracized by every boy I knew. Even being seen playing with a girl was social suicide on the parking lot that Saint John's called a playground. But I couldn't shake the feeling that their secret world contained some kind of answer to the painful loneliness that plagued me even in a crowd of boys. 

I still remember the first time that I learned that lesbianism was a thing. An alarm went off in my tiny head screaming "That's it!" The idea of two girls together was the first time that love made any sense to me. Even knowing nothing about gender identity, I just knew in my soul that that was who I really was but knowing nothing about gender identity and way too goddamn much about sin and Catholic guilt, this revelation terrified me. The only conclusion that I could come to was that I was some kind of twisted fucking pervert and that I was going straight to hell to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.

Even after I rejected the church and embraced the salvation of punk rock and anarchism, I still couldn't shake this cloud of toxic impending doom that always seemed to hang just out of reach above my head. As the secret witch trials became fiery parent-teacher conferences complete with open accusations of me plotting everything from school shootings to Satanic ritual abuse, my gender began to feel more and more like a claustrophobic prison sentence, and I prayed for execution. 

Even when I learned about the existence of the transgender phenomena, everything that was publicly available about the concept at the time told me that I didn't belong there either. I didn't belong anywhere. The only time I ever felt safe was when I was around the few girls who didn't treat me like a boy. It wasn't until after several nervous breakdowns and half a decade as a shut-in that I finally figured out that trans girls were just girls with defunct plumbing and that I had always been a tomboy in a boy's body. My life made absolutely no sense to me until the day I could look myself in the mirror and say, "I'm a dyke."

Radical feminists endlessly demonize trans women for representing an obscene caricature of stereotypical femininity, but who gets to define femininity in a chauvinist society? Who gets to define what is woman enough to be "real?" White cis hetero men, of course. And who do you think controls all the levers of power that define access to femininity? Who gets to decide whether or not trans people are even afforded the medical treatment necessary for transition? Trans women are hostages to the same sexist archetypes and institutions as any other woman only we have to be more feminine than female. Our tits have to be bigger. Our hair has to be longer. Our heels have to be higher. We have to be Dolly fucking Parton just to be visible and then we get stoned for that too. It's fucking exhausting. I just want enough hormones so I can be feminine enough not to have to try so damn hard. I don't want to be Dolly Parton. I just want to be Julien Baker. 

I wear my hair long and paint my nails, but I feel about as awkward in a dress as I do in a suit and tie. I'd much rather wear Doc Martin's and wrap the few curves Estradiol has afforded me in a trench coat. I'm loud and I'm rude. I talk with my mouth full, and I swear like a fucking sailor. My legs and armpits are hairy, and I have zero intention of ever shaving them. My heroes aren't ladies. They are brash and ballsy bitches like Joan Jett, Courtney Love and Frida Kahlo who built entire careers on terrifying cis men and quite literally flipping off the patriarchy. But somehow, I'm part of some sexist conspiracy to destroy womanhood and apparently our number one target is the endangered butch lesbian.

Every other week you'll find some TERF on Fox News going off about the coming extinction of the bull dyke. According to these hyperventilating gadfly's butch girls are being abducted by mad scientists and transformed into mutilated transgender pod people. There is a very fine grain of truth to this hysteria. A lot of young butches feel trapped by the perilously high expectations of the gender binary and get pushed by heterosexist adults into picking another gender stereotype and conforming to it surgically. Sexism exists in the trans community too. It's why I still have to fight every fucking day just to belong there as a gender-nonconforming female. But assuming that the only solution to this problem is to double down on chauvinistic schools of thought like biological essentialism isn't just stupid, it's downright un-lesbian.

The original radical lesbian movement was an insurrection against the gender binary that sought to define the dyke as a revolutionary third gender that existed completely outside of the expectations of the heterosexual establishment. Monique Wittig, the poet laureate of radical lesbianism said it all when she proudly declared that "lesbians are not women," insisting that to be a lesbian was about a hell of a lot more than flannel shirts and munching carpet, it was about rebelling against the chauvinist norm of the woman as defined by cisgender men's needs. Our Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin, took a similar approach before she forgot about the revolution and conspired against her sisters in the sex trade with the same sexist Jesus freaks who destroyed my childhood and now call for my extinction. This Faustian bargain against free speech was in many ways the beginning of the end for the original radical lesbian movement.

