Cheney Died the Only Dick Who Deserved Donald Trump

 Well, Satan died last week, or at least so I'm told. Speaking personally, I won't sleep easier until I see a body because that neocon fossil should have died centuries ago. I can't help but to feel like the final girl in some cheesy 80s slasher flick, waiting for one last jump-scare after the killer was shot 84 times, set on fire and dropped from a skyscraper. Dick Cheney was the killer, literally and figuratively, and I'll believe that monster has finally left us when I see his open casket lowered into an active volcano.

What else can I say about that putrid creature that I haven't been saying for the last twenty years. Dick Cheney was not a politician; he was one of modern histories most successful psychopaths and I don't believe any of this to be hyperbole. This man made his callous ambitions to rule the world through constant warfare and turn Washington into an omnipotent new Rome violently clear on multiple occasions through multiple administrations. Let's take a quick look at the stats, shall we.

After lurking around the darker corners of the Nixon Administration, Dick first achieved real power under Gerald Ford as his White House Chief of Staff. It was here that he found true love with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the two budding young sociopaths kicked off their lifelong partnership by out-ghouling the then world champion Washington vampire, Henry Kissinger, who as Secretary of State was attempting to avert a third world war through strategic arms control with the Soviet Union.

Dick and Rummy had a problem with this. The two established a clique of young super hawks with similarly Machiavellian underlings of Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson like Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, and together what became known as "Team B" sabotaged Kissinger's attempts at detente and affectively hobbled Soviet-American relations for another generation, but these kids were just getting started. This crew would go on to form the nucleus for what became the Neoconservative Movement, a national socialist cabal devoted to unabashed American global domination by any means necessary.

Cheney would spend most of the 80s as a representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district where he continued to make every attempt to escalate the ultraviolence of the Cold War, becoming one of the more vocal cheerleaders for Ronald Reagan's numerous genocidal Central American death squads. But Dick wouldn't make his true global ambitions obscenely clear until the Berlin Wall was already crumbling in the twilight of the Soviet-era when George H.W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in the late eighties.

It was from this vaunted cabinet position that Cheney oversaw two of the more grotesque displays of post-Cold War American power against two of America's more defenseless Cold War allies: Noriega's Panama and Saddam's Iraq, with Operation Just Cause and Operation Desert Storm. 

As Jean Baudrillard astutely observed, neither one of these operations was an actual fucking war; rather, they were highly publicized acts of unilateral slaughter committed with the careful collaboration of Washington's useful idiots in the burgeoning 24/7 news media for the purpose of sending the world two messages; Vietnam was a fluke and America' rules the world now. They were right about the second one, but only briefly.

This thinly veiled threat to the global community was articulated further in no uncertain terms with a leaked document known as the DPG or Defense Planning Guidance, which Cheney had Direct Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz draft in the glorious afterglow of their bloodbath in the Gulf. In this document another one of Dick's lifelong neocon flunkies set out a long-term strategy for American global dominance which explicitly advocated Washington primacy over a divided Eurasia so as to deter "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global scale." 

Wolfowitz also suggested toppling rogue regimes for possessing weapons of mass destruction to do so, a position further driven home when Team B got back together for the now infamous Project for a New American Century.

After spending the second half of the nineties as the CEO for the world's second largest oil service company, Haliburton, Dick was ready to put this plan into practice. As the Vice President for his former employer's born-again dunce of a son, Cheney and his neocons infiltrated the highest echelons of American power and successfully used the totally preventable attacks of September 11th to consolidate America's entire national security apparatus beneath the shadow of the Executive Office, allowing Cheney to acquire more power than any president, let alone vice president, in American history.

And the rest is history. Ugly history. And that history continues to unfurl like the tentacles of Cthulhu to this day. The history of forever wars, of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza and Iran. The history of Abu Ghraib and the Islamic State. The history of warrantless wiretaps, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, drone strikes and serial regime change. The history of the War on Terror. A heinous era of imperial conquest that by the estimation of Brown University's Cost of War Project has resulted in as many as 4.7 million dead bodies and 38 million refugees in twenty years.

