Gretchen Whitmer Goes Boogaloo Catfishing

 The news broke like something straight out of a cheesy 90s blockbuster. Whisked away to an undisclosed location, we were greeted in primetime by the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, like a heavily Botoxed Bill Pullman commanding the troops. With the shades drawn and the lights low, she carefully but forcefully wove us a harrowing narrative. She and her family, now in hiding, were the unwitting victims of an elaborate plot by crazed neo-Nazi militiamen to kidnap the brave governor and try her for crimes against liberty before an armed civilian court. At least a dozen men were in on the plot and it was all Donald Trump's fault for inspiring them to "Liberate Michigan" with his saucy social media banter and his blasé "Stand by and stand down" public demeanor. The bad men had been wrestled into submission for now by the selfless deeds of the brave men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. But for how long? How long would it be before more came to attack the figureheads of our precious democratic institutions? How long before the dreaded Boogaloo?

As at it turns out, as compelling as this carefully constructed network TV narrative was, there were more than a few things wrong with it that haven't been brought to the cable news watching public's attention. The primary one being that it was largely bullshit. Madame Whitmer's command performance as a humble public servant addressing a nation under fire was as badly scripted as the daytime soaps she interrupted. The governor was never in any real danger and she had been kept abreast of the details of the investigation for weeks if not months, being secretly shuttled about by the feds from secure location to secure location accordingly.

The men allegedly hunting her had been the subjects of a carefully arranged sting operation. No fewer than four FBI agents and/or informants had taken part in the dastardly plot from its earliest stage as chatroom heavy breathing on social media. It had all the markings of a classic FBI entrapment scheme. A dozen good old boys were picked out, infiltrated, and egged on by agent provocateurs to take their macho locker room talk to the next level. The Feds had been coaxing these bitter gun nuts for months, since the beginning of the year. God only knows how much of the plot was constructed by the feds themselves but I'm fairly confident that it probably never would have made it past the bullshitting stage if it wasn't for the hard work of our heroes in the FBI, the one gang in blue that the liberals agree matters.

I'm smugly confident in this theory because it conforms so perfectly to that crooked organization's well established modus operandi. The FBI has maintained it's questionable relevance for decades by establishing itself as a veritable cottage industry for entrapping wannabe radicals of every plausible stripe of the rainbow. We've seen it over and over again. They find themselves a weak link in the radical chain, usually some emotionally unstable blowhard, then they introduce him to one of their readymade radical informants who pushes, prods, and encourages this hapless sap into taking their heavy breathing to lengths they never would have even been capable of achieving on their own, often providing all the weapons and technological expertise themselves. Then a massive bust is launched and the compliant town criers of the mass media are fed the juicy details of an elaborate plot that the heroic feds wrote themselves before saving us all from its satanic powers. 

The feds have been at this for years with the primary purpose of justifying their own bloated tax funded budgets by creating stories that they can write themselves in as the heroes of. They've done this with isolated disenfranchised Muslims whom they've sold down the river to Gitmo. They've done this with tree-hugging environmentalists whom they've coaxed from minor monkeywrenching to full blown arson. They did this with a couple of starry eyed leftists named Bradley Crowder and David McKay back during the 2008 Republican National Convention when a motormouthed FBI crowd exciter named Bradley Michael Darby talked the two hapless Occupiers into turning their protest into a Molotov cocktail party.

The far left is fully aware of this history but they routinely choose to look the other way when these same twisted techniques are used to railroad right-wing hillbillies like the backwoods fruit loops in the Hutaree Militia, who were ultimately acquitted on all major charges and even had their guns and property returned to them well after the media had lost interest in their own sensationalized narrative. Or Randy Weaver and his two young daughters who won a lawsuit of $3.1 million after one of these stupid fucking schemes got Randy's wife, dog, and 14 year old son murdered in cold blood. The FBI has been stoking the militia movement for decades, and why not? Personal differences aside, they are essentially anarchists, aren't they? Anything to keep a stateless motherfucker down.

And just who were these 13 men arrested for plotting against Governor Whitmer? According to that Helter Skelter eyed gubernatorial batfucker, they were a bunch of white trash Nazi lunatics answering to the commands of their fearless orange leader. But the available facts paint a far more complicated picture. Sure you had your sundry connections to Infowars conspiracy theories and Vaxxer hoopla, but these were not MAGA supporters and there remains zero evidence of any kind of neo-Nazi or Alt-Right affiliation. They were members of a pretty basic libertarian constitutionalist militia, one of many in rural Michigan, called the Wolverine Watchmen, and amongst the ranks of this assorted lot were self-proclaimed anarchists who openly denounced Further Trump as a tyrant for his savage law and order police state, and at least one intersectionalist who attended both anti-lockdown protests and handed out bottled water during Black Lives Matter marches.

Perhaps more importantly, these were working class schmucks, many of them left unemployed and deeply in debt by Governor Whitmer's often arbitrary and downright unconstitutional lockdown that made peaceful assembly, in public or private, an arrestable offense. At least one of them was literally homeless. Another thing many of them shared was a history of military service and the PTSD that came with it. Much like Timothy McVeigh, they were given a hands on education in how the American Government approaches conflict resolution. Is it really that shocking that these vets would fall back on this training when they found their livelihoods at risk by a runaway police state that thinks nothing of murdering its own citizens in cold blood?