But there is a new radical lesbian movement bubbling like molten lava to the surface from the underground and its one that has about as much use for the gender binary as Monique Wittig did. A growing number of butch lesbians are micro dosing testosterone, getting top surgery and experimenting with new pronouns. Some of them are transitioning to male while still proudly declaring themselves to be butch. Some butch women even fuck men and some of us have dicks. What unites us all is an existential drive to define ourselves outside of the reach of a patriarchal society that invented the gender binary to reduce human beings into easily commodified and governable categories that leave little room for individuality. This new radical lesbian movement is a conspiracy to make butch a revolutionary third gender again. One that seeks to liberate every gender outlaw who has ever suffered beneath the yoke of some pompous straight man's definition of what womanhood means and this is one pissed off bitch with a dick who is proud to be a part of this insurrection.

So, the fucking TERFs can go choke on their shallow hypocrisy. They have become willing tools of the patriarchy and I don't need them to tell me who I am. I am butch, hear me roar and I am not alone anymore.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Miss World by Hole

* Born On a Train by Samia

* Only Women Bleed by Alice Cooper

* Go Home by Julien Baker

* Handsome and Gretell by Babes in Toyland

* Under the Wire by Haim

* Bad Reputation by Joan Jett

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

* Been a Son by Nirvana

Queer Anarchism is More Conservative Than the GOP

 Those motherfuckers in the GOP have been talking shit about me and my tribe again lately. In fact, it doesn't seem like they've shut the fuck up about us over the last six or seven years and the racket just keeps on getting louder. With less than 300 shopping days before the next sham that this failed state calls a presidential election, the Republicans have gone all in on making gender outlaws like me the official scapegoat of 2024. They made this frighteningly clear at this year's sparsely attended CPAC Conference where trendy right-wing gadflies like Michael Knowles and Candace Owens essentially called for the annihilation of "transgenderism" by any means necessary to resounding applause.

I'm touched, really, I am. Unlike your average vanilla agent of LGBTQ assimilation, I fully embrace my tribe's role as the glimmering harbingers of the decline of Western Civilization. What I have no stomach for is a party of warmongering sore losers who use the colossal hammer of big government to smash Queer children to bits and then sell this shameless hypocrisy as some kind of conservatism. 

Over the first few months of 2023 alone, Republican legislators have upchucked an acidic tsunami of over 340 anti-Queer bills across the country that seek to use armed government agents to police everything from children's healthcare to public restrooms. What this toxic slurry of judicial hate crimes really amounts to is growing the police state to gargantuan proportions and expanding their ability to intervene into even the most intimate corners of private life.

There is absolutely nothing conservative about this jihad but that shouldn't be shocking to anybody who has paid even the most cursory amount of attention to the GOP over the last fifty years. I may be a genderfuck Yippie anarchist but even I'm more conservative than those neocon crusaders and I'm not just being cute. In spite of my decadent lifestyle choices or perhaps even because of them, my uniquely Queer school of stateless existence is far more conservative on nearly every conceivable front than the current platform of the Republican Party.

Let's us first dispense with the contrived notion that my very existence is the product of rampant modernism. Quite the contrary. Every heathen tribe from Prussia to Peru celebrated the existence of at least three genders before the original globalist groomers in the Vatican forced them all by the barrel of the musket to conform to the modern social engineering experiment known as the gender binary and it is actually precisely the pre-Christian conservative tribal diversity that the Papists trampled that drives my own distinctly Queer school of anarcho-primitivism. 

You see dearest motherfuckers, I am more than just a Queer anarchist, I am a Queer panarchist. While my own private Catalonia may consist of a communal love-in of polyamorous gender freaks living like savage libertines in yurts on the weed-infested parking lots of flaming stadium churches, I believe that this radical utopia is only possible under a system of panarchy or many anarchies that affords the existence of an infinite amount of stateless tribal societies. These societies could be based on quite literally everything and anything from Black nationalism to Mormon fundamentalism, provided that every single tribe remains 100% voluntary and that every individual can choose to leave and start over just next door at any time.

The result of this Queer new world would be infinitely more conservative on every level than the rampant statism of the Republican Party. Just look at the debauched reign of their current boy-king, Donald Trump, if you don't believe me. That dayglo Caligula added $7.8 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2020. That is an increase of 33.1%, the third highest increase of any presidency in history. 

