I've grown sick to my skull hearing about that mythical beast known as Donald Trump the Isolationist. Word of this crypto-zoological wonder began to percolate from right wing peaceniks and left wing warmongers alike on the campaign trail. This wasn't pure crazed madness, it was by design. That brilliant crypto-fascist psychopath Steve Bannon recognized that the meat and potatoes set back in the Rustbelt had had it up to here with seeing their jobs go south and their children come home without limbs from another pointless military quagmire in a country they've never heard of. Under the dark ones guidance, the Donald gleefully chummed the proles in flyover country with quasi-isolationist riffs on NATO and bad trade deals in a routine that played like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes. He even hijacked that Old Right saw-horse, America First. My neighbors in rural Pennsylvania ate it up and asked for seconds.
Of coarse anybody with even a cursory awareness of the Donald's rap sheet knew from the jump that this was just the latest scam from a morally bankrupt career flim-flam man. Anyone who's been to Atlantic City in the last twenty years can testify to the total worthlessness of Trump's word. From the Jersey Turnpike that once great city looks like one big ghetto trapped in the shadows of a gigantic graveyard of colossal empty casinos towering like gravestones with Trumps name stamped on them. He took a government bailout and left an entire community holding his bag of shit. This is what that asshole does and judging by the serial bombing senators he's spent decades bankrolling in both parties (aka the Swamp), I didn't expect much different in the White House. That and the fact that for every "maybe we should get along with the Russians" you had at least twelves "lets bomb the shit out of them"'s. But people, Americans in particular, here what they want to here.
Sadly, over a year into this mess, there are still plenty of fine paleo-anti-interventionists who are still holding on to the dream long after it's become a nightmare. Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com is the most blaring (and depressing) example of this delusional mental illness. Once one of the finest voices in the antiwar movement, Justin has reduced himself to the pitiful role of Trump's top antiwar cheerleader. To people like Justin, no amount of drone strikes, cluster-bombs, or dead brown children can convince them that they wasted their vote on a two-bit warmonger with a flea-bit hairpiece. There is nothing "America First" about illegally bombing Syria and aiding and abetting twin genocides in Yemen and Gaza. However, irony of ironies, Donald Trump's specific brand of belligerent gunboat diplomacy has had some inadvertent Isolationist results. I speak specifically of his happy clusterfucks in Korea and Iran.
In spite of what Trump and his "Nobel!" chanting cheerleaders would have you believe about Korea, Kim did not succumb to Trump's childish schoolyard threats of nuclear holocaust and finally cave to peace after half a century of only slightly milder American belligerence. The motherfucker kept building ICBMs until he had one capable of deterring an American intervention and then used the leverage to play Gorbachev. I do believe however that Trump's violent temper tantrums did have an effect on one Korean statesman. South Korean president Moon Jae-In seemed ready and willing to mediate his country's diplomacy through the traditional American network of do-nothing bullshit until Trump began openly contemplating a second Korean War on social media like Gossip Girl with a red button. It was only after it had become painfully clear that the Donald was more concerned with his dick size than even do-nothing bullshit diplomacy that Moon made the unprecedented decision to get in touch with the North through China and start the ball rolling towards peace without us. The Trump administration did everything in their power to sabotage this process before it became brutally clear that they had finally lost South Korea's loyalty after decades of using their peninsula like a giant toilet for the Military Industrial Complex.
It was only after peace between the two Korea's became inevitable that Trump, ever the opportunist, decided to swoop in and take credit for a historical peace deal rather than accepting his rightful role as the ass who lost East Asia completely to relative diplomatic sanity. This is why I'm not surprised or even particularly concerned about the Donald's fourth quarter flip-flopping on the Singapore summit. His excuses are all bullshit. Pence and Bolton attempted to sabotage the deal with their sweet nothings about treating Kim to the "Libyan model" of diplomatic dagger proctology and Trump rolled with it. But the dye is cast and these desperate little shits know it. The peace process began before Trump decided to piggy-back it and it will only grow stronger if he finally ditches it. Now there can be no question that this is a uniquely Asian peace deal and the continent has little use for the American Empire's malign influence any longer.
Many people interpreted the Donald's actions towards Iran as being at least initially antithetical to the Korean situation but our knuckle-dragging president's intentions and their cataclysmic results for US influence remain shockingly similar when carefully inspected. Trump's militant hatred for the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 nuclear deal are two of the few things the bastard has remained consistent on. Hardly shocking, considering that that predator-Zionist casino cancer Sheldon Adelson basically paid him for a war with Iran. But in the wake of Trump's heavily publicized shredding of a deal that the Iranians jumped through their own collective asshole to comply with, a strange thing happened. Europe, much like Korea, finally told America to go fuck itself. In the last few weeks Germany, France, and the EU have gone out of their way to preserve the peace deal, blocking sanctions and even cozying up to Xi's China and Putin's Russia. It appears that Trump's half-cocked attempt to spark yet another war in the Persian Gulf has instead resulted in pushing Europe even closer to their neighbors in Asia and speeding up the inevitable rise of the Eurasian Century that poses the greatest outside threat to America's moribund empire and thus the planet's greatest hope for peace.
Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of opportunities for war with Korea and Iran. As long as that craven war-junkie John Bolton has an office in Washington, World War 3 is always on the table. But the unintended consequences of President Trump's slap-dash chauvinism have actually done far more to isolate America than any legitimate America-Firster probably could have accomplished before crossing the wrong grassy knoll. Trump is far from an isolationist, he's just a fantastically inept imperialist. Perhaps Justin Raimondo and Co. have reason to celebrate after all. The man they elected may be a sexist, xenophobic, trigger-happy, con artist but he's also something far less gross. Donald J. Trump is the accidental isolationist and, god help me, that puts a smile on my tranarcho-Marxist mug a mile wide.
Keep up the bad work, dipshit! Make America shrink again and we'll drown that rabid critter in the same fucking toilet where you found that merkin stapled to your scalp.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Isolation by Joy Division
* Nobody Cares by Superorganism
* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges
* Turning Japanese by the Vapors
* Requiem by Killing Joke
* Loser by Beck
* Surrender by Cheap Trick
* Disappointing Diamonds Are the Rarest of Them All by Father John Misty
* White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground
* Mr. Brightside by the Killers
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Monday, May 21, 2018
Germany/Israel/Palestine: A Demonology In E-Minor
Two children are brought up in a tumultuous household. Both parents are deeply in debt and traumatized by their own demons and they chose to take it out on their children. The oldest is humiliated, scapegoated, and blamed for all his parent's misfortunes. The youngest is left to the mercy of the oldest who in turn blames the younger sibling for his own abuse and torments him with horrors that shock even his derelict parents. Outside forces chose to intervene and the youngest is separated from the violence of his family.
But the youngest child can't escape the demons of his violent past. He's placed with a new family in a new home in a new town. But the wounds remain open and with no abusers left to confront, the child takes on the role of the abuser and seeks to settle the score with his new siblings. Their innocence is rendered irrelevant by their adopted sibling's blind rage. Their bodies are bruised and bloodied. Their property is stolen and broken. Their once happy home is transformed into a veritable prison. Their lives are made a living hell. Soon they fall prey to the very same demons their adopted sibling inherited and begin to turn to increasingly violent and self-destructive means to fend off their abuse to little avail. Soon they turn their violent impulses towards each other and themselves.