These weren't just garden variety gun nuts, they were Boogaloo Bois. A new subculture in the American Militia Movement that takes a decidedly millennial approach to liberty. The ones I know support Black Lives Matter and defunding the police. I can tell you for a fact that the feds wouldn't have a hard time catching us joking about revolutionary action. It's how we shoot the shit, some pun intended, and it would be very easy for one of those feds to jump in on one of these irreverent conversations and push us to take things from blowing off steam to blowing up bridges. I imagine me and my friends would likely laugh them offline for such reactionary hyperbole. But I'm not a homeless vet with battle worn PTSD. Gore Vidal once described his pen-pal Timothy McVeigh as a man with an "Overdeveloped sense of justice." He was deeply saddened that this pathological burden went to waste on more bloodshed. I feel the same way about these federally catfished Boogaloo trout. A heartless crook like Gretchen Whitmer isn't worth it.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs influenced by this post

*  Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

*  I Blame Society by Titus Andronicus

*  Rebels by Tom Petty

*  Hey Joe by Jimmi Hendrix

*  Waiting Room by Fugazi

*  Affection by the Lost Boys

*  Vacation Town by the Front Bottoms

*  Tommy Gun by the Clash

*  Here Comes a Regular by the Replacements

*  Fairbanks, Alaska by the Front Bottoms

AMERIKA!: The Horror Story

 No one seems to be quite sure where this creature first lurked from. What foul crypt lays claim to the title of the beast's cradle? Most trembling fingers point towards Europe, to the land of Caligula and Vlad Tepes. In a haunted stammer they say Rome, Athens, London. But there is evidence of it's existence going back thousands of years and stretching from the peaks of the Andes to the shores of the Orient. Perhaps it has always been with us. Perhaps it clawed its way from the loins of our darkest nightmares. From the fevered visions of landless peasants who in their weakness starved and thirsted for unspeakable power. A thousand whispers screaming 'more' like a howling wind. We may never know, and if we did, we may very well wish we hadn't. But regardless of the womb of such a wicked force for human havoc, whether it gestated beneath the English thrown or nursed itself upon Vatican wine, its name stands tall and unobscured. The beast called Imperialism. It's shadow stretches across the entirety of this savage planet. But today it stands tallest, perhaps taller than it ever has before, upon the shoulders of purple mountains majesty and the graves of Wounded Knee. Today, imperialism is pronounced AMERIKA!

Empire's deadliest incarnation was born from the deeds of self-righteous wicked men. This thing that would someday colonize the earth was a colony itself. The great empires of Europe had sent their deadliest killers to the stony shores of the New World in search of treasure to plunder. They found a strange new hemisphere ripe for rape and honey. The English soon established the colonies that would serve host to a new Rome. They had no idea what evil they had unleashed. Centuries of savagery, of genocide and slavery, had created an insatiable hunger in the men who would be declared this new nation's founding fathers. They wanted more. They wanted so much more. And they weren't content to share their spoils with the Queen. They wanted their own crown. London realized that their greed had given birth to a monster more wicked than their wildest dreams. Terrified, they rushed to pull the plug on their Amerikan murder machine, but it was already too late. After attempting to hobble it's march to power by curtailing the slave trade and granting recognition to the Indian Nations still standing on it's frontier, the Founding Fathers launched a successful coup against their English overlords and declared the fitful farce a revolution. These psychopaths perverted the name of democracy much the way Rome and England had Christianity, and used its hollowed out title to justify the greatest killing spree in the history of mankind. 

Possessed by the demons of Manifest Destiny, Amerika wasted precious little time after defeating their English masters on anything remotely resembling peace. There was simply too much killing to do, too many brown bodies to throttle and mutilate with steam howling trains and cackling Gatling guns. Amerika spread like a disease from sea too shining sea, smashing anything that stood in its way. It chased the remaining European empires from its continent and slaughtered entire races of indigenous people in a holocaust that would one day inspire Hitler. But the North American continent wasn't enough. Nothing was. Once the empire had tasted flesh, its hunger became insatiable. It took the southern half of it's hemisphere with gunboats and caudillos, and cast its chains across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines where the Indian massacres continued. When given the opportunity to take Europe in the waning days of the empires that birthed it, Amerika jumped like a jackal at the opportunities afforded it by two world wars. At the end of the Second, devices capable of annihilating entire nations in seconds were constructed and dropped on the shattered shoulders of a crippled and surrendering Japanese Empire that dared to fondle our slaves in their seas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a message to the world, all your empires are now ours. The Amerikan Empire wanted to make it crystal clear. There was a new killer on the loose. No one was safe and nothing was sacred.

The last 80 years have essentially been one never-ending world war launched by a beast addicted to conquest. Bodies stacked higher than the skyscrapers they financed as Manifest Destiny went global. Bridges and dikes were demolished in Korea. A monsoon of napalm and Agent Orange drowned Indochina. Highways of death were paved across the deserts of the Persian Gulf. Bloody coups, depraved dictators, and merciless death squads proliferated at our fingertips across the darker nations of the Third World we created to feed the First. An empire unlike any the world had ever seen was unleashed, stretching its massive claws to every corner of the earth. Rome looked like Disneyworld in Washington's gargantuan midnight shadow, and we the people all became complicit in its never-ending crime spree, even as it imprisoned us as well.

All across Amerika and the other First World quisling nations where the dollar reigned supreme, a massive and impossibly elaborate prison was constructed, only it wasn't built with concrete walls, armed towers, and concertina wire. It was built with gaudy McMansions, mile-high skyscrapers, and name-brand pharmaceuticals. The people of the First World were given two choices, they could comply with the great Amerikan imperial machine and live high as a kite in gilded cages decorated with the jewels of the Third World, or we could join them in the gulags and ghettos often found within walking distance of palaces and shopping malls. We were given a choice to wake and suffer or sleep and dream. Many chose to sleep, but their slumber didn't last long. In all it's glorious bloodshed, our dear empire failed to recognize that it too was bleeding out.

Empires never last because endless expansion is simply unsustainable. Eventually every imperial beast, no matter how fearsome, comes to rely on carefully coddled colonies to run it's global ship and those very colonies have a long wicked history of devouring their hosts once they've had a taste of the gore of the good life. London, Madrid, and Lisbon were all done in by their fabulous Amerikan Frankenstein. As Amerika stretches itself razor thin trying to gobble the coming Eurasian Century in it's cradle, its own Frankensteins are beginning to feast upon its buckling limbs. Our colonial outposts in Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Ankara have become vicious little circles of despair in their own right and those circles are rapidly expanding. Meanwhile, China has taken full advantage of our greed and now stands to economically surpass us. All the gunboats in the South China Sea can't stymy the growth of this great red dragon clothed with the sun, and the gilded bars of NATO and the EU are beginning to rust. 