Part of this can be chocked up to the rampant corporate welfare that Trump used a totally avoidable pandemic to excuse, but even before Covid reached our shores, that orange lunatic was well on his way to the record books after taking the tax dollars of his own working-class constituency and redistributing it to his country club friends in the multinational corporate elite under the guise of tax breaks.

This fiscal blasphemy of reverse Robin Hood larceny is the Republican way. No more under my Queer anarchist system. No more corporate welfare. No more eminent domain. No more fucking taxes period. Taxation is a form of legalized theft that reinforces class divisions based on those who take and those who get taken. The taker class is an incestuous rat's nest of lazy thieves with shiny badges, and I am committed as a Queer anarchist to ending their infestation once and for all. This means defunding the police. All of the police. This means no more FBI, no more ATF, no more DEA, and no more fucking IRS. No more pencil-pushing bureaucratic thugs with guns breathing down your neck and asking for their cut. People's money would remain in their communities to do with as they see fit.

This would also mean an end to those corporate elites that Trump and his interparty competition pretend to combat. The One Percent only exists at the behest of a colossal international government that the rich built to justify their own parasitic existence. There would be no billionaire oligarchs like George Soros or the Koch Brothers if it weren't for a complex network of fixed trade deals and economic regulations that rig the game in their favor, all of which the Republican Party overwhelmingly supports. 

A panarchist society would run on a localist economic order similar to that of a massive network of decentralized farmer's markets in which everyone would be free to buy, sell and trade their wears with no federal middleman to tip the scales in one direction or the other. This is what a true free market really looks like, a place where anyone with the skills to sling the finest product wins the day instead of federally backed cartels and massive industrial complexes.

 This includes complexes of the military industrial variety like every Republicans favorite charity in the war machine, and you better fucking believe that a panarchsit system would erase that corporatist construct post haste, not just because its very existence is patently evil, but because it is little more than a big government boondoggle. 

Contrary to what the Grand Old Party would have you believe, there exists no Chinese threat to American military supremacy. There exists no threat of any kind to American military supremacy and there never has. This nation spends more money on "defense" than the next dozen nations combined and that includes China, Russia and India. America maintains 750 permanent bases on foreign soil in 80 different countries.

 This isn't defense and this sure as shit isn't conservative. It's empire and in spite of all his isolationist posturing, Trump was no exception to this rule. He literally broke records with his military budgets which included hefty doses of aid to foreign armies in places like Egypt, Ukraine and Israel. All part of the Republican Parties long shameless tradition of consistently countering every already bloated Democratic defense budget with demands for even more tax-pilfered loot to be carted away to blow people up on parts of the map that most Americans have never even heard of.

As for grooming, I'm as against that practice as any Bible-thumping fag-basher but it's a two-way street and it's one that I would never cross. I have never met another Queer person who has not been abused by America's compulsory school system. I carry scars in the form of complex PTSD from my own experiences of having a bunch of straight adults push their heterosexist gender ideology down my throat at a tender age. 

Unlike Ron DeSantis, my solution to this systemic barbarism isn't to replace one form of cultural hegemony with another, it's to obliterate the power structure endemic in the American school system entirely by putting children in charge of their own damn education instead of one pack of role-crazy adults or another. This means deschooling society entirely because if you don't want the government to indoctrinate your children then you shouldn't give those motherfuckers so much power over your children in the first place. This is something we should all agree on. 

That's because Queer anarchy isn't about queering society. It's about queering governance. If everybody was fucking Queer, then Queer people would be as boring as the rest of you bitches. Our power actually comes from being a minority because only minorities can truly be communities. The queerest thing that we can do is spread that philosophy by encouraging everyone to become a minority too and by encouraging the autonomy that minorities require to remain strong. This means encouraging the existence not just of Queer communes, but Amish communes and Objectivist communes and Catholic Worker communes, because only small governments truly serve their people and the smaller the better.

The GOP doesn't foster small government any more than the DNC fosters egalitarianism. They are two arms of the same colossal beast and regardless of how you or anyone else may feel about my kinky lifestyle choices or my unorthodox gender ideology, being a sworn enemy of that beast makes me far more conservative than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis will ever be. There is nothing queerer than anarchy and if you're truly looking for small government like I am, then anarchy is the only answer. 

