I don't usually do this, mostly because I don't usually give a fuck, but this week I feel it necessary to warn the few dearest motherfuckers who haunt this blog that some of the things that I am about to say are a bit shocking even for me. Like I said, I usually don't give a fuck, but seeing as I have family who read this site, I thought I owed them a fair warning. Don't worry, I'm not a serial killer or a Trump supporter or anything heinous like that. I just thought you deserved a warning because shit is about to get unprecedentedly weird. Anyway, you've been warned, so no bellyaching in the Christmas letters.
OK, with that being said, lets rip the fucking band-aid off this bitch....
Sometimes.... I wish I had a vagina. There, I fucking said it and I'm not talking about other peoples pussy, because I'm always down with that (Yeah!youknowme!) I'm talking me, myself and I, minus a pole and plus a hole. The professionals call this phenomena gender dysphoria but I prefer to call it pussy envy, a kind of aching, overarching feeling of disconnection with my own genitalia. But, and with me there's always a but, I'm not trans. OK now your more confused than I am. Maybe I should start over.
In a past post, one of my personal favorite posts, I came out as a queer heterosexual. While not a lie this wasn't quite the whole truth either. But I needed to be openly queer before I could be 100% honest about my gender identity, not just with the few people in my life but with myself as well. I know this is such a fucking queer cliche but I really did need to feel safe. You see, dearest motherfuckers, your old frenemy Comrade Hermit is genderqueer, gender fluid to be exact which basically means that my gender identity exists and shifts and changes somewhere between the male/female binary. Not quite male. Not quite female.
It took me years to figure this out. I spent a good portion of my life assuming I was male, the gender assigned to me at birth, but I never felt quite normal. I spent most of my teens and twenties going through intermittent identity crises, wondering to myself if I could be transgender and then ultimately coming to the same conclusion over and over again. That in spite of these alien feelings, I definitely wasn't a woman so I must just be some kind of weird, mixed-up male. That is until I discovered that there was more than two options. When I first read about the phenomena of gender fluidity I knew that that must be where I fit in. The only problem was I didn't quite fit in.
The description fit the way I feel like a glove but as I searched the net, I couldn't find anyone quite like me. All the other gender fluid people that I came across were flamboyantly androgynous, bold and beautiful people that expressed elements of both traditional genders and everything in between. I found there fierce, visual androgyny refreshing but it wasn't quite me. While a part of me is very much female, I've never felt a great need to express my femininity in any of the traditional ways. I like to dress simple and casual and I love my beard. I just think it might go better with a cunt than a cock. It's little wonder I've long felt a deep kinship with bearded ladies, trans-men and bull dykes. I always felt more like a manly bitch than a girly man and this left me feeling out of place even within my own new found community. It made me feel guilty, like I was some kind of traitor or phony or something.
But why the fuck should I? Why should any of us feel guilty for who we really are just because we don't fit into some kind of fucking stereotype. Isn't that the whole point of being queer, not having to follow these stupid fucking rules? But somehow that's what a broad cross section of the LGBTQ community has become, a nasty, cliquish sect of stuck-up, assimilationist snobs protecting their newfound privilege as a politically correct minority by enforcing there own slightly tweaked version of the same damn set of stupid fucking rules. Telling bisexuals to pick a hole to fuck. Telling genderqueer people to pick a gender to conform to. And telling us all to fucking tone it down so we can earn favor with the straight world that we use to reject. Well let me go on the fucking record by saying fuck that shit! this isn't what those fierce queens at Stonewall bloodied there fists for. Queer liberation doesn't come with a government stamp of approval and it doesn't play by anyone's fucking rules, not even it's own. I didn't wait 28 goddamn years to come out of the closet just so I could step into a new one draped in rainbows.
I made a promise to myself this year after we lost one of my heroes, David Bowie, that I would take his advice to courageously turn and face the strange no matter where that strange takes me.
So I'll say it again, loud and clear, bold and queer, I Comrade Hermit, sloppy, bearded, commie anarchist, sometimes wish I had a vagina. And I'm not a queer heterosexual. I'm a genderqueer bull dyke and don't you fucking forget it. Don't get me wrong I'm not about to go full castrato. Bottom surgery costs out the ass and hurts like a fucking bitch. Not mention that most girls who dig beards also dig dick. But if we're talking about magic genie scenarios here, my second wish is probably going to be a cooch, right between world peace and a three-way scissor fight with Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. What? just because I want a cunt doesn't mean I'm still not half guy. Drown me.
Turn and face the strange, dearest motherfuckers, turn and face the strange.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Thursday, August 4, 2016
The Dog Days of Trump
I've never really bought into the whole "liberal media" conspiracy theory. It's always struck me as a shrewd marketing campaign to wrangle terrified geriatrics for Rupert Murdoch's ratings and ex-Dallas cheerleaders for Roger Aile's bottle blonde harem of unwilling victims. That's not to say I buy into the equally ludicrous theory of the hardworking, hardscrabble, unbiased media. No, that farce only exists in star-studded, Hollywood, Oscar shoe-ins and in the colossal egos of Robert Redford wanna-be's like Chris Mathews and Charlie Rose. The real media bias has always had more to do with big business than partisan bullshit. Even in the most heated presidential races over the past half-century, the big networks may have had there favorites but they always seemed to give more than enough neutral air time to both major party blowhards. That is until the dog days of 2016, the dog days of Trump.
The hysteria started to really take off at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when those fantastic folks at Wikileaks released a treasure trove of damning information that proved what most of us have already strongly suspected. The documents, which Wikileaks received from an anonymous source with the fabulous nom de guerre Guccifer (has to be queer), revealed the full extent of the Democratic National Committee's collaboration with Madame Killary's campaign to nip Bernie in the bud. The leak was particularly damning to DNC head and Sandernista hate-throb, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who's comments included suggestions to use lingering American bigotry against Bernie's alleged atheism against him. Schultz complicity was made all the more garish when her morally derelict behavior was rewarded with a cushy position in Killary's campaign the moment she was fired from the DNC.
All of this mess should have damned Killary's Philly coronation to PR clusterfuck status. But the news was barely a day old when the queen of mean took a bad song and made it better. Without anything even resembling verifiable proof, Killary announced that the leak was the work of Putin's Russia, in a dastardly conspiracy to deny her her god given right to the throne. As if this load wasn't vile enough, the former First Lady then suggested that Trump's whole damn campaign was part of this convoluted Kremlin plot. Even when compared to some of Trump's zaniest racist conspiracy theories, this has to be, by-far the looniest fucking campaign accusation since JFK was accused of being the Popes personal odalisque. But the fine, hardworking folk who populate the bullpens of the network newsphere gobbled this load whole and spit it back out verbatim, word for word, like a propaganda snowball, as if it had come from the cock of god himself. No questions asked and not even a pinch of skepticism. And just like that (SNAP!), a totally legit Killary scandal became a completely facetious Trump/Putin scandal.
This probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, considering that these same people have had it in for Russia since it became clear, well over a decade ago, that Putin wasn't about to bend over and take it like Yeltsin. Since then, America and it's business partners in the Filth Estate have launched an all-out assault against the Kremlin that has included everything from overthrowing the democratically elected governments of it's neighbors to accusing them of launching fabricated, full-scale invasions of those neighbors when Putin refused to take the bait and retaliate. This campaign of chaos and deception has been described by many as the New Cold War. Which would be accurate if the old one had ever actually ended.
The Cold War began in 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the western client state of the Czar. The US and it's allies retaliated by supplementing the remaining Czarist's White Terror with a force of over thirty-thousand American, French and English troops, fresh from the trenches of World War 1. This succeeded in achieving nothing but transforming a popular socialist experiment into a blood drenched, permanent warfare state, paving the way for the rise of Stalin. The Cold War entered it's second stage when Truman dropped two nukes on a defeated, white-flag waving Japan in order to send a message to Stalin, who was still basking in the unexpected triumph of his victory over Hitler, that we were in charge now. What followed was more than forty years of terrorism, sabotage and proxy wars which only ended when the USSR finally ran out of gas (an inevitability since Stalin shelved Lenin's New Economic Program) and fell apart in 1991. The third and stealthiest stage of the Cold War was waged largely from within the new Russian Federation by our drunken tool, Boris Yeltsin who attempted to subjugate his own nation with an American designed campaign of economic warfare known as shock capitalism, all topped off with the rapacious post-Soviet expanse of NATO to the motherlands doorsteps.
The fourth and current phase of America's longest war has been the war on Putin and, with the rise of Killary towards her lifelong destination on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has been pushed farther than it's been since the halcyon days of the Red Scare and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the sickest part about this is that the New McCarthyites are the same Baby-Boomers who routinely cream themselves over Edward R. Murrow's grave. Black is white. Up is down. Yesterdays flower children are today's Birchers and there first high profile victim is none other than Donald Trump.
Trump may not be a fucking pacifist or even a half-descent human being but much like Kennedy in the twilight of Camelot, he's one overprivileged imperialist who sees the common sense in detente and this alone makes him dangerous to the system. That is why, more than any other major party candidate in my lifetime, the media has declared Trump persona non grata and launched a relentless, one sided multi-media campaign to destroy a clown they created, now that his pranks aren't funny anymore.
I didn't have an easy time deciding to write this post (what else is new, right?) I despise Trump and everything he fucking stands for. I despise his racism. I despise his dishonesty. I despise his greed, sexism, Islamaphobia and total lack of respect for basic constitutional rights and human dignity. But those aren't the reasons the mainstream media has decided to declare total war on Trump, though I'm sure that's what they tell themselves in the mirror everyday. They've unleashed the fucking hounds because of the one thing this bastard got right, the basic fact that Putin and Russia are not America's enemies. If I didn't speak out now, just because I share a target with these assholes, then what kind of fucking journalist would I be. They may be going after the Trumpsters today but who knows who it could be tomorrow, the Libertarians? Black Lives Matter? Genderqueer agoraphobic anarcho-Marxist bloggers?
And to all the self-proclaimed liberal progressives reading this latest rant in horror, I ask of you just one thing, WWERND? What would Edward R. Murrow do?