With an insane clown in the White House and a senile one on his way to save our delusional plutocracy, the image of exceptionalism that our master class has carefully constructed is coming undone. As the palaces burn, the ghettos expand, and the shopping malls are abandoned, the choices seem frightfully clear to any horror story buff willing to open their eyes. We can either give the monster what it wants, our very souls, and wait for nuclear Armageddon in the prison cell of the empire's attic. Or we can live to fight another day and get the fuck out of that haunted house by revolting against the imperial two-party monstrosity that built it upon Indian burial grounds, not merely at the ballot box, but in the streets paved with skulls. We must all become the Indians now and embrace the ghosts of our past to exorcise the demons that hold our future over the flames.

The choice is yours, dearest motherfuckers, but I can't be a prisoner of this imperial slasher flick anymore. If you want me, you can find me in the streets manically battling demons, yours and mine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Babies On Fire by Brian Eno

*  Piggies by the Beatles

*  God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols

*  I'm Afraid of Americans by David Bowie & Trent Reznor

*  The Land of Rape & Honey by Ministry

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  Killer In the Streets by the Raveonettes

*  Butcher Baby by the Plasmatics

*  Wake Up by Arcade Fire

*  My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) by Neil Young 

Joe Biden, Multiple Miggs, and the Horrors of Lesser Evilism

 As surely as the moon wanes and the dead leaves tumble, once every fourth October, it becomes downright chilling to be an American. That's because every four years, like clockwork, Americans prove every flamboyant third world boogeyman we've ever high roaded right by openly flaunting our casual embrace of evil in the highest echelons of imperial power. I speak of course of the autumnal American tradition of choosing the lesser of two evils from this foul nation's two-party oligarchy to run our horror show of a globalist menace. I feel like I talk about this subject a lot, but I never feel like I talk about it enough. That's because words consistently fail to express how uniquely revolting I find this twisted mindset to be. The lesser of two evils. The lesser evil. Nothing exposes the cruel charade of liberal democracy like the fact that what is commonly excepted by the general public to be our most cherished democratic right is commonly excepted by that same general public as a choice to openly consent to nothing less heinous than pure evil.

I don't feel like I'm being hyperbolic here and I don't see the concept of the lesser evil as being merely symbolic. We are literally advocating choosing evil. One has to look no further than any two major party candidates in the last century. Hell, one has to look no further than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We are taught that it is perfectly morally acceptable to choose between a man who served as an architect of the modern day slave trade that is the post-Clintonian prison industrial complex and a man who imprisons children at the border in glorified concentration camps. These are both clearly evil human beings. Your average American recognizes this fact, and yet it remains perfectly mainstream to not only advocate giving one of these beasts a popular mandate for their crimes but it's downright traditional to bully and humiliate anyone with enough of a conscience to refuse to play along.

What kind of sick fucking message does this send to the world? What kind of sick fucking message does send to our children? Can you imagine using this logic in any other scenario? "Well, all the kids are getting high, so I guess huffing kerosene is morally preferable to shooting bath salts into my junk. I mean, its not like I can just not get high. What kind of a party guest would I be then?" Or maybe, "Well I have to go to prom, it's my moral obligation as a student, and even though Marcus does beat me, at least he's not a confirmed date-rapist like Ben." And I'm the irresponsible radical for voting for Jill Stein? If you still have to wonder how the terrorists justify murdering American civilians, go to your local Baptist church this November and count the American civilians shrugging their shoulders and casually consenting to brutality. Thank god most of this country still has the moral fortitude to stay home and get high.

But it always comes down to the same damn thing. Every time I write one of these posts on America's business-casual relationship with the Faustian bargain of two-party voting, it's always, "...Well, OK, but who is the lesser evil?" And as much as I want to scream at you dearest motherfuckers, at the top my fucking lungs, "IT! DOESN'T! FUCKING! MATTER!" As I punctuate each word with a frying pan against my skull, I can't fucking help myself but to ponder the stupid question. I'm a total geek for hypothetical moral dilemmas. It's why the only thing I love more than the evils of politics is horror movies and true crime literature. I have to know the worst. I have to see the last frame of the snuff film so I can study the light in the killer's eyes. The best way I can answer your stupid fucking question is to explain to you why I am still one of those insufferable leftists who maintains that Hillary would have been worse than Trump. It goes back to my symbiotic fascination with horror, to something I call the Multiple Miggs Defense.

I am a huge fan of Thomas Harris and his Hannibal Lecter series. The only movie to ever do the books justice was Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. In one of the movies first scenes, young FBI intern Clarice Starling is sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to interview the infamous psychologist turned cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, about a recent rash of brutal murders that could be connected to a former patient of his. After making it past the hospital's morally depraved director, Clarice makes her way down a long dungeon-like hallway of prison cells. At the very end of the row she is confronted by two hideous creatures in adjacent cages. The first is a teemingly foul, wild eyed beast, known only as Multiple Miggs, pacing, glaring, and hissing foul obscenities. The second monster, in a neat and tidy, brightly lit cell, is Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself, calm, congenial, and completely still among the madness of his surroundings. After being carefully torn apart emotionally by the good doctor, Clarice leaves him to make her way out of the catacombs only to be horrifically assaulted by the semen hurling Multiple Miggs. The cruel doctor next door is beside himself with disgust for his neighbors barbaric manners. He apologizes to Clarice profusely for the "unspeakably ugly act" and finally consents to look over her notes 

I always found the juxtaposition between these two monsters to be quite fascinating. Which one is more depraved? Who is the lesser evil? Who knows. Who cares. But it quickly becomes readily apparent which one is more dangerous when Dr. Lecter manages to convince Miggs overnight to swallow his own tongue, murdering a beast with whispers. In 2016, I couldn't think of a better analogy to Trump and Hillary than Miggs and Hannibal. On the surface, it seemed obvious that Trump was the fouler of the two. A maniacally unhinged, race-baiting, demagogue, aping for the cameras like George Wallace on black beauties as he filled his tiny orange fists with filth and hurled it in our faces. Hillary by comparison appeared perfectly rational and collected, but that's just it, what kind of creature can remain so sedate amongst the semen crusted dungeons of Pennsylvania Avenue? Trump may have been unhinged but Hillary was the clear sociopath, laying wake to entire regions of the globe like North Africa and the Balkans with a permanently perfect camera-ready smile on her mask of sanity. I have no doubt that Hillary would have launched a full-blown ground invasion of Syria and a successful coup in Venezuela by now, had she been elected, and she would have done it all with whispers. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, our Covid ravaged Multiple Miggs in chief has been too busy jacking off his ego to overthrow anything bigger than CHOP. 