So, tell me breeders, Did I turn ya?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

* Androgynous by the Replacements

* Not Strong Enough by boygenius

* Shoplifters of the World by the Smiths

* Lose You by Bully & Soccer Mommy

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

* Trash by New York Dolls

Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War: The Limits of Isolationism Under Yellow Peril

 It's an old plot and the bastards of Babylon have been at it for ages. From Halford Mackinder to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from the British Crown to their Yankee progeny right here in Pax Americana, the Atlantic powers known collectively as the West have been motivated by a single waking nightmare since white power ran on black coal, the fever dream of the dreaded Eurasian Century. The simple fact that the backwards landlocked Huns of the World Island that is Europe, Africa and Asia hold the keys to 60% of the world's land mass and an even larger share of its natural resources has kept western imperialists up at night for centuries and motivated every great bloodbath in the era of modern warfare.

It's why London and Washington engineered two world wars with hasty borders and crippling sanctions. It's why these same mandarins initiated the first cold war with an invasion of the barely formed Soviet Union in order to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. It's why they reignited that quixotic crusade with an atom bomb long after the Japanese had surrendered, and Stalin had begrudgingly agreed to keep his hands to himself. It's why we provoked the rise of the Iron Curtain with the neo-colonialist contraption known as NATO and rearmed the fascists with Operation Gladio to keep it valid. It's why we lured the Kremlin deep into the Hindu Kush by inventing modern-day jihadism with the Mujahedin and its why NATO just kept on expanding even after that geopolitical boobytrap finished off the communist threat that alliance was supposedly designed to contain. It's also why we continue to stoke the flames of a third world war by funding the current autocratic duel over Ukraine.

Every bottomless forever war, every convoluted conspiracy against world peace, every bomb that has ever been dropped beneath the contrived banner of liberal democracy and the American way has all been part of a plot to divorce Berlin from Beijing and prevent a common-sense economic union between East Asia and Central Europe that would permanently damn the empires of the Atlantic Ocean to global irrelevancy. This is the dirty little secret of American power. The despots who run this titanic battleship we call a country have never given two flying fucks about fascism, communism or Islamic Fundamentalism. It has all been one great big shapeshifting shadow puppet show projected over the graves of a craven plot for pure naked global power.

This isn't to say that those graves haven't long been populated by twisted ghouls that are more than deserving of condemnation from any sane observer with a functioning conscience. Stalin, Mao, Putin and Xi are all repugnant rapists in their own right but there is a reason that those monsters have become household names while others like Pinochet, Suharto, Duvalier and Salman have received the full blessing of those that combat them. The only monsters that Washington is willing to blow up the world to contain are the ones that threaten to replace it on the world stage. 

The latest cold war is no exception. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a savagely venal crime against humanity and it's one that America actively encouraged. We have set Ukraine like a gigantic mousetrap over the last decade with this tragic fate in mind. We overthrew a corrupt but neutral democracy with a phony revolution in 2014 before packing their security forces with the most insanely Russophobic ultra-nationalists that money could buy. 

We encouraged the violent repression of Ukraine's Russian speaking population while running round the clock war games with American battleships and bombers capable of carrying nuclear payloads right off the shores and borders of an increasingly paranoid Russian behemoth. Then we turned up the heat by predicting their imminent invasion even while our own Ukrainian quislings begged us to cool it down. All so we could provoke a thin skinned capitalist Übermensch with daddy issues into obliterating his neighbors while we ran the footage of his savagery on a loop to discourage the blue bloods of Central Europe from investing in a future we didn't micromanage for western hegemony.

It worked, except it didn't. Putin more than lived up to the role we wrote for him as the ultimate boogeyman to end all boogeymen, but half of the American homeland still isn't willing to leverage the farm in order to dig him a bottomless grave in Bakhmut and it isn't the half some might expect. Since Putin began his special military rampage in Ukraine polls have shown a steady decline in Republicans willing to encourage its continuation with a steady diet of Stinger missiles,

Pew has the number of Republicans opposed to fueling this thing indefinitely at 40% and rising. Gallup has it even higher at nearly 50%. These are the blood and butter conservatives that America has long relied on to mindlessly support even our most batshit interventions long after their futility has become almost comically obvious. Democrats have always been the quickest nitwits to start a war but it's the Republicans who stick around for Old Glory and apple pie to finish the fucking thing long after it has become too heinous for the coastal elites to virtue signal over the carnage. So, what the fuck is going on here? Are we finally witnessing the second coming of the isolationist right in MAGA country? 