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
The hysteria started to really take off at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when those fantastic folks at Wikileaks released a treasure trove of damning information that proved what most of us have already strongly suspected. The documents, which Wikileaks received from an anonymous source with the fabulous nom de guerre Guccifer (has to be queer), revealed the full extent of the Democratic National Committee's collaboration with Madame Killary's campaign to nip Bernie in the bud. The leak was particularly damning to DNC head and Sandernista hate-throb, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who's comments included suggestions to use lingering American bigotry against Bernie's alleged atheism against him. Schultz complicity was made all the more garish when her morally derelict behavior was rewarded with a cushy position in Killary's campaign the moment she was fired from the DNC.
All of this mess should have damned Killary's Philly coronation to PR clusterfuck status. But the news was barely a day old when the queen of mean took a bad song and made it better. Without anything even resembling verifiable proof, Killary announced that the leak was the work of Putin's Russia, in a dastardly conspiracy to deny her her god given right to the throne. As if this load wasn't vile enough, the former First Lady then suggested that Trump's whole damn campaign was part of this convoluted Kremlin plot. Even when compared to some of Trump's zaniest racist conspiracy theories, this has to be, by-far the looniest fucking campaign accusation since JFK was accused of being the Popes personal odalisque. But the fine, hardworking folk who populate the bullpens of the network newsphere gobbled this load whole and spit it back out verbatim, word for word, like a propaganda snowball, as if it had come from the cock of god himself. No questions asked and not even a pinch of skepticism. And just like that (SNAP!), a totally legit Killary scandal became a completely facetious Trump/Putin scandal.
This probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, considering that these same people have had it in for Russia since it became clear, well over a decade ago, that Putin wasn't about to bend over and take it like Yeltsin. Since then, America and it's business partners in the Filth Estate have launched an all-out assault against the Kremlin that has included everything from overthrowing the democratically elected governments of it's neighbors to accusing them of launching fabricated, full-scale invasions of those neighbors when Putin refused to take the bait and retaliate. This campaign of chaos and deception has been described by many as the New Cold War. Which would be accurate if the old one had ever actually ended.
The Cold War began in 1917 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the western client state of the Czar. The US and it's allies retaliated by supplementing the remaining Czarist's White Terror with a force of over thirty-thousand American, French and English troops, fresh from the trenches of World War 1. This succeeded in achieving nothing but transforming a popular socialist experiment into a blood drenched, permanent warfare state, paving the way for the rise of Stalin. The Cold War entered it's second stage when Truman dropped two nukes on a defeated, white-flag waving Japan in order to send a message to Stalin, who was still basking in the unexpected triumph of his victory over Hitler, that we were in charge now. What followed was more than forty years of terrorism, sabotage and proxy wars which only ended when the USSR finally ran out of gas (an inevitability since Stalin shelved Lenin's New Economic Program) and fell apart in 1991. The third and stealthiest stage of the Cold War was waged largely from within the new Russian Federation by our drunken tool, Boris Yeltsin who attempted to subjugate his own nation with an American designed campaign of economic warfare known as shock capitalism, all topped off with the rapacious post-Soviet expanse of NATO to the motherlands doorsteps.
The fourth and current phase of America's longest war has been the war on Putin and, with the rise of Killary towards her lifelong destination on Pennsylvania Avenue, it has been pushed farther than it's been since the halcyon days of the Red Scare and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the sickest part about this is that the New McCarthyites are the same Baby-Boomers who routinely cream themselves over Edward R. Murrow's grave. Black is white. Up is down. Yesterdays flower children are today's Birchers and there first high profile victim is none other than Donald Trump.
Trump may not be a fucking pacifist or even a half-descent human being but much like Kennedy in the twilight of Camelot, he's one overprivileged imperialist who sees the common sense in detente and this alone makes him dangerous to the system. That is why, more than any other major party candidate in my lifetime, the media has declared Trump persona non grata and launched a relentless, one sided multi-media campaign to destroy a clown they created, now that his pranks aren't funny anymore.
I didn't have an easy time deciding to write this post (what else is new, right?) I despise Trump and everything he fucking stands for. I despise his racism. I despise his dishonesty. I despise his greed, sexism, Islamaphobia and total lack of respect for basic constitutional rights and human dignity. But those aren't the reasons the mainstream media has decided to declare total war on Trump, though I'm sure that's what they tell themselves in the mirror everyday. They've unleashed the fucking hounds because of the one thing this bastard got right, the basic fact that Putin and Russia are not America's enemies. If I didn't speak out now, just because I share a target with these assholes, then what kind of fucking journalist would I be. They may be going after the Trumpsters today but who knows who it could be tomorrow, the Libertarians? Black Lives Matter? Genderqueer agoraphobic anarcho-Marxist bloggers?
And to all the self-proclaimed liberal progressives reading this latest rant in horror, I ask of you just one thing, WWERND? What would Edward R. Murrow do?
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Trump V. Killary: A Tale of Two Evils
Well, dearest motherfuckers, it looks like it's official, what with Bernie's inevitable return to the feet of his DNC masters like a purring cat and the Republicans finally, reluctantly, swallowing the cyanide forced into there mouths by there own, long abused, electorate with the rapacious zeal of a prison bitch who's finally turned the table on his tormentors, 2016 will undeniably go down in history as the most repulsive display of defunct democracy in this unholy empire's history.
2016 is the year that this damnable nations two largest (and, naturally, most damnable) political parties has chosen the two worst human beings on earth to run for the presidency. In an age of apocalyptic upheaval, when leadership of any kind is more desperately needed than lead-free water, our choices for leader of the "free" universe come down to Donald Trump and Hillary (Killary) Clinton. A mobbed up, neonazi, snake-oil slinger and a sociopathic, body stacking, post-feminist, murder machine. This is what it comes down to? This is democracy?
Of coarse, as I've been desperately struggling to drill into you fine folks numb skulls for what feels like a millennia, there are, in fact, more than two fucking choices. In most states there's at least four. Aside from carpet-head and the dragon lady, there's Gary Johnson for the Libertarian Party and my personal favorite, Jill Stein for the Green Party. While these two candidates are far from perfect (Still miss you Ralph) they beat the ever-loving Christ out of the other two options.
But, for the sake of argument, I'll play dumb like the rest of the country and pretend our only two options are the toxic twins of eternal chaos. In which case this election becomes a game of; who do you hate? Which is worse? Which ego-drunk, wanna-be tyrant scares you less? Or, as this twisted national pass-time is more commonly known; who is the lesser of two evils?
So who's worse, the Donald or Killary? The choice should be obvious, right? The slumlord. The con-man. The proudly racist Butthole Birther who barks, cheerfully, about torturing civilians and ethnically cleansing the Southwest of anything browner then a bleached tube-sock. When it all comes down to the wire, as scandalously deceitful and shamelessly plutocratic as Madame Killary might be, Donald Trunp has to take the cake, right? I mean, shit, even my childhood mentors Noam Chomsky and Courtney Love have come to this conclusion and I, myself, on this very blog, have accused the Trumpster fire of being everything from a Killary puppet to the veritable reincarnation of Benito Mussolini. OK ,if your still with me here, you've probably realized I'm doing a bit here. So I'll cut the shit and rip the needle off the record right now. Trump maybe a lot of gross things, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, repulsive, tasteless, incestuous, verbally incontinent, morally retarded. Sure, sure, he's all that shit and then some but one thing the Donald is not, at least not this year, is the worse of two evils. Not with Killary still breathing gasoline.
Don't get me wrong, this motherfucker is dangerous. What he appears to represent is not only a rejection of the status quo (hardly a sin) but an embrace of the same racial scapegoating and chest-thumping glorification of state power that plagued the dying empires of Old Europe between World Wars. Yes, Trump may indeed be a new breed of fascist or at least so it seems to the naked eye on first glance but upon inspecting the Donald more closely, under glass, after scratching off a layer or two of noxious, pseudo-populist Cheeto dust, it becomes readily apparent that Trump is something far less terrifying. He's a fraud. A flim-flam artist in the first degree and this whole damn election has just been one big, long grift. That's why his campaign engine is held together with pantyhose and running on empty. That's why his rallies, in between the race-baiting violence, play like a bad late-night infomercial with Donald playing the part of the solicitous televangelist, slinging his ghost-written self-help books and holy water like rock cocaine at a Detroit swap meet. That's why this motherfucker has no discernibly consistent policy on anything.
But, once again, lets play dumb and pretend that Trump believes a goddamn word that passes through his slimy, jacked, lizard lips. Lets say the Donald really does want to pack all the Mexicans into a south bound train, build a Great Wall of Trump on the Rio Grande and launch drone strikes against all the girls who wouldn't blow him in high school. Hows he gonna do it? Who in his or her right mind is going to take orders from this ginger rodeo clown? The Pentagon? Congress? The Supreme court? I don't think so. They'd laugh in his fucking face just like those girls in high school. But the Commander-in-Trump demands it! Him and what fucking army. Who's really got the Donald's back aside from a drunken brood of inbred hicks and a mish-mosh of D-list celebrity has-bins. In spite of his bluster and bullshit bravado, Trump has no friends in high places. No high-powered industrialists or four-star generals to give his Fourth-Reich teeth. Hitler and Mussolini didn't act solo. They were well connected and even better organized. Trump is neither.
In all likelihood, a Trump presidency will be the most feckless, uneventful, one-term snoozefest this country has ever seen. The Donald will make scandalous pronouncements. No one but the turkey-vultures in the media will listen. The Donald will have a hissy-fit and the American people will be treated to a front row display of exactly how powerless the president really is. Trump's best hope is to pull an Obama and hand the reigns of power over to the leadership of his party but Trump won't do that. His colossal ego won't allow him to. A Trump presidency will likely serve as nothing more than yet another epic failure in the career of a life-long loser. The same, sadly, can not be said for the queen of chaos, Killary Clinton.