So what about this year? Is Biden the Hannibal Lecter to Donald's Multiple Miggs? Four years ago I would have said yes without hesitation. Biden has spent decades manipulating the gears of power to starve, bomb, and imprison children for profit. But I've had three grandparents fall beneath the cruel scythe of dementia. I know Alzheimer's when I see it and I suspect much of the rest of this country does too. So while the media does its damnedest to straighten Biden's tie, its become painfully clear that this year's race is a sticky contest of Miggs vs Miggs. But that doesn't mean it's a tie. The very fact that two thirds of our so-called journalists in the corporate media have unabashedly committed themselves to cleaning up Biden's trail of mess has revealed two very terrible truths about 2020. The first is that, unlike Trump, Joe Biden is a lunatic with a well-oiled machine behind him, ready to kill. Expect four gross years of second-term Reagan before Kamala comes in for the kill to play Pappy Bush and blow up the Gulf, a far more frightening prospect for world peace than four more years of the regime who couldn't shoot straight. The second and quite possibly most terrifying truth is that the American Empire has reached a stage of lesser evil so feverish that even it's puppets have become deranged. The machinery of the status quo had a dozen viable choices this year to put up against Trump, but they stubbornly stuck to forcing their silver-haired neoliberal favorite down our throats even after it became obscenely clear that he was completely unhinged.

Brace yourselves, dearest motherfuckers, come Trump or come Biden, the empire has gone full Miggs.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Goodbye Horses by Lazarus Q

*  Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden

*  American Nightmare by the Misfits

*  Falling to Pieces by Faith No More

*  It's No Good by Depeche Mode

*  Crazy by Patsy Cline

*  If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly

*  Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

*  Holiday Song by the Pixies

*  Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

A Marxist Joins the Libertarian Party

"Libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public"

-Murray Rothbard

"In Reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another."

-Friedrich Engels

 

So a Marxist walks into the DMV and joins the Libertarian Party... No, that's not the set up to an impossibly wonky dad joke, that's the the story of my life, or at least it was last summer. It was a simpler time. A time before COVID, when the cops were only brazenly shooting Black children in the back every other week. That sunny day in July, I put on my best crack-whore-red lipstick and my biggest Jackie-O sunglasses and made my way down to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license with a special side mission motivating me to actually show up before the last possible second this time. After strutting past the usual throngs of sullen teens and sexy foreigners with the riff from "Rebel Rebel" on repeat in my skull, I approached an angry little man in a clip-on tie, took a horrific picture, swallowed a mouth full of stomach acid when the little prick misgendered me, and became the first self-declared Marxist in Pennsylvania history to join the Libertarian Party. I got a bumper sticker and everything, and I have every intention of voting for Jo Jorgensen this November.

But why? You may ask. What in the name of god's green dick could inspire a person to do such an absurd thing? Am I just trying to piss off and confuse people at this point? As if my calamitous gender identity wasn't enough. How could any sane Marxist join the party of Ayn Rand and the Koch Brothers? Well, maybe that's just it. I'm not a sane Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. Not literally or figuratively. While I thoroughly believe that history is defined by cycles of class exploitation and that a lack of equality in the distribution of power over the means of production is the source of most if not all human oppression, I am very far from an orthodox Marxist, or an orthodox anything for that matter. I have no time for stagnant dogma and little patience for long-winded theory. I was turned on to Marx in the 7th grade because the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto filled me with the same kind of fire as Allen Ginsberg's Howl. The words exploded off the page with such cataclysmic fury and righteous indignation, condemning all the stupid little terrors from my Catholic childhood that my latent genderqueerness proved to be a lie. Jesus didn't want me for his sunbeam, but roaring fires were made of sparks like me.

But for the most part, like any true lumpenproletariat, I've always preferred cliff notes and history books to pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, and with the exception of a brief and painful dalliance with Third World state socialism, my Marxism has always been tempered by a devotion to anarchism, making it downright libertarian in nature. I've always preferred the Sorelian and Luxemburgist schools of thought, the ideas championed by Friedrich Engels after Karl's death with his daughter Eleanor and dear Mr. William Morris of the Socialist League, that crazy notion that the state itself is the fucking problem, that working people don't need wonky professors or vanguard parties or bloated bureaucracies to free themselves from the chains of class oppression. In fact the thing that finally pushed me over the edge from libertarian Marxist to Marxist Libertarian was the sobering realization that the state itself, any state at all, regardless of intention, is simply another class hierarchy in red clothing.

I came to this conclusion after watching the painful implosion of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. In spite of everything he did and everything he sacrificed, in spite of doing everything right and revolutionary and democratic and constitutional, Hugo Chavez couldn't prevent his nation from becoming another managerial thug state, much like the one he replaced. Once Hugo died under mysteriously abrupt circumstances, it took his Dengist successor, Nicholas Maduro, and and his Yanqui antagonists less than a year to tear the whole thing down in ribbons. Everything that is, but the favela collectives that predated the Bolivarian government and inspired Chavez to embrace democracy in the first place. These councils didn't require a state to be constructed and they didn't require a state to survive. They are what Marxism is supposed to be about, and they help expose what I see as the philosophies greatest contradiction.

