These are very dark days for the people of Brazil and there getting darker. It has been less than two weeks since the South American nations Senate voted to suspend left-wing populist president, Dilma Rousseff for no longer then 180 days and put her on trial for so called "crimes of responsibility." Over the months to come these same men (and their all men) will decide whether or not to make this suspension permanent. Those fine folks in our mainstream media would have you believe that this is an impeachment. I say, BULLSHIT! This is much more than an impeachment. This is a goddamn congressional coup and you don't have to follow the money very far to figure out that the usual suspects back in Washington are behind it.
You see, Dilma's crimes of responsibility, which remain totally unproven, amount to little more then sugar-coating the nation's debt to disguise the size of Brazil's fiscal deficit. A fairly common practice in most western countries, including our own. Ethically questionable? Perhaps but hardly grounds for impeachment. This is made all the more maddening by the fact that more then half of the men who voted to impeach Dilma are currently under investigation for far more serious corruption charges, under the so called Car Wash Scandal. This includes Dilma's backstabbing Vice President, Michel Temer, who is slated to take her place. These men have a few more things in common besides there shared interest in corruption. They are mostly wealthy white men from political dynasties who's relationships with Washington go back generations. In other words, these are our boys in Brazil. This "impeachment" is part of a larger conspiracy to destroy the independent left-wing government of Brazil. Which is itself a part of an even larger campaign to destroy a troublesome wave of independent left-wing governments across Latin America, known as the Pink Tide. Dilma's real crime was defying American hegemony and for that she must be destroyed. Sadly this coup isn't the first of its kind and it wont be the last. The days for Latin America will likely only grow darker from here.
They didn't use to do it this way. The they I speak of being the CIA, NEP and other dastardly tools of American imperialism. Back in the good old days, the all or nothing days, as Frank Miller would say, a Latin American leader got too uppity and tried to improve things for the poor at the expense of American business and we just popped em off, got some School of America alumni in the army to set up a junta and sent in the death squads to mop up the rest. BING! BANG! BOOM! Congress liquidated, constitution shredded, Twenty thousand dead and back to business as usual. Yep, those were the good old days. This all changed thought with the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
The mixed race son of working class parents, Hugo rose through the ranks of the Venezuelan military, only to lead a Free Officers-style revolt against his nations notoriously shameless plutocracy in 1992 with his clandestine brigade of left-wing soldiers known as MBR-200. It failed but it ignited a spark in the Venezuelan people that would not. After a couple years in the clink and a few more raising hell on the outside, Hugo shocked the world by winning the 1998 Venezuelan Presidential Election in a landslide victory. He wasted little time bringing a stick to his old rivals in the oligarchy, nationalizing Venezuela's colossal oil industry and using its profits to fund a rash of radical social programs that brought direct democracy to the destitute favelas and desperately needed free healthcare and education to everyone else. All part of Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution, named after the famed 19th century Venezuelan General, Simon Bolivar, who liberated his continent from the Spanish Monarchy. Hugo's goal was to do the same with the American Empire which had long bled South America dry. It was all marvelous but it couldn't possibly last, could it? Leftists around the world waited in agonizing anticipation for another Yankee coup. But no one could have predicted what happened next.
The 2002 Venezuelan Coup began like any other. Pompous rich kids took to the streets with there signs, doing there best impressions of campesinos. While American trained officers in the Venezuelan Army took control of the Senate and the Presidential Palace. Chavez was kidnapped and whisked away to a covert location where he was likely to be assassinated. A corporate Yankee stooge was unceremoniously declared the new president. The Senate was suspended, as was the constitution. And the crooked liars in the mainstream media, both American and Venezuelan, declared this sickening farce to be a democracy. Then something strange happened. The people woke up and flipped the fucking script.
Irate Venezuelans took to the streets in the millions, many of them coming from the nations poorest favelas, and swarmed the capitol, surrounding the coup leaders and making a massive citizens arrest. Low ranking soldiers in the Army, many from the same favelas, rejected the orders of there corrupt commanding officers and stormed the Senate and Presidential Palace, demanding the immediate release of there rightful Commander In Chief. All of this was totally unprecedented. An American coup had never been reversed like this. But that's precisely what happened. Within 48 hours of his kidnapping, Hugo Chavez was returned to power, triumphant. The masses celebrated there victory in the streets with the kind of festive enthusiasm usually reserved for Carnival. They won. The very poorest people of the once submissive nation of Venezuela had snatched the dragon of American Imperialism by its throat, held that wicked beast above there heads and roared NO MAS! This was the true beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution, waged not by a man or a party but by a people. This was when the Pink Tide came in.
The people across Latin American were equally electrified. Anything was possible. With the shackles of American Hegemony broken, nation after nation launched there own democratic revolutions. In 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President of Argentina on a populist, anti-IMF platform. That same year Dilma Rousseff's mentor, the charismatic Lula da Silva took control of Brazil. Followed by Evo Morales of Bolivia in 2006, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and former Sandinista guerrilla leader, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua in 2007 and former Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo in 2008 and on and on it went with no end in site.
Under the leadership of these men and women, Latin America witnessed a veritable renaissance, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the days of Bolivar. Corruption plummeted (though, clearly hadn't disappeared.) Quality of life among the poor skyrocketed. The rights of women, minorities, indigenous people and even the long ignored LGBTQ community were championed like never before. Groups like CELAC and UNASUR were formed to unite the poorer nations of the America's against corrupt agents of Yankee tyranny like NAFTA, CAFTA, the IMF and the OAS. Perhaps most revolutionary of all was the formation of BRICS by Brazil's Lula da Silva and the leaders of four other rising second-world nations, Russia, India, China and South Africa. BRICS primary goal was to offer poorer nations an economic alternative to the "humanitarian" black male of the World Bank and the creation of a new global currency reserve as an alternative to the tyranny of the Dollar. I always felt that BRICS was a rather fitting title for such an economically dangerous union, for that's exactly what the group created in the pants of the Western banklords, bricks.
Of coarse that wicked old dragon known as American hegemony didn't just roll over. Washington continued to bankroll acts of sabotage and destabilization across the Pink Tide nations from the Bolivian Gas Wars to the failed Ecuadoran police coup. But the most violent and persistent dirty tricks were reserved for the father of the Bolivarian Revolution. In the late 2000's/early 2010's no fewer then four attempts were made on Hugo Chavez's life. Everything from Colombian death squads to radiation poisoning. But they all failed. Hugo seemed as indestructible as the Pink Tide he ushered in appeared to be. Until 2011 that is.
That's the year that the seemingly healthy Venezuelan leader was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive strain of cancer of the gut and just in time for election season. Isn't it ironic, don't you think? The American funded Venezuelan media lost there proverbial shit, spreading vicious rumors of the leaders imminent death. But good old Hugo, like a sword pierced toro, rallied gallantly. In spite of the Kimo Therapy and the softball sized tumor removed from his gut, Hugo won his third and final re-election in 2012. Things looked good, Hugo seemed noticeably on the mend. The cancer went into remission and the long cherubic socialist even regained some of his trademark girth. But then, out of nowhere, the cancer came back with a vengeance. In a matter of weeks, Hugo went from remission to the grave. Just like his arrival on the international stage, no one saw it coming. Hugo Chavez, quite possibly the greatest anti-imperialist leader of the 21 century died at age 58 in Caracas on March 5, 2013.
I know what your thinking. You can't possibly blame this one on the United States. People die of cancer every day. I thought the same thing when I first heard the conspiracy theories percolating of a covert poisoning. But then strange things began happening. Several of Chavez's closest aides and confidantes, including his bodyguard and private nurse defected to the US only months after the President's passing and disappeared into the witness protection program. Both of these people alone would have had more then enough opportunity to poison the President. I also couldn't help remembering the Cold War documents released through FOIA detailing a top secret US Army program to develop an injectable radioactive carcinogen designed for the express purpose of serving as a mode of covert assassination. The results of the experiments were mostly mixed but the one area where this new method of germ warfare showed real promise was in the creation of soft tissue cancers, just like the one that killed Chavez. We'll probably never no for sure but it couldn't have came at a more convenient time.
The US had just perfected a new, more media friendly brand of coup de tat. The congressional coup. You see while left-wing movements had swept the executive offices of many of America's former banana republics, American Quislings funded through the State Department's inappropriately labeled National Endowment for Democracy remained in control of many of these nations legislative offices. Similarly, much of the top brass of these nations standing armies were alumni of the US military's personal war criminal academy, the School of the Americas. The only thing our jizz crusted political sock puppets had to do was create the illusion of democratic change, vis a vis trumped up impeachments and our boys in the military would take care of the rest.
This is precisely what happened in 2009 to Honduras' moderately populist new leader, Manuel Zelaya. Who was kidnapped under orders from congress and exiled to Costa Rica. The new Obama Administration feigned shock and disapproval but none other than then Secretary of State, Killary Clinton sent her and Bill's favorite impeachment lawyer Lanny Davis to sanitize the image of the new junta for the world stage. It kind of worked. The United States stood alone in applauding the totally rigged election that followed which left this poor tiny nation at the mercy of "elected" pro-Washington thugs with intimate connections to local drug cartels. The resulting carnage and mayhem has led to an influx of Central American immigrants to the United States, most of them women and children trying to avoid becoming child soldiers or sex slaves for the cartels. All because a Democratically elected centrist wanted to regulate a few American Business interests. Change we can believe in my ass.
Next up was Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, a former Catholic Bishop who had ended 61 years of single-party rule in his impoverished country only to find himself at the wrong end of an internationally scorned kangaroo court impeachment for many of the same reasons as Zelaya. So much for spreading the word of Christ.
In countries that managed to create a palpable presence in the legislature, our favorite pig-dog-Americans had to get a little more crafty. Both Venezuela, now under the leadership of Chavez's dauphin, Nicholas Madura, and Argentina, until recently, under the rule of Nestor Kirchner's widow Cristina, were subjected to a labyrinthine myriad of economic and media warfare. Currency manipulation, crooked over-speculation, fudged poll numbers, tabloid hatchet jobs, flooding oil markets with cheap crude, fostering black markets and manufacturing shortages of basic goods through corporate hoarding and self sabotage and staging increasingly violent riots. All connected to the US and/or its allies in the old moneyed aristocracies and all giving the people in these countries the illusion of a government and economy in free fall. Add to this the inescapable carnage created by Wall Street's great recession and you can hardly blame a people for becoming desperate enough to turn against there own democracies.
Cristina Kirchner's heir apparent, Daniel Scioli lost in Argentina's most recent presidential election to Wall Street's favorite Argentine bitch-boy, Mauricio Macri, and surprise surprise, the moment the people of Argentina finally cried uncle by electing another neoliberal hose-bag, the Chicken Little, sky is falling chaos came to an abrupt stop. Macri thanked his countries black-mailers for ceasing there rape by dutifully undoing years of the Kirchner's hard fought struggle for Argentina's economic independence and selling his battered nation back into IMF enslavement, but they weren't alone. That same year saw Chavez's PSUV lose control of the assembly, setting up his predecessor, Madura to become the next Dilma Rousseff. And here we are a again, full circle or should I say ninth circle in the Dante's Inferno that America's most "Progressive" President has turned Latin America back into.
During Hugo Chavez's first meeting with President Barack Obama in the latter's first year of leadership, Hugo gave Barack a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins Of Latin America, in hopes that the new president might learn something about Latin America's plight under the yoke of Imperialism. Judging by his policies since, Obama appears to have mistaken this tome for an instruction manual. So much for reaching across the aisle.
What do we make of this nasty turn of events. I, like many jaded young leftists across the globe, found hope in the underdog victories of the Pink Tide. I thought if true democracy was still possible in places as woefully corrupt as Venezuela and Argentina, then why not here, why not anywhere. In the years following Hugo's 2002 victory over the powers of imperialism, anything seemed possible. Revolutionary Socialism was winning and it felt good. I felt proud of men like Hugo Chavez and Nestor Kirchner, almost as if they were my own presidents. I would watch them stand before the UN assembly and tell my own corrupt government to go fuck itself and I would cheer like a drunken campesino.
So what am I and people like me supposed to do when the Pink Tide turns back and recedes into the deep dark ocean of the radical imagination from which it sprang. What are the people of those poor countries supposed to do when the Bolivarian Revolution burns out. I'm honestly not sure I can answer these questions. But I think I know what Hugo Chavez would tell us. I can almost hear his voice now, booming from the heavens like a thunderclap calling, " I am not the revolution! YOU ARE THE REVOLUTION!!! You have the power!"
Ultimately as heroic as men and women like Hugo Chavez and Dilma Rousseff may be, the people in the streets were the true saviors of the America's and they can be again. We need to remember the lesson Venezuela taught us back in 2002. That even the biggest imperial dragon can be slain by the united will of the people.
Maybe the Pink Tide has receded. Maybe the Bolivarian Revolution is over. But just like like the tide, revolutions come and go and come again. The Marxist dialectic teaches us that there is no such thing as a failed revolution. Every past revolution furthers the progress of the next. I say it's high time for another revolution and this time it starts right here in the belly of the dragon.The ghost of Simon Bolivar will have his revenge on the American Empire and like I said in my last post, revenge is a dish best served Green. Lets keep the ghost alive dearest motherfuckers. Let the revolution begin in 2016. Things may look dark now but it's always darkest before the dawn.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
After-Bern: Revenge is a Dish Best Served Green
Well dearest motherfuckers, it appears that the revolution is over. Or should I say the "revolution" is over. I speak of coarse of the much vaunted Bernie Sanders revolution of 2015/16. After a series of crushing if suspicious defeats in a spread of important primaries on the Eastern Seaboard, old Bernie is looking down the barrel at some long odds in his Quixotic run for the Democratic nomination for President of these United States. That's not to say that a Sanders victory is impossible but with a growing gulf of nearly 300 delegates between him and the Dragon Lady and a slew of Clinton friendly closed primaries ahead the odds of a democratic socialist White House look about as likely as they ever have. To put it simply, the jig is up. As the Mountain Goats once sang- The warning signs have all been bright and garish, far to many in number to ignore.