Killary knows exactly what she's going to do and she knows exactly how she's going to do it. She's going to further her lifelong mission of guaranteeing America's domination of the known fucking universe and if her long career of grossly over-trumpeted achievements is any indication, we're in for a bumpy ride. This is the same woman who micromanaged her husbands brutal bombing campaign on Kosovo, all in the name of a genocide that never happened and all to deplete Russia of its last Allie in the region with the end result being the creation of a racist, ethno-gangster state that now serves as Europe's capitol for heroin, sex slavery and black market organs. This is the woman who turned Libya, once one of Africa's wealthiest and most socially equal nations into a smoking heap of Islamic terrorism that is slowly engulfing the entire continent. All so she could hang Gaddafi's head on her fucking mantle. This is the woman who quit as Secretary of State over Obama's initial refusal to directly fund Al-Qaeda in Syria. This is the woman who served as the architect of a neonazi coup-de-tat in Ukraine in order to suck Russia into a black hole of endless ethnic warfare (Thankfully, unlike Milosevic, Putin didn't take the bait.) and sabotage there integration with Europe. This is the woman who turned a long peaceful debate between China and it's neighbors over the ownership of a cluster of unpopulated Islands into a giant, nuclear powered game of Battleship. And this is the woman who wants to start World War 3 with Russia by going head-to-head with there fighter jets in both Syria and the Baltic's. With Killary as president we will be closer to nuclear apocalypse then we've been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For all Trumps military tough talk and foreign policy inconsistencies, he has shown more hesitation to expand the American Empire to the gates of Russian hell than any candidate for either major party this year. He's still all for killing Muslims, so much so he wants to invite Putin to take part in the bloodbath but Trump doesn't appear to share Killary's lust for Russophobic holy war. A Trump presidency may be chaotic, violent, racist and dangerous. It may even include a couple race riots and a few crimes against humanity. But it is far less likely to be as downright apocalyptic as a Killary regime. So if your looking for the lesser of two evils in 2016, my vote is on the racist moron over the worlds finest female mass murderer since Elizabeth Bathory. But I'd personally rather get a prostate exam with a fucking chainsaw then vote for either one of them. Please, take it from me, dearest motherfuckers, vote third party this November. Then hurry home and start digging. We're gonna need a lot of fallout shelters to survive this mess.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
2016 is the year that this damnable nations two largest (and, naturally, most damnable) political parties has chosen the two worst human beings on earth to run for the presidency. In an age of apocalyptic upheaval, when leadership of any kind is more desperately needed than lead-free water, our choices for leader of the "free" universe come down to Donald Trump and Hillary (Killary) Clinton. A mobbed up, neonazi, snake-oil slinger and a sociopathic, body stacking, post-feminist, murder machine. This is what it comes down to? This is democracy?
Of coarse, as I've been desperately struggling to drill into you fine folks numb skulls for what feels like a millennia, there are, in fact, more than two fucking choices. In most states there's at least four. Aside from carpet-head and the dragon lady, there's Gary Johnson for the Libertarian Party and my personal favorite, Jill Stein for the Green Party. While these two candidates are far from perfect (Still miss you Ralph) they beat the ever-loving Christ out of the other two options.
But, for the sake of argument, I'll play dumb like the rest of the country and pretend our only two options are the toxic twins of eternal chaos. In which case this election becomes a game of; who do you hate? Which is worse? Which ego-drunk, wanna-be tyrant scares you less? Or, as this twisted national pass-time is more commonly known; who is the lesser of two evils?
So who's worse, the Donald or Killary? The choice should be obvious, right? The slumlord. The con-man. The proudly racist Butthole Birther who barks, cheerfully, about torturing civilians and ethnically cleansing the Southwest of anything browner then a bleached tube-sock. When it all comes down to the wire, as scandalously deceitful and shamelessly plutocratic as Madame Killary might be, Donald Trunp has to take the cake, right? I mean, shit, even my childhood mentors Noam Chomsky and Courtney Love have come to this conclusion and I, myself, on this very blog, have accused the Trumpster fire of being everything from a Killary puppet to the veritable reincarnation of Benito Mussolini. OK ,if your still with me here, you've probably realized I'm doing a bit here. So I'll cut the shit and rip the needle off the record right now. Trump maybe a lot of gross things, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, repulsive, tasteless, incestuous, verbally incontinent, morally retarded. Sure, sure, he's all that shit and then some but one thing the Donald is not, at least not this year, is the worse of two evils. Not with Killary still breathing gasoline.
Don't get me wrong, this motherfucker is dangerous. What he appears to represent is not only a rejection of the status quo (hardly a sin) but an embrace of the same racial scapegoating and chest-thumping glorification of state power that plagued the dying empires of Old Europe between World Wars. Yes, Trump may indeed be a new breed of fascist or at least so it seems to the naked eye on first glance but upon inspecting the Donald more closely, under glass, after scratching off a layer or two of noxious, pseudo-populist Cheeto dust, it becomes readily apparent that Trump is something far less terrifying. He's a fraud. A flim-flam artist in the first degree and this whole damn election has just been one big, long grift. That's why his campaign engine is held together with pantyhose and running on empty. That's why his rallies, in between the race-baiting violence, play like a bad late-night infomercial with Donald playing the part of the solicitous televangelist, slinging his ghost-written self-help books and holy water like rock cocaine at a Detroit swap meet. That's why this motherfucker has no discernibly consistent policy on anything.
But, once again, lets play dumb and pretend that Trump believes a goddamn word that passes through his slimy, jacked, lizard lips. Lets say the Donald really does want to pack all the Mexicans into a south bound train, build a Great Wall of Trump on the Rio Grande and launch drone strikes against all the girls who wouldn't blow him in high school. Hows he gonna do it? Who in his or her right mind is going to take orders from this ginger rodeo clown? The Pentagon? Congress? The Supreme court? I don't think so. They'd laugh in his fucking face just like those girls in high school. But the Commander-in-Trump demands it! Him and what fucking army. Who's really got the Donald's back aside from a drunken brood of inbred hicks and a mish-mosh of D-list celebrity has-bins. In spite of his bluster and bullshit bravado, Trump has no friends in high places. No high-powered industrialists or four-star generals to give his Fourth-Reich teeth. Hitler and Mussolini didn't act solo. They were well connected and even better organized. Trump is neither.
In all likelihood, a Trump presidency will be the most feckless, uneventful, one-term snoozefest this country has ever seen. The Donald will make scandalous pronouncements. No one but the turkey-vultures in the media will listen. The Donald will have a hissy-fit and the American people will be treated to a front row display of exactly how powerless the president really is. Trump's best hope is to pull an Obama and hand the reigns of power over to the leadership of his party but Trump won't do that. His colossal ego won't allow him to. A Trump presidency will likely serve as nothing more than yet another epic failure in the career of a life-long loser. The same, sadly, can not be said for the queen of chaos, Killary Clinton.
Killary knows exactly what she's going to do and she knows exactly how she's going to do it. She's going to further her lifelong mission of guaranteeing America's domination of the known fucking universe and if her long career of grossly over-trumpeted achievements is any indication, we're in for a bumpy ride. This is the same woman who micromanaged her husbands brutal bombing campaign on Kosovo, all in the name of a genocide that never happened and all to deplete Russia of its last Allie in the region with the end result being the creation of a racist, ethno-gangster state that now serves as Europe's capitol for heroin, sex slavery and black market organs. This is the woman who turned Libya, once one of Africa's wealthiest and most socially equal nations into a smoking heap of Islamic terrorism that is slowly engulfing the entire continent. All so she could hang Gaddafi's head on her fucking mantle. This is the woman who quit as Secretary of State over Obama's initial refusal to directly fund Al-Qaeda in Syria. This is the woman who served as the architect of a neonazi coup-de-tat in Ukraine in order to suck Russia into a black hole of endless ethnic warfare (Thankfully, unlike Milosevic, Putin didn't take the bait.) and sabotage there integration with Europe. This is the woman who turned a long peaceful debate between China and it's neighbors over the ownership of a cluster of unpopulated Islands into a giant, nuclear powered game of Battleship. And this is the woman who wants to start World War 3 with Russia by going head-to-head with there fighter jets in both Syria and the Baltic's. With Killary as president we will be closer to nuclear apocalypse then we've been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For all Trumps military tough talk and foreign policy inconsistencies, he has shown more hesitation to expand the American Empire to the gates of Russian hell than any candidate for either major party this year. He's still all for killing Muslims, so much so he wants to invite Putin to take part in the bloodbath but Trump doesn't appear to share Killary's lust for Russophobic holy war. A Trump presidency may be chaotic, violent, racist and dangerous. It may even include a couple race riots and a few crimes against humanity. But it is far less likely to be as downright apocalyptic as a Killary regime. So if your looking for the lesser of two evils in 2016, my vote is on the racist moron over the worlds finest female mass murderer since Elizabeth Bathory. But I'd personally rather get a prostate exam with a fucking chainsaw then vote for either one of them. Please, take it from me, dearest motherfuckers, vote third party this November. Then hurry home and start digging. We're gonna need a lot of fallout shelters to survive this mess.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Dallas, Blowback, and the Pregnant Society
BLOWBACK: An unforeseen and unwanted effect, result, or set of repercussions.
-Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
If your reading this right now, I'm sure that I don't have to tell you that we as a country have spent yet another sweltering Summer week in a cracked bathtub full of boiling blood. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who feels fucking exhausted with this countries total inability to learn a goddamn lesson and I'm rapidly approaching the end of my rope. I'm just so fucking sick and so fucking tired and all I know how to do is type.
On the first Wednesday of July two more innocent black men were murdered by the police. Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul. Both men were were reasonably armed. Both men were minding there own fucking business. Both men were black. One was pinned to the ground and physically subdued before being senselessly shot multiple times at close range, execution style. The other was blown away as he tried to provide his I.D.. Both murders caught on tape or rather on phone. And the sane world wept. And the sick world shrugged. And we all died a little bit more inside. Just another dog day in sunny America.
On the first Thursday of July, the people of Black Lives Matter held another peaceful protest in Downtown Dallas with the full consent and co-operation of the Dallas Police. The protest was coming to an uneventful close when all hell let loose. Shot's rang out. Police hit the ground while there fellow officers returned fire. By the time the smoke finally cleared several hours later, six people were dead, five cops and one gunman. Another seven cops and two civilians were maimed.
The gunman was a black Army veteran of the Afghanistan War named Micah Xavier Johnson. By all appearances he acted alone in a fit of rage against white police officers. Just like the cops in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, it mattered little if the people he killed were guilty or innocent. He was the judge, jury and executioner. And once again the sane world wept. But the sick world couldn't shut the fuck up.