Germany found itself the scapegoat of a world war they didn't ask for. Humiliated, depressed, and depleted, they directed their rage against the very weakest members of their population; Gypsys, commies, queers and most especially Jews. The Jewish people became the source of everything that ailed Germany. Bad economy- blame the Jews. High crime rate- blame the Jews. Tiny dick- blame the Jews. There was no grievance too petty to be pinned on these people. They became human lightning rods. The state could do no wrong as long as they had the Jews to blame their flaws on. But soon scapegoating and state sanctioned terrorism wasn't enough. The hideous nature of Germany's demonology became too grotesque to be contained behind a concrete mask of bureaucratic sanity. Terrorism gave way to slavery and slavery gave way to wholesale slaughter. Picturesque Prussian villages became company towns devoted to the booming industry of genocide on a level never seen before in the developed world. Everyday people became willing monsters. Untold millions perished. Entire families. Entire Neighborhoods. An entire generation of European Jews pulverized into a fine pink powder. Millions. Millions....
Once the acrid smoke of the death camps settled, the survivors were gathered by their victors and rather than being aloud to properly confront their demons face to face, they were transferred back to the Holy Land where they were guaranteed a biblical paradise under the circumstances that they remove the locals and provide a toehold for the victorious Allied Powers in the tumultuous post-Ottoman Middle East. Before the trauma of the Holocaust, the majority of European Jews rejected Zionism as a radical (and sacrilegious) fringe movement that bastardized the text of the Talmud to justify racially motivated acts of terrorism against civilians (including Jews) in the British Mandate of Palestine. But racked with the fresh wounds of genocide, sensible educated people found themselves possessed by the very demons of their tormentors and the Nakba began. Suffering under the dangerous delusion of being the chosen people, the new Israelis unleashed their pent up rage against the innocent people of Palestine.
What has transpired is 70 years of slow burning ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Millions murdered, maimed and displaced in an orgy of explicitly racist state violence that has become increasingly genocidal with each passing year. And it all feels so hauntingly familiar. People herded into ghettos, starved and deprived of basic human rights. Handsome young black-clad commandos cackling with sadistic glee as they open fire on crowds of unarmed children fleeing for their lives. A seemingly modern democracy becoming increasingly indifferent to the horrors committed by the officials who represent them, officials who speak increasingly of a single racially pure state and a final solution to their Arab problem. It has become almost obnoxiously obvious that the victims have become the victimizers, the oppressed have become the oppressors, the prey have become the predators.
Nations are a lot like children. When they develop in safe, nurturing environments they tend to grow into relatively stable democracies. When they're raised in households possessed by violence and abuse, they develop into sociopathic states and like any sociopath they tend to pay it forward by creating more victims who all too often develop into victimizers themselves in a hollow attempt to even the unbalance of their powerless pasts. It's a vicious cycle that seems to repeat itself over and over again.
Hamas, an organization once possessed by this vicious cycle, now seems to be trying to rise above it with the Gandhiesque civil disobedience of the March of Return. Their noble attempts at peaceful resistance have been met with machine gun fire and cruel praise by western leaders for the "restraint" shown by the perpetrators of these massacres. Israel and its handlers don't seem to realize that they are sowing the seeds of their own demise. Every Reich has its Stalingrad and Israel's Stalingrad is the very people they've failed to destroy. I continue to maintain that a single state solution is inevitable and in spite of Israel's best efforts the Palestinian population has only swollen in the face of the Nakba. Once Israel burns the last of its bridges with its chauvinistic brinkmanship it will be left alone on an island with a deeply traumatized majority of oppressed people who may not be as willing as the "terrorists" in Hamas to break the cycle.
The greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that many of its survivors have become the new Nazis. This isn't a politically correct position to take but history hasn't left me with any other conclusions. A beautiful people with a long proud tradition of radical resistance to tyranny, from Moses to Emma Goldman, have had their good name soiled by a state that carries their name in spite of being the antithesis of everything they represent. I pray to a god we all share that Palestine doesn't meet the same fate.
Rise above, dearest motherfuckers. Rise above.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Rise Above by Black Flag
* Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2
* Bulldog Front by Fugazi
* Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis
* Zombie by the Cranberries
* Lexicon Devil by the Germs
* Polly by Nirvana
* My Name Is Luka by Suzanne Vega
* Severed by the Decemberists
But the youngest child can't escape the demons of his violent past. He's placed with a new family in a new home in a new town. But the wounds remain open and with no abusers left to confront, the child takes on the role of the abuser and seeks to settle the score with his new siblings. Their innocence is rendered irrelevant by their adopted sibling's blind rage. Their bodies are bruised and bloodied. Their property is stolen and broken. Their once happy home is transformed into a veritable prison. Their lives are made a living hell. Soon they fall prey to the very same demons their adopted sibling inherited and begin to turn to increasingly violent and self-destructive means to fend off their abuse to little avail. Soon they turn their violent impulses towards each other and themselves.
Germany found itself the scapegoat of a world war they didn't ask for. Humiliated, depressed, and depleted, they directed their rage against the very weakest members of their population; Gypsys, commies, queers and most especially Jews. The Jewish people became the source of everything that ailed Germany. Bad economy- blame the Jews. High crime rate- blame the Jews. Tiny dick- blame the Jews. There was no grievance too petty to be pinned on these people. They became human lightning rods. The state could do no wrong as long as they had the Jews to blame their flaws on. But soon scapegoating and state sanctioned terrorism wasn't enough. The hideous nature of Germany's demonology became too grotesque to be contained behind a concrete mask of bureaucratic sanity. Terrorism gave way to slavery and slavery gave way to wholesale slaughter. Picturesque Prussian villages became company towns devoted to the booming industry of genocide on a level never seen before in the developed world. Everyday people became willing monsters. Untold millions perished. Entire families. Entire Neighborhoods. An entire generation of European Jews pulverized into a fine pink powder. Millions. Millions....
Once the acrid smoke of the death camps settled, the survivors were gathered by their victors and rather than being aloud to properly confront their demons face to face, they were transferred back to the Holy Land where they were guaranteed a biblical paradise under the circumstances that they remove the locals and provide a toehold for the victorious Allied Powers in the tumultuous post-Ottoman Middle East. Before the trauma of the Holocaust, the majority of European Jews rejected Zionism as a radical (and sacrilegious) fringe movement that bastardized the text of the Talmud to justify racially motivated acts of terrorism against civilians (including Jews) in the British Mandate of Palestine. But racked with the fresh wounds of genocide, sensible educated people found themselves possessed by the very demons of their tormentors and the Nakba began. Suffering under the dangerous delusion of being the chosen people, the new Israelis unleashed their pent up rage against the innocent people of Palestine.
What has transpired is 70 years of slow burning ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Millions murdered, maimed and displaced in an orgy of explicitly racist state violence that has become increasingly genocidal with each passing year. And it all feels so hauntingly familiar. People herded into ghettos, starved and deprived of basic human rights. Handsome young black-clad commandos cackling with sadistic glee as they open fire on crowds of unarmed children fleeing for their lives. A seemingly modern democracy becoming increasingly indifferent to the horrors committed by the officials who represent them, officials who speak increasingly of a single racially pure state and a final solution to their Arab problem. It has become almost obnoxiously obvious that the victims have become the victimizers, the oppressed have become the oppressors, the prey have become the predators.