I wish, but as an often less than willing occupant of America's rustbelt outback, I can tell you from personal experience that it's actually a lot more personal than that. Once again, Hillary Clinton has shit this bed, this time by tarring the deplorables in flyover country as Russian dupes in 2016. All because they would rather vote for a reality television rapist then one of the two dynasties that sold their children into servitude to opioids and Walmart by hollowing out their futures with crooked trade deals. 

Regardless of where you land on Russia's supposed involvement in the 2016 election, the notion that backwoods farm folk are too fucking stupid to realize that even a goon like Trump is a lesser evil to a Bush or a Clinton without the assistance of Kremlin manipulation is beyond fucking offensive. The blowback from this campaign to blame the humiliating spectacle of a Trump presidency on anyone but the people who made it inevitable is that now middle America has finally become increasingly immune to Russophobia and right-wing shills like Tucker Carlson are chasing that money even if they have to sing "Give Peace a Chance" to earn it.

So, what's an empire to do? Pack it up and sue for peace? Never. Instead, the bipartisan war machine is tearing a page form the playbook that hoodwinked the original America First movement into throwing its weight behind total war. When all else fails, just try good old-fashioned American racism and stir twice. Republicans and Democrats alike weren't willing to return to the trenches of Europe in the wake of the Great Depression to kill a bunch of white people. But once FDR turned the war effort into a fight to keep filthy yellow hands off of Lady Liberty's creamy white bosom, all it took was goading the Japanese into bombing an American colony in the Pacific to get every farmer's daughter to willingly chuck her own sons straight into the wheat thresher.

Just turn on Fox News and you'll realize that things haven't changed a bit. Peace peddling peckerwoods like Carlson flipped the switch from isolationism to imperialism at the speed of a scatter bomb the moment an errant Chinese weather balloon passed over an American farm. That smug asshole went from blowing Glenn Greenwald to screeching for the blood of every first-born Chinese son faster than you can say 'Lindberg lovingly licks Lemonheads.' Now, it's Chinese fever around the clock. They're scuttling across the border. They're slipping fentanyl into your favorite soft drinks. They're training bats to peddle pandemics and critical race theory door-to-door. Biden and his gray-care handlers are already on the bandwagon too, sniping at UFOs with F-22s and fessing up to the dangers of gain of function research while they sail battleships through the Strait of Taiwan and dare Xi Jinping not to flinch.

And just like that, the Cold War is back in tetanus country like crystal meth. My neighbors have gone from sensibly questioning the efficacy of poking a nuked-up basket case with a NATO stick to calling for a ground invasion of Peking if those commie cunts are two weeks late with the next fucking X-Box. One step forward and a great leap backwards into the frying pan of 1950s-style xenophobic hysteria.

So, pick a cold war, any cold war! China or Russia, Ukraine or Taiwan, either way the Atlantic Empire achieves its real goal of isolating the bustling markets of Beijing from the sophisticated banks of Europe and stalling the Eurasian Century for another 15 minutes. The only problem with this conspiracy is that middle America isn't the only landlocked rust heap growing weary of constant war and it's a little bit harder to sell Sinophobia to Polish farmers when they're starving just three hours from a highspeed rail system that can sling them prosperity straight from the Orient. All while the fat cats of NATO tell them to take another one for the team.

I'm not the Bolshevik Barbie that I used to be. One century is as sick as the last one as long as rich men with small dicks and big bombs still run the show. But I also can't ignore the fact that a Second American Century is only possible with a nuclear bomb or that a Eurasian Century would put my trailer park smack dab in the middle of the next empire's blind spot. Call me a communist, but I'll take those daylight vampires in the Politburo over the double-speaking Doctor Strangeloves on Fox News any day of the week. I just wish that I could convince my neighbors to hate the bomb more than "the other" it drops on and learn to eat their grits with chopsticks.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Shark Smile by Big Thief

* China Girl by Iggy Pop

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* Holidays in the Sun by the Sex Pistols

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* My Girl by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Counting Backwards by Throwing Muses

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

The Better and Worse Angels of Jimmy Carter's Nature

 Every time an ex-president dies a demon gets his wings. It's a time-honored tradition in these hallowed halls of Babylon. Lucifer himself could drop dead and provided that motherfucker spent no less than a hot minute in the Oval Office, every self-proclaimed journalist from the Wall Street Journal to Penthouse Forum would be lined around the block to polish his horns with their filthy flicking tongues. In fact, fuck Satan, just look to Ronald Reagan if you don't believe me. That B-grade cowboy slung crack to grade school kids for rapists in Nicaragua and limp-wristed Bay area liberals are still tripping over the AIDS quilt to throw themselves sobbing on his casket.