There is no such thing as a benevolent state. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, at least as it's commonly interpreted, as a temporary state in place to manage production while the rest of its institutions magically whither away, is an epic oxymoron. A state, any state, is by definition an institution of the ruling class. In fact, it's an institution that requires a ruling class to exist. A ruling class that serves as a group of people not held to the same standards as the proletariat they supposedly serve. If the poor have no right to steal, then how can the state justify taxation without holding its bureaucracy to a higher authority and a lower moral standard? And once this bureaucratic class tastes the fruits of this awesome power, how can it ever be trusted to give it back? All states ultimately exist largely to justify their own greedy existence. Thus for there ever to be any hope for a classless society, destroying the state must be priority number one, by any means necessary.

Is this going to happen through an election? Fuck no. But that doesn't mean that the electoral system can't be used to further a greater revolution. The number one function of the electoral system for true radicals against the state must be to delegitimize the state through its propaganda. This means getting as many votes as possible for the candidate whose platform represents the greatest threat to the state, especially its deadliest and most existential organ, the prison-warfare state. The only party that consistently threatens to gut these institutions at the federal level is the Libertarian Party, and after three cycles of lame-dick ex-Republican poseurs running their presidential tickets, they've finally nominated a truly libertarian candidate with Jo Jorgensen. With Ron Paul and Ralph Nader retired and Rand and Tulsi sold out, Jo is the loudest voice left against empire. Howie Hawkins and the Green Party talk a good game on the antiwar front but what they advocate isn't weakening the state itself but rather shifting its weight elsewhere. I guarantee that if by some miracle a Hawkins White House became a reality, the predators that run the war machine would simply change shape and devote themselves to hacking down Joshua trees and imprisoning the wrong kind of polluters for the Green New Deal. There's no room for half measures when it comes to reigning in the state or using electoral propaganda to shift the zeitgeist against it.

If the radical left in this country truly wants to retain its lethality at any level, it needs to radically rethink its methods. The priorities are all there; peace, equality, mutual aid. But relying on increased state power to achieve these goals is a fool's errand. Venezuela tried that. Now the Bolivarian Revolution sicks its troops on the barrio. Egalitarianism can only sustain itself from the ground up. We the proletariat need to build the voluntary communal institutions that can make this utopian dream a reality, through autonomous grass roots communes, syndicates, councils, guilds, and credit unions. The only thing the state can do for us is fuck off and die. A vote for Jo Jorgensen is a vote for that happy dagger. A vote for Howie Hawkins is just a vote for Bernie Sanders lite. More social democratic FDR progressivism. Another silly costume for the state to wear for Trick or Treat. Only a vote for Jo is a vote for Marx, and if Charles Koch wants to foot the bill for his own suicide then I'll gladly be Jack Kevorkian for Halloween, or at least Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Power to the People by John Lennon

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

*  Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by Nirvana

*  Come On Everybody by Sid Vicious

*  As Many Candles As Possible by the Mountain Goats

*  Young Adult Friction by Pains of Being Pure At Heart

*  Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash

*  Sweet Transvestite by Tim Curry

In loving memory of Andre Vltchek, a renegade communist muckraker who died too damn soon.

A Radical Alternative to Whiteness

Is it just me or do white people kind of suck lately? I mean more than usual. That's not racist, I use to be one. I sort of still am, I guess. More on that later. It kind of seems like white folk have fallen into two equally obnoxious sub-species. There's the White Alpha Douche, bitching like a 13 year old emo kid that he's the real victim because everybody else is playing the fucking victim card and that's his card. Then there's the equally tiresome Squishy White Apology Addict, who's just terribly terribly sorry about all the savagery his ancestors have dished out to minorities, but now he looks to the Noble Savages and Magical Negroes to show him how to walk and talk and censor people like me for not stepping in line. He's probably banning me again from Facebook as we speak for self-identifying as a tranny and patting himself on the back for being part of the solution. 

Both of these unbearable archetypes are offensively one dimensional and, lets face it, downright racist in their shallow world view. The first one blames all the world's woes on people of color, and the second relies completely on this same coalition of minorities to save him from his ancestral evil ways. Black folks have enough trouble getting home from the grocery store without getting shot full of ketamine and chucked in the back of a police cruiser without having to choose between smacking us or holding our hand. Why can't we just get our shit together? Well, believe it or not, it's not all our fault. Not exactly anyway.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, white people are a race without an ethnicity. These two words get switched around a lot, especially by cantankerous racial renegades like yours truly, but most sociologists essentially view ethnicity as some one's cultural heritage while race is merely the aesthetic nonsense that cops and porn producers fixate on, namely skin color. So we'll roll with that definition for this post. I don't think it should be controversial to say that race is silly bullshit that has sadly become deadly bullshit. But ethnicity is very important. It tells us where we've been and helps guide us to where we're going, like a Jungian compass, and white people, as a group, just don't have one. That's because white is not an ethnicity. It's merely a ludicrously broad and inherently globalist blanket race. A race that seems to thrive on the suffocation of ethnic individuality both from within and without its strict confines.

The concept of whiteness is a relatively recent one. The Oxford Dictionary puts it back somewhere in the late 1600s, which unironically was a time of great civil unrest in America's colonies. Before whiteness, everything was defined by traditional English nobility and Protestant Christian zealotry. Nobody identified as white and the only permanent slaves were those who refused to convert from their indigenous heathen ways to what empires had mangled Christianity into. There were indentured servants of every color, Black Africans, American Indians, Irishmen, and even English commoners, but as long as they assimilated to the violence of colonial order, they too could have a piece of that bloody pie. It wasn't altogether unusual to have a slave, even an African slave, work his way up to landowner status and own slaves of his own. (Women and gender non-conforming folk of any shade were still fucked though.)

This only changed when poor landless folk started to get pissed off with this predatory social arrangement and began to launch multi-ethnic rebellions against it. After they literally burned down Jamestown, the British Crown began to dread the very real possibility of losing their colonies to the unwashed masses. So they made the decision to divide us into two major groups, white and not-white. This way they could pay off the European peasantry with petty privileges and create a permanent slave class out of those who could easily be deemed outsiders among the pale skinned majority. This quickly turned into a booming industry at the turn of the 17th Century, with the violent export of Africans multiplying nearly tenfold. Even then, whiteness was still more of a class than a race. Most people in this country who now consider themselves white weren't when they first immigrated to the New World. Irish, Jewish, Polish, and Italian people all had to earn their privilege by losing their ethnicity and joining in on the institutional violence of white supremacy. This is why I become so furious when right wing imbeciles bitch about "White Genocide." White is genocide, not just to black, brown, and indigenous folk, but to all the unique European cultures that were annihilated in its melting pot.