Nations are a lot like children. When they develop in safe, nurturing environments they tend to grow into relatively stable democracies. When they're raised in households possessed by violence and abuse, they develop into sociopathic states and like any sociopath they tend to pay it forward by creating more victims who all too often develop into victimizers themselves in a hollow attempt to even the unbalance of their powerless pasts. It's a vicious cycle that seems to repeat itself over and over again.
Hamas, an organization once possessed by this vicious cycle, now seems to be trying to rise above it with the Gandhiesque civil disobedience of the March of Return. Their noble attempts at peaceful resistance have been met with machine gun fire and cruel praise by western leaders for the "restraint" shown by the perpetrators of these massacres. Israel and its handlers don't seem to realize that they are sowing the seeds of their own demise. Every Reich has its Stalingrad and Israel's Stalingrad is the very people they've failed to destroy. I continue to maintain that a single state solution is inevitable and in spite of Israel's best efforts the Palestinian population has only swollen in the face of the Nakba. Once Israel burns the last of its bridges with its chauvinistic brinkmanship it will be left alone on an island with a deeply traumatized majority of oppressed people who may not be as willing as the "terrorists" in Hamas to break the cycle.
The greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that many of its survivors have become the new Nazis. This isn't a politically correct position to take but history hasn't left me with any other conclusions. A beautiful people with a long proud tradition of radical resistance to tyranny, from Moses to Emma Goldman, have had their good name soiled by a state that carries their name in spite of being the antithesis of everything they represent. I pray to a god we all share that Palestine doesn't meet the same fate.
Rise above, dearest motherfuckers. Rise above.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Rise Above by Black Flag
* Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2
* Bulldog Front by Fugazi
* Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis
* Zombie by the Cranberries
* Lexicon Devil by the Germs
* Polly by Nirvana
* My Name Is Luka by Suzanne Vega
* Severed by the Decemberists
Monday, May 14, 2018
Why I Don't Smoke Pot
I've never been particularly shy about my opinions regarding drugs (see Legalize Everything). My general philosophy is, when in doubt, legalize it. Marijuana? Legalize it. Ecstasy? Legalize it. Heroin? Fuck it. And legalize it. The prohibition of consensual human behavior isn't just immoral, it's impossible and the state knows it. The point of prohibition isn't to prevent drug use, Its to get rich failing. Between the arms industry and the Prison Industrial Complex, prohibition is a booming cottage industry, made in America. In Guadalajara, the cartels sling dope. In Washington they sling guns and shackles. One can't exist without the other. It's a marriage made in hell.
But my fixation with intoxicants transcends the stuffy corridors of law and order. I love drug culture and I always have. Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain, Allen Ginsberg, Courtney Love, Timothy Leary, Lou Reed, virtually all of my favorite people are junkies which is made somewhat ironic by the fact that aside from the staggering regimen of prescription pills I require to maintain some assemblage of sanity, I'm about as Straight Edge as Ian goddamn Mackaye (Google it, you rubes). Don't smoke, Don't drink, Don't toke, Don't trip. It's not like I'm not curious. I've always wanted to experiment. I had a lot of friends in school who did, but to quote the Hives, I've always been "too messed up to even mess around".
With my myriad gumbo of mental health and nervous system maladies, I could probably benefit a great deal from some more organic narcotics, marijuana and psilocybin in particular. However, I could also just as easily trigger some kind of apocalyptic melt down without the proper consultation. But with the rise of the medical marijuana industry and psycho-friendly, high CBD strains like Northern Lights and Querkle, realizing my lifelong ambition of high functioning stonerdom has become a very graspable reality. So naturally when my home state of Pennsylvania became the latest state to legalize, I was stoked. But still I don't smoke. Why? You ask.
To put it bluntly, I'm too poor to get high and the law fucking sucks. In spite of the fact that my crippling social anxiety has kept me from maintaining employment for over a decade, Medicaid doesn't cover a drug that could help me to chill the fuck out without all the negative side affects of hardcore benzodiazepines. And the state of Pennsylvania doesn't even recognize agoraphobia as an eligible condition for its medical marijuana program. It's almost like they don't want the mentally eccentric to escape the bureaucratic straight jacket of the welfare state....
Regardless, even if I were deemed eligible by Pennsylvania's designated wizards of pot, good dope doesn't come cheap. A gram of a CBD heavy indica like Harlequin can run upwards of $75 bucks and PA's medical marijuana law is what they call a No-Smoke Law. Supposedly designed for "public safety" (that old fascist trope), it makes every cannabinoid besides high-priced vapeable concentrates illegal in spite of the fact that there still remains zero solid evidence connecting smoking cannabis with lung disease.
This effectively makes getting stoned a classist right reserved for upwardly mobile suburbanites with disposable income, not white trash fags like me. It also forces patients to rely completely on the big business producers that carry the tools in Harrisburg in their back pockets. Rather than being able to grow our own plants, free from pesticides and carbon dioxide, the citizens of Pennsylvania are left to the mercy of an incestuous cartel of predator capitalists and government bureaucrats. And my state isn't alone. In neighboring states like New Jersey and New York, medical marijuana is next to impossible for anyone to obtain, essentially making it legal in name only. People either have to move to a state with (slightly) saner laws or resort to the black market, which brings us full circle.
I think we need to except the unfortunate fact that medical marijuana as we know it is a bust. Nothing substantial has ever been gained by turning the marketplace into a bureaucratic cobweb of who knows who, who blows who. These laws are a slick form of stoner payola from the very same people who make a mint off prohibition. Let rich white folks get high while people too poor (or too free) to buy into this rigged system get buttfucked by the people's stick. The only exceptable approach to marijuana or any other controlled substance for that matter is full legalization without exception. There is no such thing as a glass half full in a democracy because any glass left half empty will inevitably be filled with shit. And that's exactly what my state's pot laws are; pure weapons grade shit.
Smoke em if you got em, dearest motherfuckers. But this motherfucker isn't smoking a damn thing that I don't grow myself.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Little Green Bag by the George Baker Selection
* Die, All Right! by the Hives
* Hit So Hard by Hole
* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground
* Lithium by Nirvana
* Coming Down by the Dum Dum Girls
* Some New Kind of Kick by the Cramps
* White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
But my fixation with intoxicants transcends the stuffy corridors of law and order. I love drug culture and I always have. Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain, Allen Ginsberg, Courtney Love, Timothy Leary, Lou Reed, virtually all of my favorite people are junkies which is made somewhat ironic by the fact that aside from the staggering regimen of prescription pills I require to maintain some assemblage of sanity, I'm about as Straight Edge as Ian goddamn Mackaye (Google it, you rubes). Don't smoke, Don't drink, Don't toke, Don't trip. It's not like I'm not curious. I've always wanted to experiment. I had a lot of friends in school who did, but to quote the Hives, I've always been "too messed up to even mess around".
With my myriad gumbo of mental health and nervous system maladies, I could probably benefit a great deal from some more organic narcotics, marijuana and psilocybin in particular. However, I could also just as easily trigger some kind of apocalyptic melt down without the proper consultation. But with the rise of the medical marijuana industry and psycho-friendly, high CBD strains like Northern Lights and Querkle, realizing my lifelong ambition of high functioning stonerdom has become a very graspable reality. So naturally when my home state of Pennsylvania became the latest state to legalize, I was stoked. But still I don't smoke. Why? You ask.
To put it bluntly, I'm too poor to get high and the law fucking sucks. In spite of the fact that my crippling social anxiety has kept me from maintaining employment for over a decade, Medicaid doesn't cover a drug that could help me to chill the fuck out without all the negative side affects of hardcore benzodiazepines. And the state of Pennsylvania doesn't even recognize agoraphobia as an eligible condition for its medical marijuana program. It's almost like they don't want the mentally eccentric to escape the bureaucratic straight jacket of the welfare state....
Regardless, even if I were deemed eligible by Pennsylvania's designated wizards of pot, good dope doesn't come cheap. A gram of a CBD heavy indica like Harlequin can run upwards of $75 bucks and PA's medical marijuana law is what they call a No-Smoke Law. Supposedly designed for "public safety" (that old fascist trope), it makes every cannabinoid besides high-priced vapeable concentrates illegal in spite of the fact that there still remains zero solid evidence connecting smoking cannabis with lung disease.
This effectively makes getting stoned a classist right reserved for upwardly mobile suburbanites with disposable income, not white trash fags like me. It also forces patients to rely completely on the big business producers that carry the tools in Harrisburg in their back pockets. Rather than being able to grow our own plants, free from pesticides and carbon dioxide, the citizens of Pennsylvania are left to the mercy of an incestuous cartel of predator capitalists and government bureaucrats. And my state isn't alone. In neighboring states like New Jersey and New York, medical marijuana is next to impossible for anyone to obtain, essentially making it legal in name only. People either have to move to a state with (slightly) saner laws or resort to the black market, which brings us full circle.
I think we need to except the unfortunate fact that medical marijuana as we know it is a bust. Nothing substantial has ever been gained by turning the marketplace into a bureaucratic cobweb of who knows who, who blows who. These laws are a slick form of stoner payola from the very same people who make a mint off prohibition. Let rich white folks get high while people too poor (or too free) to buy into this rigged system get buttfucked by the people's stick. The only exceptable approach to marijuana or any other controlled substance for that matter is full legalization without exception. There is no such thing as a glass half full in a democracy because any glass left half empty will inevitably be filled with shit. And that's exactly what my state's pot laws are; pure weapons grade shit.
Smoke em if you got em, dearest motherfuckers. But this motherfucker isn't smoking a damn thing that I don't grow myself.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Little Green Bag by the George Baker Selection
* Die, All Right! by the Hives
* Hit So Hard by Hole
* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground
* Lithium by Nirvana
* Coming Down by the Dum Dum Girls
* Some New Kind of Kick by the Cramps
* White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
Monday, May 7, 2018
Shout Theater! For the Persian Gulf
I was fifteen the last time we invaded the Persian Gulf (something of a national pass-time). I was young, confused, and like most kids that age, a bit stupid. I was conservative like my parents, I thought Korn was the best band since Kiss, and I was so far in the closet over my gender identity that I thought it was a studio apartment. I was dumb as shit alright, but I was still smart enough to recognize that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Being stupid, I was fully on board with Afghanistan. I suffered under the national delusion that invading that black hole would somehow vindicate the deaths of the people killed primarily by American allies on 9/11. But Afghanistan made sense. It added up on some level. I mean, at least Bin Laden was there (maybe). But even in my nu-metal damaged teenage mind, Iraq felt insane.
None of the "facts" added up. All of the "evidence" seemed sketchy at best. And I couldn't fight the creeping feeling that people were rushing to drop bombs before they could come to their senses. But I was a conservative Catholic boy in a purple state and everyone who I loved and trusted seemed to buy into this bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Of coarse we should bomb Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is a wild animal, he funds his enemies in Al-Qaeda and runs a WMD program so incognito that even the UN can't see it. It felt like my whole universe had up and lost its goddamn mind. Up was down, black was white, and things would never be the same.
That was how it all began for me. I was radicalized the night they bombed Baghdad. I remember watching the skyline of that beautiful ancient city explode like fireworks that Sunday after my parents had gone to bed and feeling physically ill. People were dying and no one I knew seemed to fucking care. The next day I got up and horrified my tiny Catholic school by showing up with a peace sign strapped to my arm. I spent the whole day fighting, with classmates, with teachers, with clergy. By the time the bell rang I was exhausted. But I never felt more alive. I had taken a stand that not even my parents believed in and I held my ground. I was hooked on chaos. That was the day Nicholas Reid, good Catholic boy, died and, in many ways, that was the day Comrade Hermit, genderfuck anarchist fire-starter, was born. It would have been downright fantastic if it made a difference. But America has never been as smart as its stupid, rebellious, youth. And now it feels like 2003 all over again.
I invited you, dearest motherfuckers, on this stroll down memory lane because I'm pretty sure we're headed back for yet another clusterfuck in the Persian Gulf. Bibi Netanyahu has hit the road again with his classic "the sky is falling unless we bomb it black" prop comedy routine (now with PowerPoint!). And our latest man-child president has been paid handsomely by bloodsucking cretins like Sheldon Adelson to decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal and set the stage for a cataclysmic showdown that could easily end in World War 3.
At one time we might have been able to rest our hopes on the shaky ground of the Donald's spastic dog-like attention span but with the Wonder Twins of neocon doom, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, jabbing their fork-tongues into his unwashed ears, I'm pretty sure we're shit out of luck. Our last hope may be praying to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of righteous sex workers, that Stormy Daniels can sabotage Trump's mojo with raw footage of her pegging the war-monger in chief with a 13 inch strap-on and an apple in his mouth. Then again, sexual humiliation never slowed that Super-Predator and fellow Lolita Express frequent flyer Bill Clinton down, so this may be the end of the road.
Our best hope may be to fight war like fifteen year old fire-starters. Young, angry, and just a little bit stupid in the Quixotic sense of the word. It may be time to charge the windmills. That pied piper of youth rebellion, Abbie Hoffnam, would say in times like these the only thing left to do is shout Theater! in a crowded fire. Take to the streets. Jam the Capitol phone lines. Burn a flag. Deface a monument. Holler and cuss at any adult too emotionally tone-def to give a fuck about the piles of young corpses that may soon line the streets of Tehran like crimson snow-piles after a blizzard of shrapnel. This country doesn't learn lessons. Lets fucking blow it up like 1968. In the eternal words of H. Rap Brown, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."
Well gather your matches, dearest motherfuckers. We've got a theater to light. It may be what's left of the Persian Gulf's only hope.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty & the Hearbreakers
* Shoots & Ladders by Korn
* Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen
* Rebellion (Lies) by Arcade Fire
* In the Streets by Cheap Trick
* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* Mandinka By Sinead O'Connor
* Shout It Out Loud by Kiss
* Firestarter By the Prodigy
None of the "facts" added up. All of the "evidence" seemed sketchy at best. And I couldn't fight the creeping feeling that people were rushing to drop bombs before they could come to their senses. But I was a conservative Catholic boy in a purple state and everyone who I loved and trusted seemed to buy into this bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Of coarse we should bomb Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is a wild animal, he funds his enemies in Al-Qaeda and runs a WMD program so incognito that even the UN can't see it. It felt like my whole universe had up and lost its goddamn mind. Up was down, black was white, and things would never be the same.
That was how it all began for me. I was radicalized the night they bombed Baghdad. I remember watching the skyline of that beautiful ancient city explode like fireworks that Sunday after my parents had gone to bed and feeling physically ill. People were dying and no one I knew seemed to fucking care. The next day I got up and horrified my tiny Catholic school by showing up with a peace sign strapped to my arm. I spent the whole day fighting, with classmates, with teachers, with clergy. By the time the bell rang I was exhausted. But I never felt more alive. I had taken a stand that not even my parents believed in and I held my ground. I was hooked on chaos. That was the day Nicholas Reid, good Catholic boy, died and, in many ways, that was the day Comrade Hermit, genderfuck anarchist fire-starter, was born. It would have been downright fantastic if it made a difference. But America has never been as smart as its stupid, rebellious, youth. And now it feels like 2003 all over again.
I invited you, dearest motherfuckers, on this stroll down memory lane because I'm pretty sure we're headed back for yet another clusterfuck in the Persian Gulf. Bibi Netanyahu has hit the road again with his classic "the sky is falling unless we bomb it black" prop comedy routine (now with PowerPoint!). And our latest man-child president has been paid handsomely by bloodsucking cretins like Sheldon Adelson to decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal and set the stage for a cataclysmic showdown that could easily end in World War 3.
At one time we might have been able to rest our hopes on the shaky ground of the Donald's spastic dog-like attention span but with the Wonder Twins of neocon doom, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, jabbing their fork-tongues into his unwashed ears, I'm pretty sure we're shit out of luck. Our last hope may be praying to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of righteous sex workers, that Stormy Daniels can sabotage Trump's mojo with raw footage of her pegging the war-monger in chief with a 13 inch strap-on and an apple in his mouth. Then again, sexual humiliation never slowed that Super-Predator and fellow Lolita Express frequent flyer Bill Clinton down, so this may be the end of the road.
Our best hope may be to fight war like fifteen year old fire-starters. Young, angry, and just a little bit stupid in the Quixotic sense of the word. It may be time to charge the windmills. That pied piper of youth rebellion, Abbie Hoffnam, would say in times like these the only thing left to do is shout Theater! in a crowded fire. Take to the streets. Jam the Capitol phone lines. Burn a flag. Deface a monument. Holler and cuss at any adult too emotionally tone-def to give a fuck about the piles of young corpses that may soon line the streets of Tehran like crimson snow-piles after a blizzard of shrapnel. This country doesn't learn lessons. Lets fucking blow it up like 1968. In the eternal words of H. Rap Brown, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."
Well gather your matches, dearest motherfuckers. We've got a theater to light. It may be what's left of the Persian Gulf's only hope.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty & the Hearbreakers
* Shoots & Ladders by Korn
* Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen
* Rebellion (Lies) by Arcade Fire
* In the Streets by Cheap Trick
* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* Mandinka By Sinead O'Connor
* Shout It Out Loud by Kiss
* Firestarter By the Prodigy
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Fake News and Despotism: Ours and Theirs
It's getting harder and harder to be a brutally honest muckraker in this country. It seems like you can't objectively cover anything related to foreign policy without being blackballed as a Putin puppet or an advocate for totalitarianism. According to even many alternative news outlets, you can't afford to point out the complexities of geopolitics in a dying empire without trafficking in "Fake News", a loaded term that started out as a way for the falling Fourth Estate to tar the rising Fifth, only to be turned into a political football that has lost all meaning in the era of Trump. Fake News has basically become shorthand for news that you don't like and when journalism becomes a popularity contest that no one can win, you know that despotism can't be far behind.
Well, I don't write to tell people what they want to hear. I write to tell people what they need to here. And sometimes what the people need to here is that the "Bad Guy" didn't do it. I'm a queer anarchist, I have zero love lost for authoritarians like Putin or Assad. But I also have zero love lost for authoritarians like John McCain and Nikki Haley, so you'll have to forgive me for not taking their word as bond. The gross reality of the new Cold War landscape is that, as fucked up as Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be, they're not nearly as fucked up as the establishment press would have us believe and, even grosser, they're far from the sickest fucks on the block.
Putin's Russia is far from heaven. Truth be told, in many ways it's worse off than the Soviet Union. Say what you will about Brezhnev but at least he kept his prisoners fed. Putin is the top dog in a Social Darwinist oligarchy that would make Ayn Rand's panties wet (Think Hunger Games.With vodka!). You better believe he had to steal, fuck over and even kill to get to where he is today but, contrary to popular belief, Mr. Putin is not in fact the devil. Their is a reason that man is so goddamn popular in Russia and it's not just those saucy Tom of Finland pics. The main reason Russia loves Putin is that he isn't Boris Yeltsin, Putin's drunken predecessor that today's most hysterical Putin-phobes couldn't get enough of. This was a man who liquidated the constitution, literally bombed congress and sold entire Soviet industries to Mafioso's. He also stole an election, and we helped!
Putin may be a cold blooded, fag-bashing, autocrat but he also mopped up a lot of Yeltsin's mess and refused to take orders from his former handlers back in Brussels and Washington. This is the real reason why he gets blamed for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to those meddling kids in Black Lives Matter. I could care less about Putin but when the mass media becomes an echo chamber for our own derelict government's lies about the motherfucker I'm gonna fucking say something. The one thing that Russiagate, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Skripal poisonings have in common is that there remains zero proof connecting these dirty deeds to Vlad the Terrible. That doesn't mean that the man isn't a first class cunt, he's just not likely guilty of putting a lunatic in charge of the bombs pointed at his head or wasting a critic across the street from his house or setting free a rat from the gulags just to wack him in a hostile country. Their's a big difference between evil and strategically retarded and Putin didn't climb his way from being a burned out KGB taxi driver to the top of the Kremlin pile by being stupid.
Assad is another grotesque creature that I wouldn't piss on if he were on fire (I'd probably wait until he's nice and crisp and then wash away the ashes). Like his daddy, he's a barrel bombing sociopath who's zest for torture porn is so great that he outsourced his black sites to Uncle Sam. Sadly, as far as the hellscape that we turned the Levant into is concerned, he's also the lesser of several evils. The basic math that our human rights loving media seems incapable of solving is that if Assad goes, the Salafi whack-jobs will take his place and a half dozen genocides will begin. Say what you will about Assad but the creepy pencil-stashed bastard has kept the minorities of his country (Christians, Alawites, Druze, etc.) relatively safe, albeit for largely self-serving reasons. And in spite of his decidedly inconsistent commitment to humanity, the chemical attacks he's been blamed for remain shrouded in the noxious fog of war. We know for a fact that both he and the so-called rebels likely have access to chemical weapons but with Assad's victory all but a forgone conclusion, only the rebels have a sane reason to use them.
Try and remind most people in this country of these uncomfortable truths and you get treated like a goddamn goose-stepping fascisti. But is there anything more fascist than people who take their government at its word with the unblinking obedience of a small child? These same small children with big microphones now seek to regulate the internet, the last bastion of America's moribund free press, to silence anyone who questions the infinite wisdom of the state with "Fake News". And these are the same children who have helped this same state lie us into war repeatedly with their own fake news, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Yellowcake. Putin and Assad must be so jealous. Maybe we should work on reigning in our own despots before we set our sites on others.
Just a thought. But you don't have think about it, dearest motherfuckers. After all this is only Fake News.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Time by Land of Talk
* Roseblood by Mazzy Star
* Dive by Beach House
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* I'll Be You're Mirror by the Velvet Underground & Nico
* When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon
* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
* Fireworks by First Aid Kit
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
Well, I don't write to tell people what they want to hear. I write to tell people what they need to here. And sometimes what the people need to here is that the "Bad Guy" didn't do it. I'm a queer anarchist, I have zero love lost for authoritarians like Putin or Assad. But I also have zero love lost for authoritarians like John McCain and Nikki Haley, so you'll have to forgive me for not taking their word as bond. The gross reality of the new Cold War landscape is that, as fucked up as Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be, they're not nearly as fucked up as the establishment press would have us believe and, even grosser, they're far from the sickest fucks on the block.
Putin's Russia is far from heaven. Truth be told, in many ways it's worse off than the Soviet Union. Say what you will about Brezhnev but at least he kept his prisoners fed. Putin is the top dog in a Social Darwinist oligarchy that would make Ayn Rand's panties wet (Think Hunger Games.With vodka!). You better believe he had to steal, fuck over and even kill to get to where he is today but, contrary to popular belief, Mr. Putin is not in fact the devil. Their is a reason that man is so goddamn popular in Russia and it's not just those saucy Tom of Finland pics. The main reason Russia loves Putin is that he isn't Boris Yeltsin, Putin's drunken predecessor that today's most hysterical Putin-phobes couldn't get enough of. This was a man who liquidated the constitution, literally bombed congress and sold entire Soviet industries to Mafioso's. He also stole an election, and we helped!
Putin may be a cold blooded, fag-bashing, autocrat but he also mopped up a lot of Yeltsin's mess and refused to take orders from his former handlers back in Brussels and Washington. This is the real reason why he gets blamed for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to those meddling kids in Black Lives Matter. I could care less about Putin but when the mass media becomes an echo chamber for our own derelict government's lies about the motherfucker I'm gonna fucking say something. The one thing that Russiagate, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Skripal poisonings have in common is that there remains zero proof connecting these dirty deeds to Vlad the Terrible. That doesn't mean that the man isn't a first class cunt, he's just not likely guilty of putting a lunatic in charge of the bombs pointed at his head or wasting a critic across the street from his house or setting free a rat from the gulags just to wack him in a hostile country. Their's a big difference between evil and strategically retarded and Putin didn't climb his way from being a burned out KGB taxi driver to the top of the Kremlin pile by being stupid.
Assad is another grotesque creature that I wouldn't piss on if he were on fire (I'd probably wait until he's nice and crisp and then wash away the ashes). Like his daddy, he's a barrel bombing sociopath who's zest for torture porn is so great that he outsourced his black sites to Uncle Sam. Sadly, as far as the hellscape that we turned the Levant into is concerned, he's also the lesser of several evils. The basic math that our human rights loving media seems incapable of solving is that if Assad goes, the Salafi whack-jobs will take his place and a half dozen genocides will begin. Say what you will about Assad but the creepy pencil-stashed bastard has kept the minorities of his country (Christians, Alawites, Druze, etc.) relatively safe, albeit for largely self-serving reasons. And in spite of his decidedly inconsistent commitment to humanity, the chemical attacks he's been blamed for remain shrouded in the noxious fog of war. We know for a fact that both he and the so-called rebels likely have access to chemical weapons but with Assad's victory all but a forgone conclusion, only the rebels have a sane reason to use them.
Try and remind most people in this country of these uncomfortable truths and you get treated like a goddamn goose-stepping fascisti. But is there anything more fascist than people who take their government at its word with the unblinking obedience of a small child? These same small children with big microphones now seek to regulate the internet, the last bastion of America's moribund free press, to silence anyone who questions the infinite wisdom of the state with "Fake News". And these are the same children who have helped this same state lie us into war repeatedly with their own fake news, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Yellowcake. Putin and Assad must be so jealous. Maybe we should work on reigning in our own despots before we set our sites on others.
Just a thought. But you don't have think about it, dearest motherfuckers. After all this is only Fake News.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Time by Land of Talk
* Roseblood by Mazzy Star
* Dive by Beach House
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* I'll Be You're Mirror by the Velvet Underground & Nico
* When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon
* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
* Fireworks by First Aid Kit
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Making Peace with Deplorables
The latest American war crime in Syria had all the predictable, deja vu makings of a cheesy cable reboot, with all the same players playing all the same parts. We have Bashar Assad playing the pencil-mustachioed demogorgon, slaving over his bubbling cauldron of noxious chemicals. We have Vladimir Putin playing the Nosferatu-domed Sith lord puppet master who's long shadow somehow covers every grave from Douma to Salisbury, with no evidence needed to prove his inevitable guilt. We have the gallant White Helmets playing the tireless and spotless crusaders for truth with their cameras always set on the right place at the right time. And, of coarse, we have Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May shedding their usual clown attire to play the part of the guardians of justice, brazenly defying the laws of man to achieve only what the gods can do and restore the precious sanctity of the global order.
Of coarse, like most cheesy cable reboots, the narrative provided by the mainstream press was roughly 80% bullshit. For the umpteenth time, the anti-Assad propagandists delivered sketchy evidence of a supposed poison gas attack that came just in time for a massive Syrian Army victory and our scatter brained president's latest empty threat to finally pull the troops out of that fucked to death hellscape we created in the Levant. Trump and his French and British counterparts wasted zero time waiting for pesky details like evidence before pronouncing Assad and his eternal partner in crime, Putin guilty as sin of committing an atrocity that they had absolutely nothing to gain from, with everything to lose. The western mass media for their part dutifully regurgitated the baseless accusations of their collective governments verbatim as if they were scientific fact. The Russians and Syrians welcomed an international investigation with open arms and the self-sainted masters of the universe (aka the First World) dropped bombs before one could take place and ruin their little war crime.
It all felt so damn normal because its all happened a million times before. Bill Clinton mastered the art of the micro-intervention back in in the nineties when he bombed some god forsaken place every time another sex scandal resurfaced. Donald seems to be a big fan of his ex-buddies playbook. Stormy who?....
Pretty much the only thing that didn't go according to plan was that Trump's seemingly indefatigable fan club didn't follow their dear leader into disaster this time. Apparently America First was more than just a nifty catch phrase for the deplorables, who nearly jammed up the White House phone lines in the days before the bombing, voicing their righteous fury over their beloved Donald's latest and most egregious act of hypocrisy.
The predator propagandists in the right wing media reacted in time with their demo audience's outrage, with former neocon saber-rattlers like Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham following the money onto the peace train and Tucker Carlson, of all people, delivering some of the most stunningly eloquent antiwar prose heard on a major news site since Bill Donahue got shit-canned from MSDNC for the unforgivable crime of speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was nothing short of surreal. If you would have told me even a year ago that Fox News would become a veritable hotbed of non-interventionism, I would have called you crazy then doubled my meds.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, how unprecedented this sea change is. I take zero pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Trump anymore than I took pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Obama. But I am overjoyed to be proven wrong about Trump's deplorables, at least in one respect. As an anti-imperialist trans person in Trump country, being able to find common ground with my redneck neighbors on issues of war and peace is beyond refreshing, it's goddamn empowering. For all their many, many, many flaws, the deplorables have shown a level of moral fortitude that the woke Obama progressives failed at miserably when their hero went to war. They have taken a stand against the supposed leader of their movement and I believe it may have had an impact.
In the days after the alleged gas attacks, Trump showed every sign of being primed and ready for a full blown, scorch the earth, shock and awe, bomb-a-thon. But after a couple of days of having his bridle ego raddled by his former cheerleaders' defiant disapproval he settled on just three targets in a largely symbolic and ineffectual (albeit, still grossly illegal) strike. This could be a coincidence, another sign that Trump is more bluster than bite, but I doubt it. While the "Resistance" busied themselves defending the sanctity of Bob Mueller's dead end Russiagate investigation, the deplorables were taking Trump's orange ass to the fucking woodshed over crimes he actually committed (what a concept!). I believe there is an opportunity here, if the truly radical left and the populist right can get over their respective prejudices to embrace it. Their is no reason why intersectionality can't benefit poor white trash and queer folks can't put America (or at least peace) first.
Many people forget that the original major league antiwar movement in this country wasn't the Students for a Democratic Society but the America First Committee, an organization that brought together left and right, from isolationist race-baiters like Charles Lindbergh to Christian socialist doves like Norman Thomas, and kept this country out of a brutal and senseless world war for years before being outflanked by the furor over the sanction provoked attacks on Pear Harbor. Donald Trump bastardized this dynamic movement by hijacking its name for a cheap popcorn headline. But the movement that formed around this lie has grown a mind of its own and I say we engage it.
Anti-imperialism makes for some strange bedfellows, dearest motherfuckers. But I'm open to sharing my bed with some white trash deplorables as long as they're willing to get down with a tranarchist like me and Trump isn't invited. Let the bed-in begin.
Peace, Love & Understanding- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Knights In White Satin by the Moody Blues
* My War by Black Flag
* Pilot Can At the Queer of God by Flaming Lips
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Pepper by Butthole Surfers
* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno
* Crisis Fest by Sunflower Bean
* Minor Threat by Minor Threat
* E-Pro by Beck
* Wild In the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
Of coarse, like most cheesy cable reboots, the narrative provided by the mainstream press was roughly 80% bullshit. For the umpteenth time, the anti-Assad propagandists delivered sketchy evidence of a supposed poison gas attack that came just in time for a massive Syrian Army victory and our scatter brained president's latest empty threat to finally pull the troops out of that fucked to death hellscape we created in the Levant. Trump and his French and British counterparts wasted zero time waiting for pesky details like evidence before pronouncing Assad and his eternal partner in crime, Putin guilty as sin of committing an atrocity that they had absolutely nothing to gain from, with everything to lose. The western mass media for their part dutifully regurgitated the baseless accusations of their collective governments verbatim as if they were scientific fact. The Russians and Syrians welcomed an international investigation with open arms and the self-sainted masters of the universe (aka the First World) dropped bombs before one could take place and ruin their little war crime.
It all felt so damn normal because its all happened a million times before. Bill Clinton mastered the art of the micro-intervention back in in the nineties when he bombed some god forsaken place every time another sex scandal resurfaced. Donald seems to be a big fan of his ex-buddies playbook. Stormy who?....
Pretty much the only thing that didn't go according to plan was that Trump's seemingly indefatigable fan club didn't follow their dear leader into disaster this time. Apparently America First was more than just a nifty catch phrase for the deplorables, who nearly jammed up the White House phone lines in the days before the bombing, voicing their righteous fury over their beloved Donald's latest and most egregious act of hypocrisy.
The predator propagandists in the right wing media reacted in time with their demo audience's outrage, with former neocon saber-rattlers like Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham following the money onto the peace train and Tucker Carlson, of all people, delivering some of the most stunningly eloquent antiwar prose heard on a major news site since Bill Donahue got shit-canned from MSDNC for the unforgivable crime of speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was nothing short of surreal. If you would have told me even a year ago that Fox News would become a veritable hotbed of non-interventionism, I would have called you crazy then doubled my meds.
I shouldn't have to tell you, dearest motherfuckers, how unprecedented this sea change is. I take zero pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Trump anymore than I took pleasure in being proven right (repeatedly) about Obama. But I am overjoyed to be proven wrong about Trump's deplorables, at least in one respect. As an anti-imperialist trans person in Trump country, being able to find common ground with my redneck neighbors on issues of war and peace is beyond refreshing, it's goddamn empowering. For all their many, many, many flaws, the deplorables have shown a level of moral fortitude that the woke Obama progressives failed at miserably when their hero went to war. They have taken a stand against the supposed leader of their movement and I believe it may have had an impact.
In the days after the alleged gas attacks, Trump showed every sign of being primed and ready for a full blown, scorch the earth, shock and awe, bomb-a-thon. But after a couple of days of having his bridle ego raddled by his former cheerleaders' defiant disapproval he settled on just three targets in a largely symbolic and ineffectual (albeit, still grossly illegal) strike. This could be a coincidence, another sign that Trump is more bluster than bite, but I doubt it. While the "Resistance" busied themselves defending the sanctity of Bob Mueller's dead end Russiagate investigation, the deplorables were taking Trump's orange ass to the fucking woodshed over crimes he actually committed (what a concept!). I believe there is an opportunity here, if the truly radical left and the populist right can get over their respective prejudices to embrace it. Their is no reason why intersectionality can't benefit poor white trash and queer folks can't put America (or at least peace) first.
Many people forget that the original major league antiwar movement in this country wasn't the Students for a Democratic Society but the America First Committee, an organization that brought together left and right, from isolationist race-baiters like Charles Lindbergh to Christian socialist doves like Norman Thomas, and kept this country out of a brutal and senseless world war for years before being outflanked by the furor over the sanction provoked attacks on Pear Harbor. Donald Trump bastardized this dynamic movement by hijacking its name for a cheap popcorn headline. But the movement that formed around this lie has grown a mind of its own and I say we engage it.
Anti-imperialism makes for some strange bedfellows, dearest motherfuckers. But I'm open to sharing my bed with some white trash deplorables as long as they're willing to get down with a tranarchist like me and Trump isn't invited. Let the bed-in begin.
Peace, Love & Understanding- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Knights In White Satin by the Moody Blues
* My War by Black Flag
* Pilot Can At the Queer of God by Flaming Lips
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Pepper by Butthole Surfers
* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno
* Crisis Fest by Sunflower Bean
* Minor Threat by Minor Threat
* E-Pro by Beck
* Wild In the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
Monday, April 16, 2018
Revenge of the Invisible Girl
Cis-gender people take mirrors for granted. For most people a mirror is just a reflection of what the rest of the world sees, for better or worse. Mirrors can be cruel in the straight world, particularly if you're female, but it's a magnifying glass, pointing out and distorting the harsher fringes of reality. For trans and genderqueer people, mirrors are something much more cruel, something much more cerebral. It's a hissing funhouse mirror twisting the truth into knots until reality itself becomes a opaque concept. For most people outside the binary the mirror is a tool of dysphoria, pointing out all the things we aren't and all the things we'll never be. I've had my own struggles with the tyranny of the mirror and gender dysphoria, but my problems seem to be different, even from other queer folk.
You see, when I look in the mirror I see my true self. Even with the burly body hair and six o'clock shadow, I still see that angry little girl who rages beneath. My hirsute only adds to her androgynous mystique. The problem is, no one else sees her and trying to convince people that she's really there becomes unbearably tiresome. Being something no one else can see makes you feel fucking crazy. What's even worse, it makes you feel invisible. This is my dysphoria, being haunted by the invisible girl that only I can see in the mirror. And the damnedest thing is that she rarely feels more invisible than when she's among other queer people, my people.
I spent most of my life suffering from an affliction that I didn't even know existed. Being neither male nor female but a fluid mix of the two and everything in between, I didn't exactly grow up feeling like a girl and I just assumed that I must be male because that's what everyone told me I was. But I never felt right. I never felt content. And the older I got, the louder these feelings became. As I entered the maelstrom of my twenties, my dysphoria reached a late full bloom and being male began to feel like a cruel prison sentence, life without parole. It was only through my isolated agoraphobic autodidactism that I discovered that the universe was so much more colorful than pink and blue. After voraciously consuming the incendiary ideas of gender renegades like Judith Butler, Julia Serrano and Justin Vivian Bond, not to mention my online mentor, Angela Keaton, and a shitload of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Courtney Love songs, I came to the conclusion that I was queer and I made a conscious decision to reject the gender binary entirely.
After a disastrously failed attempt to find more answers through therapy (see Comrade Hermit Vs. the Tranny Whisperer), I decided that I couldn't trust a psychiatric establishment who's understanding of gender identity belonged in the Nineteenth Century with leech therapy and exorcisms. So I sought to find myself by finding my tribe. I began attending the few local queer support groups that exist in my agrarian corner of Trump Country. At first it was great and in many ways it still is. Its given me a sense of community and belonging that I had long gave up on ever finding. But the more time I spent with these wonderful people, the more dysphoric I seemed to get.
It was through zero fault of their own. They were all open and welcoming and I now count them among the few truly close friends I've made since high school. The damage was all self-inflicted but it hurt like a bitch regardless. When I looked at these beautiful people, my people, I didn't see myself. I didn't see anyone who looked like me. I didn't see anyone who felt like me. And that made me feel like an impostor. And that made me feel invisible. I'm not pretty. I'm not girly. I don't fit the standards of a modern day androgynous femme. As queer and female as I feel, I still like to wear my facial hair thick and I feel much more comfortable in sweats than skirts. I didn't fit in and for the first time in my life, I wanted too, I wanted too so bad.
I've spent the last few months suffering silently, twisting myself into knots trying to figure out how to get the rest of the world to see the invisible girl and every time I looked in the mirror she was still there, taunting me with the fact that I was the only one who could see her. Finally, it hit me like a bolt of lightening, that I had put myself into another closet. In spite of the fact that I felt perfectly femme and queer in my own burly skin, I let the perceived expectations of other queer people dictate how I should behave. This is the polar opposite of what being queer is all about. Being queer isn't about lipstick and pretty dresses or hiking boots and butch hairdos. Being queer is about being free, being free to be who we wanna be, to fuck who we wanna fuck and to fuck how we wanna fuck.
I'm through sweating my masculine idiosyncrasies. I'm done beating myself up for not being queer enough. When I look in the mirror I know what I see. I see a hairy genderfuck femme and she looks beautiful to me. I see the invisible girl in the mirror and fuck anyone, straight or queer, who is too goddamn blind to see her. They're the ones with the fucking problem, not me. I am my own gender, a serpent who has slithered its way out of the binary swamp that once enslaved me and, against all odds, I've sprung arms and legs and an identity all my own. I am a prototype of queer evolution. A bearded bull-dyke with a dick and a blog, hear me roar. And ignore the invisible girl at your own risk, dearest motherfuckers. She's pissed and out for revenge. Call her sir and she'll slit your fucking throat.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* the Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* When It's Cold I'd Like To Die by Moby
* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie
* Boyish by Japanese Breakfast
* What Goes On by the Velvet Underground
* For Once In My Life by the Decemberists
* Pretty On the Inside by Hole
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
You see, when I look in the mirror I see my true self. Even with the burly body hair and six o'clock shadow, I still see that angry little girl who rages beneath. My hirsute only adds to her androgynous mystique. The problem is, no one else sees her and trying to convince people that she's really there becomes unbearably tiresome. Being something no one else can see makes you feel fucking crazy. What's even worse, it makes you feel invisible. This is my dysphoria, being haunted by the invisible girl that only I can see in the mirror. And the damnedest thing is that she rarely feels more invisible than when she's among other queer people, my people.
I spent most of my life suffering from an affliction that I didn't even know existed. Being neither male nor female but a fluid mix of the two and everything in between, I didn't exactly grow up feeling like a girl and I just assumed that I must be male because that's what everyone told me I was. But I never felt right. I never felt content. And the older I got, the louder these feelings became. As I entered the maelstrom of my twenties, my dysphoria reached a late full bloom and being male began to feel like a cruel prison sentence, life without parole. It was only through my isolated agoraphobic autodidactism that I discovered that the universe was so much more colorful than pink and blue. After voraciously consuming the incendiary ideas of gender renegades like Judith Butler, Julia Serrano and Justin Vivian Bond, not to mention my online mentor, Angela Keaton, and a shitload of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Courtney Love songs, I came to the conclusion that I was queer and I made a conscious decision to reject the gender binary entirely.
After a disastrously failed attempt to find more answers through therapy (see Comrade Hermit Vs. the Tranny Whisperer), I decided that I couldn't trust a psychiatric establishment who's understanding of gender identity belonged in the Nineteenth Century with leech therapy and exorcisms. So I sought to find myself by finding my tribe. I began attending the few local queer support groups that exist in my agrarian corner of Trump Country. At first it was great and in many ways it still is. Its given me a sense of community and belonging that I had long gave up on ever finding. But the more time I spent with these wonderful people, the more dysphoric I seemed to get.
It was through zero fault of their own. They were all open and welcoming and I now count them among the few truly close friends I've made since high school. The damage was all self-inflicted but it hurt like a bitch regardless. When I looked at these beautiful people, my people, I didn't see myself. I didn't see anyone who looked like me. I didn't see anyone who felt like me. And that made me feel like an impostor. And that made me feel invisible. I'm not pretty. I'm not girly. I don't fit the standards of a modern day androgynous femme. As queer and female as I feel, I still like to wear my facial hair thick and I feel much more comfortable in sweats than skirts. I didn't fit in and for the first time in my life, I wanted too, I wanted too so bad.
I've spent the last few months suffering silently, twisting myself into knots trying to figure out how to get the rest of the world to see the invisible girl and every time I looked in the mirror she was still there, taunting me with the fact that I was the only one who could see her. Finally, it hit me like a bolt of lightening, that I had put myself into another closet. In spite of the fact that I felt perfectly femme and queer in my own burly skin, I let the perceived expectations of other queer people dictate how I should behave. This is the polar opposite of what being queer is all about. Being queer isn't about lipstick and pretty dresses or hiking boots and butch hairdos. Being queer is about being free, being free to be who we wanna be, to fuck who we wanna fuck and to fuck how we wanna fuck.
I'm through sweating my masculine idiosyncrasies. I'm done beating myself up for not being queer enough. When I look in the mirror I know what I see. I see a hairy genderfuck femme and she looks beautiful to me. I see the invisible girl in the mirror and fuck anyone, straight or queer, who is too goddamn blind to see her. They're the ones with the fucking problem, not me. I am my own gender, a serpent who has slithered its way out of the binary swamp that once enslaved me and, against all odds, I've sprung arms and legs and an identity all my own. I am a prototype of queer evolution. A bearded bull-dyke with a dick and a blog, hear me roar. And ignore the invisible girl at your own risk, dearest motherfuckers. She's pissed and out for revenge. Call her sir and she'll slit your fucking throat.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* the Middle by Jimmy Eat World
* When It's Cold I'd Like To Die by Moby
* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie
* Boyish by Japanese Breakfast
* What Goes On by the Velvet Underground
* For Once In My Life by the Decemberists
* Pretty On the Inside by Hole
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
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