Naturally, being the terminally jaded cunt that I am, I have made it my own private jihad in life to pop a squat over the graves of the powerful and unleash a hot steamy piss on their sacred soil. I have plenty of reverence for the dead, but nobody lights a candle for Hitler during Suicide Awareness Month. What the hell makes our monsters so fucking special? A cult of personality is a cult of personality and if I'm not game to deface a few monuments then I might as well turn in my slingshot with my shoplifted copy of Never Mind the Bollocks and call it quits on being an anarcho-anything.

With that being said and may Bill Hicks have mercy on my soul for even saying this out loud, I'm finding myself feeling oddly pee shy as old Jimmy Carter shuffles towards the light. As surreal as it may seem, at least for the past forty years, that soft-spoken peanut farmer appears to have led the life of a halfway decent human being. While the Clintons would perform at a supper club for the Khmer Rouge if the price was right, Jimmy has spent the lion's share of his long retirement from power building houses for the Dollar Tree class and literally eradicating diseases in countries that Anderson Cooper couldn't even pronounce right with a goddamn Speak-and-Spell. The man will die in a one-story house he built with his own hands in a town even smaller and poorer than mine. I'm hard set to admit it but that motherfucker was a good ex-president. That does not however mean that he has a guaranteed table reserved for him passed the Pearly Gates between Gandhi and Dorothy Day.

Jimmy Carter does have a dark side, a downright hideous dark side in fact and that dark side is the 39th presidency of these United States of Babylon. While Jimmy may have spent the last four decades teaching Sunday school to pint-sized bumpkins, between 1977 and 1981 he spent four years dressing up an empire like Mr. Rogers and setting the stage for one of the most violent quarter-centuries in the storied history of its sick existence.

You can quite literally thank Jimmy Carter for Al-Qaeda. During the early hours of his presidency, Jimmy conspired with his twisted Machiavellian little National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski to arm, train and organize some of the Muslim world's sickest lunatics to start a rampant garbage fire on the Soviet Union's southern border in Afghanistan for the express purpose of luring Moscow into burning itself alive stomping out the flames. 

Jimmy and Zbig have all but admitted this with Brzezinski gloating mincingly that "the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." Mission accomplished. The resulting fallout of the Carter Administration's midwifing of the Mujahedin speaks for itself. $3 billion US tax dollars, 1. 5 million Afghan lives, two Twin Towers, a partridge and a pear tree.

This was far from an isolated incident either. The all-knowing corporate zeitgeist generally considers the biggest triumph of Jimmy's one term tenure to be the 1978 Camp David Accord and its biggest folly to be his botching of the Iran Hostage Crisis but neither one of these incidents is generally given the proper context their casualties deserve.

The peace deal that President Carter organized between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin wasn't really a peace deal at all, at least not for the Palestinians. It was a bribe. Jimmy Carter agreed to arm Egypt's colonels to the fucking teeth if they agreed to look the other way while Israel continued to slaughter their fellow Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank like lambs. Gamal Abdul Nasser would have shot Sadat himself if he were alive to witness this Noble Prize winning screwjob, the end result of which being a military dictatorship in Cairo that even the Arab Spring couldn't upset and the Nakba that never ends.

As for Iran, few popular historical observers seem to pay much attention to the fact that the only reason hostages were even taken in the first place was that Jimmy had given sanctuary to one of the region's cruelest dictators, a loathsomely venal creature known as the Shah of Iran who Carter openly supported as he massacred student protestors during the Islamic Revolution and even threw a military coup to save him from the righteous wrath of the Mullahs. 

Even fewer historical observers waste the ink to report that Jimmy's most lasting response to this revolution was his establishment of the Carter Doctrine which officially made it a matter of public policy that the United States would treat any perceived threat to destabilize the Persian Gulf and its precious resources as a national security threat to be "repelled by any means necessary, including military force." By 1981, Carter had reorganized a gargantuan chunk of the United States Military into a 200,000-man Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force who would later be used in two Gulf wars and usher in the age of ISIS.