Most modern day left-wing intellectuals are fully aware of this history and readily admit that whiteness is a violent class construct. But their analysis virtually grinds to a halt there, because the question of 'what now for white people?' is just too politically incorrect to be asked. Liberal America likes to pretend that ethnicity doesn't matter to anyone but people of color but it matters to everyone. Everyone needs a sense of belonging and cultural history. Without it, we're lost. This is why post-colonial societies like North America and Australia are so vain, vapid, and materialistic. The shrinking white majority has nothing but the empty trappings of vulture capitalism to cling too, and those privileged trappings are undeniably the fruit of a white supremacist culture that continues to drive our countries violently imperialist foreign policy. Americans only have cheap excess crap to binge on because the shithole countries have nothing, and for all its virtue signaling woke culture, the liberal left offers very little to address this problem or, not so coincidentally, the white question. According to the Ivy League arbiters of social justice, white people should just feel like shit and never stop apologizing, but this just isn't a viable solution, especially when you consider that many white people are getting railed just slightly softer than the people they're apologizing too.

The solution, ironically enough, can actually be provided by the example of Black people. You see, Black was the other manufactured global race. African people had their tribal cultures forcibly stripped from them, their languages, their gods, their everything. But instead of accepting their status as a permanent slave race, they resisted, often violently, and constructed a new ethnicity from a culture of resistance to imperialism. American Indians, Chicanos, and Queers followed suit. This is how I ceased to be white. I never felt anything resembling a sense of belonging in the community I was born into. Even before I realized that I was a genderqueer transwoman, I was always treated like something dangerous by other white people in my rural Pennsylvanian town. I was born an intruder. It wasn't until I came out of the closet and rejected many of the puritanical standards of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that I felt a sense of belonging that I had been thirsty for my whole life. Queer became my ethnicity, my shared history and culture, one built in defiance to whiteness and every petty thing it stood for. 

I believe that this is the solution to white supremacy. We need radical alternatives to whiteness, ones either built on pre-white European ethnicities like Irish, Welsh, German, or Scottish ancestry, or new ethnicities built in defiance to the colonialist order. Hillbillies, Rednecks, Cajuns, Italian Americans, and French Canadians have all been victims of colonialist class subjugation. Their privileges are just that, privileges, not rights. Trinkets and tokens of compliance to good white people, and with the empire drying up like a salt flat, they're beginning to rust. Well stop being good white people and embrace the renegade traditions of rural European Americans. Those same fucking Americans who joined their Black brothers and sisters in burning Jamestown to the fucking ground.

White people suck because being white people sucks. Lets ditch this honky drag and try on something a little more revolutionary.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones

*  Guilty of Being White by Minor Threat

*  Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Slip Away by Perfume Genius

*  Rock n Roll Nigger by Patti Smith

*  John Wayne Was a Nazi by MDC

*  Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

The Struggle for Bottom Unity in an Age of Division

"The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone."

-Karl Hess

“We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”

-Fred Hampton

Solidarity is a bitch when everyone who can afford a knife is slitting each other's throat. That's the nasty little limerick that keeps playing on repeat in my skull like a mantra as populist grassroots uprisings devolve into bitter proxy wars between roaming tribes of bitter proles, killing each other over which oligarch's name they have scrawled across their battle flags. Everyone wants to pick sides. Everyone is trolling for convenient scapegoats. I just see poor people killing poor people while two sick rich candidates arrange their corpses into clever platforms to stand on and promote more war from. The splintering of the George Floyd Uprisings into partisan turf warfare doesn't just rip up my already bleeding heart because I had so much hope for the revolutionary potential now being squandered. It kills me because I have people on both sides of these gorey shenanigans and they should both be on the same damn team. All poor people should be, regardless of race or even politics.

This philosophy, the crazy little idea that what defines the revolutionary struggle for a better world isn't about who's on the left or the right but who's on the top or the bottom, is known as Bottom Unity. It's an oddly Marxian libertarian philosophy that serves as the cornerstone to my whole belief system. You see, dearest motherfuckers, I am what's known as a Panarchist, essentially an anarchist against adjectives. Even though I personally subscribe to a kind of Sorel-in-Drag Queer Syndicalism, I believe that the only way this whole anarchism gig works is if every tribe is free to construct their own private utopia, provided that it be completely voluntary and that it minds its own damn business vis a vis a non-aggression pact. In advocating this ideal I've become a strange sort of revolutionary ambassador, forming ties with weirdos across the political spectrum. This is how I've built an audience, I lovingly call my dearest motherfuckers, which stretches from Antifa to Boogaloo, and this is why the violence of the last several weeks sickens me so deeply.

When those fucking pigs lynched George Floyd at the height of a virulently unconstitutional socioeconomic lockdown, something deep inside the spirit of the American dispossessed snapped like tinder and an explosion of righteous fury swept across every corner of this deeply sick nation. While the conmen of the news class chased fires like chickens with their heads cut off, I saw something they were clearly too willfully blind to see in the blaze. I saw hope. I saw a country tired of being pushed and united in pushing back. I knew full well the odds of it lasting uncorrupted were stacked against me, but for one brilliant flaming moment, the revolutionary potential seemed endless. Then the charade of our fakakta election circus leaked in and tainted blacktop direct democracy with its fraudulent pseudo-representative cousin. And suddenly motherfuckers started shooting each other instead of aiming their righteous fury where it belonged at the police and the filthy fucking oligarchs they protect and serve. In classic bottom unity fashion, I'm not here to pick sides. Not because I'm some kind of genderfuck Gandhi but because you're all fucking guilty.