Because according to all these lovely gnashing heads in the permanently televised sick world, this was Black Live Matter's fault. Those cops were clearly killed by the reasonable demands of uppity black kids seeking the right to walk down a fucking street without getting murdered. Or maybe this was all the NRA's fault, because the Second Amendment is just so 1776. The only thing that couldn't possibly be at fault was the police state itself AKA blowback. But, like usual, the gnashing heads of the permanently televised sick world were dead fucking wrong.
I first and foremost want to make it perfectly fucking clear that when I say the police state, I don't necessarily mean the police. There are many good, hardworking, blue collar cops out there, I have had the pleasure to consider some of them family and I have no reason to believe that the dozen cops shot by Johnson weren't among this silent majority among the violent minority. My beef is not with the police, at least not as individuals. My beef is with the putrid system that has made even good cops complicit in a never-ending war against poor people, particularly those of color.
Over the last couple years alone this country has seen an endless procession of innocent, mostly unarmed people of color, slaughtered in cold blood by trigger happy cops. As horrifying as this sounds the orgy of bloodshed wasn't the truly shocking part of this latest spree. Black and brown and queer people have been telling their friends in the white/straight world for years that this shit's been going down. What made these cases different was that most of them were recorded and what made this downright horrifying is that it didn't even fucking matter. In case after bloody case, the pigs, and these were not cops but pigs, were tried before a rigged court and released with just a slap on the fucking wrist, if that.
Eric Garner, Micheal Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Samuel Duboise, Freddie Gray and now Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Case after case after goddamn case. Kids were killed. There killers were set free. The people protested (mostly peacefully.) And the bodies just kept pilling up. It quickly became graphically clear to the whole country that these pigs were above the law as long as they kept there bullets in brown bodies.
There is only so much a people can take before they break. Martin Luther King Jr. said it himself, paraphrasing JFK- "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable." Sooner or later someone will break under the colossal weight of oppression and it'll usually be someone already on the edge, but, regardless, without reform it becomes inevitable.
Black and brown and queer (particularly trans) people in this country have been consistently taught through the actions of the people supposedly payed to protect them that there lives don't matter and any kind of justice in the legal system is all but hopeless. The reason behind this unfortunate fact isn't simply a matter of racism or bigotry. It is a matter of unchecked power. The police state in this country has been given a free hand to annihilate with impunity and even good cops have been rendered powerless to stop this legacy of bloodshed due to the strictly enforced culture of blue silence. There success and even there safety within the police community is dependent upon keeping there mouths shut and looking the other way when things get out of control. This deeply ingrained practice has created a community where, sadly, bad cops rise in the ranks while good cops are left with only three options- Go silent, go bad or just go away.
The only way to change this hopelessly corrupt system is to destroy it and replace it with something more transparent and democratic. This can be done by making the career progress of cops dependent on the approval of the communities they police and by having acts of police violence prosecuted by attorneys who work outside the law enforcement community, perhaps by creating a separate prosecutorial organ that works exclusively on cases of police brutality thus avoiding putting prosecutors in the corrupting position where they have to prove the guilt of someone they have to work with on a day to day basis to win cases.
Until this kind of radical reform happens the violence coming from both sides of the law will only get worse and the divide between the police and the citizens they serve will only grow wider. If left unchecked this divide may ultimately make the ultimate act of violent social upheaval a forgone conclusion when even peaceful people will be given no choice but to defend there own communities from predators with or without a badge.
One more quote- "Violence is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one."
-Karl Marx.
For better or worse, these contractions are coming closer and closer. A C-section via peaceful revolutionary reform maybe the only way to prevent a violent revolutionary birth.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
-Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
If your reading this right now, I'm sure that I don't have to tell you that we as a country have spent yet another sweltering Summer week in a cracked bathtub full of boiling blood. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who feels fucking exhausted with this countries total inability to learn a goddamn lesson and I'm rapidly approaching the end of my rope. I'm just so fucking sick and so fucking tired and all I know how to do is type.
On the first Wednesday of July two more innocent black men were murdered by the police. Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul. Both men were were reasonably armed. Both men were minding there own fucking business. Both men were black. One was pinned to the ground and physically subdued before being senselessly shot multiple times at close range, execution style. The other was blown away as he tried to provide his I.D.. Both murders caught on tape or rather on phone. And the sane world wept. And the sick world shrugged. And we all died a little bit more inside. Just another dog day in sunny America.
On the first Thursday of July, the people of Black Lives Matter held another peaceful protest in Downtown Dallas with the full consent and co-operation of the Dallas Police. The protest was coming to an uneventful close when all hell let loose. Shot's rang out. Police hit the ground while there fellow officers returned fire. By the time the smoke finally cleared several hours later, six people were dead, five cops and one gunman. Another seven cops and two civilians were maimed.
The gunman was a black Army veteran of the Afghanistan War named Micah Xavier Johnson. By all appearances he acted alone in a fit of rage against white police officers. Just like the cops in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, it mattered little if the people he killed were guilty or innocent. He was the judge, jury and executioner. And once again the sane world wept. But the sick world couldn't shut the fuck up.
Because according to all these lovely gnashing heads in the permanently televised sick world, this was Black Live Matter's fault. Those cops were clearly killed by the reasonable demands of uppity black kids seeking the right to walk down a fucking street without getting murdered. Or maybe this was all the NRA's fault, because the Second Amendment is just so 1776. The only thing that couldn't possibly be at fault was the police state itself AKA blowback. But, like usual, the gnashing heads of the permanently televised sick world were dead fucking wrong.
I first and foremost want to make it perfectly fucking clear that when I say the police state, I don't necessarily mean the police. There are many good, hardworking, blue collar cops out there, I have had the pleasure to consider some of them family and I have no reason to believe that the dozen cops shot by Johnson weren't among this silent majority among the violent minority. My beef is not with the police, at least not as individuals. My beef is with the putrid system that has made even good cops complicit in a never-ending war against poor people, particularly those of color.
Over the last couple years alone this country has seen an endless procession of innocent, mostly unarmed people of color, slaughtered in cold blood by trigger happy cops. As horrifying as this sounds the orgy of bloodshed wasn't the truly shocking part of this latest spree. Black and brown and queer people have been telling their friends in the white/straight world for years that this shit's been going down. What made these cases different was that most of them were recorded and what made this downright horrifying is that it didn't even fucking matter. In case after bloody case, the pigs, and these were not cops but pigs, were tried before a rigged court and released with just a slap on the fucking wrist, if that.
Eric Garner, Micheal Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Samuel Duboise, Freddie Gray and now Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Case after case after goddamn case. Kids were killed. There killers were set free. The people protested (mostly peacefully.) And the bodies just kept pilling up. It quickly became graphically clear to the whole country that these pigs were above the law as long as they kept there bullets in brown bodies.
There is only so much a people can take before they break. Martin Luther King Jr. said it himself, paraphrasing JFK- "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable." Sooner or later someone will break under the colossal weight of oppression and it'll usually be someone already on the edge, but, regardless, without reform it becomes inevitable.
Black and brown and queer (particularly trans) people in this country have been consistently taught through the actions of the people supposedly payed to protect them that there lives don't matter and any kind of justice in the legal system is all but hopeless. The reason behind this unfortunate fact isn't simply a matter of racism or bigotry. It is a matter of unchecked power. The police state in this country has been given a free hand to annihilate with impunity and even good cops have been rendered powerless to stop this legacy of bloodshed due to the strictly enforced culture of blue silence. There success and even there safety within the police community is dependent upon keeping there mouths shut and looking the other way when things get out of control. This deeply ingrained practice has created a community where, sadly, bad cops rise in the ranks while good cops are left with only three options- Go silent, go bad or just go away.
The only way to change this hopelessly corrupt system is to destroy it and replace it with something more transparent and democratic. This can be done by making the career progress of cops dependent on the approval of the communities they police and by having acts of police violence prosecuted by attorneys who work outside the law enforcement community, perhaps by creating a separate prosecutorial organ that works exclusively on cases of police brutality thus avoiding putting prosecutors in the corrupting position where they have to prove the guilt of someone they have to work with on a day to day basis to win cases.
Until this kind of radical reform happens the violence coming from both sides of the law will only get worse and the divide between the police and the citizens they serve will only grow wider. If left unchecked this divide may ultimately make the ultimate act of violent social upheaval a forgone conclusion when even peaceful people will be given no choice but to defend there own communities from predators with or without a badge.
One more quote- "Violence is the midwife of any old society pregnant with a new one."
-Karl Marx.
For better or worse, these contractions are coming closer and closer. A C-section via peaceful revolutionary reform maybe the only way to prevent a violent revolutionary birth.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Anarchy in the EU, Liberty in the UK!
When I first heard that British Prime Minister David Cameron had promised the euroskeptics in his Conservative Party a popular referendum on whether or not the UK should leave the EU, in return for there support in the 2015 elections, I thought there was no fucking way it would ever happen. My skepticism only deepened after the failure of Yes! Scotland. The UK seemed as impervious to true radical change as the US. Last night, speaking as I scribble this last minute post down on a piece of computer paper with Sonic Youth's "Expressway to your skull" blaring through my headphones, the UK proved me and a lot of other leftists to be dead wrong. Unlike many of those other so-called leftists, I couldn't be happier to be so wrong. In spite of my Irish-Catholic Anglophobic tendencies, I'm feeling very proud of those dastardly limey bastards right now. I feel like I should by them a pint.
After months and months of the most brutal fear campaign to be launched on the Brits since the down and dirty days of Tony Blair's Downing Street Memo. After being fed shovel loads of pro-Euro propaganda from every establishment hack from both ends of the aisle. Even after a rushed visit by Sir Barack of Obomba, who came to little Lord Cameron's aid in order to threaten the citizens of America's oldest Allie with economic apartheid if they dared exercise there right to rid themselves of foreign rule. The British people still gathered together on the 23rd of June to deliver a great big middle finger to the tyrants of corporate globalism in Brussels and beyond. Today should be a day of international celebration. Because this is just the fucking beginning. The Brits have shown us all a way out and it didn't even cost them a single drop of blood.
The leaders of the movement to leave the EU, namely the UK Independence Party (UKIP), may have had there own chauvinistic and xenophobic reasons for the Brexit but the majority of the Brits who voted Leave this week weren't thinking about immigrants or Sharia nonsense. They were voting to emancipate themselves from a corrupt cabal of foreign crony capitalists. It was a loud and hearty rejection of Cameron's vaunted "Age of austerity." It was a glorious populist rebellion against the tyranny of "Business as usual" and sadly most of my comrades on the far left chose to sit this one out on the sidelines and miss out on all the anarchic fun.
The only parts of the UK that voted aggressively against the Brexit are, sadly, my own Celtic people in the leftist heartlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland and this breaks my fucking heart. Even Labor's insurgent leader Jeremy Corbyn and those fantastic lions in the Scottish National Party (SNP) spoke out (somewhat begrudgingly) against Leave. This is due to the sad fact that too many of even the finest minds on the far left (Noam Chomsky!?) buy into the bullshit theory that the EU is somehow a stateless socialist alternative to American hegemony. The reality couldn't be farther from this fallacy if it were in outer space.
The stone cold reality is actually quite the opposite. The EU and in fact the very notion of a united federal Europe was designed by CIA globalist masterminds like Allen Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan after World War 2 in order to create a unified European identity that would serve as a socioeconomic glue to hold the imperial NATO army together and ensure that the communist and anarchist partisans who liberated much of the continent from fascism would not be given an opportunity to provide a true socialist alternative to American global capitalism. Billions of US tax dollars were poured into a decades long propaganda campaign via the Marshal Plan to brainwash Europeans into believing that a United Europe was as inevitable as a fart on taco Tuesday.
The result of the EU's "socialist" paradise? A crooked fiefdom of moneyed banksters sucking the continents poorest people dry like vampires. Not to mention an economic appendage for America's NATO Megatron to better rape and pillage with. But still, even after decades of brutal austerity, corruption, ponzi schemes, labor exploitation and regime change, my people back in the old country of Ireland and Scotland are still convinced that an existence under the tutelage of this imperial juggernaut would be kinder then an independent UK. Which only proves how horrifically the Crown has abused these people (send your hate mail to the Queen). But like a battered spouse, they go running from the arms of one monster to another. My only hope is that the earth-shattering cataclysm that is the Brexit will finally shake some sense into my people and the early signs look good.
As news of the Brexit reached the masses, calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence have been made by the SNP and even the long castrated and taciturn Sinn Fein of Northern Ireland is calling for serious discussion on a similar referendum to FINALLY unify Ireland (and the Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day!) Perhaps even better, that defeated stooge Cameron has announced he will be stepping down from his dismally failed role as Prime Minister and leader of the Tories, leading some folks in Labor to whisper about the possibility of bumping up the 2020 general elections. Giving the NATO-skeptic if not totally euroskeptic Head of Labor, Jeremy Corbyn a serious shot at redeeming himself as the first true leader of the newly independent UK. Corbyn may have chickened out on Leave but I have a hard time believing that this longtime Euro-critic will go out his way to put the shackles back on.
Just like UKIP's Leave campaign, these actions by the SNP, Sinn Fein and Corbyn may not be done with the wisest of intentions but, like the Brexit, there result could be nothing short of miraculous. And the revolution doesn't stop at the shores of the British Isles. The Brexit sets a powerful precedent for countries like Spain, France, Italy and Holland with similar levels of Euro-discontent. Not to mention independence movements from Basque to Venice. 2016 could go down in history as the most revolutionary year in European history since at least May '68 if not 1799.
Of coarse this doesn't mean a clean, easy victory for the powers of good over evil. The EU is a multi-billion dollar menace that won't be dismantled without a long, bloody fight. The economic backlash against the UK has only just begun and it has already plunged the value of the British Pound to a thirty year low. Things will likely get far worse before they get better. The global corporate aristocracy is going to do everything they can to ensure an independent Britain will fail. There may even be backroom schemes in the works to sabotage the Brexit, which will likely take years to go into effect, before it can even begin.
But true revolutionary change is hard. If doing the right thing was easy then the world wouldn't be so fucked up. People of all nationalities and political stripes who truly value liberty need to come together now behind the Brits and show our unflinching solidarity with there declaration of independence. The Brexit is victory for us all. Stand strong limey bastards. This Marxist mick solutes you.
Peace, Love and Anarchy- CH
After months and months of the most brutal fear campaign to be launched on the Brits since the down and dirty days of Tony Blair's Downing Street Memo. After being fed shovel loads of pro-Euro propaganda from every establishment hack from both ends of the aisle. Even after a rushed visit by Sir Barack of Obomba, who came to little Lord Cameron's aid in order to threaten the citizens of America's oldest Allie with economic apartheid if they dared exercise there right to rid themselves of foreign rule. The British people still gathered together on the 23rd of June to deliver a great big middle finger to the tyrants of corporate globalism in Brussels and beyond. Today should be a day of international celebration. Because this is just the fucking beginning. The Brits have shown us all a way out and it didn't even cost them a single drop of blood.
The leaders of the movement to leave the EU, namely the UK Independence Party (UKIP), may have had there own chauvinistic and xenophobic reasons for the Brexit but the majority of the Brits who voted Leave this week weren't thinking about immigrants or Sharia nonsense. They were voting to emancipate themselves from a corrupt cabal of foreign crony capitalists. It was a loud and hearty rejection of Cameron's vaunted "Age of austerity." It was a glorious populist rebellion against the tyranny of "Business as usual" and sadly most of my comrades on the far left chose to sit this one out on the sidelines and miss out on all the anarchic fun.
The only parts of the UK that voted aggressively against the Brexit are, sadly, my own Celtic people in the leftist heartlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland and this breaks my fucking heart. Even Labor's insurgent leader Jeremy Corbyn and those fantastic lions in the Scottish National Party (SNP) spoke out (somewhat begrudgingly) against Leave. This is due to the sad fact that too many of even the finest minds on the far left (Noam Chomsky!?) buy into the bullshit theory that the EU is somehow a stateless socialist alternative to American hegemony. The reality couldn't be farther from this fallacy if it were in outer space.
The stone cold reality is actually quite the opposite. The EU and in fact the very notion of a united federal Europe was designed by CIA globalist masterminds like Allen Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan after World War 2 in order to create a unified European identity that would serve as a socioeconomic glue to hold the imperial NATO army together and ensure that the communist and anarchist partisans who liberated much of the continent from fascism would not be given an opportunity to provide a true socialist alternative to American global capitalism. Billions of US tax dollars were poured into a decades long propaganda campaign via the Marshal Plan to brainwash Europeans into believing that a United Europe was as inevitable as a fart on taco Tuesday.
The result of the EU's "socialist" paradise? A crooked fiefdom of moneyed banksters sucking the continents poorest people dry like vampires. Not to mention an economic appendage for America's NATO Megatron to better rape and pillage with. But still, even after decades of brutal austerity, corruption, ponzi schemes, labor exploitation and regime change, my people back in the old country of Ireland and Scotland are still convinced that an existence under the tutelage of this imperial juggernaut would be kinder then an independent UK. Which only proves how horrifically the Crown has abused these people (send your hate mail to the Queen). But like a battered spouse, they go running from the arms of one monster to another. My only hope is that the earth-shattering cataclysm that is the Brexit will finally shake some sense into my people and the early signs look good.
As news of the Brexit reached the masses, calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence have been made by the SNP and even the long castrated and taciturn Sinn Fein of Northern Ireland is calling for serious discussion on a similar referendum to FINALLY unify Ireland (and the Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day!) Perhaps even better, that defeated stooge Cameron has announced he will be stepping down from his dismally failed role as Prime Minister and leader of the Tories, leading some folks in Labor to whisper about the possibility of bumping up the 2020 general elections. Giving the NATO-skeptic if not totally euroskeptic Head of Labor, Jeremy Corbyn a serious shot at redeeming himself as the first true leader of the newly independent UK. Corbyn may have chickened out on Leave but I have a hard time believing that this longtime Euro-critic will go out his way to put the shackles back on.
Just like UKIP's Leave campaign, these actions by the SNP, Sinn Fein and Corbyn may not be done with the wisest of intentions but, like the Brexit, there result could be nothing short of miraculous. And the revolution doesn't stop at the shores of the British Isles. The Brexit sets a powerful precedent for countries like Spain, France, Italy and Holland with similar levels of Euro-discontent. Not to mention independence movements from Basque to Venice. 2016 could go down in history as the most revolutionary year in European history since at least May '68 if not 1799.
Of coarse this doesn't mean a clean, easy victory for the powers of good over evil. The EU is a multi-billion dollar menace that won't be dismantled without a long, bloody fight. The economic backlash against the UK has only just begun and it has already plunged the value of the British Pound to a thirty year low. Things will likely get far worse before they get better. The global corporate aristocracy is going to do everything they can to ensure an independent Britain will fail. There may even be backroom schemes in the works to sabotage the Brexit, which will likely take years to go into effect, before it can even begin.
But true revolutionary change is hard. If doing the right thing was easy then the world wouldn't be so fucked up. People of all nationalities and political stripes who truly value liberty need to come together now behind the Brits and show our unflinching solidarity with there declaration of independence. The Brexit is victory for us all. Stand strong limey bastards. This Marxist mick solutes you.
Peace, Love and Anarchy- CH
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Summer Reading for Freaks and Radicals
Well dearest motherfuckers, it's finally summer and if your an amateur literati such as myself, that means one thing more than most. Long, warm afternoons designed by god (or whoever) for the express purpose of getting lost between the pages of a good book. It also means that every magazine, blog and website has some milquetoast, Ivy League, butt-monkey trying to sell you on a list of the latest mainstream, Oprah approved boregasms that I like to call the tyranny of the summer reading list. What's a bookish weirdo to do? Throw up your hands and settle for dreck? Not anymore! Never fear, freaks and radicals, this weirdo's got a blog and a summer reading list full of all the blasphemy, anarchy,sex, bloodshed and intrigue a fellow weirdo could ask for. Now, some of this shit is pretty esoteric and some of it's just plain fucked up, so don't expect to find much of it at your local Barnes and Noble, I'm permanently banned from mine! (Is he kidding?!) But if your craving something truly sinister, and I always am, you'll find a way to get your hands on these paperback gems. Hell, I did and I'm a goddamn agoraphobic basket-case. So without further ado, I give you, most dearest of motherfuckers, my own personal summer reading list. Read at your own discretion but except no substitutions.
* Killing Hope and Rogue State by William Blum
If your looking to rip the fucking scab off the ghastly wound that is the American Empire, you can do no better than the great William Blum. As folklore would have it, young Bill spent one year working as a pencil pusher for the US State Department in the late sixties and found himself so repulsed by what he saw behind the Wizard's curtain at Oz that he quit in disgust and devoted the next 40+ years of his life to exposing American foreign policy for the repulsive, man-eating, nation smashing beast that it really is. Killing Hope and Rogue State are his masterpieces. In the latter he gives us a quick but thorough guided tour through the precise reasons why the United States is the most feared and hated nation on the planet. In his magnum-opus, Killing Hope, Blum goes into painstaking detail cataloging America's foreign misdeeds from country to country, coup to coup, war to war, in chronological order. Not everyone's cup of tea but it's the kind of shit a malcontent, history dork such as myself can get lost in for hours.
* American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
One of the most grossly underrated and misinterpreted novels in modern American History. It had radical feminists up in arms over what they perceived to be it's sexist depiction of a handsome, young serial killer slaughtering prostitutes and party girls. They couldn't be farther from the truth. In reality, Bret Easton Ellis' experimental, Reagan era horror story is one of the most savagely brilliant and darkly hilarious satires ever written on the sociopathic hollowness and savage chauvinism of American capitalism. It's also one of the most grotesque works of transgressive fiction since the Marquis De Sade, so read at your own risk.
* Amok Fifth Dispatch
An absolute must have for any self-respecting, sub-altern bibliophile. Amok was basically like the internet before the internet, only weirder and better. The fifth and final dispatch is a massive catalog of paragraph long reviews of over a thousand of the worlds strangest pieces of underground literature broken up into sections on everything from anarchism, UFO's and perverted manga to Wilhelm Reich, neo-Nazi comics and the JFK assassination. It's beyond bizarre. It's information run amok and it fucking rules.
* The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
The best American history book is still probably Howard Zinn's indispensable Peoples History of the United States but Oliver Stones' Untold History is definitely the most entertaining. A downright cinematic tour-de-force through the last century of American intrigue, both at home and abroad. Stone doesn't pull any punches but he doesn't pull any of his trademark conspiranioa either. No doubt, disappointing his devoted gaggle of haters, just looking for another chance to take a swipe at old Ollie for using there own propaganda techniques against them and there precious status quo. Stone just sticks to the facts and leaves you to connect the dots if your daring enough to do so.
* Lords of Chaos by Micheal Moynihan
If you thought gangsta rap was violent, just wait until you get a load of the Norwegian Black Metal Scene. Biggie and Tupac ain't got shit one these lily-white devil worshipers. Murder, suicide, cannibalism, church arson, grave desecration, prison breaks, neo-Nazi terrorists, Jungian psychology? Lycanthropy! Nordic heathenry! Just when you think the shit can't get any crazier, it does. And it all started with just a handful of teenage metal-heads trading Celtic Frost tapes in an Oslo basement. A lot of people shit on this book because of it's authors alleged quasi-Fascist/occultist tendencies but I say, who better to lead a guided tour through the Satanic underground then a fellow basement dweller and all his eccentricities aside, Moynihan is a damn fine journalist and Lords of Chaos is the wildest rock book ever written.
* Introducing Marx by Rius and Introducing Marxism by Rupert Woodfin and Oscar Zarate
If you know me, you know I'm one anarchist who loves him some Marx. But even I have to admit, however brilliant the K-man might be, his books can be a bit of a bore. Blasphemy, I know, but it's true. Which makes converting non-believers a bit of a challenge. The best place to start is with these two pocket size graphic novels by the fine folks at Introducing Books, who specialize in what's basically college starter coarse's in comic form. I use to devour them when I was still a shut-in but the two on Marx are probably my favorites. There a great overview of all things Marx. His life, his work, his philosophy, his influence and why he still matters as much today as he did in the 19th century. All in all, fast paced and brilliantly illustrated infotainment.
* House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
By far, the strangest novel I've ever read which, naturally, makes it my favorite. It's probably not scientifically possible to sum it up in a single paragraph, so I won't even try. I'll just say it's a twisted horror story within an even more twisted horror story involving mental illness, a possibly haunted house, a decaying marriage, an endless hallway with a life of it's own and a documentary. All of which may or may not actually exist. It's a demented house of mirrors with multiple narratives that leaves you feeling upside down and inside out. Sounds like fun, right?.... ....pussies.
* The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schecter
Love serial killers? Me too! (Is he kidding?) Know one knows em better than Harold Schecter, who's Serial Killer Files serve as the most comprehensive study of murder and those fascinating psychopaths who commit it. It's basically the anti-Killing Hope. An encyclopedia of human destruction not sanctioned by the state.
* Preacher: Volumes 1-9 by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
When I heard that my favorite comic, the greatest comic, was going to be made into an AMC Original Series by Frat Pack schlock-miesters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, best known for there infantile "Bro" comedies like Superbad, my heart fucking sank. I thought, here we go again, another shitty comic adaptation that all the Deutsche bags of the world can cream themselves over. I couldn't have been more wrong and I couldn't be happier to be so wrong. Based on the first few episodes, it looks like those damn stoners might actually pull it off and make a halfway descent TV show. But nothing can ever beat the original. The epic tale of a drunken, apostate, Texas priest, granted the power of the word of god to command people to do anything from tell the truth to go fuck themselves (literally), only to be hunted down by an all powerful secret religious society, with his ass kicking, gun nut, feminist, bombshell girlfriend and his hard partying Irish vampire bestie at his side. Along the way they encounter everything from inbred desert cannibals to an indestructible god-slaying cowboy called the Saint of Killers. It's a long, bloody, surreal, hilarious, profane and romantic saga and it's the best way to waste your summer indoors without the use of high-powered recreational pharmaceuticals.
* Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich
Radical investigative journalist Gregory Elich goes into downright gratuitous detail, playing devils advocate, defending some of America's favorite boogeymen, from Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe to Iraq to North Korea and he does a damn fine job doing it. Uncovering narratives that not only fly in the face of the "official" stories but make mince meat of them. Picking them apart, piece by piece. Forget everything you thought you knew about world politricks. If you can actually get your hands on this long out of print antiwar classic it will make you question everything and it will make you all the better for it.
* Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
Not so much an autobiography as a scrapbook of letters, pictures, prison records, poems, psych evaluations and lyrics that create a complex self portrait of one of the most brilliant, incendiary and misunderstood feminist auteurs of the last several decades. Hate her all you want but this walking study in demonology will not, can not and should not go ignored.
* Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond
Grant Morrison's batshit bonkers, gonzo one-shot graphic novel about a bored London schoolgirl who falls in love with a cheeky psychopath, kills her boyfriend (naturally) and joins an avante-garde terrorist collective hellbent on bringing down an iconic tower with a single hand grenade in the coastal English tourist trap of Blackpool. It's a zany, deliciously Nineties, psychedelic teenage riot from the maestro of comic book surrealism that set the stage for later cinematic cult classics (and personal favorites) like Natural Born Killers and the Doom Generation.
* Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
An oral history of the American 80's underground punk scene that formed the glue that connects the Ramones and Nirvana. Each chapter tells the story of a different band on the periphery and there journey through the still embryonic loose knit network of dive bars, basement parties and mosh pits that would eventually grow from the punk rock underground into the Alternative Revolution of the early Nineties. Includes chapters on Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Big Black, the Replacements, Mission of Burma, the Minutemen, Fugazi, Mudhoney, Beat Happening and my personal favorite chapter on America's strangest band, the Butthole Surfers. A must read for any self-respecting Punk Rock fan.
* .45 Dangerous Minds by Steven Blush and George Petros
Before the internet and yes, dearest motherfuckers, there was a before the internet, freaks and radicals had to turn to the news stands for there intellectual fix which usually meant a crap-high of boring, airbrushed, jingoistic banality that gives propaganda a bad name. That is until the rise of the zines. After places like Kinko's made it possible for anyone with a few bucks and some angry words to Xerox and staple together there own glossy diatribes, the American underground was rocked by a wave of taboo smashing, homemade organs known as zines, in which freaks and radicals finally had a say. The best of these became full fledged periodicals in there own right with names like Maximum Rock&Roll, Re/Search, Answer Me!, Roller Derby, Anything that Moves and Murder Can Be Fun. More often than not, they were crude, crass, tasteless, profane and even downright pornographic. They were also fucking brilliant and the very best among them, in my not-so-humble opinion was a fearless little New York magazine called Seconds, run by two post-punk rejects named Steven Blush and George Petros with one simple mission in mind, give the most brutally honest, mercilessly rude and unabashedly prying interviews (aka interrogations) with the most dangerously unpredictable people they could get a hold of. The results where some of the strangest moments in journalism history and 45 of there finest interviews are collected in .45 Dangerous minds: Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Rollins, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Richard Remirez, GG Allin, Anton Levey and many, many more. Needless to say without iconoclastic rags like Seconds, without insane books like .45 Dangerous Minds and without brilliantly dangerous minds like Blush and Petros, there would be no Comrade Hermit or Exile In Happy Valley. On my best day I am but a parasite clinging to the bellies of those brilliant savage beasts. Read, learn and pay it forward. Start your own Seconds, your own Exile, online today and be heard by other fantastic freaks like you and me. In the words of Jello Biafra- "Don't hate the media. Become the media." I say why not do both. Let the war begin at home with a pile of good books and a laptop.
Knowledge is power and we've got it. Happy reading, dearest motherfuckers.
Peace, Love and Anarchy- CH
* Killing Hope and Rogue State by William Blum
If your looking to rip the fucking scab off the ghastly wound that is the American Empire, you can do no better than the great William Blum. As folklore would have it, young Bill spent one year working as a pencil pusher for the US State Department in the late sixties and found himself so repulsed by what he saw behind the Wizard's curtain at Oz that he quit in disgust and devoted the next 40+ years of his life to exposing American foreign policy for the repulsive, man-eating, nation smashing beast that it really is. Killing Hope and Rogue State are his masterpieces. In the latter he gives us a quick but thorough guided tour through the precise reasons why the United States is the most feared and hated nation on the planet. In his magnum-opus, Killing Hope, Blum goes into painstaking detail cataloging America's foreign misdeeds from country to country, coup to coup, war to war, in chronological order. Not everyone's cup of tea but it's the kind of shit a malcontent, history dork such as myself can get lost in for hours.
* American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
One of the most grossly underrated and misinterpreted novels in modern American History. It had radical feminists up in arms over what they perceived to be it's sexist depiction of a handsome, young serial killer slaughtering prostitutes and party girls. They couldn't be farther from the truth. In reality, Bret Easton Ellis' experimental, Reagan era horror story is one of the most savagely brilliant and darkly hilarious satires ever written on the sociopathic hollowness and savage chauvinism of American capitalism. It's also one of the most grotesque works of transgressive fiction since the Marquis De Sade, so read at your own risk.
* Amok Fifth Dispatch
An absolute must have for any self-respecting, sub-altern bibliophile. Amok was basically like the internet before the internet, only weirder and better. The fifth and final dispatch is a massive catalog of paragraph long reviews of over a thousand of the worlds strangest pieces of underground literature broken up into sections on everything from anarchism, UFO's and perverted manga to Wilhelm Reich, neo-Nazi comics and the JFK assassination. It's beyond bizarre. It's information run amok and it fucking rules.
* The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
The best American history book is still probably Howard Zinn's indispensable Peoples History of the United States but Oliver Stones' Untold History is definitely the most entertaining. A downright cinematic tour-de-force through the last century of American intrigue, both at home and abroad. Stone doesn't pull any punches but he doesn't pull any of his trademark conspiranioa either. No doubt, disappointing his devoted gaggle of haters, just looking for another chance to take a swipe at old Ollie for using there own propaganda techniques against them and there precious status quo. Stone just sticks to the facts and leaves you to connect the dots if your daring enough to do so.
* Lords of Chaos by Micheal Moynihan
If you thought gangsta rap was violent, just wait until you get a load of the Norwegian Black Metal Scene. Biggie and Tupac ain't got shit one these lily-white devil worshipers. Murder, suicide, cannibalism, church arson, grave desecration, prison breaks, neo-Nazi terrorists, Jungian psychology? Lycanthropy! Nordic heathenry! Just when you think the shit can't get any crazier, it does. And it all started with just a handful of teenage metal-heads trading Celtic Frost tapes in an Oslo basement. A lot of people shit on this book because of it's authors alleged quasi-Fascist/occultist tendencies but I say, who better to lead a guided tour through the Satanic underground then a fellow basement dweller and all his eccentricities aside, Moynihan is a damn fine journalist and Lords of Chaos is the wildest rock book ever written.
* Introducing Marx by Rius and Introducing Marxism by Rupert Woodfin and Oscar Zarate
If you know me, you know I'm one anarchist who loves him some Marx. But even I have to admit, however brilliant the K-man might be, his books can be a bit of a bore. Blasphemy, I know, but it's true. Which makes converting non-believers a bit of a challenge. The best place to start is with these two pocket size graphic novels by the fine folks at Introducing Books, who specialize in what's basically college starter coarse's in comic form. I use to devour them when I was still a shut-in but the two on Marx are probably my favorites. There a great overview of all things Marx. His life, his work, his philosophy, his influence and why he still matters as much today as he did in the 19th century. All in all, fast paced and brilliantly illustrated infotainment.
* House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
By far, the strangest novel I've ever read which, naturally, makes it my favorite. It's probably not scientifically possible to sum it up in a single paragraph, so I won't even try. I'll just say it's a twisted horror story within an even more twisted horror story involving mental illness, a possibly haunted house, a decaying marriage, an endless hallway with a life of it's own and a documentary. All of which may or may not actually exist. It's a demented house of mirrors with multiple narratives that leaves you feeling upside down and inside out. Sounds like fun, right?.... ....pussies.
* The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schecter
Love serial killers? Me too! (Is he kidding?) Know one knows em better than Harold Schecter, who's Serial Killer Files serve as the most comprehensive study of murder and those fascinating psychopaths who commit it. It's basically the anti-Killing Hope. An encyclopedia of human destruction not sanctioned by the state.
* Preacher: Volumes 1-9 by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
When I heard that my favorite comic, the greatest comic, was going to be made into an AMC Original Series by Frat Pack schlock-miesters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, best known for there infantile "Bro" comedies like Superbad, my heart fucking sank. I thought, here we go again, another shitty comic adaptation that all the Deutsche bags of the world can cream themselves over. I couldn't have been more wrong and I couldn't be happier to be so wrong. Based on the first few episodes, it looks like those damn stoners might actually pull it off and make a halfway descent TV show. But nothing can ever beat the original. The epic tale of a drunken, apostate, Texas priest, granted the power of the word of god to command people to do anything from tell the truth to go fuck themselves (literally), only to be hunted down by an all powerful secret religious society, with his ass kicking, gun nut, feminist, bombshell girlfriend and his hard partying Irish vampire bestie at his side. Along the way they encounter everything from inbred desert cannibals to an indestructible god-slaying cowboy called the Saint of Killers. It's a long, bloody, surreal, hilarious, profane and romantic saga and it's the best way to waste your summer indoors without the use of high-powered recreational pharmaceuticals.
* Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich
Radical investigative journalist Gregory Elich goes into downright gratuitous detail, playing devils advocate, defending some of America's favorite boogeymen, from Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe to Iraq to North Korea and he does a damn fine job doing it. Uncovering narratives that not only fly in the face of the "official" stories but make mince meat of them. Picking them apart, piece by piece. Forget everything you thought you knew about world politricks. If you can actually get your hands on this long out of print antiwar classic it will make you question everything and it will make you all the better for it.
* Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
Not so much an autobiography as a scrapbook of letters, pictures, prison records, poems, psych evaluations and lyrics that create a complex self portrait of one of the most brilliant, incendiary and misunderstood feminist auteurs of the last several decades. Hate her all you want but this walking study in demonology will not, can not and should not go ignored.
* Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond
Grant Morrison's batshit bonkers, gonzo one-shot graphic novel about a bored London schoolgirl who falls in love with a cheeky psychopath, kills her boyfriend (naturally) and joins an avante-garde terrorist collective hellbent on bringing down an iconic tower with a single hand grenade in the coastal English tourist trap of Blackpool. It's a zany, deliciously Nineties, psychedelic teenage riot from the maestro of comic book surrealism that set the stage for later cinematic cult classics (and personal favorites) like Natural Born Killers and the Doom Generation.
* Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
An oral history of the American 80's underground punk scene that formed the glue that connects the Ramones and Nirvana. Each chapter tells the story of a different band on the periphery and there journey through the still embryonic loose knit network of dive bars, basement parties and mosh pits that would eventually grow from the punk rock underground into the Alternative Revolution of the early Nineties. Includes chapters on Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Big Black, the Replacements, Mission of Burma, the Minutemen, Fugazi, Mudhoney, Beat Happening and my personal favorite chapter on America's strangest band, the Butthole Surfers. A must read for any self-respecting Punk Rock fan.
* .45 Dangerous Minds by Steven Blush and George Petros
Before the internet and yes, dearest motherfuckers, there was a before the internet, freaks and radicals had to turn to the news stands for there intellectual fix which usually meant a crap-high of boring, airbrushed, jingoistic banality that gives propaganda a bad name. That is until the rise of the zines. After places like Kinko's made it possible for anyone with a few bucks and some angry words to Xerox and staple together there own glossy diatribes, the American underground was rocked by a wave of taboo smashing, homemade organs known as zines, in which freaks and radicals finally had a say. The best of these became full fledged periodicals in there own right with names like Maximum Rock&Roll, Re/Search, Answer Me!, Roller Derby, Anything that Moves and Murder Can Be Fun. More often than not, they were crude, crass, tasteless, profane and even downright pornographic. They were also fucking brilliant and the very best among them, in my not-so-humble opinion was a fearless little New York magazine called Seconds, run by two post-punk rejects named Steven Blush and George Petros with one simple mission in mind, give the most brutally honest, mercilessly rude and unabashedly prying interviews (aka interrogations) with the most dangerously unpredictable people they could get a hold of. The results where some of the strangest moments in journalism history and 45 of there finest interviews are collected in .45 Dangerous minds: Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Rollins, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Richard Remirez, GG Allin, Anton Levey and many, many more. Needless to say without iconoclastic rags like Seconds, without insane books like .45 Dangerous Minds and without brilliantly dangerous minds like Blush and Petros, there would be no Comrade Hermit or Exile In Happy Valley. On my best day I am but a parasite clinging to the bellies of those brilliant savage beasts. Read, learn and pay it forward. Start your own Seconds, your own Exile, online today and be heard by other fantastic freaks like you and me. In the words of Jello Biafra- "Don't hate the media. Become the media." I say why not do both. Let the war begin at home with a pile of good books and a laptop.
Knowledge is power and we've got it. Happy reading, dearest motherfuckers.
Peace, Love and Anarchy- CH
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
In Search of Solutions After Orlando
I had every intention of writing a summer reading list this week. Something simple and fun. Then Orlando happened. Nearly fifty people dead and over fifty injured. I'm sure I don't have to tell you, the news is inescapable. A lot of turbulent emotions have been ripping through me over this latest national tragedy. I have only just begun to feel safe identifying myself as an openly queer individual, only to see scores of beautiful people, who I'll never have the good fortune to know, in my newfound community, senselessly slaughtered in cold blood. I honestly don't know how to react to this. All I know is that I can't stay silent.
Especially when the people making the loudest noises over the mass media have there heads so firmly planted up there own pinch little assholes. And of coarse, there all fucking breeders. Who else always knows best? Even before anyone knows anything at all. It must be nice to know everything. Maybe that kind of blase self-confidence only comes with the good fortune of being born with all the right parts in all the right places, fitting so easily into all the right people. Anyway, I feel some obligation to rise above my own complex emotions and clear up some of the bullshit. It's a smelly, thankless job but somebody has to do it, so it might as well be my iconoclastic and recently decloseted gender fluid ass.
There's a reason bullshit usually reigns supreme in the aftermath of massacres like the one in Orlando. The Western World doesn't suffer these kinds of tragedies as often as the rest of the planet. The uncomfortable truth is that this country is often on the other side of the trigger. It's the nature of living behind the gilded fences of a global empire. That doesn't make these horrific events anymore exceptable than any of our own massacres. In fact the illusion of invulnerability created by this nations unchecked power on the global stage can make these events all the more traumatic. It's only natural for people living beneath an imperial bubble to overreact on the relatively rare occasions when that bubble is breached, even from within. But being reactionary has never solved anything. It's in trying times like these that we need to struggle to keep our heads straight and think logically. There are know simple solutions to a mess like this. So lets dispel with some of the politico-media-spheres favorite bullshit quick fixes right off the fucking bat.
#1. Labels are pointless- Terms like Terrorism and Hate Crime are nothing more than pointless labels for the same damn thing. Mass murder is mass murder. Killing a club full of innocent people isn't made any more or less tragic by giving it a fancy and often politicized title. All violent crimes are hate crimes and all terrorists are killers. There no different then any other garden variety psychopath. I don't give two fucks if your Osama Bin Laden, Richard Speck, Eric Rudolf, Ted Bundy or Omar Mateen, your all the same flavor of shit in my book and you don't fucking impress me with your cowardice.
#2. Islam is not the enemy- Omar Mateen is not an Islamic killer. He's just a killer who happens to call himself a Muslim. Whether it's revenge for American foreign policy or just another self-loathing closet case killing himself by killing his own kind, this crime had nothing to do with religion and it had nothing to do with immigration. Omar was the American born son of two quirky but moderate Afghan refugee's. His relationship to radical jihadism was minimal and totally inconsistent. He had variously claimed affiliation with ISIS, Hezbollah and Al-Nusrah, groups that are all currently at war with each other. The idea of banning all Muslim immigration into this country is not only unconstitutional and immoral, it's totally ineffective. Why would ISIS or anyone else for that matter waste there trained fighters by sending them away from the battlefield, overseas, when they already have there pick of the litter of mentally disturbed assholes within our borders, just a mouse click away. Scapegoating an entire population of mostly peaceful people plays directly into groups like ISIS' hands. They want Muslims to be isolated, vilified and humiliated by secular governments. It makes for easy marks in there holy war scheme. Don't take the bait.
#3. Guns are not the problem- I know this is probably dangerous for a hardcore leftist to say out loud but the only way to stop a gay-basher with a gun is a small army of fierce queens with high-powered pieces that match there outfits. How many people would that homophobic cunt been able to kill if there was more than just one armed, off-duty cop on the scene? We'll probably never know but I'm willing to bet it would have been far less then 49. Too many people on the left seem to suffer under the delusion that stripping law abiding citizens of there Second Amendment rights will stop loose cannons like Mateen from arming themselves illegally. This is just plain bullshit. Just ask Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who managed to slaughter 77 people in a country with fewer guns than Candyland. I'm not saying this country couldn't use a few new regulations but assault weapons bans, like all forms of prohibition, simply don't work, they only create black markets where regulation is impossible.
#4. The FBI fucked up- I find nothing more repulsive than the endless procession of current and ex-feds getting air time to demand that we the people hurl more of our tax dollars into there already bulging coffers so they can burn it haunting mosques, trolling antiwar chat-rooms and entrapping harmless mental-midgets in there pointless sting operations, all while known extremists like Mateen continue to fall through the cracks of our massive police state. This bastard had been on there radar for years. YEARS! And wear was Florida's finest feds on the night that Pulse got sacked. Well they were arresting a mentally ill homeless man in Miami who fell victim to there latest bait-and-switch build-a-terrorist trap, of coarse. And these assholes wan't more fucking money. FUCK THAT! And fuck the FBI. Get your fucking shit together and do your fucking job. Then will talk.
#5. War is not the Answer- Even if it does turn out that Mateen had some kind of legitimate terror connection, no amount of drone strikes will bring the beautiful people he killed back to us. It will only serve to sully there names with blood and give ISIS or whoever a new crop of traumatized survivors of American terrorism to turn into human weapons. Violence only begets more violence. Terror only begets more terror. Like I said earlier it doesn't matter if your strangling a dormitory full of nursing students, shooting up a dance club of unarmed party-goers or shooting a Hellfire Missile at a wedding party full of the same, it is all murder and it is all inexcusable. People have a right to defend themselves, yes. It is there god given, constitutional right to do so. But maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have to if this country didn't insist on pissing on every hornet's nest from Aleppo to Kandahar.
This country desperately needs to stop being brainlessly reactive to every tragedy we suffer and start being proactive by putting an end to our own violent behavior abroad that makes the horror of tragedies like the one in Orlando so much more likely. Until we learn this lesson, the bodies will only continue to pile up in both hemispheres. I for one mourn them all and I refuse to sit by and stay silent until ALL the killing stops.
Until then, take care of each other, Beautiful people. If we don't, no one will. And if your religious, say a prayer for the dead and say a prayer for peace. We all deserve it.
PEACE, LOVE & EMPATHY- C.H.
Especially when the people making the loudest noises over the mass media have there heads so firmly planted up there own pinch little assholes. And of coarse, there all fucking breeders. Who else always knows best? Even before anyone knows anything at all. It must be nice to know everything. Maybe that kind of blase self-confidence only comes with the good fortune of being born with all the right parts in all the right places, fitting so easily into all the right people. Anyway, I feel some obligation to rise above my own complex emotions and clear up some of the bullshit. It's a smelly, thankless job but somebody has to do it, so it might as well be my iconoclastic and recently decloseted gender fluid ass.
There's a reason bullshit usually reigns supreme in the aftermath of massacres like the one in Orlando. The Western World doesn't suffer these kinds of tragedies as often as the rest of the planet. The uncomfortable truth is that this country is often on the other side of the trigger. It's the nature of living behind the gilded fences of a global empire. That doesn't make these horrific events anymore exceptable than any of our own massacres. In fact the illusion of invulnerability created by this nations unchecked power on the global stage can make these events all the more traumatic. It's only natural for people living beneath an imperial bubble to overreact on the relatively rare occasions when that bubble is breached, even from within. But being reactionary has never solved anything. It's in trying times like these that we need to struggle to keep our heads straight and think logically. There are know simple solutions to a mess like this. So lets dispel with some of the politico-media-spheres favorite bullshit quick fixes right off the fucking bat.
#1. Labels are pointless- Terms like Terrorism and Hate Crime are nothing more than pointless labels for the same damn thing. Mass murder is mass murder. Killing a club full of innocent people isn't made any more or less tragic by giving it a fancy and often politicized title. All violent crimes are hate crimes and all terrorists are killers. There no different then any other garden variety psychopath. I don't give two fucks if your Osama Bin Laden, Richard Speck, Eric Rudolf, Ted Bundy or Omar Mateen, your all the same flavor of shit in my book and you don't fucking impress me with your cowardice.
#2. Islam is not the enemy- Omar Mateen is not an Islamic killer. He's just a killer who happens to call himself a Muslim. Whether it's revenge for American foreign policy or just another self-loathing closet case killing himself by killing his own kind, this crime had nothing to do with religion and it had nothing to do with immigration. Omar was the American born son of two quirky but moderate Afghan refugee's. His relationship to radical jihadism was minimal and totally inconsistent. He had variously claimed affiliation with ISIS, Hezbollah and Al-Nusrah, groups that are all currently at war with each other. The idea of banning all Muslim immigration into this country is not only unconstitutional and immoral, it's totally ineffective. Why would ISIS or anyone else for that matter waste there trained fighters by sending them away from the battlefield, overseas, when they already have there pick of the litter of mentally disturbed assholes within our borders, just a mouse click away. Scapegoating an entire population of mostly peaceful people plays directly into groups like ISIS' hands. They want Muslims to be isolated, vilified and humiliated by secular governments. It makes for easy marks in there holy war scheme. Don't take the bait.
#3. Guns are not the problem- I know this is probably dangerous for a hardcore leftist to say out loud but the only way to stop a gay-basher with a gun is a small army of fierce queens with high-powered pieces that match there outfits. How many people would that homophobic cunt been able to kill if there was more than just one armed, off-duty cop on the scene? We'll probably never know but I'm willing to bet it would have been far less then 49. Too many people on the left seem to suffer under the delusion that stripping law abiding citizens of there Second Amendment rights will stop loose cannons like Mateen from arming themselves illegally. This is just plain bullshit. Just ask Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who managed to slaughter 77 people in a country with fewer guns than Candyland. I'm not saying this country couldn't use a few new regulations but assault weapons bans, like all forms of prohibition, simply don't work, they only create black markets where regulation is impossible.
#4. The FBI fucked up- I find nothing more repulsive than the endless procession of current and ex-feds getting air time to demand that we the people hurl more of our tax dollars into there already bulging coffers so they can burn it haunting mosques, trolling antiwar chat-rooms and entrapping harmless mental-midgets in there pointless sting operations, all while known extremists like Mateen continue to fall through the cracks of our massive police state. This bastard had been on there radar for years. YEARS! And wear was Florida's finest feds on the night that Pulse got sacked. Well they were arresting a mentally ill homeless man in Miami who fell victim to there latest bait-and-switch build-a-terrorist trap, of coarse. And these assholes wan't more fucking money. FUCK THAT! And fuck the FBI. Get your fucking shit together and do your fucking job. Then will talk.
#5. War is not the Answer- Even if it does turn out that Mateen had some kind of legitimate terror connection, no amount of drone strikes will bring the beautiful people he killed back to us. It will only serve to sully there names with blood and give ISIS or whoever a new crop of traumatized survivors of American terrorism to turn into human weapons. Violence only begets more violence. Terror only begets more terror. Like I said earlier it doesn't matter if your strangling a dormitory full of nursing students, shooting up a dance club of unarmed party-goers or shooting a Hellfire Missile at a wedding party full of the same, it is all murder and it is all inexcusable. People have a right to defend themselves, yes. It is there god given, constitutional right to do so. But maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have to if this country didn't insist on pissing on every hornet's nest from Aleppo to Kandahar.
This country desperately needs to stop being brainlessly reactive to every tragedy we suffer and start being proactive by putting an end to our own violent behavior abroad that makes the horror of tragedies like the one in Orlando so much more likely. Until we learn this lesson, the bodies will only continue to pile up in both hemispheres. I for one mourn them all and I refuse to sit by and stay silent until ALL the killing stops.
Until then, take care of each other, Beautiful people. If we don't, no one will. And if your religious, say a prayer for the dead and say a prayer for peace. We all deserve it.
PEACE, LOVE & EMPATHY- C.H.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)