But don't tell that to the kids. They still have there young hearts set on sweet Uncle Bernie saving them from the bleak future of Killary's America. They've even bought into the false hope of a contested convention, with the mighty will of the people being upheld by the wise and holy Super-delegates. Oh you pretty things don't you know that Satan made Super-delegates for the express purpose of crushing the peoples will? There's nothing left for you to do but watch in horror as your dear leader, Chairman Bern, bows down and kisses Madam Killary's ring in return for a pittance of hollow platitudes and empty promises to respect the spirit of the revolution as long as it's children agree to mind there manners and vote Killary come fall. As I had predicted earlier on this blog, this has been the plan all along. This is how Killary aims to hijack the youth vote.
Bernie's revolution has always been little more then a viral marketing campaign to herd wayward millennials into the Democratic barn. That's not to say it has been a total waste for the far left in this country. Quite the contrary, in fact. Regardless of its true intentions, Bernie's campaign has actually (and probably inadvertently) done a great deal of good. For starters it has removed layers of stigma attached to the word socialist by generations of hysterical Cold War red baiting. It has also revealed seemingly radical ideals like living wages, free education and single-payer healthcare for what the rest of the western world already knows them to be; Basic common sense. Most importantly it has lit a fucking fire in the post-Occupy left that wont go out and Killary is in for a rude awakening if she thinks she can just hijack this inferno and use it to burn a straight path to the White House.
The kids are pissed and seeing darling Bernie capitulate to the very same forces he claimed to be fighting against is only gonna make it worse. Especially when you consider how these very forces extinguished the Bern. From the coin tosses of the Iowa Caucus' to the New York Board of Elections purging of 126,000 Brooklyn voters, the 2016 Democratic Primary has been the most horrifically corrupt American election since Bush had half the black people in Ohio arrested back in 2004. 17 out of the 19 contests with exit polling overestimated Bernie's lead. 9 of them outside of the margin of error. By these calculations at least 58 of Killary's delegates should be Bernie's. This may not be enough to close the gap but in the heat of the moment it could have been enough to swing momentum in Bernie's favor. In other words, dear Madam Killary is so woefully loathsome that she needed to fix a race against her own sheepdog. This woman makes Dick Nixon look like Atticus Finch.
Of coarse the devout Killary loyalists in the mainstream media have done everything they can to keep these facts silent. Not that Bernie has exactly made it hard for them. He barely made a fucking peep until the Brooklyn heist. But this isn't the nineties. America's finest propagandists in the Fourth Estate can't manufacture consent like they use to. Social media is ablaze with furious Sandernistas, beside themselves with well earned rage after being turned away from the ballot box. And Bernie still believes he can sell those poor fucked kids on Killary with peons to party loyalty and platformism. Fat fucking chance.
It's little wonder that a growing number of Sanders supporters have vowed not to vote at all if/when Killary finally finishes stealing the nomination. What choice do they have? They figure if there votes are worth less than shit to the DNC then why even fucking bother. Not voting in there mind's eye is the only way to get back at the system that chewed them up and spat them out like so many young believers before them. I don't blame them. I've been there myself.
During the first Presidential Election that I was eligible to vote in back in 2008, I put my heart and soul behind another Democratic outsider named Dennis Kucinich. I even joined the Democratic Party for the sole purpose of voting for him in the primaries. Much to my dismay Dennis dropped out of the race just before he could reach my state of Pennsylvania, leaving this young anti-imperialist with the unsavory option of voting for Barack "lets bomb Pakistan" Obama and Killary herself. I chose to vote for neither. But the worst was yet to come. I had to watch a great man who I still deeply admire sell his convictions short and endorse Obomba at the Denver Convention with a rousing speech encouraging young leftist like myself to do the same. The DNC loved it and heaped mountains of praise upon there prodigal son before thanking him by redistricting him out of congressional existence. I felt like throwing up. I may not have voted at all in 2008 if it wasn't for Ralph Nader which leads me to my final point. Sandernistas could simply stay home in November, binge watch Dexter or re-read A People History of the United States (both great choices.) But there remains another option. A third option.
I speak of coarse of current Green Party favorite Jill Stein. A woman who's views are more then compatible with Bernie's and are far more consistent and thought out. Like Bernie, Jill supports Single-payer, the $15 an our minimum wage and free public education. Unlike Bernie, she realizes that the only way to actually achieve these goals is to do what Scandinavia has done and cut our bloated military spending by at least 50% and shutter America's phalanx of 700+ foreign military bases.
Jill herself has realized the opportunity provided to her by the Sanders shellacking. She has even left the door open for Bernie to run with her on the Green Party ticket. This would give Bernie automatic access to general election ballot boxes in nearly every state. Personally, I wouldn't count on this possibility and I doubt Jill is either. With decades of Democratic Party loyalty behind him and a shot at a senior senators seat ahead, Bernie is one "Socialist" sheep-dog who knows his place at the foot of the Washington dinner table. And I believe that this is precisely what Jill is trying to point out to the Sandernistas with her unprecedented offer. As she herself poignantly put it recently; "You can't really have a revolutionary campaign inside a counter-revolutionary party." Amen, but I would take it one step further and say; You can't really have a revolutionary campaign with a counter-revolutionary candidate.
What the true revolutionaries of this country have now is a grand opportunity to reach out to a whole new generation of would-be revolutionaries before they can be co-opted or jaded beyond repair. I don't suffer under the delusion that Jill Stein will win this time. She likely won't. But the crater size mud hole she can stomp in the two-party plutocracy's ass, with a little help from some young pissed Sandernistas, will be too massive for even Killary's little Eichmann's at the Clinton "News" Network (aka CNN) to ignore. Revenge truly is a dish best served green.
Cheer up, dearest motherfuckers. This is where we get to make it right.
But don't tell that to the kids. They still have there young hearts set on sweet Uncle Bernie saving them from the bleak future of Killary's America. They've even bought into the false hope of a contested convention, with the mighty will of the people being upheld by the wise and holy Super-delegates. Oh you pretty things don't you know that Satan made Super-delegates for the express purpose of crushing the peoples will? There's nothing left for you to do but watch in horror as your dear leader, Chairman Bern, bows down and kisses Madam Killary's ring in return for a pittance of hollow platitudes and empty promises to respect the spirit of the revolution as long as it's children agree to mind there manners and vote Killary come fall. As I had predicted earlier on this blog, this has been the plan all along. This is how Killary aims to hijack the youth vote.
Bernie's revolution has always been little more then a viral marketing campaign to herd wayward millennials into the Democratic barn. That's not to say it has been a total waste for the far left in this country. Quite the contrary, in fact. Regardless of its true intentions, Bernie's campaign has actually (and probably inadvertently) done a great deal of good. For starters it has removed layers of stigma attached to the word socialist by generations of hysterical Cold War red baiting. It has also revealed seemingly radical ideals like living wages, free education and single-payer healthcare for what the rest of the western world already knows them to be; Basic common sense. Most importantly it has lit a fucking fire in the post-Occupy left that wont go out and Killary is in for a rude awakening if she thinks she can just hijack this inferno and use it to burn a straight path to the White House.
The kids are pissed and seeing darling Bernie capitulate to the very same forces he claimed to be fighting against is only gonna make it worse. Especially when you consider how these very forces extinguished the Bern. From the coin tosses of the Iowa Caucus' to the New York Board of Elections purging of 126,000 Brooklyn voters, the 2016 Democratic Primary has been the most horrifically corrupt American election since Bush had half the black people in Ohio arrested back in 2004. 17 out of the 19 contests with exit polling overestimated Bernie's lead. 9 of them outside of the margin of error. By these calculations at least 58 of Killary's delegates should be Bernie's. This may not be enough to close the gap but in the heat of the moment it could have been enough to swing momentum in Bernie's favor. In other words, dear Madam Killary is so woefully loathsome that she needed to fix a race against her own sheepdog. This woman makes Dick Nixon look like Atticus Finch.
Of coarse the devout Killary loyalists in the mainstream media have done everything they can to keep these facts silent. Not that Bernie has exactly made it hard for them. He barely made a fucking peep until the Brooklyn heist. But this isn't the nineties. America's finest propagandists in the Fourth Estate can't manufacture consent like they use to. Social media is ablaze with furious Sandernistas, beside themselves with well earned rage after being turned away from the ballot box. And Bernie still believes he can sell those poor fucked kids on Killary with peons to party loyalty and platformism. Fat fucking chance.
It's little wonder that a growing number of Sanders supporters have vowed not to vote at all if/when Killary finally finishes stealing the nomination. What choice do they have? They figure if there votes are worth less than shit to the DNC then why even fucking bother. Not voting in there mind's eye is the only way to get back at the system that chewed them up and spat them out like so many young believers before them. I don't blame them. I've been there myself.
During the first Presidential Election that I was eligible to vote in back in 2008, I put my heart and soul behind another Democratic outsider named Dennis Kucinich. I even joined the Democratic Party for the sole purpose of voting for him in the primaries. Much to my dismay Dennis dropped out of the race just before he could reach my state of Pennsylvania, leaving this young anti-imperialist with the unsavory option of voting for Barack "lets bomb Pakistan" Obama and Killary herself. I chose to vote for neither. But the worst was yet to come. I had to watch a great man who I still deeply admire sell his convictions short and endorse Obomba at the Denver Convention with a rousing speech encouraging young leftist like myself to do the same. The DNC loved it and heaped mountains of praise upon there prodigal son before thanking him by redistricting him out of congressional existence. I felt like throwing up. I may not have voted at all in 2008 if it wasn't for Ralph Nader which leads me to my final point. Sandernistas could simply stay home in November, binge watch Dexter or re-read A People History of the United States (both great choices.) But there remains another option. A third option.
I speak of coarse of current Green Party favorite Jill Stein. A woman who's views are more then compatible with Bernie's and are far more consistent and thought out. Like Bernie, Jill supports Single-payer, the $15 an our minimum wage and free public education. Unlike Bernie, she realizes that the only way to actually achieve these goals is to do what Scandinavia has done and cut our bloated military spending by at least 50% and shutter America's phalanx of 700+ foreign military bases.
Jill herself has realized the opportunity provided to her by the Sanders shellacking. She has even left the door open for Bernie to run with her on the Green Party ticket. This would give Bernie automatic access to general election ballot boxes in nearly every state. Personally, I wouldn't count on this possibility and I doubt Jill is either. With decades of Democratic Party loyalty behind him and a shot at a senior senators seat ahead, Bernie is one "Socialist" sheep-dog who knows his place at the foot of the Washington dinner table. And I believe that this is precisely what Jill is trying to point out to the Sandernistas with her unprecedented offer. As she herself poignantly put it recently; "You can't really have a revolutionary campaign inside a counter-revolutionary party." Amen, but I would take it one step further and say; You can't really have a revolutionary campaign with a counter-revolutionary candidate.
What the true revolutionaries of this country have now is a grand opportunity to reach out to a whole new generation of would-be revolutionaries before they can be co-opted or jaded beyond repair. I don't suffer under the delusion that Jill Stein will win this time. She likely won't. But the crater size mud hole she can stomp in the two-party plutocracy's ass, with a little help from some young pissed Sandernistas, will be too massive for even Killary's little Eichmann's at the Clinton "News" Network (aka CNN) to ignore. Revenge truly is a dish best served green.
Cheer up, dearest motherfuckers. This is where we get to make it right.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Bathroom Liberation Front
Nearly a year ago, on my 27th birthday, I wrote a post celebrating the Supreme Court decision to essentially legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. I used the event to remind myself, in the haze of my annual birthday depression, that even in fucked up little Amerikkka, good things come to those who wait. After decades of discrimination, humiliation, violence, disease and repression, the queer community in this country that I've come to see as a kind of extended family of proud misfits finally had a bright, shining victory to celebrate for all the heartache and backbreaking hard work and it felt like a victory for the whole fucking country. One that gave me hope when I needed it most. We had witnessed true radical change in this country for the first time in a very long time and it felt good, damn good. The people had come together and together we were heavy.
Unfortunately, like most great moments of cataclysmic change in this country, it came with a price. One step forward and two steps back. And those steps were to be taken on the backs of the queer communities most vulnerable minority and the one nearest to my heart. Those fine folks at fag-basher's INC. set there sights on the trans+ community and set there phasers to kill. What transpired and sadly continues to transpire is not legislation or even a backlash. It's revenge. Our happiness angered the gods of hate and they demanded blood.
They got it over the last year as a slew of states across the Bible Belt got busy creating legislation that targeted queer people under the guise of defending small business' and civil servant's right to discriminate as long as they invoked the name of god to do so (they always do) giving everyone from bakers to pissed off crazy cat ladies like that bitch Kim Davis the ability to deny services to gay couples. But that was just the proverbial lubricant. The real dick in the ass came with the anti-trans+ bathroom laws.
They differ slightly from state to state but they all follow a similar line of thought, if you can call it that. In order to protect the delicate sensibilities of our precious daughters from the off possibility of seeing a wiener (GASP!) women's bathrooms had to be policed by laws that barred anyone born with a prick from entering them. Now, aside from the fact that these laws are totally unenforceable, which I'll get to shortly, they seem designed and marketed to humiliate, dehumanize and demonize a minority that already suffers from more gruesome brutality then any other. The vile commercials for these campaigns routinely go out of there way to paint transgender people and trans-women in particular as depraved sexual predators only interested in using public restrooms as a hunting ground to prey on young children. They did everything but invoke the name of Buffalo Bill.
These laws weren't designed to be effective. As stated above, there totally unenforceable unless your going to put an armed state trooper at every fucking rest stop to check peoples birth certificates at the door like a goddamn bouncer. No, these laws are designed with only one purpose in mind and that is to unleash a witch-hunt style wave of persecution against transgender and genderqueer individuals which can only end in violence. I'm not being hyperbolic here. The letter of these laws is written word for word by "faith" based, designated hate groups like the Liberty Council. These laws are about hate, pure and simple. There is no room to mince words on this. There is yet to be a single, solitary recorded case of a trans+ person assaulting anyone in a public restroom. Yet over 70% of polled transgender people report having experienced traumatizing encounters in public restrooms. Many of those incidents include violence and even rape. Many of these victims are trans+ kids who also experience record shattering rates of suicide, largely because campaigns like this make them feel like loveless monsters. But I guess those precious daughters don't fucking matter to all the fine Christian folk at the Liberty Council. Well, they fucking matter to me. To quote Throwing Muses- They can no longer move and I can no longer be still.
To be clear, I may be some yet to be defined variant of genderqueer (still figuring that out) but I'm lucky enough to be able to say that these laws don't effect me directly. However frustratingly complicated it may be, my predominant gender identity still matches my biology. I have no problem using a men's room aside from the fact that there fucking repulsive. Even if the prototypical jarhead fag-basher pissing next to me knew I was genderqueer, one look at my mountain man beard and my Haystacks Calhoun physique and he would probably just assume that a guy like me being genderqueer just meant that I liked to wear women's lingerie while I slaughtered my victims with a fire-ax (I actually prefer kimonos and chainsaws.) Long, hypothetical story short, Johnny Fag-Basher would probably sooner piss sitting down then risk a bloody death in my basement choreographed to the tune of "Goodbye Horses". What can I say, even the most hideous stereotypes can be fun sometimes. My point is, I have the luxury of being able to blend in with the straight world. Even my feminine side is pretty butch. But most gender non-conforming folks aren't so lucky. And since I can't be in every men's room from Kansas to Mississippi with my kimono and chainsaw to protect my people, I have no other choice but to once again fall back on the sadly limited power of my mighty little blog.
My solution, aside from castrating the Johnny Fag-Basher's of this universe, is actually pretty simple. Down right obvious in my opinion. Desegregate the bathrooms. Seriously, why the fuck not. I don't think even the most heavily chromosomed mongoloids out here in cousin-fucker country suffer under the delusion that not everybody poops. The very premise of gender segregated bathrooms is actually relatively recent. About 127 years to be exact. Which in the scheme of human existence is equivalent to a fucking pin drop. Furthermore, it's a relic of an antiquated and sexist era.
During the burgeoning Industrial Revolution of the late 1880's, the mustache twirling patriarchy of Victorian America jumped at ways to protect or rather control the growing population of female factory workers. What they came up with in there infinite, manly, Caucasian wisdom was that good old stand by of segregation. They figured, shit, it worked on those troublesome colored folk down south, so fuck it, why not? And thus we had ladies reading rooms in libraries, ladies parlors in department stores, ladies train cars (in back, naturally) and ladies restrooms. Most of these brilliant, paternalistic advances fell by the wayside of progress. So why hold on to the last vestige of a stupid era. Especially when it oppresses and violates peoples basic dignity. Privacy would simply be a matter of locking the stall door. Urinals and open showers would have to go but I'd hardly call that a tragedy. And I know what you ladies out there are thinking. Men are fucking animals in the bathroom. My OCD has made me painfully aware of this fact. But ask any straight married man if his bathroom habits have become more human since cohabitating with a member of the opposite sex and they will promptly give you a defeated sigh and concur. The more women in a house, the more cleanly the bathroom. Never underestimate the power of a good example. We can fucking do this people. It's not fucking rocket science. All we have to do is grow the fuck up and evolve. Segregation of any kind is bullshit. Lets liberate the bathroom, NOW!!!
Unfortunately, like most great moments of cataclysmic change in this country, it came with a price. One step forward and two steps back. And those steps were to be taken on the backs of the queer communities most vulnerable minority and the one nearest to my heart. Those fine folks at fag-basher's INC. set there sights on the trans+ community and set there phasers to kill. What transpired and sadly continues to transpire is not legislation or even a backlash. It's revenge. Our happiness angered the gods of hate and they demanded blood.
They got it over the last year as a slew of states across the Bible Belt got busy creating legislation that targeted queer people under the guise of defending small business' and civil servant's right to discriminate as long as they invoked the name of god to do so (they always do) giving everyone from bakers to pissed off crazy cat ladies like that bitch Kim Davis the ability to deny services to gay couples. But that was just the proverbial lubricant. The real dick in the ass came with the anti-trans+ bathroom laws.
They differ slightly from state to state but they all follow a similar line of thought, if you can call it that. In order to protect the delicate sensibilities of our precious daughters from the off possibility of seeing a wiener (GASP!) women's bathrooms had to be policed by laws that barred anyone born with a prick from entering them. Now, aside from the fact that these laws are totally unenforceable, which I'll get to shortly, they seem designed and marketed to humiliate, dehumanize and demonize a minority that already suffers from more gruesome brutality then any other. The vile commercials for these campaigns routinely go out of there way to paint transgender people and trans-women in particular as depraved sexual predators only interested in using public restrooms as a hunting ground to prey on young children. They did everything but invoke the name of Buffalo Bill.
These laws weren't designed to be effective. As stated above, there totally unenforceable unless your going to put an armed state trooper at every fucking rest stop to check peoples birth certificates at the door like a goddamn bouncer. No, these laws are designed with only one purpose in mind and that is to unleash a witch-hunt style wave of persecution against transgender and genderqueer individuals which can only end in violence. I'm not being hyperbolic here. The letter of these laws is written word for word by "faith" based, designated hate groups like the Liberty Council. These laws are about hate, pure and simple. There is no room to mince words on this. There is yet to be a single, solitary recorded case of a trans+ person assaulting anyone in a public restroom. Yet over 70% of polled transgender people report having experienced traumatizing encounters in public restrooms. Many of those incidents include violence and even rape. Many of these victims are trans+ kids who also experience record shattering rates of suicide, largely because campaigns like this make them feel like loveless monsters. But I guess those precious daughters don't fucking matter to all the fine Christian folk at the Liberty Council. Well, they fucking matter to me. To quote Throwing Muses- They can no longer move and I can no longer be still.
To be clear, I may be some yet to be defined variant of genderqueer (still figuring that out) but I'm lucky enough to be able to say that these laws don't effect me directly. However frustratingly complicated it may be, my predominant gender identity still matches my biology. I have no problem using a men's room aside from the fact that there fucking repulsive. Even if the prototypical jarhead fag-basher pissing next to me knew I was genderqueer, one look at my mountain man beard and my Haystacks Calhoun physique and he would probably just assume that a guy like me being genderqueer just meant that I liked to wear women's lingerie while I slaughtered my victims with a fire-ax (I actually prefer kimonos and chainsaws.) Long, hypothetical story short, Johnny Fag-Basher would probably sooner piss sitting down then risk a bloody death in my basement choreographed to the tune of "Goodbye Horses". What can I say, even the most hideous stereotypes can be fun sometimes. My point is, I have the luxury of being able to blend in with the straight world. Even my feminine side is pretty butch. But most gender non-conforming folks aren't so lucky. And since I can't be in every men's room from Kansas to Mississippi with my kimono and chainsaw to protect my people, I have no other choice but to once again fall back on the sadly limited power of my mighty little blog.
My solution, aside from castrating the Johnny Fag-Basher's of this universe, is actually pretty simple. Down right obvious in my opinion. Desegregate the bathrooms. Seriously, why the fuck not. I don't think even the most heavily chromosomed mongoloids out here in cousin-fucker country suffer under the delusion that not everybody poops. The very premise of gender segregated bathrooms is actually relatively recent. About 127 years to be exact. Which in the scheme of human existence is equivalent to a fucking pin drop. Furthermore, it's a relic of an antiquated and sexist era.
During the burgeoning Industrial Revolution of the late 1880's, the mustache twirling patriarchy of Victorian America jumped at ways to protect or rather control the growing population of female factory workers. What they came up with in there infinite, manly, Caucasian wisdom was that good old stand by of segregation. They figured, shit, it worked on those troublesome colored folk down south, so fuck it, why not? And thus we had ladies reading rooms in libraries, ladies parlors in department stores, ladies train cars (in back, naturally) and ladies restrooms. Most of these brilliant, paternalistic advances fell by the wayside of progress. So why hold on to the last vestige of a stupid era. Especially when it oppresses and violates peoples basic dignity. Privacy would simply be a matter of locking the stall door. Urinals and open showers would have to go but I'd hardly call that a tragedy. And I know what you ladies out there are thinking. Men are fucking animals in the bathroom. My OCD has made me painfully aware of this fact. But ask any straight married man if his bathroom habits have become more human since cohabitating with a member of the opposite sex and they will promptly give you a defeated sigh and concur. The more women in a house, the more cleanly the bathroom. Never underestimate the power of a good example. We can fucking do this people. It's not fucking rocket science. All we have to do is grow the fuck up and evolve. Segregation of any kind is bullshit. Lets liberate the bathroom, NOW!!!
Friday, April 1, 2016
Putin's Last Laugh Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Chess Game
It was a beautiful dream. A dream of blood and guts and conquest. A dream of sword swinging Mujaheddin. A dream of transcontinental pipelines. A dream of an ethnically cleansed, Wahhabi quisling state, a hatchets throw from Russia's jugular. It was a hideous, ghastly wet dream straight out of Churchill's musty spank bank. It was a nightmare about secular Syria in chains, splay legged and prepped for Yankee rape. And it almost came true. They would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling Russians.
Yes, dearest motherfuckers, on March 14, Vladimir Putin, that most wily of Kremlin bastards, announced before a shocked global audience on the eve of the Geneva Ceasefire that Russia had achieved its goals in Syria and would be pulling the majority of its combat forces out of the country less then six months after they had arrived. In other words, checkmate.
But to fully understand and appreciate the gravity of Putin's victory speech you have to look at how we got here and start at the very beginning of this Syrian mess.
It all started with a pipeline. In the year of our lord, two-thousand-and-nine, Qatar, one of America's finest little oil-rich terror state-lets, offered the secular regime of Bashar Al-Assad the opportunity of a lifetime. You see, Qatar, with the full support of its American handlers, had cooked up a grand scheme to funnel its plentiful oil stash directly into the EU by way of a pipeline that was to run through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and hopefully Syria. Thus cutting a huge chunk out of Russia and Iran's own Euro driven oil profits and further isolating two of America's final targets in its century long quest for global domination. Syria was the last state necessary to make this scheme come true.
Naturally, Assad said no. Which only came as a surprise if you've spent the last fifty years up your own asshole (AKA the US State Department). Syria wasn't about to fuck over two of its oldest and most loyal allies just to hop in bed with a nest of serpents who would (and have) gladly devour there own young just to see there stock value rise half a point. As if that weren't enough to finally due in this little anti-imperialist pariah state, Assad then went ahead and signed on to a counter deal to start a similar pipeline with Iran in 2010. That was the point of no return. As far as Uncle Sam and his Wahhabi quislings were concerned, Assad's ass was as good as grass.
Thankfully the villains of our story had just figured out how to hijack the once troublesome Arab Spring vis-a-vis the magic of social media and use it for there own evil plots. This reckless formula had already (pseudo)successfully brought down Gaddafi in Libya. All part of then Secretary Killary's new wave of American imperialism, ironically deemed Soft Power. Now it was time for a sequel in Syria. And Killary, in her perma-infinite wisdom, decided to use the war-booty of Muammar's massive weapons cache to do it. Soon literal shiploads of Libyan weaponry began to find its way to rebels on the shores of Syria. But after this pipeline got hit by Killary's own once loyal freedom fighters in Benghazi, slaughtering Ambassador Steven and his entourage in the process, Obama got spooked and rejected Killary's plot to directly arm what was essentially Al-Qaeda with the emphasis on directly. This wouldn't do. Madame Killary, not accustomed to hearing no from someone who, as her charming hubby once mused, would have been getting her coffee a few years ago, left in protest. This didn't stop Obama from getting a little help from his friends.
With Madame Killary out and the post-Benghazi arms tide too toxic to touch with American fingers, the job of moving Gaddafi's deadly loot to our latest proxy jihad was outsourced to Turkey who dutifully began to flood the Syrian deserts with a searing hot ocean of high-powered weaponry. Meanwhile Qatar and Saudi Arabia did what they do best and gathered the disaffected maniacs of the world and sent them into another poor secular nation in dire need of destabilization. All while Obama and his cabal of little Eichmann's in the State Department went to work pumping the compliant western media-sphere full of propagandist tall tales of brave Syrian rebels being violently repressed by big badman Assad, infringing upon there there god given right to slaughter infidels and sell there daughters like cattle. Naturally, the bright, wholesome folks of the fifth estate, entrusted to educate the American people, ate this devil's dung like fine chocolate and spit it back out into the gaping mouths of there already thoroughly debased audience.
Not that this was nearly enough. The reality on the ground in Syria was that the manufactured rebellion never had the support of more than thirty percent of the local population and that number plummeted once it became undeniable that this supposedly homegrown uprising was in fact comprised largely of foreign mercenaries who couldn't give two shits about democracy or even humanity itself for that matter. The Syrian people did the only sane thing they could and stood by the devil they knew. Russia did the same and continued to back there Baathist Allies against yet another uprising clearly aimed at weakening there presence in there own continent.
In spite of all the free guns and man power or more then likely because of it, America's latest mujaheddin loverboys quickly had there asses handed to them by the very people they claimed to be liberating. It rapidly became painfully clear to Obama that Killary was right about one thing. You couldn't have your imperialist pie and eat it too. He could have pulled a JFK and realized that he was in over his head with his dusty Bay of Pigs and pull the plug on it. But no, the Nobel Peace Prize winner decided to double down on his mess. It was time to pull a Dubya and go balls deep in this bloody bitch. The only problem was Obama didn't have the 911-style support he needed to commit such an act of imperial pasty rape with his dovish posterity in tact. Even with the waves of State Department approved propaganda being vomited at the American people, they still couldn't stomach another Middle Eastern quagmire. The corpses of Iraq and Libya weren't buried deep enough to stop reeking. Obama would have to get crafty with this one.
So the Commander in Chief came up with a plan, A wickedly ingenious plan. With Assad's boys enjoying the joyful sadist's end of a glorious ass whooping and with the full knowledge that the rebel's re-gifted Gaddafi arms stash included biological weaponry, Obama sent his whip-lashed errand boys a thinly coded message through the western mass media. The crafty young president made a series of public announcements the he would not interfere (directly) in the Syrian Fracas UNLESS, that is, someone (anyone?) crossed the "red line" and used chemical weapons (wink wink). The desperate Jihadi's heard the message loud and clear and launched a series of nerve gas false flag attacks against Syrian civilians. Obama and his NATO posse wasted zero time waiting for the bodies to get cold before declaring unequivocally that the then victorious Assad had inexplicably crossed the red line that insured his own doom. And of coarse, once again, Obama's devoted fanclub in the media joyfully jumped aboard another war bandwagon with the unblinking giddiness of kindergartner's on an Autumn hayride. It looked like Obama would finally have his war. But Putin had other plans.
As Obama began to circle the wagons and prep for a full blown Syrian invasion, complete with fleets of menacing gunboats gathering along the nation's coastline, even going so far as to fire a warning shot over the bow of a locally stationed Russian battleship (Gulf of Tonkin, much?), Vladimir Putin, ever the Russian chess master, carefully plotted his next move. A weaker leader, like Yeltsin, would have simply abandoned there embattled Allie. A dumber one, like (insert American president's name)
would have over reacted with military bombastics. Putin chose a third way and against all odds it fucking worked.
With a little help from a fellow anti-imperialist hell raiser in the Vatican, Putin brokered a peace deal with the Assad regime. Assad agreed to hand over his own antiquated chemical weapons stash, left-over from his feud with Yankee armed mustard gas enthusiast Saddam Hussein, to the Russians for disposal if the "free world" agreed to step off there throat. The lion share of the so called free world was pleased with this option. Obama was beside himself with frustration but what could he do? Putin caught him with his pants down, spanked him and called his bluff. Without the already played out specter of weapons of mass destruction, Obama didn't have the support he needed at home or abroad to engage in a "humanitarian" bloodbath. What was even better was that now Obama's Heroes(TM) in Al-Qaeda could no longer gas people without exposing the lie of the previous false flag attacks. In one fare swoop Putin managed to not only kill Obama's war but he also depleted him of an option in provoking another one. Obama, who had previously poo-pooed the constitutional necessity of congressional approval for war powers, was forced to send his plot against Syria to die in the Senate and anti-warriors such as myself welcomed the rise of Putin as an unlikely champion for peace.
Putin had humiliated Obama. He made a wanna-be warmonger look like a fucking pussy in front of the chicken-hawk set. The cruelty of cold, hard reality didn't stop Obama's liberal fanboys however from ludicrously giving there dear leader credit for preventing a war he carefully designed himself. It also didn't stop this wolf in doves clothing from seeking revenge. But he'd have to look north of Damascus to get it.
As the Russian people basked in the new found glory of there international leadership at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Obama's minions in the State Department busied themselves manufacturing an uprising in Russia's neighbor and former heartland Ukraine. By the Games closing ceremony the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych had been violently overthrown and replaced with an openly Russophobic, neofascist junta who wasted little time antagonizing the nations sizable Russian speaking population when the people of Crimea rose up and decided, democratically, to return to there motherland. Putin stepped up again and bravely accepted the will of the people followed immediately, of coarse, by another toxic campaign of slanderous vilification from the lemmings in the western media.
The point of the Maidan coup was to provoke Russia into a confrontation that would permanently alienate them from the European market they depended on for oil revenue. Putin recognized this right away and adamantly refused to take the bait. I myself, as a lifelong Russophile and history nerd was livid with what appeared to me to be Vlad's cowardly indecision on Eastern Ukraine. I was all to familiar with the long plight of the Novorussiyan people. I had read extensively on the grotesque horrors they had suffered and against all odds survived at the hands of the Nazi's and there Western Ukrainian henchmen. Millions of bullet riddled bodies in mass graves. Only now to face skinheads marching beneath the same treacherous flags there forefathers had died beneath. I supported there independence. I still do. And I was furious that Putin refused to do the same, especially after Crimea. I was wrong. Though I may possess a Russian soul, I lack a Russian mind. You see, Russians play the long game and Putin was no exception. Putin played for keeps.
While Vlad had little choice but to respect Crimea's wishes in order to maintain Russia's indispensable Black Sea fleet in Sebastipol, he wasn't about to be suckered into another Afghan trap like his Soviet forefathers before him. So he played it cool. He aloud NATO to go out of there way to harass him and he aloud the US to discredit itself and expose there own duplicity with there relentless and increasingly unhinged tall tales about fictional Russian invasions. Sure enough, it took less then a year for Europe to grow exasperated by the constant Yankee wolf crying. These cultured self righteous Euro-twats may have been ready and willing to indulge in there innate Slavophobia with sanctions and economic warfare but they weren't about let the US use them as a front for starting the third world war. So they cautiously decided to go against Obama's wishes and give Putin another opportunity to play peacemaker. And so it was that Putin brokered another peace deal that still stands strong today. Novorussiya has held on to there hard fought autonomy while the fascist American rump state of Banderastan has devolved into a colossal despotic money-pit, totally dependent on funds the US and the EU can barely afford to pay. Once again, Putin had shrewdly turned the tables on his foes.
This didn't mean he was out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. While Vlad was distracted up north, Obama's black budget henchmen devised a devilish new strategy to destabilize Assad. Two armies were built. One, the ironically titled Syrian Free Army, was built out in the open as a force of American armed and trained "good guys" ready to fight for mom, apple pie and democracy. The other army appeared just as suddenly but from the shadows. ISIS, as they called themselves, seemed to have mysteriously rose from the sands of Iraq like Ozy-fucking-mandias. It's leaders were all former Al-Qaeda fighters who met in the same American run prison and were summarily released for reasons still shrouded in mystery. The nucleus of there rank and file came directly from the Sunni death squads used by Petreaus during the Fox fabled surge. I think you get where I'm going with this.
While America had zero traceable ties to ISIS, our client states in Turkey and the Persian Gulf pulled out all the stops to bankroll these bastards. As did our own Free Syrian Army in there own weird way. While officially enemies of ISIS, our boys seemed to act mostly as a recruiting ground or even a conduit to the army of darkness. A common narrative unfolded. A Syrian rebel is vetted by the US. Trained by the US. Armed by the US. Sent back into Syria by the US. Then summarily joined ISIS the moment there boots hit the fucking sand. Obama puts up his hands and says oopsy-daisy. But it happened way too goddamn much to just be a coincidence. That tasty, cinnamon flavored neocon Marco Rubio was right about one thing. We need to dispel with the notion that Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's doing what right-wing chicken-hawks like Rubio only dream about and he gets away with it every fucking time.
After destabilizing the Iran-friendly Shiite government in Iraq, leading the once resistant Al-Maliki regime to get down on there knee's and beg us to re-occupy there country, ISIS turned there attention to Syria and quickly pushed Assad's back back up against the wall. After a Grand Guiginol-esque orgy of depravity on YouTube, Obama finally had the support he needed from the thoroughly terrified western populace to justify his presence in Syria. America, along with a coalition of other ISIS backers, began dropping bombs but unsurprisingly most of them seemed to be directed at Syrian infrastructure, while those sly little cretins in ISIS always managed to slink away with only minor damage. Meanwhile our presence in the Levant served another twisted purpose. Keeping Assad's allies and ISIS' real enemies like Iran and Hezbollah at bay. Brilliant, right? But as we all know, things quickly got completely out of hand.
Obama's Free Syrian Army rapidly devolved from winkingly unreliable to a total multi-billion dollar embarrassment that Obama could no longer just shrug off with a flippant "shit happens" pose and there predecessors fared even worse. All the while the Black Plague of the Islamic State had grown far too powerful to contain and swiftly spread across three continents. Yet our Frankenstein monster still couldn't manage to dislodge Assad quickly enough to make Obama's inaction look less then suspicious. Obama's plan B? Killarys Plan A. Arm Al-Qaeda directly and proclaim them to be newly minted "moderates". Shit was going to hell in a hand basket alright. That is, until Putin stepped up and stepped in to end this mad imperialist circus once and for all.
Flash forward some six months later. Al-Qaeda and it's other "moderate" Yankee Doodle head choppers are fucking decimated. In spite of it's cowardly attacks on civilians abroad, ISIS is on the run like scared rabbits caught in a surly old Russian's turnip garden. There territory shrinks day by day. As I type this Palmyra is being liberated and Raqqa appears to be next. The bullet-proof umbrella of the Russian air campaign has allowed the true enemies of jihad, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Rejova and Hezbollah to flourish and Russia's sudden removal of this umbrella has both empowered these forces reclaimed sense sovereignty and forced Assad to get serious about reform. The myth of a America, the great and mighty imperial peacekeeper has been shattered by Putin's mastery of the great chessboard and the people of the Middle East aren't the only ones to realize it. From England to Germany, America's quisling Allies in the EU establishment are fighting a losing battle against there own citizens, who are drowning in a deluge of the refugee's created by there own reckless support of America's war on Russia. An uprising of anti-establishment populist movements on both the left and the right now threaten the very fabric of the EU and NATO's existence. Similarly Obama's heir apparent and the architect of the Syrian conspiracy, Imperial Queen Killary is dodging a barrage of shit being flung by monkey's on both ends of the Bipartisan Washington Zoo while both major parties are beginning to lose control of there own constituents.
And somewhere in Russia, on the porch of a rustic old dacha in a birch tree grove an hour outside the Kremlin walls, Vladimir Putin watches the winter ice thaw with his dog Buffy at his feet, a glass of vodka in his hand and the wind at his back. On a distant television reports of Putin's unprecedented high approval ratings are interrupted by news of Donald Trump's victory in another Rustbelt primary. Vlad cracks a wry little smile and takes another sip of Stoli. Like a Screwdriver, revenge is best served orange with a splash of vodka. Drink up Vlad. You've earned it. But I'm still moving to Canada.
Nostrovia, dearest motherfuckers, Peace, Love and Nostrovia.
Yes, dearest motherfuckers, on March 14, Vladimir Putin, that most wily of Kremlin bastards, announced before a shocked global audience on the eve of the Geneva Ceasefire that Russia had achieved its goals in Syria and would be pulling the majority of its combat forces out of the country less then six months after they had arrived. In other words, checkmate.
But to fully understand and appreciate the gravity of Putin's victory speech you have to look at how we got here and start at the very beginning of this Syrian mess.
It all started with a pipeline. In the year of our lord, two-thousand-and-nine, Qatar, one of America's finest little oil-rich terror state-lets, offered the secular regime of Bashar Al-Assad the opportunity of a lifetime. You see, Qatar, with the full support of its American handlers, had cooked up a grand scheme to funnel its plentiful oil stash directly into the EU by way of a pipeline that was to run through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and hopefully Syria. Thus cutting a huge chunk out of Russia and Iran's own Euro driven oil profits and further isolating two of America's final targets in its century long quest for global domination. Syria was the last state necessary to make this scheme come true.
Naturally, Assad said no. Which only came as a surprise if you've spent the last fifty years up your own asshole (AKA the US State Department). Syria wasn't about to fuck over two of its oldest and most loyal allies just to hop in bed with a nest of serpents who would (and have) gladly devour there own young just to see there stock value rise half a point. As if that weren't enough to finally due in this little anti-imperialist pariah state, Assad then went ahead and signed on to a counter deal to start a similar pipeline with Iran in 2010. That was the point of no return. As far as Uncle Sam and his Wahhabi quislings were concerned, Assad's ass was as good as grass.
Thankfully the villains of our story had just figured out how to hijack the once troublesome Arab Spring vis-a-vis the magic of social media and use it for there own evil plots. This reckless formula had already (pseudo)successfully brought down Gaddafi in Libya. All part of then Secretary Killary's new wave of American imperialism, ironically deemed Soft Power. Now it was time for a sequel in Syria. And Killary, in her perma-infinite wisdom, decided to use the war-booty of Muammar's massive weapons cache to do it. Soon literal shiploads of Libyan weaponry began to find its way to rebels on the shores of Syria. But after this pipeline got hit by Killary's own once loyal freedom fighters in Benghazi, slaughtering Ambassador Steven and his entourage in the process, Obama got spooked and rejected Killary's plot to directly arm what was essentially Al-Qaeda with the emphasis on directly. This wouldn't do. Madame Killary, not accustomed to hearing no from someone who, as her charming hubby once mused, would have been getting her coffee a few years ago, left in protest. This didn't stop Obama from getting a little help from his friends.
With Madame Killary out and the post-Benghazi arms tide too toxic to touch with American fingers, the job of moving Gaddafi's deadly loot to our latest proxy jihad was outsourced to Turkey who dutifully began to flood the Syrian deserts with a searing hot ocean of high-powered weaponry. Meanwhile Qatar and Saudi Arabia did what they do best and gathered the disaffected maniacs of the world and sent them into another poor secular nation in dire need of destabilization. All while Obama and his cabal of little Eichmann's in the State Department went to work pumping the compliant western media-sphere full of propagandist tall tales of brave Syrian rebels being violently repressed by big badman Assad, infringing upon there there god given right to slaughter infidels and sell there daughters like cattle. Naturally, the bright, wholesome folks of the fifth estate, entrusted to educate the American people, ate this devil's dung like fine chocolate and spit it back out into the gaping mouths of there already thoroughly debased audience.
Not that this was nearly enough. The reality on the ground in Syria was that the manufactured rebellion never had the support of more than thirty percent of the local population and that number plummeted once it became undeniable that this supposedly homegrown uprising was in fact comprised largely of foreign mercenaries who couldn't give two shits about democracy or even humanity itself for that matter. The Syrian people did the only sane thing they could and stood by the devil they knew. Russia did the same and continued to back there Baathist Allies against yet another uprising clearly aimed at weakening there presence in there own continent.
In spite of all the free guns and man power or more then likely because of it, America's latest mujaheddin loverboys quickly had there asses handed to them by the very people they claimed to be liberating. It rapidly became painfully clear to Obama that Killary was right about one thing. You couldn't have your imperialist pie and eat it too. He could have pulled a JFK and realized that he was in over his head with his dusty Bay of Pigs and pull the plug on it. But no, the Nobel Peace Prize winner decided to double down on his mess. It was time to pull a Dubya and go balls deep in this bloody bitch. The only problem was Obama didn't have the 911-style support he needed to commit such an act of imperial pasty rape with his dovish posterity in tact. Even with the waves of State Department approved propaganda being vomited at the American people, they still couldn't stomach another Middle Eastern quagmire. The corpses of Iraq and Libya weren't buried deep enough to stop reeking. Obama would have to get crafty with this one.
So the Commander in Chief came up with a plan, A wickedly ingenious plan. With Assad's boys enjoying the joyful sadist's end of a glorious ass whooping and with the full knowledge that the rebel's re-gifted Gaddafi arms stash included biological weaponry, Obama sent his whip-lashed errand boys a thinly coded message through the western mass media. The crafty young president made a series of public announcements the he would not interfere (directly) in the Syrian Fracas UNLESS, that is, someone (anyone?) crossed the "red line" and used chemical weapons (wink wink). The desperate Jihadi's heard the message loud and clear and launched a series of nerve gas false flag attacks against Syrian civilians. Obama and his NATO posse wasted zero time waiting for the bodies to get cold before declaring unequivocally that the then victorious Assad had inexplicably crossed the red line that insured his own doom. And of coarse, once again, Obama's devoted fanclub in the media joyfully jumped aboard another war bandwagon with the unblinking giddiness of kindergartner's on an Autumn hayride. It looked like Obama would finally have his war. But Putin had other plans.
As Obama began to circle the wagons and prep for a full blown Syrian invasion, complete with fleets of menacing gunboats gathering along the nation's coastline, even going so far as to fire a warning shot over the bow of a locally stationed Russian battleship (Gulf of Tonkin, much?), Vladimir Putin, ever the Russian chess master, carefully plotted his next move. A weaker leader, like Yeltsin, would have simply abandoned there embattled Allie. A dumber one, like (insert American president's name)
would have over reacted with military bombastics. Putin chose a third way and against all odds it fucking worked.
With a little help from a fellow anti-imperialist hell raiser in the Vatican, Putin brokered a peace deal with the Assad regime. Assad agreed to hand over his own antiquated chemical weapons stash, left-over from his feud with Yankee armed mustard gas enthusiast Saddam Hussein, to the Russians for disposal if the "free world" agreed to step off there throat. The lion share of the so called free world was pleased with this option. Obama was beside himself with frustration but what could he do? Putin caught him with his pants down, spanked him and called his bluff. Without the already played out specter of weapons of mass destruction, Obama didn't have the support he needed at home or abroad to engage in a "humanitarian" bloodbath. What was even better was that now Obama's Heroes(TM) in Al-Qaeda could no longer gas people without exposing the lie of the previous false flag attacks. In one fare swoop Putin managed to not only kill Obama's war but he also depleted him of an option in provoking another one. Obama, who had previously poo-pooed the constitutional necessity of congressional approval for war powers, was forced to send his plot against Syria to die in the Senate and anti-warriors such as myself welcomed the rise of Putin as an unlikely champion for peace.
Putin had humiliated Obama. He made a wanna-be warmonger look like a fucking pussy in front of the chicken-hawk set. The cruelty of cold, hard reality didn't stop Obama's liberal fanboys however from ludicrously giving there dear leader credit for preventing a war he carefully designed himself. It also didn't stop this wolf in doves clothing from seeking revenge. But he'd have to look north of Damascus to get it.
As the Russian people basked in the new found glory of there international leadership at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Obama's minions in the State Department busied themselves manufacturing an uprising in Russia's neighbor and former heartland Ukraine. By the Games closing ceremony the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych had been violently overthrown and replaced with an openly Russophobic, neofascist junta who wasted little time antagonizing the nations sizable Russian speaking population when the people of Crimea rose up and decided, democratically, to return to there motherland. Putin stepped up again and bravely accepted the will of the people followed immediately, of coarse, by another toxic campaign of slanderous vilification from the lemmings in the western media.
The point of the Maidan coup was to provoke Russia into a confrontation that would permanently alienate them from the European market they depended on for oil revenue. Putin recognized this right away and adamantly refused to take the bait. I myself, as a lifelong Russophile and history nerd was livid with what appeared to me to be Vlad's cowardly indecision on Eastern Ukraine. I was all to familiar with the long plight of the Novorussiyan people. I had read extensively on the grotesque horrors they had suffered and against all odds survived at the hands of the Nazi's and there Western Ukrainian henchmen. Millions of bullet riddled bodies in mass graves. Only now to face skinheads marching beneath the same treacherous flags there forefathers had died beneath. I supported there independence. I still do. And I was furious that Putin refused to do the same, especially after Crimea. I was wrong. Though I may possess a Russian soul, I lack a Russian mind. You see, Russians play the long game and Putin was no exception. Putin played for keeps.
While Vlad had little choice but to respect Crimea's wishes in order to maintain Russia's indispensable Black Sea fleet in Sebastipol, he wasn't about to be suckered into another Afghan trap like his Soviet forefathers before him. So he played it cool. He aloud NATO to go out of there way to harass him and he aloud the US to discredit itself and expose there own duplicity with there relentless and increasingly unhinged tall tales about fictional Russian invasions. Sure enough, it took less then a year for Europe to grow exasperated by the constant Yankee wolf crying. These cultured self righteous Euro-twats may have been ready and willing to indulge in there innate Slavophobia with sanctions and economic warfare but they weren't about let the US use them as a front for starting the third world war. So they cautiously decided to go against Obama's wishes and give Putin another opportunity to play peacemaker. And so it was that Putin brokered another peace deal that still stands strong today. Novorussiya has held on to there hard fought autonomy while the fascist American rump state of Banderastan has devolved into a colossal despotic money-pit, totally dependent on funds the US and the EU can barely afford to pay. Once again, Putin had shrewdly turned the tables on his foes.
This didn't mean he was out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. While Vlad was distracted up north, Obama's black budget henchmen devised a devilish new strategy to destabilize Assad. Two armies were built. One, the ironically titled Syrian Free Army, was built out in the open as a force of American armed and trained "good guys" ready to fight for mom, apple pie and democracy. The other army appeared just as suddenly but from the shadows. ISIS, as they called themselves, seemed to have mysteriously rose from the sands of Iraq like Ozy-fucking-mandias. It's leaders were all former Al-Qaeda fighters who met in the same American run prison and were summarily released for reasons still shrouded in mystery. The nucleus of there rank and file came directly from the Sunni death squads used by Petreaus during the Fox fabled surge. I think you get where I'm going with this.
While America had zero traceable ties to ISIS, our client states in Turkey and the Persian Gulf pulled out all the stops to bankroll these bastards. As did our own Free Syrian Army in there own weird way. While officially enemies of ISIS, our boys seemed to act mostly as a recruiting ground or even a conduit to the army of darkness. A common narrative unfolded. A Syrian rebel is vetted by the US. Trained by the US. Armed by the US. Sent back into Syria by the US. Then summarily joined ISIS the moment there boots hit the fucking sand. Obama puts up his hands and says oopsy-daisy. But it happened way too goddamn much to just be a coincidence. That tasty, cinnamon flavored neocon Marco Rubio was right about one thing. We need to dispel with the notion that Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's doing what right-wing chicken-hawks like Rubio only dream about and he gets away with it every fucking time.
After destabilizing the Iran-friendly Shiite government in Iraq, leading the once resistant Al-Maliki regime to get down on there knee's and beg us to re-occupy there country, ISIS turned there attention to Syria and quickly pushed Assad's back back up against the wall. After a Grand Guiginol-esque orgy of depravity on YouTube, Obama finally had the support he needed from the thoroughly terrified western populace to justify his presence in Syria. America, along with a coalition of other ISIS backers, began dropping bombs but unsurprisingly most of them seemed to be directed at Syrian infrastructure, while those sly little cretins in ISIS always managed to slink away with only minor damage. Meanwhile our presence in the Levant served another twisted purpose. Keeping Assad's allies and ISIS' real enemies like Iran and Hezbollah at bay. Brilliant, right? But as we all know, things quickly got completely out of hand.
Obama's Free Syrian Army rapidly devolved from winkingly unreliable to a total multi-billion dollar embarrassment that Obama could no longer just shrug off with a flippant "shit happens" pose and there predecessors fared even worse. All the while the Black Plague of the Islamic State had grown far too powerful to contain and swiftly spread across three continents. Yet our Frankenstein monster still couldn't manage to dislodge Assad quickly enough to make Obama's inaction look less then suspicious. Obama's plan B? Killarys Plan A. Arm Al-Qaeda directly and proclaim them to be newly minted "moderates". Shit was going to hell in a hand basket alright. That is, until Putin stepped up and stepped in to end this mad imperialist circus once and for all.
Flash forward some six months later. Al-Qaeda and it's other "moderate" Yankee Doodle head choppers are fucking decimated. In spite of it's cowardly attacks on civilians abroad, ISIS is on the run like scared rabbits caught in a surly old Russian's turnip garden. There territory shrinks day by day. As I type this Palmyra is being liberated and Raqqa appears to be next. The bullet-proof umbrella of the Russian air campaign has allowed the true enemies of jihad, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Rejova and Hezbollah to flourish and Russia's sudden removal of this umbrella has both empowered these forces reclaimed sense sovereignty and forced Assad to get serious about reform. The myth of a America, the great and mighty imperial peacekeeper has been shattered by Putin's mastery of the great chessboard and the people of the Middle East aren't the only ones to realize it. From England to Germany, America's quisling Allies in the EU establishment are fighting a losing battle against there own citizens, who are drowning in a deluge of the refugee's created by there own reckless support of America's war on Russia. An uprising of anti-establishment populist movements on both the left and the right now threaten the very fabric of the EU and NATO's existence. Similarly Obama's heir apparent and the architect of the Syrian conspiracy, Imperial Queen Killary is dodging a barrage of shit being flung by monkey's on both ends of the Bipartisan Washington Zoo while both major parties are beginning to lose control of there own constituents.
And somewhere in Russia, on the porch of a rustic old dacha in a birch tree grove an hour outside the Kremlin walls, Vladimir Putin watches the winter ice thaw with his dog Buffy at his feet, a glass of vodka in his hand and the wind at his back. On a distant television reports of Putin's unprecedented high approval ratings are interrupted by news of Donald Trump's victory in another Rustbelt primary. Vlad cracks a wry little smile and takes another sip of Stoli. Like a Screwdriver, revenge is best served orange with a splash of vodka. Drink up Vlad. You've earned it. But I'm still moving to Canada.
Nostrovia, dearest motherfuckers, Peace, Love and Nostrovia.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
March Madness
I love March. Like October, it's a month of almost cosmic change. It's a month of rain and light and furious winds which seem to thrash the last dreary remnants of winter darkness into oblivion. It's a month of turbulence. A month of revolution. Only, this year, those winds, that turbulence, this revolution seems to be tainted with a foreboding sense of imminent doom that I find hard to shake. Like the ghouls of winter depression have fallowed me into this cherished month and are riding the winds of march like surfers on a tsunami. It seems sadly fitting that this should be the month when the already rusty levy of Trumpismo finally breaks and unleashes the flailing ginger Kracken of white rage in all its mighty ugliness. Oh, cruel irony! Thy name is melodramatic blog post.
I speak of coarse about this past weekends Trump rally riots in the Midwest. An event as inevitable as it is disturbing. After all, the Donald has been stoking his compliant audience for months with not so subtle suggestions of a return to the glory days of social unrest when a couple of hardworking pigs and other assorted salt of the earth thugs could drag a limp-wristed hippie such as myself by his long hair to nice, quiet, dimly lit alleyway and bash his fucking teeth in. Ah, yes, the good old days. Yes as dear Mr. Dylan once mused, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Grossly, that wind seems to be blowing right out of dear Mr. Trump's ass.
That foresight, however, didn't make it any less depressing for me to spend my weekend watching tryouts for a future race war. As angry black and white men traded punches, I couldn't help wondering aloud "Why the fuck are you beating on each other? You should be on the same damn side!" and shouldn't they be? After all, aren't Black Lives Matter and the lion share of Trump's blue collar supporters essentially fighting for the same thing? A world free or at least depleted of the tyranny of the status-quo's corporate bully state. What I saw in Chicago and elsewhere was one group of poor people beating on another and vice versa, all at the behest of one ego-sick billionaire. The Marxist in me weeps.
I get why some good if slightly ignorant people dig Trump's shit. Seriously, I do. He's the first candidate in years to take on the oft-untouched toxic legacy of bipartisan globalism. A sick pseudo-philosophy of crony capitalist internationalism with a grotesque legacy of mass layoffs, endless wars and third world wage slavery. Racism aside, many of the things he attempts to say make sense but to believe that Donald Trump is the white knight who will lead the working man back to the veritable nirvana of a descent days wage for a hard days work is nothing short of asinine.
Regardless of whether or not this man is or was indeed a secret agent of dear twisted Lady Killary. it takes little more then a cursory glance at the Donald's rap sheet to tell you he's not the fearless leader he currently presents himself to be. A spoiled rotten trust-fund baby handed his daddies already tainted legacy on a sterling silver platter, Donald made a name for himself by throwing people in his loyal followers tax bracket out into the fucking streets so he could turn there homes into gaudy casinos and luxury condos for the one percent. A few bankruptcies later Trump began cutting checks for corrupt globalist swine like Chuck Schumer, John McCain and of coarse the devil herself. Not one dime went to a single antiwar or anti-globalization candidate. Not one measly red cent. Our favorite populist Daddy Warbucks' coffers were welded shut for the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul or any other real working class hero for that matter. If you like, you can choose to believe that the Donald experienced a sudden, miraculous conversion to paleolibertarianism just in time for election season. If you like, you can choose to believe that Santa Claus shot JFK from his flying sleigh. I personally prefer to live in the real world and in the real world, as any corporate crook will tell you, money talks, bullshit walks. And that is precisely what Donald Trump is, a walking, talking, steaming pile of bright orange caviar bullshit, doing what capitalist cretins like him have always done. Pitting one group of poor people against another like roosters in a cockfight. Divide and conquer.
The other side, while certainly not the aggressor is far from squeaky clean themselves. It's easy to mock poor white trash for falling in love with such a shameless demagogue. It's equally easy to forget that many of these liberal know-it-all's fell into the same trap with Obama. The urban left (yes, black people) drank Obama's frothy, empty, hope-wash Kool-Aid without thinking twice to check for cyanide ( and no, that's not a black joke, it's a Jonestown joke. I'm an asshole, not a monster) and lets be real here, Barack's race and his delicate exploitation of civil rights era rhetoric had something to do with that undying loyalty. What's even worse is many more poor people of color are falling for the same line of horseshit from neoliberal Nazi Killary. Check your fingernails comrades, there only slightly cleaner then the Trumpster's.
That's not to say the Obamaites and the Trumpsters are necessarily equal. I'll take the passive, corny love-ins of 2008 over 2016's face-socking festivals any day of the fucking week. But delusion is delusion and both sides of the partisan fence suffer from similar strains of identity dementia (identia?). It's only worse now because of the Donald's introduction of Beer Hall Putsch style street fighter theater.
Identity politics are bullshit. Much like our rigged presidential elections, they only serve to distract and divide poor people in order to keep them from realizing that we outnumber the oligarchs, ninety-nine to one. I'm not saying race doesn't matter. Racism is still a very serious problem in this country but, and god help me for saying this out loud, it pales in comparison to this countries problem of with classicism. The true divider. The majority of people rotting in America's finest gulags today are people of color but nearly all American inmates are poor people. We have had a black president and we will likely soon have a female one but we have never had a poor one and we likely never will with our current economic apartheid state in tact. Hell, race itself is a classist invention. Devised to separate the haves from the have nots and to keep it that way. The western perception of race is no less backwards and anti-scientific then the Hindu caste system. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Quite the contrary. It means we have the power to destroy it. We just have to stop punching each other in the fucking face,
Poor people have every right to be pissed and we have every fucking right to revolution. But expecting it to be led by a member of the master class like Trump or Killary or even Bernie is just plain stupid. These partisan charlatans will only tear us apart. A true revolution would bring us together. A true revolution would see inner-city black folks and white ranchers marching arm in arm against the eminent domain laws which rob them both blind. A true revolution would see armed militiamen guarding unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters from violent police persecution in Ferguson. And a true revolution would see an elderly redneck holding a cunt like Trump's arms behind his back while a young cholo smashed his fucking face in. This country desperately needs a real revolution.
Dearest motherfuckers of America, unite and take over.
I speak of coarse about this past weekends Trump rally riots in the Midwest. An event as inevitable as it is disturbing. After all, the Donald has been stoking his compliant audience for months with not so subtle suggestions of a return to the glory days of social unrest when a couple of hardworking pigs and other assorted salt of the earth thugs could drag a limp-wristed hippie such as myself by his long hair to nice, quiet, dimly lit alleyway and bash his fucking teeth in. Ah, yes, the good old days. Yes as dear Mr. Dylan once mused, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Grossly, that wind seems to be blowing right out of dear Mr. Trump's ass.
That foresight, however, didn't make it any less depressing for me to spend my weekend watching tryouts for a future race war. As angry black and white men traded punches, I couldn't help wondering aloud "Why the fuck are you beating on each other? You should be on the same damn side!" and shouldn't they be? After all, aren't Black Lives Matter and the lion share of Trump's blue collar supporters essentially fighting for the same thing? A world free or at least depleted of the tyranny of the status-quo's corporate bully state. What I saw in Chicago and elsewhere was one group of poor people beating on another and vice versa, all at the behest of one ego-sick billionaire. The Marxist in me weeps.
I get why some good if slightly ignorant people dig Trump's shit. Seriously, I do. He's the first candidate in years to take on the oft-untouched toxic legacy of bipartisan globalism. A sick pseudo-philosophy of crony capitalist internationalism with a grotesque legacy of mass layoffs, endless wars and third world wage slavery. Racism aside, many of the things he attempts to say make sense but to believe that Donald Trump is the white knight who will lead the working man back to the veritable nirvana of a descent days wage for a hard days work is nothing short of asinine.
Regardless of whether or not this man is or was indeed a secret agent of dear twisted Lady Killary. it takes little more then a cursory glance at the Donald's rap sheet to tell you he's not the fearless leader he currently presents himself to be. A spoiled rotten trust-fund baby handed his daddies already tainted legacy on a sterling silver platter, Donald made a name for himself by throwing people in his loyal followers tax bracket out into the fucking streets so he could turn there homes into gaudy casinos and luxury condos for the one percent. A few bankruptcies later Trump began cutting checks for corrupt globalist swine like Chuck Schumer, John McCain and of coarse the devil herself. Not one dime went to a single antiwar or anti-globalization candidate. Not one measly red cent. Our favorite populist Daddy Warbucks' coffers were welded shut for the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul or any other real working class hero for that matter. If you like, you can choose to believe that the Donald experienced a sudden, miraculous conversion to paleolibertarianism just in time for election season. If you like, you can choose to believe that Santa Claus shot JFK from his flying sleigh. I personally prefer to live in the real world and in the real world, as any corporate crook will tell you, money talks, bullshit walks. And that is precisely what Donald Trump is, a walking, talking, steaming pile of bright orange caviar bullshit, doing what capitalist cretins like him have always done. Pitting one group of poor people against another like roosters in a cockfight. Divide and conquer.
The other side, while certainly not the aggressor is far from squeaky clean themselves. It's easy to mock poor white trash for falling in love with such a shameless demagogue. It's equally easy to forget that many of these liberal know-it-all's fell into the same trap with Obama. The urban left (yes, black people) drank Obama's frothy, empty, hope-wash Kool-Aid without thinking twice to check for cyanide ( and no, that's not a black joke, it's a Jonestown joke. I'm an asshole, not a monster) and lets be real here, Barack's race and his delicate exploitation of civil rights era rhetoric had something to do with that undying loyalty. What's even worse is many more poor people of color are falling for the same line of horseshit from neoliberal Nazi Killary. Check your fingernails comrades, there only slightly cleaner then the Trumpster's.
That's not to say the Obamaites and the Trumpsters are necessarily equal. I'll take the passive, corny love-ins of 2008 over 2016's face-socking festivals any day of the fucking week. But delusion is delusion and both sides of the partisan fence suffer from similar strains of identity dementia (identia?). It's only worse now because of the Donald's introduction of Beer Hall Putsch style street fighter theater.
Identity politics are bullshit. Much like our rigged presidential elections, they only serve to distract and divide poor people in order to keep them from realizing that we outnumber the oligarchs, ninety-nine to one. I'm not saying race doesn't matter. Racism is still a very serious problem in this country but, and god help me for saying this out loud, it pales in comparison to this countries problem of with classicism. The true divider. The majority of people rotting in America's finest gulags today are people of color but nearly all American inmates are poor people. We have had a black president and we will likely soon have a female one but we have never had a poor one and we likely never will with our current economic apartheid state in tact. Hell, race itself is a classist invention. Devised to separate the haves from the have nots and to keep it that way. The western perception of race is no less backwards and anti-scientific then the Hindu caste system. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Quite the contrary. It means we have the power to destroy it. We just have to stop punching each other in the fucking face,
Poor people have every right to be pissed and we have every fucking right to revolution. But expecting it to be led by a member of the master class like Trump or Killary or even Bernie is just plain stupid. These partisan charlatans will only tear us apart. A true revolution would bring us together. A true revolution would see inner-city black folks and white ranchers marching arm in arm against the eminent domain laws which rob them both blind. A true revolution would see armed militiamen guarding unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters from violent police persecution in Ferguson. And a true revolution would see an elderly redneck holding a cunt like Trump's arms behind his back while a young cholo smashed his fucking face in. This country desperately needs a real revolution.
Dearest motherfuckers of America, unite and take over.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
7 Reasons Not to Vote for President (Yet)
Well dearest motherfuckers, it's that time again. Time to talk about my least favorite subject. Yes folks it's time, once again, to talk about that shit clogged toilet bowl that is the 2016 Presidential Election. I have avoided this dreaded subject like the fucking plague for as long as I possibly could. I mean, shit, I even chose coming out of the fucking closet over this. But I can't ignore this depressing circus of shameless spectacle forever, so here we go.
All in all, my basic view on voting in the 2016 primaries can be put very simply in just one word. Don't. Opt out of this pseudo-democratic charade, stay home and do something more constructive with your time like jerk-off or draw dicks on a picture of Trumps face. Maybe this isn't the most politically correct position to take. "Vote or Die", right? Well I for one would rather fucking die than soil my conscience by voting for any of these trigger-happy rodeo clowns called candidates, so fucking bring it Diddy.
What? You wan't more? well hold your horses asshole, I'll give you more reasons to shirk your patriotic civic duty. In fact I'll give you fucking seven in no particular order. So here it is dearest motherfuckers. Seven reasons not to vote for president, at least not yet.
1.) MARCO RUBIO- I'm not gonna mince words on this one, so if your the sensitive sort I politely suggest you find another, gentler blog. I'm pretty sure they have Lou Ferrigno talking about his 13 favorite labradoodle Vine's on Huff-Po right now.... ....They gone? Cool. Too put it bluntly, Marco Rubio is the official cabana boy of the Military Industrial Complex. He's a charming, brown, scrumptiously fuckable mouthpiece, factory made by bitter old white chicken-hawks to fool America's war-sick heartland into falling in love with the neocon cult of perpetual warfare all over again. He's G.W. Bush for a younger, hipper, more ethnic American Empire. There's just one problem. They pushed the robot off the assembly line a little to early. He looks and sounds like a real boy until he's forced to actually defend his carefully memorized talking points and he begins to short-circuit like R2-D2 soaked in Dr. Pepper. If even a ham-fisted neanderthal like Chris Christie can jam this sexy moron up, how the hell is he supposed to get passed Sith Lord Killary. Oh well, so much for the New American Century. Better luck next time Bill Kristol.
2.) BERNIE SANDERS- Few people on earth piss me off more then this asshole and his mesmerized fan club. It's Obama fever all over again. I am a socialist. I am a lot of other things too but it all comes back to socialism. I have devoted my entire young, tortured existence to the cause of peace, equality and egalitarianism by any means necessary and to here this pathetic DNC whore bandy about the word socialism like the latest Twitter meme makes me want to fucking hurl. Jesus Christ is a socialist. Eugene Debs is a socialist. Noam Chomsky is a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a fucking disgrace. He supported the bombing of Kosovo (and the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia). He supported the Clinton era sanctions on Iraq that murdered half a million children. He supports drone strikes (and wants more of them). He supports the jihadist "rebels" destroying Syria and the neo-Nazi thugs in Ukraine. He called Hugo Chavez, the finest socialist leader of this generation, a fucking dictator and he calls that crooked wretch, Killary Clinton, who he's supposed to be running AGAINST, a good woman and a trustworthy politician as he rallies the wayward left youth into the DNC's filthy pockets. Fuck you, Bernie Sanders. Steal another fucking identity to hide behind because your no fucking socialist and I will never vote for you. Feel THAT Bern!
3.) TED CRUZ- One thing everyone but the most Bible-thumpingest fag-bashers seem to be able to agree on is that Texas Senator Ted Cruz is pure fucking scum incarnate. He certainly looks the part with all the reptilian good looks and charm of a Dick Nixon wax dummy left in the microwave a minute to long. Ted's a grade-A scuzz-bag all right, no arguments there, but if you ask me, he's also one big fucking lie too. Ted passed through two fucking Ivy League schools with flying colors but he denies basic grade school shit like evolution and global warming. Ted's a Tea Party "outsider" but he cut his teeth as a fed in the Department of Justice and worked on arch-insider George Dubya's 2000 campaign. Do I have to say it out loud again? He's a fake! A fraud. A con-man playing hayseed for the gee-shucks cousin-fucker vote and if Iowa's any indicator, it looks like the slime-ball's got it. Not that it's going to be enough to to mean anything other than a future career as a resident honky minstrel in the Huckabeeland of Fox News' Sunday evening slot. But hey, that's where the green cash grows, right? Dollar dollar bill, yo!
4.) BEN CARSON- Who the fuck are we kidding?.... ....NEXT!!!
5.) DONALD TRUMP- I pushed a theory a couple of posts ago that Donald Trump was in fact another foul agent of Killaries soft power plot to steal the White House by hook or by crook. Well folks IF that's true then the old bitch has shit the bed again with another regime change scheme gone horribly aerie. Only this time it's not Libya, Syria or Ukraine she's shitting on, it's the good old US of A and Trump is that shit. Straight from the tyrant's ass. Yes dearest motherfuckers, it appears the orange cunt's gone rogue and decided to make a legitimate go at the White House and we're all in big fucking trouble cause this dumb fuck might actually have a shot, however statistically remote it might be. If you think the Donald's obnoxious now, imagine the ginger Duce with nukes and drones. You just shit a little bit didn't you? It's OK. I did to.
6.) JOHN KASICH- Still can't pronounce that name right.... ....ANYWAY, The Ohio governor is a lot like the state he leads. Boring, polite and judging by that Chinese Kenny Rogers Botox job, fairly full of toxins. He's a former congressman and a Fox News host with all kinds of gross connections to Wall Street and a puke-y melange of other corporate criminals. John's probably best known for joining his mid-western Republican brethren in screwing fire fighters and paramedics out of there pensions in order to rebound from a financial holocaust dicks like them caused. AND he wants to re-invade Iraq because FUCK IT! why not? In other words he's your typical, run of the mill, Republican stuffed shirt. Which is why, ironically, I believe he might have the best shot against Killary. Nobody and I mean Nobody wants to vote for that cackling lunatic. Even her own staffers probably have wet dreams about drowning her in the fucking Reflecting Pool. People would rather vote for a shopping mall mannequin, which is perfect for Kasich, I'm pretty sure that was his minor in college. He's just bland and beige enough to be your average timid voters plan B. He'll never get the chance though, thanks to old Kill-dog's trusty Trumpasaurus Rex. Oh well, there's always Macy's.
7.) KILLARY CLINTON- And then of coarse there's the best reason not to vote, our likely next and quite possibly worst president, Killary Rodham Clinton, a corrupt, war hungry and downright evil fucking egomaniac who literally everyone seems to fucking hate but somehow everyone seems willing to vote for. Why? Well aside from the fact that we're living in the long prophesied decline of Western Civilization, because Killary gets things done.
Killary gets things done for black people by supporting her husband's policies to gut welfare and feed there children to the prison industrial complex in record numbers.
Killary gets things done for women by using her position as Secretary of State to pander to the worlds most sexist regimes in the Persian Gulf for campaign cash and helping to cover up Bill's long history of disgusting, sexually predatory behavior including accusations of sexual assault and even rape (but be careful who you vote for ladies lest Killary's gal-pals declare you a slut and condemn you to hell).
Killary gets things done for the poor by sending there jobs to the Third World and cutting backroom deals with her friends in Wall Street while they recklessly drive the economy into a fucking ditch. Not to mention sending there brave sons and daughters to die disproportionately in her latest "humanitarian" imperialist conquest.
But more then anything Killary gets things done for Killary. Gaming the system, hoodwinking the electorate, lying through her fucking teeth and generally doing everything and anything to be the first and inevitably worst female president in American history. #I'm with her? More like #I'm with Satan.
So there you have it dearest motherfuckers, seven good reasons not to waist your time on the primaries for this country's two most corrupt organized crime families. the Republicrats and the Dempublicans. I'm sure more then a few of these assholes will have probably dropped out by the time you even read this but that's irrelevant. The fact that ANY of these gutless human trashcans were even considered viable candidates to run this drowning country is all the proof you'll ever need that the two party system is hopelessly fucked beyond repair.
Truth be told so is so called representative democracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one. There is nothing democratic about getting to choose which despot gets to run your life for the next four years. It's kind of like choosing your kidnapper. At the end of the day your still going to get raped regardless of the cut of your captors jib. The only real democracy is direct democracy and to my knowledge there are only two political parties advocating such a revolution in this country, the Greens and the Libertarians. Personally, I'm sick of the whole damn left-right paradigm all together. An ideal campaign would unite socialists and libertarians alike. Fuck the parties. I'm thinking something along the lines of Ron Paul-Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky-Lew Rockwell. Marxist blasphemy, I know but we've tried the partisan/purist shtick and it just doesn't work. We need to start thinking dangerously otherwise we're gonna wake up in November to find either a psychopath (Killary) or a moron (Trump) in the White House. It's revolution, REAL revolution or my fat commie ass is moving to Nova Scotia.
PEACE OUT!
All in all, my basic view on voting in the 2016 primaries can be put very simply in just one word. Don't. Opt out of this pseudo-democratic charade, stay home and do something more constructive with your time like jerk-off or draw dicks on a picture of Trumps face. Maybe this isn't the most politically correct position to take. "Vote or Die", right? Well I for one would rather fucking die than soil my conscience by voting for any of these trigger-happy rodeo clowns called candidates, so fucking bring it Diddy.
What? You wan't more? well hold your horses asshole, I'll give you more reasons to shirk your patriotic civic duty. In fact I'll give you fucking seven in no particular order. So here it is dearest motherfuckers. Seven reasons not to vote for president, at least not yet.
1.) MARCO RUBIO- I'm not gonna mince words on this one, so if your the sensitive sort I politely suggest you find another, gentler blog. I'm pretty sure they have Lou Ferrigno talking about his 13 favorite labradoodle Vine's on Huff-Po right now.... ....They gone? Cool. Too put it bluntly, Marco Rubio is the official cabana boy of the Military Industrial Complex. He's a charming, brown, scrumptiously fuckable mouthpiece, factory made by bitter old white chicken-hawks to fool America's war-sick heartland into falling in love with the neocon cult of perpetual warfare all over again. He's G.W. Bush for a younger, hipper, more ethnic American Empire. There's just one problem. They pushed the robot off the assembly line a little to early. He looks and sounds like a real boy until he's forced to actually defend his carefully memorized talking points and he begins to short-circuit like R2-D2 soaked in Dr. Pepper. If even a ham-fisted neanderthal like Chris Christie can jam this sexy moron up, how the hell is he supposed to get passed Sith Lord Killary. Oh well, so much for the New American Century. Better luck next time Bill Kristol.
2.) BERNIE SANDERS- Few people on earth piss me off more then this asshole and his mesmerized fan club. It's Obama fever all over again. I am a socialist. I am a lot of other things too but it all comes back to socialism. I have devoted my entire young, tortured existence to the cause of peace, equality and egalitarianism by any means necessary and to here this pathetic DNC whore bandy about the word socialism like the latest Twitter meme makes me want to fucking hurl. Jesus Christ is a socialist. Eugene Debs is a socialist. Noam Chomsky is a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a fucking disgrace. He supported the bombing of Kosovo (and the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia). He supported the Clinton era sanctions on Iraq that murdered half a million children. He supports drone strikes (and wants more of them). He supports the jihadist "rebels" destroying Syria and the neo-Nazi thugs in Ukraine. He called Hugo Chavez, the finest socialist leader of this generation, a fucking dictator and he calls that crooked wretch, Killary Clinton, who he's supposed to be running AGAINST, a good woman and a trustworthy politician as he rallies the wayward left youth into the DNC's filthy pockets. Fuck you, Bernie Sanders. Steal another fucking identity to hide behind because your no fucking socialist and I will never vote for you. Feel THAT Bern!
3.) TED CRUZ- One thing everyone but the most Bible-thumpingest fag-bashers seem to be able to agree on is that Texas Senator Ted Cruz is pure fucking scum incarnate. He certainly looks the part with all the reptilian good looks and charm of a Dick Nixon wax dummy left in the microwave a minute to long. Ted's a grade-A scuzz-bag all right, no arguments there, but if you ask me, he's also one big fucking lie too. Ted passed through two fucking Ivy League schools with flying colors but he denies basic grade school shit like evolution and global warming. Ted's a Tea Party "outsider" but he cut his teeth as a fed in the Department of Justice and worked on arch-insider George Dubya's 2000 campaign. Do I have to say it out loud again? He's a fake! A fraud. A con-man playing hayseed for the gee-shucks cousin-fucker vote and if Iowa's any indicator, it looks like the slime-ball's got it. Not that it's going to be enough to to mean anything other than a future career as a resident honky minstrel in the Huckabeeland of Fox News' Sunday evening slot. But hey, that's where the green cash grows, right? Dollar dollar bill, yo!
4.) BEN CARSON- Who the fuck are we kidding?.... ....NEXT!!!
5.) DONALD TRUMP- I pushed a theory a couple of posts ago that Donald Trump was in fact another foul agent of Killaries soft power plot to steal the White House by hook or by crook. Well folks IF that's true then the old bitch has shit the bed again with another regime change scheme gone horribly aerie. Only this time it's not Libya, Syria or Ukraine she's shitting on, it's the good old US of A and Trump is that shit. Straight from the tyrant's ass. Yes dearest motherfuckers, it appears the orange cunt's gone rogue and decided to make a legitimate go at the White House and we're all in big fucking trouble cause this dumb fuck might actually have a shot, however statistically remote it might be. If you think the Donald's obnoxious now, imagine the ginger Duce with nukes and drones. You just shit a little bit didn't you? It's OK. I did to.
6.) JOHN KASICH- Still can't pronounce that name right.... ....ANYWAY, The Ohio governor is a lot like the state he leads. Boring, polite and judging by that Chinese Kenny Rogers Botox job, fairly full of toxins. He's a former congressman and a Fox News host with all kinds of gross connections to Wall Street and a puke-y melange of other corporate criminals. John's probably best known for joining his mid-western Republican brethren in screwing fire fighters and paramedics out of there pensions in order to rebound from a financial holocaust dicks like them caused. AND he wants to re-invade Iraq because FUCK IT! why not? In other words he's your typical, run of the mill, Republican stuffed shirt. Which is why, ironically, I believe he might have the best shot against Killary. Nobody and I mean Nobody wants to vote for that cackling lunatic. Even her own staffers probably have wet dreams about drowning her in the fucking Reflecting Pool. People would rather vote for a shopping mall mannequin, which is perfect for Kasich, I'm pretty sure that was his minor in college. He's just bland and beige enough to be your average timid voters plan B. He'll never get the chance though, thanks to old Kill-dog's trusty Trumpasaurus Rex. Oh well, there's always Macy's.
7.) KILLARY CLINTON- And then of coarse there's the best reason not to vote, our likely next and quite possibly worst president, Killary Rodham Clinton, a corrupt, war hungry and downright evil fucking egomaniac who literally everyone seems to fucking hate but somehow everyone seems willing to vote for. Why? Well aside from the fact that we're living in the long prophesied decline of Western Civilization, because Killary gets things done.
Killary gets things done for black people by supporting her husband's policies to gut welfare and feed there children to the prison industrial complex in record numbers.
Killary gets things done for women by using her position as Secretary of State to pander to the worlds most sexist regimes in the Persian Gulf for campaign cash and helping to cover up Bill's long history of disgusting, sexually predatory behavior including accusations of sexual assault and even rape (but be careful who you vote for ladies lest Killary's gal-pals declare you a slut and condemn you to hell).
Killary gets things done for the poor by sending there jobs to the Third World and cutting backroom deals with her friends in Wall Street while they recklessly drive the economy into a fucking ditch. Not to mention sending there brave sons and daughters to die disproportionately in her latest "humanitarian" imperialist conquest.
But more then anything Killary gets things done for Killary. Gaming the system, hoodwinking the electorate, lying through her fucking teeth and generally doing everything and anything to be the first and inevitably worst female president in American history. #I'm with her? More like #I'm with Satan.
So there you have it dearest motherfuckers, seven good reasons not to waist your time on the primaries for this country's two most corrupt organized crime families. the Republicrats and the Dempublicans. I'm sure more then a few of these assholes will have probably dropped out by the time you even read this but that's irrelevant. The fact that ANY of these gutless human trashcans were even considered viable candidates to run this drowning country is all the proof you'll ever need that the two party system is hopelessly fucked beyond repair.
Truth be told so is so called representative democracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one. There is nothing democratic about getting to choose which despot gets to run your life for the next four years. It's kind of like choosing your kidnapper. At the end of the day your still going to get raped regardless of the cut of your captors jib. The only real democracy is direct democracy and to my knowledge there are only two political parties advocating such a revolution in this country, the Greens and the Libertarians. Personally, I'm sick of the whole damn left-right paradigm all together. An ideal campaign would unite socialists and libertarians alike. Fuck the parties. I'm thinking something along the lines of Ron Paul-Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky-Lew Rockwell. Marxist blasphemy, I know but we've tried the partisan/purist shtick and it just doesn't work. We need to start thinking dangerously otherwise we're gonna wake up in November to find either a psychopath (Killary) or a moron (Trump) in the White House. It's revolution, REAL revolution or my fat commie ass is moving to Nova Scotia.
PEACE OUT!
Monday, February 15, 2016
Diary of a Queer Heterosexual
I've always had a very complicated relationship with my gender and sexuality and the older I get the more complicated it seems to become. While I've long considered myself to be a heterosexual male I've never really been completely comfortable calling myself straight. Truth be told I feel anything but. Even if my road always ultimately leads me to pussy, it's a long jagged road with many detours along the way. Lets just say while I've never been an L, a G, a B or a T, I am most definitely a Q. I'm a Questioner in every sense of the word and I always have been. I question everything, religion, politics, philosophy, history and of coarse gender and sexuality. I've also come to see myself as another Q. You see dearest motherfuckers I identify as a queer heterosexual. Confused? Me too. Maybe I should start again at the beginning.
Growing up in a conservative Irish Catholic household and a small town parochial school, I more or less accepted from an early age that sin and sexuality were largely synonymous and homosexuality was the worst of them all. I never really gave much thought to the possibility that I myself could be anything but heterosexual. I've been attracted to females ever since little Maggie Marshal bloodied my shins with her tiny wooden clogs in the first grade (which may explain some of my sadomasochistic tendencies) and I had never experienced similar feelings towards a boy. Then OCD happened and just in time for puberty.
As I've discussed here before, my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has always been wrapped in layers of self doubt and irrational fear. Imagine what terrifies you most in the world. Now multiply it by ten and imagine not being able to stop yourself from thinking about it over and over and over again and you've got the basic idea. And what's more terrifying to a twelve year old Catholic schoolboy then the prospect of being gay. A fate worse than death. During the early days of my OCD, I became obsessed by the fear that I might be gay which was simultaneously deeply intertwined with my greatest fears, isolation, loneliness and dying alone and unloved. You see in my community the basic theory on homosexuals was that while they were in fact born that way, there natural urges were a test from god. Leaving them with only two real choices, live a life of loveless chastity or a life of sinful, soulless evil topped off by an eternity in hell. So yeah I was pretty fucking terrified of being gay. It didn't take long for the OCD to all but convince me that I must be and was therefore thoroughly fucked beyond redemption. No one and nothing could convince me otherwise. Not my parents. Not even my shrinks. I spent months in panicked terror and self loathing until finally I stumbled across a rare moment of clarity. If god was truly the kind and loving god I was raised to believe and if I was made in his image then it shouldn't fucking matter who I loved as long as I was a good person. I came to the conclusion that I didn't give a fuck what my priests and teachers said. I was going to be happy and if that meant fucking dudes then fuck it, I was gonna fuck dudes and just like that the spell was broken.
It took accepting the possibility that I could plausibly be happily gay with open arms to convince me that I wasn't. But I did have a brand new appreciation for the horror that real gay kids go through every day. The fear. The agony. The terror. The self hatred. I came to the conclusion that no one should ever be made to feel that way just because they get a chubby in there own locker room. That was the day I became an outspoken straight allie but I became something more then that. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being queer, I began exploring the subculture and quickly fell in love with the community. I was particularly smitten with the anti-assimilationist queer liberation movement of the sixties and seventies. I became fascinated with this underground world of leathermen, radical faeries, drag queens and glam rock gender renegades. It all spoke to me and my rebellious teenage spirit during a very formidable time in my young life and I'm proud to say it helped shape the man I am today.
My universe soon became dominated by queer culture, from movies (Gregg Araki and John Waters) to music (the Smiths, Lou Reed and the Hidden Cameras) to art (Andy Warhol and Tom of Finland) to literature (Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk). I adopted a rogues gallery of queer icons for role models- Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Gore Vidal, Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, Harry Hay, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman. The hallways of my personality were permanently vandalized with rainbow graffiti and those colors wouldn't run but my journey wasn't over yet. I would have to undergo another mental crisis before I could fully come to terms with my complex identity.
As those who have read this blog before probably already know, my mental health took a major fucking nose-dive soon after high-school culminating in a series of devastating nervous breakdowns that left me and my sense of self totally shattered. While too terrified of the chaos of the outside world to even leave my fucking house, I did find myself with a great abundance of free time to devote to my favorite pass-time of researching obscure subcultures, which eventually led me to explore the often misunderstood phenomena of transexuality. I found the subject to be engrossingly fascinating but also oddly inspiring. Here was an entire class of people born into the wrong bodies who quite literally risk there lives everyday just by presenting themselves honestly as who they really are. Rather than hide in the dark safety of the closet and live a lie, they get up every morning, put on there make-up and there heels or there denim and there bulge, walk out the front door and fucking strut, knowing full well that every step could be there last. That any day could be the day that some confused, self loathing psychopath, threatened by there courage, decides to eviscerate them with a razor blade. Forget brave, it doesn't get anymore bad-ass then that. And these bad-asses quickly became my heroes and gave this terrified shut-in the courage and curiosity to escape the dark safety of my own closet and explore my own fractured identity. I began to read everything I could find on the subject of gender identity, discovering in the process that much like race, sex was as much or more a social construct as a biological one. In many cultures through out the world there are three or four or even more recognized genders who are not only accepted but often revered. I began to look critically at my own long-assumed gender and I found that a lot of things didn't quite fit into that tight little box of heteronormativity.
At the same time I began to actively engage my long dormant feminine side and with a little help from my own personal fairy bitch-mother Courtney Love and the indispensable wisdom of gender-sage Judith Butler I managed to tap into reservoirs of inner strength I didn't even know existed. In a lot of ways this self-discovery gave me the fire to fuel my busted engine and push my way out of my agoraphobic ditch. My nervous breakdowns left my sense of masculinity totally ravaged. I was only able to put myself back together with the glue of my untapped femininity, leaving me forever altered. I had awaken my inner bitch and like a werewolf, once she had tasted freedom there was know way to put her back in that cage even if I wanted to and I didn't.
So what the hell does that make me exactly? Through my studies I discovered a seemingly endless list of gender identities that fell outside of the traditional gender binary- genderqueer, gender fluid, gender neutral, bigender, trigender, pan gender, third gender, two spirit, hijra. It's enough to make your fucking head spin. But none of them really seemed to fit. Ultimately all the books and websites in the world couldn't tell me who I am. Only I could do that. So who exactly is Nick Reid.
While I've never felt the need to present my feminine side visually, I've never really felt much need to present my masculine side either. With the blaring example of my beard (which I do love), my presentation is largely slacker-neutral. Baggy all-black sweats and t-shirts. I consciously developed this uniform in my late teens in an attempt to reject all social labels but is it possible that subconsciously I was attempting to reject gender labels as well?
While I've always maintained strong friendships with males throughout my life, I've also always felt a much deeper and more meaningful kinship with my female friends. I could feel closer to a girl in a single conversation then I could with a male I had known for a decade. Truth be told, I've always found your garden variety heterosexual male to be a bland and shallow bore. They never fucking listen and they rarely have anything remotely meaningful to say. I've never felt more alien then I did in my high school gym locker room and I've never felt more comfortable then I did skipping class with just a few girlfriends at my side. It's these brief moments of rebellious female companionship that I found myself reliving over and over again during my self imposed exile and it's these memories that kept me warm during some of the darkest and coldest nights of my life.
While I've always been exclusively attracted to females this attraction has been anything but conventional. Aside from the fact that I seem biologically incapable of getting down to hetero-porn, my sexual appetites have always ran towards the kinkier end of the spectrum. I'll spare you the graphic details but lets just say my libido has long been governed by lifelong fixations with corporal punishment, bodily functions and parts of the female anatomy often overlooked by your traditional mainstream skin mags. My ideal woman is someone like Yoko Ono, Bjork or Frida Kahlo. Tiny, ethnic, feisty and a little bit nuts. At the same time I'm also a strong believer that no one is completely straight. While I personally have never seen or met a man I was willing to fuck, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist and I'd like to believe if we ever crossed paths I would be man or whatever enough to embrace those feelings. My point is that even my heterosexuality seems to express itself in uniquely queer ways.
So what the fuck am I exactly? Mostly male? Lesbian in spirit? Gender curious? A bearded bull-dyke with a dick? While all those labels are probably somewhat accurate, it's also probably equally accurate to say that I'm just an extremely abnormal heterosexual cis-male but I prefer to identify as queer.
During the halcyon days of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, a loose collection of brave, radical gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals made the decision to reclaim the pejorative slur queer as a label of pride in there rejection of heterosexist tyranny that they could rally around in solidarity. It became a hallowed term of endearment under which all the beautiful, jagged puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit into the straight world could find a place to belong, a place to fit. So I say why not me? I would never in a million years try to take credit for someone else's struggle. Whatever I am, I haven't had to suffer the way most LGBTQ people have and I own that but does that mean I should be forced to be prisoner to an identity that strangles me. That keeps me from fully exploring who I really am. I want to be free. I want to love who I wanna love, how I wanna love. And I wanna be whoever and whatever the fuck I wanna be. And fuck anyone who stands in the way of my emancipation from the heteronormative gulag. Only I have the right to define who I am.
The word queer has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. To me it means freedom. Anyone can be queer. We all have it in us somewhere. Human sexuality and gender are too goddamn complicated for tiny little boxes with neat little labels. If I hadn't suffered the way did with my mental anguish I may have grown old and grey without fully realizing how beautifully complex I really am. You see, what separates the queer from the straight is the courage and conviction to embrace these messy unknowns with an open mind and an open heart and to carry them with pride. So I'll say it loud and proud, I'm here, I'm hetero AND I'm queer and your all gonna have to get fucking use to it because wild horses couldn't drag me back in that goddamn closet.
Now if I can only find a good woman mad enough to love this mess I'll be sitting pretty.
P.S. This post is dedicated in loving memory to the late David Bowie, another straight man who gave many queer people of all stripes the courage to be themselves and love themselves for the wonderful creatures they are, myself included. He taught us all how to be heroes for far longer then just one day and I will miss him and love him dearly until the day I join him among the stars.
Growing up in a conservative Irish Catholic household and a small town parochial school, I more or less accepted from an early age that sin and sexuality were largely synonymous and homosexuality was the worst of them all. I never really gave much thought to the possibility that I myself could be anything but heterosexual. I've been attracted to females ever since little Maggie Marshal bloodied my shins with her tiny wooden clogs in the first grade (which may explain some of my sadomasochistic tendencies) and I had never experienced similar feelings towards a boy. Then OCD happened and just in time for puberty.
As I've discussed here before, my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has always been wrapped in layers of self doubt and irrational fear. Imagine what terrifies you most in the world. Now multiply it by ten and imagine not being able to stop yourself from thinking about it over and over and over again and you've got the basic idea. And what's more terrifying to a twelve year old Catholic schoolboy then the prospect of being gay. A fate worse than death. During the early days of my OCD, I became obsessed by the fear that I might be gay which was simultaneously deeply intertwined with my greatest fears, isolation, loneliness and dying alone and unloved. You see in my community the basic theory on homosexuals was that while they were in fact born that way, there natural urges were a test from god. Leaving them with only two real choices, live a life of loveless chastity or a life of sinful, soulless evil topped off by an eternity in hell. So yeah I was pretty fucking terrified of being gay. It didn't take long for the OCD to all but convince me that I must be and was therefore thoroughly fucked beyond redemption. No one and nothing could convince me otherwise. Not my parents. Not even my shrinks. I spent months in panicked terror and self loathing until finally I stumbled across a rare moment of clarity. If god was truly the kind and loving god I was raised to believe and if I was made in his image then it shouldn't fucking matter who I loved as long as I was a good person. I came to the conclusion that I didn't give a fuck what my priests and teachers said. I was going to be happy and if that meant fucking dudes then fuck it, I was gonna fuck dudes and just like that the spell was broken.
It took accepting the possibility that I could plausibly be happily gay with open arms to convince me that I wasn't. But I did have a brand new appreciation for the horror that real gay kids go through every day. The fear. The agony. The terror. The self hatred. I came to the conclusion that no one should ever be made to feel that way just because they get a chubby in there own locker room. That was the day I became an outspoken straight allie but I became something more then that. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being queer, I began exploring the subculture and quickly fell in love with the community. I was particularly smitten with the anti-assimilationist queer liberation movement of the sixties and seventies. I became fascinated with this underground world of leathermen, radical faeries, drag queens and glam rock gender renegades. It all spoke to me and my rebellious teenage spirit during a very formidable time in my young life and I'm proud to say it helped shape the man I am today.
My universe soon became dominated by queer culture, from movies (Gregg Araki and John Waters) to music (the Smiths, Lou Reed and the Hidden Cameras) to art (Andy Warhol and Tom of Finland) to literature (Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk). I adopted a rogues gallery of queer icons for role models- Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Gore Vidal, Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, Harry Hay, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman. The hallways of my personality were permanently vandalized with rainbow graffiti and those colors wouldn't run but my journey wasn't over yet. I would have to undergo another mental crisis before I could fully come to terms with my complex identity.
As those who have read this blog before probably already know, my mental health took a major fucking nose-dive soon after high-school culminating in a series of devastating nervous breakdowns that left me and my sense of self totally shattered. While too terrified of the chaos of the outside world to even leave my fucking house, I did find myself with a great abundance of free time to devote to my favorite pass-time of researching obscure subcultures, which eventually led me to explore the often misunderstood phenomena of transexuality. I found the subject to be engrossingly fascinating but also oddly inspiring. Here was an entire class of people born into the wrong bodies who quite literally risk there lives everyday just by presenting themselves honestly as who they really are. Rather than hide in the dark safety of the closet and live a lie, they get up every morning, put on there make-up and there heels or there denim and there bulge, walk out the front door and fucking strut, knowing full well that every step could be there last. That any day could be the day that some confused, self loathing psychopath, threatened by there courage, decides to eviscerate them with a razor blade. Forget brave, it doesn't get anymore bad-ass then that. And these bad-asses quickly became my heroes and gave this terrified shut-in the courage and curiosity to escape the dark safety of my own closet and explore my own fractured identity. I began to read everything I could find on the subject of gender identity, discovering in the process that much like race, sex was as much or more a social construct as a biological one. In many cultures through out the world there are three or four or even more recognized genders who are not only accepted but often revered. I began to look critically at my own long-assumed gender and I found that a lot of things didn't quite fit into that tight little box of heteronormativity.
At the same time I began to actively engage my long dormant feminine side and with a little help from my own personal fairy bitch-mother Courtney Love and the indispensable wisdom of gender-sage Judith Butler I managed to tap into reservoirs of inner strength I didn't even know existed. In a lot of ways this self-discovery gave me the fire to fuel my busted engine and push my way out of my agoraphobic ditch. My nervous breakdowns left my sense of masculinity totally ravaged. I was only able to put myself back together with the glue of my untapped femininity, leaving me forever altered. I had awaken my inner bitch and like a werewolf, once she had tasted freedom there was know way to put her back in that cage even if I wanted to and I didn't.
So what the hell does that make me exactly? Through my studies I discovered a seemingly endless list of gender identities that fell outside of the traditional gender binary- genderqueer, gender fluid, gender neutral, bigender, trigender, pan gender, third gender, two spirit, hijra. It's enough to make your fucking head spin. But none of them really seemed to fit. Ultimately all the books and websites in the world couldn't tell me who I am. Only I could do that. So who exactly is Nick Reid.
While I've never felt the need to present my feminine side visually, I've never really felt much need to present my masculine side either. With the blaring example of my beard (which I do love), my presentation is largely slacker-neutral. Baggy all-black sweats and t-shirts. I consciously developed this uniform in my late teens in an attempt to reject all social labels but is it possible that subconsciously I was attempting to reject gender labels as well?
While I've always maintained strong friendships with males throughout my life, I've also always felt a much deeper and more meaningful kinship with my female friends. I could feel closer to a girl in a single conversation then I could with a male I had known for a decade. Truth be told, I've always found your garden variety heterosexual male to be a bland and shallow bore. They never fucking listen and they rarely have anything remotely meaningful to say. I've never felt more alien then I did in my high school gym locker room and I've never felt more comfortable then I did skipping class with just a few girlfriends at my side. It's these brief moments of rebellious female companionship that I found myself reliving over and over again during my self imposed exile and it's these memories that kept me warm during some of the darkest and coldest nights of my life.
While I've always been exclusively attracted to females this attraction has been anything but conventional. Aside from the fact that I seem biologically incapable of getting down to hetero-porn, my sexual appetites have always ran towards the kinkier end of the spectrum. I'll spare you the graphic details but lets just say my libido has long been governed by lifelong fixations with corporal punishment, bodily functions and parts of the female anatomy often overlooked by your traditional mainstream skin mags. My ideal woman is someone like Yoko Ono, Bjork or Frida Kahlo. Tiny, ethnic, feisty and a little bit nuts. At the same time I'm also a strong believer that no one is completely straight. While I personally have never seen or met a man I was willing to fuck, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist and I'd like to believe if we ever crossed paths I would be man or whatever enough to embrace those feelings. My point is that even my heterosexuality seems to express itself in uniquely queer ways.
So what the fuck am I exactly? Mostly male? Lesbian in spirit? Gender curious? A bearded bull-dyke with a dick? While all those labels are probably somewhat accurate, it's also probably equally accurate to say that I'm just an extremely abnormal heterosexual cis-male but I prefer to identify as queer.
During the halcyon days of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, a loose collection of brave, radical gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals made the decision to reclaim the pejorative slur queer as a label of pride in there rejection of heterosexist tyranny that they could rally around in solidarity. It became a hallowed term of endearment under which all the beautiful, jagged puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit into the straight world could find a place to belong, a place to fit. So I say why not me? I would never in a million years try to take credit for someone else's struggle. Whatever I am, I haven't had to suffer the way most LGBTQ people have and I own that but does that mean I should be forced to be prisoner to an identity that strangles me. That keeps me from fully exploring who I really am. I want to be free. I want to love who I wanna love, how I wanna love. And I wanna be whoever and whatever the fuck I wanna be. And fuck anyone who stands in the way of my emancipation from the heteronormative gulag. Only I have the right to define who I am.
The word queer has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. To me it means freedom. Anyone can be queer. We all have it in us somewhere. Human sexuality and gender are too goddamn complicated for tiny little boxes with neat little labels. If I hadn't suffered the way did with my mental anguish I may have grown old and grey without fully realizing how beautifully complex I really am. You see, what separates the queer from the straight is the courage and conviction to embrace these messy unknowns with an open mind and an open heart and to carry them with pride. So I'll say it loud and proud, I'm here, I'm hetero AND I'm queer and your all gonna have to get fucking use to it because wild horses couldn't drag me back in that goddamn closet.
Now if I can only find a good woman mad enough to love this mess I'll be sitting pretty.
P.S. This post is dedicated in loving memory to the late David Bowie, another straight man who gave many queer people of all stripes the courage to be themselves and love themselves for the wonderful creatures they are, myself included. He taught us all how to be heroes for far longer then just one day and I will miss him and love him dearly until the day I join him among the stars.
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