The Militia Movement might be guiltier than most. After all they're the motherfuckers breaking bread with the enemy. Libertarian gun culture has always had its quirks and bad actors but the shit has gotten ridiculous. Somehow an armed agrarian movement against any form of government regulation higher than a city council has been heinously perverted into a mob of bootlicking pigfuckers with the gag reflex of a bukkake porn starlet. Blue Lives Matter? Motherfucker Blue Lives shot unarmed women at Ruby Ridge and burned babies alive at Waco. Wake the fuck up. In post-Clinton Crime Bill America there is less separating your local heroes in the police from the feds than ever. I blame the influence of Trump. That race baiting huckster hijacked right wing populism and made you all dependent pussies bowing to his cheesy cult of personality.

Militia folk need to recall their Sovereign Citizen roots and act a little bit more like Ammon Bundy, the Malheur raider who has come out in support of Black Lives Matter and defunding the police from the standpoint of a good old boy who doesn't want the government's jackboot on anyone's neck. Defending small business is one thing. I've got no beef with rooftop Koreans. But a bunch of bougie brats with paintball guns from the burbs cruising in pick-up trucks to someone else's city to troll shell-shocked protestors is just hillbilly colonialism. Stop kissing the government's ass and begging city slickers to shoot you for it. This ain't what Karl Hess fought for. If that motherfucker could build bridges between the Old Right and the New Left by sharing a spliff with the Weather fucking Underground then you should be able to shout 'Black Lives Matter!' with a mouth full of chaw and an AR cradled in your arms.

This doesn't mean BLM gets off easy, though I may have to temper my vitriol a bit to adjust to the fact that I'm a Queer Celt addressing people of color. I don't think any sane sentient creature can argue with the logic that all lives can't matter until Black lives matter, but I do feel like many members of the movement along with their pale faced allies have lost site in the heat of the rhetoric of the fact that a lot of other lives are in the crosshairs of our homicidal police state too. Brown lives, red lives, trans lives and yes even some white lives. If you're a poor person in this country then your life is expendable. The American police system was designed to protect and serve property and property owners. For centuries this meant straight white cis-men and that's how white supremacy got grandfathered in to our classist system as an institutional menace. You can't fight a class war without fighting white supremacy, but you also can't fight white supremacy without fighting a class war. The two have become interchangeable.

So while yes, Black lives matter, you could just as accurately say poor lives matter. BLM matters because Black people have every right to fight for their own but even they could benefit a hell of a lot more from solidarity than patronage. That means building a network of allies that includes some of those rednecks with ARs. The trailer park will always share far more common ground with the projects than Capitol Hill. Fred Hampton realized this and lead the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party to form a strategic armed alliance with William "Preacherman" Fesperman's Young Patriots Organization, a radical coalition of hillbilly migrant workers from Appalachia who proudly displayed rebel flags on their jean jackets. You think Hampton was down with that George Wallace horseshit? Fuck no. But Fred Hampton, just like Karl Hess and Ammon Bundy, was down with Bottom Unity.

The chaos erupting in the streets has been a long time coming. Empires don't grow peacefully and they don't collapse peacefully either. But the only way poor people are gonna ride this out and build a better world on the ashes is to stop slitting throats and start practicing solidarity. It ain't easy. The system put a lot of time and money into traumatizing poor people of every color and pitting us against each other. But it's never too late to make things right. Libertarians and leftists need to let bygones be bygones and join forces to the settle the score with the vile forces of the American Empire, once and for all. Lets get together, brothers and sisters, and make some motherfucking history by making these motherfuckers history. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

* Garbageman by the Cramps

* (un)Knowing by Young Jesus

* We Can Work It Out by the Beatles

* Sometimes Always by The Jesus & Mary Chain and Hope Sandoval

* Life On Mars by David Bowie

* Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine

* Ruff Ryders Anthem by DMX

* All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem

* Instant Karma by John Lennon

* I Against I by Bad Brains

The Lonesome Death of the Liberal Social Justice Warrior

 Joseph Biden killed the liberal social justice warrior with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, and blue lives were called in to matter, and his weapon took from him, as they rode him in custody down towards the White House, and booked Joseph Biden for Democratic nominee for president of these United States of Hysteria. But you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for your tears.

Yes, dearest motherfuckers, we stand here today to pay our respects to a pain in the ass. For with the nomination and all too likely election of one Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that once thriving moral upstart known as the white liberal social justice warrior is as good as dead, bleeding out from cane related injuries on the white marble floor of Eva Longoria's palatial Beverley Hills mansion, murdered in an act of domestic violence by her own racist party for reasons as tragic as they were inevitable. Her memory and the rhetoric of her cause live on in the cruel minstrel shows of her killers as they dress up the same neoliberal policies in the clothing of a movement that was supposed to end them.

The social justice warrior, for whatever it was worth, was much more than a collection of rude if often accurate stereotypes. The white upper-middle class progressive liberal arts student, downwardly mobile do to predatory loans, and committed to everybody getting along or else she'd tell the dean on you, was essentially the future of the Democratic Party. Much like the hippies of yore, the SJW represented a new spirit for a new liberal America, and as condescending as she could be, she really wasn't all that bad. She wanted many of same things I do and that I suspect many of you, my dearest motherfuckers, do as well. An end to the incestuous marriage of government and the predator class of corporate lobbyists who pull it's strings. Equality for all minorities big and small, Black and brown, Queer and straight. And an end to the casual daily obscenities of systemic racism and rape culture. My only real beef with the bitch was her shifty priorities. She stole the left's attention away from the unspeakable atrocities and existential threat of the war machine and placed it gently in a box of genteel political correctness that could fit easily in any polished war criminals Prius.

There was a time when I actually thought this might just be the future of our dear empire. With the rise of Bernie Sanders, MeToo, and Black Lives Matter in an era of Trump hysteria, I figured the Clintonian Democratic machine would finally concede and embrace many of the squishy social democratic tendencies of modern day Europe, so long as they were still aloud to blow up the Third World and seek nuclear oblivion with Russia. In fact it seemed like the perfect cover. Few people would see a storm trooper coming in Birkenstocks and a dashiki. Every drone strike would be like Helter Skelter all over again. It seemed to me like a disturbingly brilliant way to sell forever war to sensitive millennials, but I underestimated the absolutely stupid greed and brazen pig headedness of the neoliberal class which has reigned supreme in the Democratic Party since the Clintons barnstormed the bitch in the early Nineties.