And yet how does America's bleeding hearts on the mainstream left remember this monster? As the courageous compassionate conservative who campaigned for Kamala with his equally loathsome daughter and received a standing ovation when visiting the Capitol on the first anniversary of the January 6 riots. 

Dick Cheney is remembered as a Never Trumper and somehow, it's this absurd farce that I find most revolting. That's because no single human being on the face of the planet, not Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Lucifer himself, has done more to make the nightmare of Donald Trump downright inevitable.

Every single crime our orange emperor commits, every single atrocity that he continues to get away with, is the direct product of Dick Cheney's relentless forty-year campaign to afford the Executive Office with the powers of a Greek god. 

There were many policies and conspiracies that led us to this black and loathsome place but perhaps none stands alone as more telltale than the simple decision to prosecute the blowback of 9/11 as a war rather than a crime. This was an unprecedented legal innovation that opened Pandora's Box to a world where quite literally anyone can be declared a terrorist, and any atrocity can be justified in the name of national security so long as such decrees are hurled from the Oval Office onto the White House lawn.

So, now Donald Trump has the power to invent his own sick reality as he goes along. A refugee crisis brought on by Cheney's war machine can be declared an "invasion." The sale of soul-numbing narcotics to veterans of Cheney's conquest in the Middle East can be labeled as a campaign of "terrorism." Anyone with a green card caught bad mouthing Israel can be declared a dangerous "extremist." And entire genders can be red flagged as mental illnesses and divorced form their constitutional rights.

Not that Dick Cheney was particularly offended by any of this. I have never actually heard that man or his demonic offspring ever criticize Donald Trump for crushing poor people within the gears of the death star they idiot proofed. Such elites are far more offended by the hissy fit Trump threw at the Capitol and the fact that he has made their precious empire look tacky in front of their bougie colleagues in the EU. 

But isn't this how empires always end, with tragedy repeating itself as tragic comedy?

Didn't the Julio-Claudian Dynasty end with an ego-maniacal imbecile like Emperor Nero shaming his aristocratic contemporaries with his garish amphitheaters, grotesque gladiator spectacles and gosh public displays of autoeroticism as everything the Ceasars built burned around him? 

This may be the sick silver lining on Dick Cheney's long life of crime. It lasted just long enough for his criminal enterprise to humiliate him by becoming the plaything of a sadistic buffoon. This is the New American Century, one drenched in blood and flaked with gold leaf. A new Gilded Age of crippling national debt and irreversible Eurasian supremacy.

Dick Cheney wanted Washington to be the new Rome. Technically, he got what he wanted and died of a broken heart. It couldn't have happened to a nicer monster.

Peace, Love and Antipathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Angel of Death by Slayer

* I'm Not Like Everybody Else by the Kinks

* Search and Destroy by the Stooges

* Master of Puppets by Metallica

* Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* My Plague by Slipknot

* Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

You Don't Have to Be a Commie to Stand with Venezuela

 Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a goddamn commie, and I'm not talking Bernie Sanders here. I'm talking hardcore, blood-red, dyed-in-the-wool, revolutionary Marxism. I was a goddamn tankie and while I quoted Lenin and defended Putin, I tended to look to the Third World for inspiration. For a deeply closeted Queer kid outnumbered by pervy Catholic fundamentalists in hick country, there was something scrumptiously satisfying about other post-Papist outlaws taking on Washington's New Rome just south of the border. I was fascinated with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and the Castro Brothers, but in the early aughts, Hugo Chavez was my greatest hope.

Everything about that man seemed impossible. He was a trash-talking, pot-bellied, serial David, going off on Goliath over and over and over again and somehow winning every fucking time. While Allende went down in a blaze defending democracy from the pulpit of Marxism and the Castros were forced to reduce Cuba to a floating citadel just to keep the Batista out, Hugo Chavez faced down the guns of American imperialism like Tony Montana and managed to come out of the maelstrom without ever missing an election.

It all should have been over by 2002 when the CIA organized another one of its spectacular Latin American coup d'etats. A phony protest movement was organized, high-ranking military officers had Chavez kidnapped and absconded to an unknown location, some corporate gangster named Pedro Carmena was arbitrarily installed as president, the National Assembly and Supreme Court were dissolved, and then-President George W. Bush recognized the whole farce as democracy. This is usually where the story ends and I've read that tragic story more times than I can count, from Augustus Sandino to Jacobo Arbenz. But then the Bolivarian Revolution flipped the script.

Hundreds of thousands of irate Venezuelans poured into the streets like a flash flood, many from the most impoverished favelas in the country, swarming the national palace and demanding their democracy back. When Uncle Sam rented thugs to open fire on these people, the people stood their ground and fired back. The lower ranks of the Venezuelan Army, staffed largely by denizens of those same barrios, were inspired to do the unthinkable. They turned their guns on their commanding officers and brought Chavez back from the dead. And just like that, what had started out as a carefully orchestrated American putsch had resulted in a spontaneous anti-American uprising. Uncle Sam was humiliated, Venezuela was galvanized, and I was officially in love with the Bolivarian Revolution.

Babylon kept on trying but their attempts just kept on backfiring in the most spectacular ways. When Wall Street manufactured an economic crisis by colluding with the fat cats running Venezuela's various state-owned industries in a lockout that froze oil production for two months straight, the workers toiling beneath them formed democratic councils and brought those resources back closer to the people that lived on top of them than they had ever been. When the National Endowment for Democracy dumped millions of dollars into building up a phony opposition movement, Chavez kicked their asses fair and square in elections that even Jimmy Carter couldn't bring himself to delegitimize and inspired a wave of other left-wing populist fire breathers across Latin America to do the same. 

Soon the CIA had their hands full of democracies to overthrow from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador, from the Kirchners in Argentina to Lula and Dilma in Brazil. It was almost as if Che Guevara and Salvador Allende had birthed two, three, many Vietnams at the ballot box and started a storm too wild for firepower to pacify. Then something truly tragic happened that seemed to turn this entire Pink Tide into a hurricane of disillusionment; Hugo Chavez turned out to be human being after all.

That fantastic human missile crisis died very suddenly and somewhat suspiciously of cancer in 2013 and his successor, then-Vice President Nicholas Maduro, seemed to waste very little time betraying his revolution. He very quickly turned the Bolivarian Republic into a giant bludgeon for him to maintain the power he had practically stumbled into over Hugo's corpse, starting by dismantling the various workers councils, misiones, comunas and collectives that had created the architecture of direct democracy that had served as the backbone of Hugo's revolution and then concentrating their power back into a bureaucratic elite while repressing anyone who stood in this pink oligarchy's way beneath a banner of Dengist-style state socialism.

By 2015, Maduro was ruling the nation largely by decree, by 2017, he was castrating the National Assembly and rewriting the Constitution that Hugo Chavez and millions of other Venezuelans had risked their lives to preserve, and by 2018, the Bolivarian Revolution was dead and I was heartbroken. However, in my disillusioned grief, I was also forced to take a second look at the Revolution altogether, and I was haunted by what I found. While Hugo certainly did appear to do all that he could for the Venezuelan poor, he had also steadfastly relied on many pre-existing state powers to do so and in the process consistently undermined his own revolution's grass roots civilian infrastructure.

The most blatant and egregious example of this was the way Chavez managed Venezuela's state oil company, PDUSA, which was actually a relic of the neoliberal oligarchy that he was elected to confront. This humongous corporate behemoth continues to represent 90% of Venezuela's economy and was largely dependent on Chevron to function before Donald Trump's escalated embargo pushed Maduro to replace them with Chinese capitalist roadsters who now essentially own the nation's economy thanks to $62.5 billion dollars in predatory loans.

But it was actually Hugo who betrayed the workers councils who had saved his ass from the economic crisis of 2003 by colluding with their duplicitous bosses. In return for their cooperation, the Bolivarian Republic retained this same bureaucratic management system once the crisis was averted so long as they agreed to finance massive welfare state programs that kept their workers distracted from the fact that they had basically just proven they didn't even require a state to achieve true economic democracy.

While Chavez publicly rallied support for these autonomous councils, he continued to rely on the exact same top-down system that had long oppressed the Venezuelan people in what appeared to be a foolish attempt to liberate them. Even when this farce managed to temporarily benefit the people it did nothing to change the imbalance of power between them and the elites. At best, this arrangement swapped one raft of oligarchs for another, turning "revolutionary" civil servants into the new bourgeoisie, but mostly it just left a system designed for oppression largely intact and only one strongman away from being turned back into another meat grinder.

Soon, I began to question everything. I looked back at my revisionist history books and began to see this same tragedy repeat itself over and over again, from Lenin shackling the Soviets and building a centralized bureaucratic monstrosity that would ultimately offer Boris Yeltsin the ability to sell the Russian economy off in chunks the size of continents to Chairman Mao laying down the industrial foundation that turned China into the world's largest sweatshop plantation. 

The problem was and has always been the state itself. As long as there is a system in place that offers one class of people a monopoly on the use of force, the government will always be a den for despotism regardless of whether the scam is dressed up in the trappings of socialism, capitalism, democracy or nationalism. Just so long as the sanctity of the state is left intact, the results will always ultimately be the same.

This was the painful revelation that ultimately led a Bolivarian-Guevarist like me to embrace free market anti-capitalism and post-left anarchism, but some things never change, and this includes my solidarity with what's left of the Bolivarian Revolution as it faces down the barrels of total war at the hands of an empire that it had humiliated one too many times.

America's war against the Bolivarian Revolution never changed. In fact, if anything, it has only grown crueler with age. After five major coup attempts and a dozen distinct rounds of sanctions, the United States has affectively crippled what had until fairly recently been a fully functioning economy which has in turn triggered an almost unprecedented economic crisis. 

In 2014, Venezuela's GDP stood shoulder to shoulder with Brazil's at $14,000. By 2024, it was closer to Bangladesh at $3,870. As a result of this medieval style siege accelerated by every single American president from Obama to Trump, 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled for their lives, constituting the single largest displacement in modern history with 25% of the nation's population now living abroad as refugees. Some might argue such mass sadism constitutes a form of genocide; however, this Latin American Nakba is also primed for some serious blowback.

That's because the other thing that hasn't changed for Venezuela is the fire that stokes its poorest citizens to fight back, specifically the lumpenproletariats who make up Maduro's paramilitary Colectivos. While the Bolivarian oligarchy may have turned these civilian street fighters into a glorified Red Guard, they remain largely autonomous in structure, and they are the true heirs to Hugo Chavez because they were also his revolution's founding fathers. 

The Colectivos began as the armed wing of Venezuela's Communal Councils, autonomous favela democracies that trace their roots back to the leftist guerrilla movements of the 1960s. These organizations may have been reduced to Maduro's errand boys in recent years, but the last time America very briefly took control of the streets of Caracas in 2002, it was this same rambunctious squad of Robin Hood gangbangers who took it back with steel pipes and Brazilian off-brand Berettas.

Now, there are dozens of Colectivos operating in 16 of Venezuela's 23 states with numbers as high as 8,000. If Donald Trump is stupid enough to play Iraq with Venezuela, he won't be fighting fat thugs like Maduro; that pig will roll quicker than Saddam; he will be fighting a guerrilla war against the true bastard fathers of Hugo's revolution. The Colectivos will become the Sadrists of the Western Hemisphere, and I will support their fight for the same reason that Murray Rothbard supported the Vietcong. Because sovereignty is sacred and solidarity is bigger than any one ideology.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks

* Here's Where the Story Ends by the Sundays

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* My Hero by Foo Fighters

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* Suffragette City by David Bowie

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* Cochise by Audioslave

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

A Samhain Message to an Embattled Trans Youth

 Thousands of years ago, on the sacred rock from which my ancestors fled, this season of the year was celebrated as Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the darker months of the year. This was also a time of sacred upheaval and spiritual transformation, when the veil between the material world and the spirit world was thin, allowing lost spirits to return to earth and the normal roles of society to be inverted. At twilight, the craggy hills of the moors were alive with the glow of massive bonfires set by peasants embracing the darkness in drag. 

Eventually, this became what is now known as Halloween and it is really little wonder considering those roots that what became known as Halloween became less commonly known among my people as "Queer Christmas." 

Chaos reigns, the young govern the streets after dark and social transgressions typically demonized are set free to be flaunted flamboyantly by the light of the moon. All of which is beautiful enough in its own right, but this season is so much more than that for a person like me who considers their gender identity to be an integral part of their spiritual journey.

I am a Celtic Christian Pagan who reveres the Virgin Mary as a representative of the Tripple Goddess found throughout ancient matriarchal societies. I also pray to the Morrigana, three sister goddesses of ancient Celtic lore typically associated with battle but also with transformation and necessary change.

While there exists little direct evidence of third genders in ancient Celtic society and little direct evidence of much else of these tribes in general, considering that this was one of many sacred oral traditions wiped out by the tyranny of the churches who used the cross as a weapon for conquest and homogeny, the surviving myths of Celtic heathenry are rife with the same narratives of spiritual gender fluidity that defined many neighboring pagan cultures where the history of revered third genders remains very tangible.

My own embrace of a gender identity that refused to be governed by the limitations of the material world triggered the unlocking of decades of repressed trauma at the hands of the Catholic Church, who replaced the Celtic Druids of my ancestral homeland, along with multiple identities representing the young girls these men failed to silence.

Since becoming a woman divided among five personalities, my relationship with Mary and the Morrigana has become quite direct. They speak to me in words too sacred for language and they have a lot to say about the times we live in. Much like the months of the year ushered in by Samhain, these are days of darkness. America's carcinogenic roots of colonialism and white supremacy are strangling the few illusions of democracy that we once held dear. Soldiers stock the streets of America's crumbling metropolises while genocide of all kinds has become an open part of public policy.

These forces of unconcealed darkness have decided to make a point of trying to police the young in particular. Those yet to be initiated into their cult of conformity and murder, especially today's Queer youth who they never seem to stop writing laws against. Literally thousands of laws seeking to render the existence of young gender outlaws intolerable. 

An estimated 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13 and 17 live in states with severe restrictions on healthcare that simply allows them to postpone puberty with fewer known side effects than antidepressants. Dozens of states have turned the already carceral compulsory school system in this country into biological apartheid regimes in which adult public servants are granted the ability to police genitalia in bathrooms and locker rooms to insure the purity of their constructed gender binary.

This is all very personal to me, not just because I carry the scars from a transgender childhood but because a culture of survivalism informs the very existence of my modern tribe. In Queer culture if you are an open trans person who has lived passed the age of thirty without being broken or assimilated, you are considered to be an elder and I mean this quite literally. Out of all the activism that I have engaged myself in with organizing Queer resistance in my conservative rural environment, working with young people, specifically Queer and trans youth, is by far the most rewarding.

When you are part of such a small and marginalized minority, surrounded by people who couldn't possibly comprehend your very existence if they tried, having just a few people in your life who have been there and survived, listening and sharing, can literally be a lifeline.

The sheer amount of destruction I did to myself in a world where there wasn't even a word for the way I felt other than 'strange', or 'pervert' is irreversible. Suicide was a viable option on more than one occasion during this bleak existence. So, now when trans youth come to me for advice, I am both humbled and obliged, and the advice that I have to give them during this sacred season of Samhain is to show your teeth and remain ungovernable.

The people currently running this desperate nation are terrified of you and they should be. These are people who define their existence by defining other people's existence and you are living a lifestyle that defies basic bureaucratic categorization. The most basic principle of centralized government is the tyranny of paperwork, systems upon systems of filing, compiling, defining, categorizing... Reducing humanity into a series of boxes to check on a scantron and the first box is always 'male or female.'

You have exploded this system simply by crossing out the word 'or.' Your average Queer youth in the age of Trump changes their gender identity with the color of their hair and consults their friends online for advice before even thinking about addressing the tyranny of the clinic. They have decided to find themselves publicly and without apology, and their numbers are rising.

In 2023, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 3.3% of high school students identify openly as trans or non-binary and another 2.2% are questioning their government arranged gender designation. Considering how little teens talk to the goddamn CDC, I don't think I'm being presumptuous for assuming these numbers merely represent the tip of the iceberg. Pew has found that 5.1% of adults younger than 30 openly identify as trans or non-binary compared to just 1.6% of those between 30 and 49 and 0.3% of those 50 or older.

The hyper-statists of the Christian Right look at these numbers and shutter. They will tell you and any other asshole who will listen that this is all part of some "Cultural Marxist" wave of behavioral decadence that poses an existential threat to Western Civilization, and I actually agree with them on the second part.

After growing bored with Marx myself by my mid-twenties, an old Queer sage named William Burroughs turned me on to a quirky German historical philosopher named Oswald Spengler, best known for his epic treatise Decline of the West. While Spengler is frequently name-dropped by trolls on the right, based on my own studies, I suspect very few of them have actually done their homework. The central point of 'Decline' is that all cultures are essentially living organisms that tend to exist in lifespans of about 2000 years and that the final stage of a culture is the sterile stasis of civilization.

Based on his studies on other past empires from the Romans to the Aztecs, Spengler believed the West to be in the twilight of its existence which is an era typically defined by decadence.

However, Spengler didn't define decadence in terms of sexual perversion or debauchery. He defined this symptom of cultural collapse as being far more defined by the overly rational urban materialist, lost in an overpopulated desert of money and things with no connection to any real spiritual roots but only shallow replicants, like stadium churches and television preachers. Spengler also rejected the notion of culture being defined by blood and soil, stating that its true definition comes from the intimacy experienced between people with a shared history, values and vision of the future.

By Spenglerian definitions, it isn't today's trans youth who are the decadents. These children are rejecting the material world to follow the dictates of their souls and leaving today's temples of emptiness in favor of a spirituality defined by gnosis or personal experience. All of this puts them in line with the values of ancient paganism represented by Samhain as well as movements like Black Power, Aztlan and other forms of indigenous revivalism. 

It is our enemies in the Christian Right, with their bourgeoise fantasies of Zionist conquest and white picket fences who are the true decadents and that is why their civilization is dammed to irrevocable decline.

In this time of darkness, with the veil between the spirit world and our universe thinning by the second, I can only tell the youngest members of my culture that they are the ones who carry the light of our ancestors. They are part of a sacred revival that can provide the survivors of Western Civilization with a rare opportunity to start again and possibly even avoid the cycle of destruction represented by the soulless nation state and the fragile empires they aspire to become.

Wake up children. Samhain is upon us. It's time to stop dreaming and start truly living again. Let the fire burn brightly behind you and may it illuminate your path forward.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Wake Up by Arcade Fire

* All Tomorrows Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros

* What About Us by Ministry

* Dance Yourself Clean by LCD Soundsystem

* Dusted by Belly

* Serve the People by Handsome Furs

* Irish Heart, English Blood by Morrissey

* Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

* Describe by Perfume Genius