But perhaps the darkest chapter of Jimmy Carter's brief but eventful massacre on Capitol Hill occurred in 1980 in a Korean college town called Gwangju. After an assassination and a coup replaced a dictatorship in Seoul with a military dictatorship, South Korea exploded in a wave of largely peaceful student protests, demanding democracy on the peninsula. The boldest of these uprisings broke out in Gwangju, where students were joined by local blue-collar workers in an epic groundswell of resistance that reached 300,000 people in the streets. When soldiers attempted to violently shut these protests down, its partisans raided local arms depots and police stations to repel the troops, courageously holding their own for six days. Then Jimmy sent in the Black Berets.

While publicly condemning the increasingly gruesome crackdowns, documents released through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the Carter Administration used the US Military's leadership over their joint command with the Korean Military to plan, lead and execute a colossal bloodbath with the hopes of avoiding a repeat of the Iranian Revolution. The Korean Army used American tanks to cordon off the city of Gwangju and after a 90-minute gun battle with the civilian militia organized by the protesters, these brave kids surrendered, the American trained Korean Special Forces known as the Black Berets invaded and the massacre began. Homes were raided, mass graves were dug at the edge of town and some two thousand of the bravest people America never knew simply ceased to exist.

This is the side of Jimmy Carter that no one but his victims knows, and it makes the side of Jimmy Carter that we've all gotten to know over the last four decades incredibly hard to reconcile. It's very tempting to believe that the better angels of Jimmy Carter's nature are simply part of a conspiracy to wash the blood from a callous killer's hands, but I honestly believe that the truth is far more complicated than that. Most of Jimmy's post-presidential actions don't seem designed for popular public fanfare. In fact, many of them have only provoked the ire of the manufactured consensus.

What did Jimmy have to gain from calling out his former homies in Israel for their apartheid ways other than being smeared by their lobby as an antisemite? Whose good graces were gained by preventing another American coup in Venezuela with the Carter Foundation's endorsement of Hugo Chavez's victory in his 2004 recall referendum? All of this smacks of something very different than your standard Washington whitewash. All of this smacks of legitimate liberal guilt, attempts made by a man with a functioning conscience to redeem himself for the evils of his office and no single effort was more heroic or more thankless than the one Jimmy made in Pyongyang in 1994.

Few people remember that the Second Korean War was set to begin before the end of Bill Clinton's first term in office. Hellbent on proving to the GOP that he wasn't the dovish pussy they had painted him as, Bill was fully prepared to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear reactors. Ex-president Jimmy Carter was sent over the DMZ to meet up with legendary Stalinist strongman Kim Il-Sung as part of an "unofficial" and largely symbolic pre-war PR stunt, but then old Jimmy went rogue.

Not only did he go off-script to reach a deal to prevent the war with a deal that Clinton never actually signed off on, but Carter even called a press conference to announce it live on CNN before the White House could squash it. What resulted was the framework for a nuclear freeze and the closest thing to peace that peninsula that President Carter once so violently fucked over has likely ever seen, 7 years of free trade and a Sunshine Policy that only ended with Dubya's Axis of Evil. God only knows how many lives were saved in the process. Probably at least two thousand.

The Clinton's never returned Jimmy's phone calls again. He was ostracized by both the media and the DNC and only recently rehabilitated so Joe Biden could pose with the only Democrat old enough to make him look young. So, was Jimmy good or evil? 

The truth likely lies somewhere between. While Jimmy's post-presidential actions in Korea were undeniably inspiring, the fact remains that he has also never apologized for the horrors of the Mujahedeen, Hosni Mubarak or the Black Berets. All I can really tell you for sure is that the office Jimmy served in required the actions of a psychopath and the hideous legacy of these actions requires a very sophisticated cult of personality to turn every servant of American power into a saint upon the hour of their death. This institution is a danger that should not exist.

With that being said, I won't be pissing on Jimmy Carter's grave this year. For once, I would rather pray to Kali that the better angels of Jimmy's nature are reincarnated in some species not eligible for office. I'd like to think that the saints of Gwangju would approve.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Salvation by Rancid

* Sixers by the Hold Steady

* Debaser by the Pixies

* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats

* The Pretender by Foo Fighters

* 100% by Sonic Youth

* Trying by Bully

* Makes No Sense at All by Husker Du

* Carry Me Out by Mitski