The Democrats selection of candidates for the 2020 ticket made this abundantly clear even to many dreamy eyed SJW's. The nomination of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris throttled the white progressive do-gooder agenda with three swift blows of old Joe's cane, one to the so called Bernie Sanders Revolution, one to the MeToo Movement, and one to Black Lives Matter, which might be the only movement gritty enough to survive its wounds without the gauze of neoliberal assimilation.

The Sanders Revolution was an inside job from the drop. A do-nothing senator from the whitest state in America, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has long served the roll as the Clinton Parties Red Diaper Mascot, an independent in name only who the party could drag out from time to time to preserve what remained of it's Sixties counterculture cache. While Bernie talked big on pie-in-the-sky social welfare programs, he dutifully and quite vocally supported every war crime ever committed by a Democratic administration and consistently voted for the bloated bipartisan defense bills that raided our GDP of the kind of tax revenue necessary to achieve Bernie-grade Scandinavianization. To put it frankly, Bernie Sanders is little more than our military industrial complexes token social democratic stooge, and his so-called Revolution seeks to serve those same masters by serving up the wayward SJW masses to the cannibals in the Clinton-Biden wing of the party. Bernie made it painfully clear from the beginning that he had every intention of blindly backing the party nominee and delivering his flock up to the slaughter, but his sheep went rabid.

So called Bernie Bros took the word revolution seriously and fought the blatantly corporate campaigns of Hillary and Biden with a ferocity that made their own candidate look like an anemic kitten by comparison. The party got scared. One of Hillary's carefully constructed color revolutions had finally come back to bite her in the ass. And so the Democrats rigged not one, but two primary elections against their strongest candidate, using every weapon at their disposal, from the kind of brazen voter suppression they periodically (and rightfully) cane the Republicans for engaging in to outright character assassination coordinated by the parties pseudo-neutral central intelligentsia. The mainstream media jumped in too, proving that it wasn't so much liberal as neoliberal in slant. They gave Bernie less coverage than Vermin Supreme even when he was the presumptive nominee, and then slimed him left and right when he nearly decapitated Biden in the early primaries. The truth is the Democrats never really feared Bernie. He remains a compliant booster for his supposed enemies in the party to this day. The DNC feared the company Bernie kept. Fiery SJW sweethearts like the Muslim half of the Squad who turned criticism of holy Israel mainstream and lacked the kneejerk compliance of their geriatric master. So their revolution was sabotaged with a swing of Biden's cane. 

The MeToo movement served the Democrats quite well during the rise of Trump. After all, the Orange Creep and everyone he played golf with appeared to be a rapist of one kind or another. This feminist movement really showed its fangs during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and quickly became a force to be reckoned with. In hindsight, they should have seen the screwjob coming when their parties leadership gave that teenage date rapist a lifetime pass to the Supreme Court. The moment the totally valid accusations of Tara Reade surfaced against her former employer, Joe Biden, MeToo was rapidly gutted from the inside out. Vocal members of the movement suddenly fell silent while some of its most visible supporters like Alissa Milano rallied around their favorite accused rapist. Even MeToo's founder, Tarana Burke, declared that there was at least one woman she didn't believe. The same mainstream press that had boisterously championed the movement as the future of gender relations just weeks earlier rapidly resorted to Fox News-like tactics of character assassination against Reade, calling every single sin from her past into question including her mental health and social reputation. By Milwaukee, MeToo had been erased from the conversation completely. Only Rose McGowan remained beneath Biden's cane.

As for Black Lives Matter, another movement that has exploded well beyond the intentions of its handlers in the non-profit industrial complex, the very existence of the Biden/Harris ticket and the movements refusal to hold it to the same scrutiny as Trump will be its downfall unless it publicly divorces itself from America's other white supremacist party, but their fickle white liberal social justice warrior allies appear to already be whipped into submission by the empty spectacle of the first Black female VP. This offensively fetishistic infatuation with a glorified gulag warden and the tolerance afforded to a lifelong servant of carceral capitalism like Biden confounds and infuriates me. Joe Biden is one of the architects of the Clinton Crime Bill, that sickening gift to the prison industrial complex that has sent Black lives back to the status of Jim Crow, and Kamala Harris was one of the many vain psychopathic attorneys who used this apartheid state to build a career on the battered bones and torn flesh of the people of color she pretends to represent. If BLM is allowed to be appropriated like SJW then welcome to NWO, where even Black lives rep white power.

As bitter as I am about these movements and there flippant hypocrisy, I don't want to be right about this. I would much rather have those politically correct virtue signalers remain a pain in my ass on the streets than see them become neutered lapdogs of the 1 percent. At least in the direct democracy of the streets they can be a pain in powerful's ass too. But hope seems to be in short supply these days and I have to sing it like I see it, even when the lyrics burn. The SJW, at least as a force anything authentic, is as good as dead, and even a sour bitch like me has to shed a tear.

The liberal social justice warrior was a pale servant of the ghetto, she was much younger than me and gave birth to several movements, who carried the signs and took to the streets and never once to the Oval Office and didn't even talk to the lobbyists there and emptied the hash from the hash pipes on a whole other level, got killed by a blow lay slain by a cane that sailed through the air and came down through the room, doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle, and she never did nothing to threaten Joseph Biden. But all you dearest motherfuckers who philosophize, disgrace, and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for your tears. Put that rag in a bottle filled with gasoline and when you shout Black lives matter, show these cunts what you mean.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

*  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll by Bob Dylan

*  Graceland Too by Phoebe Bridgers

*  All Flowers In Time Bend Towards the Sun by Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser

*  Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

*  Like a Rolling Stone by the Drive-By Truckers

*  Sour Girl by Stone Temple Pilots

*  Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan