Once upon a time, somewhere over the rainbow, being Queer was dangerous. We were vile leather-clad degenerates, strutting down the cracked streets of neon drenched red light districts, lipstick smeared, basted in glitter, our self-manicured claws sharper than knives, our foul tongues sharper than claws, posing, posturing, begging the devil for a bad time.
We were outlaws, pirates sailing the high deserts in long stolen Cadillacs, painting our faces like savages and pitching our battered rainbow tepees on the banks of the Salton Sea, smoking peace-pipes loaded with hash, reefer, semen, tobacco, opium, ludes, kitten heels and moldy crumbled make-up. We got so high, we fucked so hard, for so long, our tantric screams of ecstasy bouncing off the canyon walls and swelling the cul-de-sacs of the recently robbed rich, depriving them of the sleep they so desperately needed to fulfill their wretched obligations as some bloated dictator's greatest generation, a pill-popping silent majority who couldn't swallow a barbiturate big enough to free them from the knowledge that the moaning sodomites who ransacked their garages were their bastard kin.
We were bomb-throwing revolutionaries, marching with Panthers, torching cop cars, hurling our diseased corpses upon the machines of powerful men all but deaf to anything but the sound of our shattered bones clogging the guts of their federally funded sports utility vehicles. We were Billy Burroughs, Miss Major, Hakim Bey, Allen Ginsberg, John Waters, Leslie Feinberg, Harry Hay, Paul Goodman, Gore Vidal, Larry Kramer. We were dykes, fags, trannies, perverts, lunatics, sodomites, carpet munchers, cocksuckers, radical faeries, flaming fucking queens. We were dangerous. We were beautiful. We were Queer.
Not that it was all unshaved pussy and roses. We also got clubbed to death by roll crazy fascist pigs and lynched behind the pickup trucks of neckless bullet-headed closet queens, deeply threatened by the chaos of our hard won sexual liberation. We were raped and castrated for pissing in the wrong way in the right places or vice versa. We had our childhoods excavated, evacuated, eviscerated, annihilated, incinerated, hooked up to the jumper cables of a mincing cabal of priests, cops, shrinks, parents, teachers, scions of adulthood who used every weapon at their disposal to mutilate us in their own barbaric image of "Normal."
We lost whole generations of brothers, sisters, lovers, fuckers, heroes, villains, magnificent creatures too divine to reproduce, to a plague the state couldn't be bothered to even acknowledge, a veritable holocaust of derelict medical neglect. Millions gone, vanished, erased. But all these horrors pale in comparison to the most grievous disease to ever infect the American Faggot, the disease of assimilation, invisibility, ceasing to exist, melting into the masses who we long raged so valiantly against. Much like today's Zionists, we have braved a Third Reich only to take our place in the Fourth. Today, Queer people, my people, have become an integral part of the very system that conspired to destroy us only decades ago.
I have seen the finest minds of my generation destroyed by political correctness, plump, sane and tastefully dressed. Today's queer is polite. Today's queer is well behaved. Today's queer is neat and tidy and commercially viable, that foul beast known as the law-abiding citizen. Today's queer votes Democrat and quivers at the feet of the police state, begging for safety, begging for censorship, begging for shelter beneath the cathedral ceilings of elite institutions which suddenly find us so novel. Today's queer is the spayed and neutered poodle of the First World. Something to be paraded about and celebrated for one month a year as a symbol of western benevolence. "Look how fine we treat our parasites!" They beam glowingly to the brown savages in desperate need of cultural correction. We are safe. We are boring. We are "Normal." The adults have finally succeeded in our correction. We aren't even queer anymore. We are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, a divided alphabet of carefully assimilated zoo creatures. We are Pete Buttigieg, Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyler Perry. I am lost. I am sick. These are not my people, I tell myself.
Maybe I'm just stranger than the average millennial or perhaps simply too old for my young age. My view of Queer rights, of what it even means to be Queer, seems to come from a different era. I may be a millennial but I spent the better part of my hermetic early twenties living through books on Kwame Ture and Russell Means and Abbie Hoffman. Tomes on those halcyon days of rage in the Sixties and Seventies when anything was possible through barrel of a gun. During my self-imposed agoraphobic isolation, I found myself between those pages. The way I see it, Queer is not some posh lifestyle fit for reality TV, but a race unto itself. A stateless, anti-colonial race like the Chicanos or the Black Power Movement. A race in need of self-emancipation and liberation rather than belonging or equality.
There was a time, many years ago, when Queer people were separated across a thousand races. Every tribe from the British Isles to the Alaskan Tundra retained a respectful place of honor in their communities for those of us who could not or would not conform to the typical biological order of reproduction and gender performance. We were raised to be pillars of our tribes; priests, shaman, warriors, teachers and caregivers. That time ended with the Roman-ization of Christianity and the patriarchal creation of property. From that point on, we were purged from the ranks of our societies, burned at the preachers stake and fed alive to the conquistador's dogs. We were forced to build our own race in the hinterlands. We were a species reborn in the wild. Our culture was pagan, feral and free. Now that heterosexual conglomeration known as the white race wants us back. But some of us don't want to belong. Some of us would sooner remain pink niggers than become token members of the master race. Some of us have good memories. Some of us haven't forgotten the plagues and funeral pyres. And some of us want revenge.
My proposition to this break in the ranks among my people is this; Being gay or trans is not a choice. It's a variation that exists in nature. If some of my people wish to return to the often bastardized versions of our former tribes, then let them. That's their choice and I genuinely wish them well. They can be LGBT in the white man's world. However, being LGBT may not be a choice but I say being Queer is. Being Queer isn't simply fucking and performing differently. Being Queer is a conscious rejection of white western colonial society. It is a rejection of all things "Normal." It is a rejection of puritanical patriarchy. It is a rejection of fitting in. It is a rejection of passing for male or female. It is a rejection of monogamy and traditional marriage. It is a rejection of both church and state. It is a rejection of the police-warfare state and all the drafts and mandatory minimums which fill it's belly with the flesh of both our children and their enemies alike. It is a rejection of those imperial dugouts called embassies being festooned with our flags while they oppress our brothers and sisters in the Third World. It is a rejection of the First World and the colonialist mindset it cultivates. And perhaps above all else, it is a rejection of that modern genre of violence called progress.
On this the eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Revolt at Stonewall, I call on us proud few undomesticated faggots who still march in the footsteps of those partisans to redeclare our independence from the straight world and its shallow ethnic borders and create a race of our own built upon our feral renegade culture of resistance. This June, I say we declare Queer to be our race and revolution to be our creed. It's high time to light that fire again. The only power we need is Queer power, because pride just isn't enough.
Peace, Love, Empathy & Solidarity- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats
* Been a Son by Nirvana
* Can You Read My Mind by Boygenius
* All the Young Dudes by David Bowie
* Drowners by Suede
* Trash by New York Dolls
* I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys
* Rockstar by Hole
* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski
* Burn Baby by L7
* Freak Scene by Dinosaur Jr.
* Debaser by the Pixies
* Home by David Byrne & Brian Eno
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Sunday, June 16, 2019
The Spreading Antifa Virus
There's a storm brewing, dearest motherfuckers, or so I'm told. And I'm not talking about climate change. The wild wild world of the world wide web is ablaze with rumors, dark rumors, rumors told of a Fourth Reich, more than seventy years since the last one ran out of gas in the mucklands of Stalingrad. Fash is back and this time it's coming through the left door. There are reams of hysterical chatter across the mucklands of social media speaking of a diabolical collaboration between the far right and the far left. From Julian Assange robbing Hillary of her throne for Donald Trump, to Steve Bannon and George Galloway exchanging bro-hugs at a Eurasianist summit in Kazakhstan, to Glenn Greenwald getting chummy with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. It's a deep, dark, twisted, incestuous collaboration built on a shared comradery among crypto-Baathist Russophiles goosestepping their way to overthrowing the blessed post-war order of the Atlanticist brand of globalism we all know and love. And naturally that dastardly Kremlin puppet master, Vladimir Putin, is behind it all with his army of trolls and bots and other assorted shadow people. It's a dementedly elaborate conspiracy to lynch liberal democracy and here's the Shyamalan twist, apparently I'm the token tranny holding the noose.
For those of you who are less than familiar with my jagged, lip-smacking brand of drag queen satire, that first paragraph was a joke and so is this whole tired conspiracy theory of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Some call it Horseshoe Theory, some call it the Red-Brown or the Red-Green-Brown Alliance (Just add Islamaphobia!), but that old feverish canard about a grand plot by the fascist right to infiltrate the far-left or vice versa has long been a favorite scare tactic of neoliberal centrists seeking to keep dissidents separated across their manufactured left-right divide. The desired result of this campaign is to keep conservatives and leftists too frightened of "infiltrators" to think outside of the ideological box while also keeping them dependent on the radical center to protect them from the ominous "other". Nothing scares the establishment more than working class unity, so the establishment turns this unity into a Polanskiesque horror story. Any leftist open to working with the right (like myself) is in danger of being linked to the worst excesses of white nationalism, while any conservative who refuses to spit on a hippie is blackballed as a dreaded National Bolshevik.
There is nothing new about this divide and conquer school of neoliberal strategy. I would expect it coming from those paranoid nitwits at MSNBC or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The scary thing about this latest wave of Horseshoe hysteria is that it appears to be infecting the radical left, thanks largely to the malign influence of Antifa. Originally founded as a loose collection of left-wing punks tired of getting curb-stomped by neo-Nazi skinheads, Antifa has devolved into an uptight squadron of watered down social anarchists who mostly busy themselves flexing their muscles and beating the fucking shit out of their peers in toxic masculinity in the alt-right. They define themselves as anti-fascists but, much like socialism, everyone seems to have a different definition of what fascism even is. Antifa seems to think it covers everything that offends their suburban, upper-middle-class sensibilities. Personally, speaking as someone who's always despised fascism, I see it as an attempt by the wealthy upper-class to hijack working-class populist rhetoric in order to use pissed off poor people to protect the endangered status quo that enslaves them.
The sick fucking thing is this seems to be precisely what Antifa has become devoted to. This country is way too goddamn complex for a single left-wing revolution to truly succeed. You will never see a communist Utah anymore than you can hope to expect a fundamentalist Vermont. Demanding Antifa's level of ideological purity is the surest way to insure that a truly stateless revolution is damned to certain failure. Historically speaking, what great American anarchist could ever pass Antifa's Hoity-toity purity test. Could Emma Goldman with her moral opposition to abortion. Or Edward Abbey with his environmental concerns regarding immigration. How about the great Alexander Cockburn himself who spent the last years of his life writing columns for that old-right flagship, Chronicles. Anarchy has always been about diversity and individualism because humanity itself is defined by diversity and individualism. The only way we will ever be able to conquer the state is if we provide stateless opportunities that can appeal to everyone, not just a handful of skateboarding hipsters on the coasts.
If Antifa has its way, anarchism will die a slow miserable death as a bourgeois fad or, even worse, become assimilated into the increasingly authoritarian status quo of the neoliberal west. This is a fate far more dire than the risk posed by largely-mythic nazbols, tankies and sputnik leftists in online chatrooms. More and more, everyday, Antifa is beginning to resemble the Red Guards, Mao's censorious and largely stateless student shock troops. If this growing virus of leftist paranoia continues to spread, we could be looking at a population that doesn't even require the state to be oppressed, a stateless police state. This is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares and this is one left-wing anarchist who will not sit idly by and watch it happen. I say anarchy is for everyone who rejects the state and embraces voluntary liberty, regardless of whether your adjective of choice is national or communist, syndicalist or capitalist. If that makes me a token fascist faggot, then so be it. Anything beats being a self-censoring, crypto-fascist, Antifa brat. And if that rubs you wrong, dearest motherfuckers, you can pucker up and kiss the queerest part of my fat tranny ass. I'm through stepping on eggshells and I'm not here to please you. Come and get me.
Peace, Love & Solidarity- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus
* White Riot by the Clash
* Hologram by Tacocat
* Attitude by the Misfits
* Flag Pole Sitta by Harvey Danger
* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Pinhead by the Ramones
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop
For those of you who are less than familiar with my jagged, lip-smacking brand of drag queen satire, that first paragraph was a joke and so is this whole tired conspiracy theory of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Some call it Horseshoe Theory, some call it the Red-Brown or the Red-Green-Brown Alliance (Just add Islamaphobia!), but that old feverish canard about a grand plot by the fascist right to infiltrate the far-left or vice versa has long been a favorite scare tactic of neoliberal centrists seeking to keep dissidents separated across their manufactured left-right divide. The desired result of this campaign is to keep conservatives and leftists too frightened of "infiltrators" to think outside of the ideological box while also keeping them dependent on the radical center to protect them from the ominous "other". Nothing scares the establishment more than working class unity, so the establishment turns this unity into a Polanskiesque horror story. Any leftist open to working with the right (like myself) is in danger of being linked to the worst excesses of white nationalism, while any conservative who refuses to spit on a hippie is blackballed as a dreaded National Bolshevik.
There is nothing new about this divide and conquer school of neoliberal strategy. I would expect it coming from those paranoid nitwits at MSNBC or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The scary thing about this latest wave of Horseshoe hysteria is that it appears to be infecting the radical left, thanks largely to the malign influence of Antifa. Originally founded as a loose collection of left-wing punks tired of getting curb-stomped by neo-Nazi skinheads, Antifa has devolved into an uptight squadron of watered down social anarchists who mostly busy themselves flexing their muscles and beating the fucking shit out of their peers in toxic masculinity in the alt-right. They define themselves as anti-fascists but, much like socialism, everyone seems to have a different definition of what fascism even is. Antifa seems to think it covers everything that offends their suburban, upper-middle-class sensibilities. Personally, speaking as someone who's always despised fascism, I see it as an attempt by the wealthy upper-class to hijack working-class populist rhetoric in order to use pissed off poor people to protect the endangered status quo that enslaves them.
The sick fucking thing is this seems to be precisely what Antifa has become devoted to. This country is way too goddamn complex for a single left-wing revolution to truly succeed. You will never see a communist Utah anymore than you can hope to expect a fundamentalist Vermont. Demanding Antifa's level of ideological purity is the surest way to insure that a truly stateless revolution is damned to certain failure. Historically speaking, what great American anarchist could ever pass Antifa's Hoity-toity purity test. Could Emma Goldman with her moral opposition to abortion. Or Edward Abbey with his environmental concerns regarding immigration. How about the great Alexander Cockburn himself who spent the last years of his life writing columns for that old-right flagship, Chronicles. Anarchy has always been about diversity and individualism because humanity itself is defined by diversity and individualism. The only way we will ever be able to conquer the state is if we provide stateless opportunities that can appeal to everyone, not just a handful of skateboarding hipsters on the coasts.
If Antifa has its way, anarchism will die a slow miserable death as a bourgeois fad or, even worse, become assimilated into the increasingly authoritarian status quo of the neoliberal west. This is a fate far more dire than the risk posed by largely-mythic nazbols, tankies and sputnik leftists in online chatrooms. More and more, everyday, Antifa is beginning to resemble the Red Guards, Mao's censorious and largely stateless student shock troops. If this growing virus of leftist paranoia continues to spread, we could be looking at a population that doesn't even require the state to be oppressed, a stateless police state. This is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares and this is one left-wing anarchist who will not sit idly by and watch it happen. I say anarchy is for everyone who rejects the state and embraces voluntary liberty, regardless of whether your adjective of choice is national or communist, syndicalist or capitalist. If that makes me a token fascist faggot, then so be it. Anything beats being a self-censoring, crypto-fascist, Antifa brat. And if that rubs you wrong, dearest motherfuckers, you can pucker up and kiss the queerest part of my fat tranny ass. I'm through stepping on eggshells and I'm not here to please you. Come and get me.
Peace, Love & Solidarity- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus
* White Riot by the Clash
* Hologram by Tacocat
* Attitude by the Misfits
* Flag Pole Sitta by Harvey Danger
* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Pinhead by the Ramones
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Hollywood, Cinema, Pornography & Propaganda
It's often said that there is a fine line between art and pornography, and this is true, but few people take the time to seriously contemplate where that line is. As a fan of both art and pornography, not to mention sociology, I have probably spent too much time on the subject. Most people view the dividing line between these two mediums to be the actions of its subjects, to put it bluntly, people fucking. But some of my favorite art films include graphic scenes of passionate and unsimulated coitus. And some of my favorite genres of pornography involve acts that many wouldn't even consider to be sexual. No, the line between art and pornography is not defined by its subject matter but rather by its intent. The intent of art is to provoke and engage the audience intellectually. The intent of pornography is to indulge and engage the audience reactively.
Unlike far too many other feminists, I have no problem with pornography in and of itself, particularly if it involves Asian lesbians with small feet and plenty of rope, but there are forms of pornography that have nothing to do with natural human sexuality in all its perverted diversity. Propaganda would probably be my least favorite genre of pornography and this hardcore smut plays on cable news 24/7 when any child could be flipping through the channels. Propaganda is the ultimate form of malignant pornography. It is the complete antithesis of art, designed for the express purpose of keeping people reacting by making sure they have no time to think. The audience is blitzed with an explosive barrage of suggestions, largely parroted from the satanic conglomeration of big government and big business commonly referred to by woke freaks like me as the Establishment. "Fear! Fear! Be afraid! Be afraid! Vote! Buy! Vote! Attack Iran! Squirrels on jet skies! Lupus fun run! Drone strike! MONEY SHOT! Have you attacked Iran yet?" Some pretty sick shit. Ted Turner makes Bob Guccione look like Captain Kangaroo.
But while cable news may make the sickest porn in the biz, they don't sling the most. That foul distinction belongs to Hollywood, a bottomless tar pit of brain-dead smut. I love cinema, I have since watching Bonnie & Clyde on Turner Classic Movies as a curious genderless tyke, but it is because I love cinema that I have grown to despise those perverts in Tinsel Town. Hollywood is the mortal enemy of any true cinephile because it reduces the art form into an intellectually masturbatory industry. And Summer is their jiz streaked Bacchanalia of mass banality, when big studio vampires lure wayward rubes to the cool shadows of the theater where they suck their wallets dry.
People in this country hate to talk about movies with me because I hate all their beloved stupid fucking movies with a furious passion that idiots tend to find off-putting. I hate the pandering nostalgia porn of Pixar, where computer generated mascots assault peoples clitoral-sensitive funny-bones with an endless stream of random pointless references like Robin Williams on a crystal methamphetamine bender. I hate the goopy inspiration porn of high-handed historical hagiographies, designed to glorify the state as a bastion of multicultural perseverance in order to sell the American Dream like a snuff film to the jaded foreigners on the festival circuit."You see, Frenchy, America ain't so bad. We got saucy colored gals making our Nazi rockets!"
I hate the endless assembly line of instantly forgettable remakes, cheesier than any Skinemax parody and twice as stupid, often advertised as progress just because they replaced all the main characters with this weeks favorite token minority. "Stay tuned for Paul Feig's gutless remake of The Breakfast Club with all the leads... Played by... Hermaphrodites with Marfan Syndrome?! Be there!!!" And I absolutely fucking despise with every cell in my chronically misgendered corpse that never ending assembly line of moronic blockbuster schlock that every errant asshole and their cousin adores called Marvel Studios. The one dimensional superheroes. The black and white moralism. The empty social justice pandering. The gratuitous abuse of green screen special effects. The thinly veiled appeal to hyper-jingoistic do-gooder interventionism. I fucking hate it all. Superheroes have long been the bane of good comic books, now they threaten to take Hollywood to new depths of pornographic sleaze as they turn the once moribund industry into a cultural juggernaut defacing the globe with American "values". The basic premise of nearly every one of these cinematic abortions is identically simplistic; Here's your fucking shit, now eat it. And eat it they do, by the boatload. I only wish Stan Lee was still alive so he could die twice.
This has long been the problem with American Cinema. People in this country view films as being roller coaster rides. They hand some toothless carny a sweaty wad of cash and get their cheap thrills for about 90 minutes then forget what the saw on the way home. And sometimes that's OK, but to reduce an entire medium to mental masturbation sinfully underestimates the revolutionary power of cinema. Not to sound like a snob, but Europe still seems like the one place that really gets this on an above marginal level. People in Italy and France go to theaters to think and be challenged, to be provoked, and in a society so desensitized by constant war, plague and pestilence, it takes a lot of cinematic dynamite to provoke even basic empathy. That's why a new wave of European directors have taken to resurrecting Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, a philosophy that preaches that the only way to drain the collective abscesses of a crumbling society is to assault audiences dulled senses with provocative imagery and tap into the subconscious root of their misery.
In this context, the director must not simply be an artist. They must be a terrorist, awakening the privileged to the suffering that will be returned to them by the people that their wealth oppresses if they fail to wake from their stupor. These auteurs of Europe's so called new wave of extremity have turned the propaganda of modern cinema into a new form of what the old anarchists referred to as propaganda of the deed, using their Kalashnikov cameras to blitz the cinema with the power of uncensored imagination, raw, naked, dripping with blood. They use the once exploitative tropes of horror and eroticism to provoke philosophical debates on things even most Europeans would prefer to ignore.
As I alluded to above, the English speaking world has derisively called this new wave 'Extreme Cinema'. They even find the gal to accuse it's directors, terrifying visual Blanquists like Lars Von Trier, Gaspar Noe and Micheal Haneke, of being the real pornographers for the simple fact that they aren't afraid to use the weapon of untethered sexuality to get their point across. We have witnessed similar knee-jerk reactions to nearly every significant avante-garde movement of the last century, from the Dadaists to the Vienna Actionists. The western press doesn't want you to expose yourself to the masochistic lessons that only radicals dare to teach. They fear, as they always have, that you might run the risk of being awakened from your shackled slumber in this suburban purgatory capitalism has erected around us. But I implore you to ignore their breathless warnings, save your time, save your money or what's left of it, skip the latest Avengers monstrosity, stay home and download something to challenge yourself, like Gaspar Noe's latest intoxicating mirage, Climax, or the critic-eviscerating menace that is Mr. Von Trier's The House That Jack Built. Prepare to be offended but resist the temptation to simply react. This is not Hollywood pornography. This is art. This is cinema. It's supposed to hurt a little, but trust me, dearest motherfuckers, it's worth the price of admission.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Other movies to watch out for.
-Irreversible (2002) by Gaspar Noe
-Man Bites Dog (1992) by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel & Benoit Poelvoorde
-Funny Games (1997) by Micheal Haneke
-Martyrs (2008) by Pascal Laugier
-Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) by Abdellatif Kechiche
-Holy Motors (2012) by Leos Carax
-The Piano Teacher (2001) by Micheal Haneke
-Inside (2007) by Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo
-Antichrist (2009) by Lars Von Trier
-Raw (2016) by Julia Ducournau
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Love to Hate You by Erasure
* Closer by Nine Inch Nails
* Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
* My Monkey by Marilyn Manson
* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth
* Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
* Shitty Ballet by Bleached
* Debaser by the Pixies
* Raping a Slave by Swans
Unlike far too many other feminists, I have no problem with pornography in and of itself, particularly if it involves Asian lesbians with small feet and plenty of rope, but there are forms of pornography that have nothing to do with natural human sexuality in all its perverted diversity. Propaganda would probably be my least favorite genre of pornography and this hardcore smut plays on cable news 24/7 when any child could be flipping through the channels. Propaganda is the ultimate form of malignant pornography. It is the complete antithesis of art, designed for the express purpose of keeping people reacting by making sure they have no time to think. The audience is blitzed with an explosive barrage of suggestions, largely parroted from the satanic conglomeration of big government and big business commonly referred to by woke freaks like me as the Establishment. "Fear! Fear! Be afraid! Be afraid! Vote! Buy! Vote! Attack Iran! Squirrels on jet skies! Lupus fun run! Drone strike! MONEY SHOT! Have you attacked Iran yet?" Some pretty sick shit. Ted Turner makes Bob Guccione look like Captain Kangaroo.
But while cable news may make the sickest porn in the biz, they don't sling the most. That foul distinction belongs to Hollywood, a bottomless tar pit of brain-dead smut. I love cinema, I have since watching Bonnie & Clyde on Turner Classic Movies as a curious genderless tyke, but it is because I love cinema that I have grown to despise those perverts in Tinsel Town. Hollywood is the mortal enemy of any true cinephile because it reduces the art form into an intellectually masturbatory industry. And Summer is their jiz streaked Bacchanalia of mass banality, when big studio vampires lure wayward rubes to the cool shadows of the theater where they suck their wallets dry.
People in this country hate to talk about movies with me because I hate all their beloved stupid fucking movies with a furious passion that idiots tend to find off-putting. I hate the pandering nostalgia porn of Pixar, where computer generated mascots assault peoples clitoral-sensitive funny-bones with an endless stream of random pointless references like Robin Williams on a crystal methamphetamine bender. I hate the goopy inspiration porn of high-handed historical hagiographies, designed to glorify the state as a bastion of multicultural perseverance in order to sell the American Dream like a snuff film to the jaded foreigners on the festival circuit."You see, Frenchy, America ain't so bad. We got saucy colored gals making our Nazi rockets!"
I hate the endless assembly line of instantly forgettable remakes, cheesier than any Skinemax parody and twice as stupid, often advertised as progress just because they replaced all the main characters with this weeks favorite token minority. "Stay tuned for Paul Feig's gutless remake of The Breakfast Club with all the leads... Played by... Hermaphrodites with Marfan Syndrome?! Be there!!!" And I absolutely fucking despise with every cell in my chronically misgendered corpse that never ending assembly line of moronic blockbuster schlock that every errant asshole and their cousin adores called Marvel Studios. The one dimensional superheroes. The black and white moralism. The empty social justice pandering. The gratuitous abuse of green screen special effects. The thinly veiled appeal to hyper-jingoistic do-gooder interventionism. I fucking hate it all. Superheroes have long been the bane of good comic books, now they threaten to take Hollywood to new depths of pornographic sleaze as they turn the once moribund industry into a cultural juggernaut defacing the globe with American "values". The basic premise of nearly every one of these cinematic abortions is identically simplistic; Here's your fucking shit, now eat it. And eat it they do, by the boatload. I only wish Stan Lee was still alive so he could die twice.
This has long been the problem with American Cinema. People in this country view films as being roller coaster rides. They hand some toothless carny a sweaty wad of cash and get their cheap thrills for about 90 minutes then forget what the saw on the way home. And sometimes that's OK, but to reduce an entire medium to mental masturbation sinfully underestimates the revolutionary power of cinema. Not to sound like a snob, but Europe still seems like the one place that really gets this on an above marginal level. People in Italy and France go to theaters to think and be challenged, to be provoked, and in a society so desensitized by constant war, plague and pestilence, it takes a lot of cinematic dynamite to provoke even basic empathy. That's why a new wave of European directors have taken to resurrecting Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, a philosophy that preaches that the only way to drain the collective abscesses of a crumbling society is to assault audiences dulled senses with provocative imagery and tap into the subconscious root of their misery.
In this context, the director must not simply be an artist. They must be a terrorist, awakening the privileged to the suffering that will be returned to them by the people that their wealth oppresses if they fail to wake from their stupor. These auteurs of Europe's so called new wave of extremity have turned the propaganda of modern cinema into a new form of what the old anarchists referred to as propaganda of the deed, using their Kalashnikov cameras to blitz the cinema with the power of uncensored imagination, raw, naked, dripping with blood. They use the once exploitative tropes of horror and eroticism to provoke philosophical debates on things even most Europeans would prefer to ignore.
As I alluded to above, the English speaking world has derisively called this new wave 'Extreme Cinema'. They even find the gal to accuse it's directors, terrifying visual Blanquists like Lars Von Trier, Gaspar Noe and Micheal Haneke, of being the real pornographers for the simple fact that they aren't afraid to use the weapon of untethered sexuality to get their point across. We have witnessed similar knee-jerk reactions to nearly every significant avante-garde movement of the last century, from the Dadaists to the Vienna Actionists. The western press doesn't want you to expose yourself to the masochistic lessons that only radicals dare to teach. They fear, as they always have, that you might run the risk of being awakened from your shackled slumber in this suburban purgatory capitalism has erected around us. But I implore you to ignore their breathless warnings, save your time, save your money or what's left of it, skip the latest Avengers monstrosity, stay home and download something to challenge yourself, like Gaspar Noe's latest intoxicating mirage, Climax, or the critic-eviscerating menace that is Mr. Von Trier's The House That Jack Built. Prepare to be offended but resist the temptation to simply react. This is not Hollywood pornography. This is art. This is cinema. It's supposed to hurt a little, but trust me, dearest motherfuckers, it's worth the price of admission.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Other movies to watch out for.
-Irreversible (2002) by Gaspar Noe
-Man Bites Dog (1992) by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel & Benoit Poelvoorde
-Funny Games (1997) by Micheal Haneke
-Martyrs (2008) by Pascal Laugier
-Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) by Abdellatif Kechiche
-Holy Motors (2012) by Leos Carax
-The Piano Teacher (2001) by Micheal Haneke
-Inside (2007) by Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo
-Antichrist (2009) by Lars Von Trier
-Raw (2016) by Julia Ducournau
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Love to Hate You by Erasure
* Closer by Nine Inch Nails
* Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
* My Monkey by Marilyn Manson
* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth
* Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
* Shitty Ballet by Bleached
* Debaser by the Pixies
* Raping a Slave by Swans
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Waiting Out the Landlord's Clock In Iran
Quick hypothetical; Lets say you've been living in the same house in the same neighborhood for your whole life, generations in fact. There have been some minor squabbles but for the most part you've managed to get along with the neighbors. Then one day, some outside landlord buys the house next door. After several tenants come and go, a real loudmouth thug moves in, making threats, beating his wife and kids. Finally, the bastard truly breaks bad, tares down your fence and declares your backyard to be part of his property. After an epic battle in the courts, he finally returns to his property and eventually gets evicted. 'Great!', you think, naturally, and you even help the landlord clean up the place. Everything seems peachy fucking keen for suburbia. And then the landlord moves in.
Suddenly, this brash wealthy landlord is building shit up, putting up new outbuildings and sheds near the property line, erecting tall steel fences with razor wire. Suddenly, it dawns on you that the last tenant wasn't the problem, you were, and the last tenant was only removed because he wasn't trouble enough for you. And the threats start up again. Local street kids who you've helped out in the past are declared gangs and you get blamed for running them. The landlord accuses you of possessing certain weapons that your neighbors have and freely flaunt but you've never showed any interest in. Finally, after dealing with years of threats, you sign a deal with the landlord promising to stop procuring these fictional weapons if the landlord backs off. Things calm down for a tip. Then the landlord pulls out of the deal and shit gets nuts again.
The landlord starts telling you that you better not attack any of his installations on your property line, as if you've been the aggressor. He starts warning all of your neighbors how dangerous you are until even they start to believe it. Heavily armed men start stalking the neighborhood menacingly. A large armored vehicle parks outside your house at all hours. Whenever it shows up, you get a phone call from the landlord, telling you in a steely draw that you better not attack his truck. You call the cops. They agree with you that the landlord is way out of line but even they are afraid to get on his bad side. They tell you 'tough luck motherfucker' and hang up abruptly. The shit gets worse. Several vehicles in the neighborhood are allegedly vandalized and naturally you're the one to blame. Scared and isolated, you start stalking up on weapons which only makes the threats increase. Soon the armored vehicle is parking on your lawn, grinding it's tires into the sod and flicking lit cigarettes into your flower beds. And it dawns on you, as the phone rings with the landlord undoubtedly on the other end, 'these crazy fuckers want me to attack them..." What do you do? I'm not telling you, I'm asking you. What do you do?
In case you haven't guessed, this is a Straw Dogs-style analogy for America's insane harassment campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran. After a decade of fighting off the brutal attacks of America's Sumerian pit-bull, Saddam Hussein, Iran manages to put the little psycho in his place. The US finally turns on the maniac and overthrows him with Iran's help, only for it to become increasingly clear to helpful Iran that they were always the real target. You see, those damn Persians offended the landlord when they evicted his friend the Shah and got too close with their neighbors in the Kremlin. We strong armed them into signing a peace deal that kept them from developing weapons they likely never even attempted to acquire (though the Shah and Israel did), only to have us violate it and threaten them for not sticking to it even though they have. Over the last few weeks, Trump and his lunatic neocon death squad have stepped up the madness, repeatedly and menacingly warning Iran not to attack our imperial phalanx of illegal military installations surrounding them on all sides, blaming them for mysterious acts of vandalism that may or may not have even taken place and flooding the Gulf with cigarette flicking battleships and B-52 bombers.
So what did Iran do? So far nothing, which is the smartest move to make. Trump is literally begging Iran to strike and give him the Gulf of Tonkin he needs to justify the invasion he's been angling for since Sheldon Adleson paid him to do so. The only thing Iran can do is practice patience and allow the over eager warmongers of the administration-who-couldn't-shoot-straight to expose themselves for the fumbling aggressors that they are while China slowly bleeds their prolapsed empire dry. The so-called free world is still too petrified to stand up to that Helter Skelter ax murderer, Uncle Sam. But as his geostrategic failures begin to pile up higher than the corpses, from Korea to Iraq to Venezuela and beyond, it will become increasingly clear to these nations who have long been held hostage by this country, that it's days of primacy are numbered. We can only hope that Iran can wait out the landlord's clock and that Bolton isn't quite crazy enough to pull a false flag.
Keep the peace and keep hope alive, dearest motherfuckers. For where an empire is bleeding, there is still hope for peace and sometimes hope is all we've got.
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Let's Lynch the Landlord by Dead Kennedys
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground
* Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
* Grow Into a Ghost by Swearin
* Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
* Shitty Ballet by Bleached
* Rock the Casbah by the Clash
* Time is On My Side by the Rolling Stones
Suddenly, this brash wealthy landlord is building shit up, putting up new outbuildings and sheds near the property line, erecting tall steel fences with razor wire. Suddenly, it dawns on you that the last tenant wasn't the problem, you were, and the last tenant was only removed because he wasn't trouble enough for you. And the threats start up again. Local street kids who you've helped out in the past are declared gangs and you get blamed for running them. The landlord accuses you of possessing certain weapons that your neighbors have and freely flaunt but you've never showed any interest in. Finally, after dealing with years of threats, you sign a deal with the landlord promising to stop procuring these fictional weapons if the landlord backs off. Things calm down for a tip. Then the landlord pulls out of the deal and shit gets nuts again.
The landlord starts telling you that you better not attack any of his installations on your property line, as if you've been the aggressor. He starts warning all of your neighbors how dangerous you are until even they start to believe it. Heavily armed men start stalking the neighborhood menacingly. A large armored vehicle parks outside your house at all hours. Whenever it shows up, you get a phone call from the landlord, telling you in a steely draw that you better not attack his truck. You call the cops. They agree with you that the landlord is way out of line but even they are afraid to get on his bad side. They tell you 'tough luck motherfucker' and hang up abruptly. The shit gets worse. Several vehicles in the neighborhood are allegedly vandalized and naturally you're the one to blame. Scared and isolated, you start stalking up on weapons which only makes the threats increase. Soon the armored vehicle is parking on your lawn, grinding it's tires into the sod and flicking lit cigarettes into your flower beds. And it dawns on you, as the phone rings with the landlord undoubtedly on the other end, 'these crazy fuckers want me to attack them..." What do you do? I'm not telling you, I'm asking you. What do you do?
In case you haven't guessed, this is a Straw Dogs-style analogy for America's insane harassment campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran. After a decade of fighting off the brutal attacks of America's Sumerian pit-bull, Saddam Hussein, Iran manages to put the little psycho in his place. The US finally turns on the maniac and overthrows him with Iran's help, only for it to become increasingly clear to helpful Iran that they were always the real target. You see, those damn Persians offended the landlord when they evicted his friend the Shah and got too close with their neighbors in the Kremlin. We strong armed them into signing a peace deal that kept them from developing weapons they likely never even attempted to acquire (though the Shah and Israel did), only to have us violate it and threaten them for not sticking to it even though they have. Over the last few weeks, Trump and his lunatic neocon death squad have stepped up the madness, repeatedly and menacingly warning Iran not to attack our imperial phalanx of illegal military installations surrounding them on all sides, blaming them for mysterious acts of vandalism that may or may not have even taken place and flooding the Gulf with cigarette flicking battleships and B-52 bombers.
So what did Iran do? So far nothing, which is the smartest move to make. Trump is literally begging Iran to strike and give him the Gulf of Tonkin he needs to justify the invasion he's been angling for since Sheldon Adleson paid him to do so. The only thing Iran can do is practice patience and allow the over eager warmongers of the administration-who-couldn't-shoot-straight to expose themselves for the fumbling aggressors that they are while China slowly bleeds their prolapsed empire dry. The so-called free world is still too petrified to stand up to that Helter Skelter ax murderer, Uncle Sam. But as his geostrategic failures begin to pile up higher than the corpses, from Korea to Iraq to Venezuela and beyond, it will become increasingly clear to these nations who have long been held hostage by this country, that it's days of primacy are numbered. We can only hope that Iran can wait out the landlord's clock and that Bolton isn't quite crazy enough to pull a false flag.
Keep the peace and keep hope alive, dearest motherfuckers. For where an empire is bleeding, there is still hope for peace and sometimes hope is all we've got.
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Let's Lynch the Landlord by Dead Kennedys
* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground
* Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
* Grow Into a Ghost by Swearin
* Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
* Shitty Ballet by Bleached
* Rock the Casbah by the Clash
* Time is On My Side by the Rolling Stones
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pledging Allegiance to the Divided States of America
I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will
-Antonio Gramsci
When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out", "turn on", and "tune in."
-Timothy Leary
America, the indispensable nation. That old jingoistic canard gets tossed around like confetti in this country, while the rest of the world rolls their collective eyes and crack their collective knuckles. According to patriotic lore, America is some beige, color-blind, miracle designed by the greatest white philosophers since Socrates to free the world from its backwards indigenous ways with the magic of global capitalism. Naturally, this is all bullshit. The kind of sad pep-talk a date-rapist gives himself in the mirror before showering his glamour muscles in Axe body spray. There is absolutely nothing miraculous about America but that doesn't mean that it isn't exceptional.
America is an exceptionally cruel experiment in the outer reaches of colonial social engineering. We are a nation defined by the two greatest holocausts in recorded history, spanning three continents and an entire hemisphere. America as we know it was founded by an ambitious collection of European super-colonialists who found themselves and their nations increasingly depleted of the wealth they accumulated from the Crusades. So they traveled the seas in search of greener pastures to irrigate with more dark-skinned blood. They found their sainted killing fields of Shangri-La in the New World and with the superiority of their steel, they decided to take the Americas by force and slaughter anyone who stood in their way. But with an entire hemisphere half empty of its indigenous inhabitants, these European overlords found themselves with too much work for their feeble bourgeois fingers to handle, so they filled their new colonies with shiploads of slaves pilfered from the jungles of Africa to build a nation on their scarred shoulders, murdering millions more in the process and permanently hobbling another entire continent.
But even slave-driving proved too onerous for our glorious founding fathers, so they brought in floods of refugees from their more battered European neighbors to serve as a pauper class between the WASPs and their shackled human property. The result of this massive game of Red Rover was a badly cobbled together empire that lacked the royal blood and soil that usually held the illusion of the European-style nation state together. New races had to be constructed to justify their class division. Scores of seemingly incongruous tribes were lumped together into massive racial conglomerations known as White and Colored (later to be broken down into Black and Brown). Whenever the numbers of the people of color swelled to numbers that threatened the White master race, whole chunks were chiseled off and arbitrarily declared White. Irish, Italians, Jews; we were all niggers once until we became more useful as White insulation than dark fodder.
Eventually, however, these badly manufactured moving lines collapsed beneath the weight of their own absurdity and racism was traded in, at least officially, for a new imperial creed of neoliberal globalism and market order. And so yesterday's White supremacists became today's racial harmony loving progressive internationalists, using the racism which they once thrived upon to justify their existence in order to prevent others from engaging in the kind of genocides that made them pillars of international order. Appeals to good old fashioned White supremacy are still trotted out from time to time by the likes of Donald Trump to rally those still suspicious of the new order around it with the vestiges of the old, and the racist power structure remains largely untouched where it remains useful in the courts and prisons, regardless of the politically correct language they have adopted like menthol to numb their pollution. Never the less, by and large, globalization is the new White.
What we're left with as this strange bastard empire slouches towards Bethlehem to die in a hail of bullets is a colossal landmass of lost souls without purpose. As we cling to the wreckage of our manufactured mass tribes we descend deeper and deeper into nihilistic violence and self destruction. We are ravaged by plagues of mass shootings and narcotics addiction. While our mandarins continue to start unwinnable crusades in a sad attempt to revive their past glories, we stand as a nation on the brink of a societal collapse unlike any seen since the Roman Empire. But in this crisis I can't help but to see great opportunities. Every apocalypse presents an opportunity, however fleeting, for utopia.
In the case of a post-racial/post-colonial America, I see the opportunity for a thousand utopias. Cleaved from the chains of more traditional national identities, American's and the citizenry of other vast neocolonial experiments like Canada and Australia have been granted the ability to redefine themselves however they goddamn please. What race do you want to be? What gender feels like freedom? What do you want to call your new species? We can choose to cling to our past as prisoners of a horrific imperial experiment, we can wallow in aggrievement and victimhood and go down with this rusted hulk of a slave ship, or we can rise above it, wipe the slate clean and create new tribes around the more abstract and less constraining concepts of love and community, family and kinship, anarchy and liberty.
There is no reason why hillbillies can't live on trout and moonshine in Appalachia while hippie dykes macro-may rainbow flags in New England and Mormon Fundamentalists build a new Zion in the deserts of Utah. There is no reason why we cant have Mutualism in Kansas, Syndicalism in Pennsylvania, Communism in Vermont, Paleolibertarianism in Oklahoma and Agorism in Florida. Hell, there's no reason we can't have them all in one city block. Ultimately, the only way to save this thing called America is to break this thing called America. This nation was a hideous mistake but it doesn't have to be our prison. All we have to do is embrace the endless possibilities of a voluntary society by dropping out of this broken involuntary one.
United we fall, divided we stand, dearest motherfuckers. Now lets Balkanize this bitch before the Chinese get a chance to pick at the bones. Viva la secession!
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Rush by Big Audio Dynamite 2
* Severed by the Decemberists
* Read My Mind by Boygenius
* Sit Down by James
* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders
* I'm Free by the Soup Dragons
* Private World by New York Dolls
* Come Together by Primal Scream
* This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Trump's War In Venezuela Could Be Che's Revenge
Che Guevara had a dream. After decades of chasing the American Empire into guerrilla street fights from Guatemala to the Congo, Che dreamed of drawing that dreadful beast into an unwinnable quagmire on the graves of its first victims in the heart of Latin America, the treacherous mountain forests of Bolivia where the Conquistadors first struck it rich with Indio silver. Che dreamed of revenge for centuries of violence, of rape, genocide and colonialism. He dreamed of creating another Vietnam in the Western Hemisphere that would spread across Uncle Sam's indentured colonies and liberate his people, all of his people, from Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana and beyond. Che chased this Quixotic dream into the rugged highlands of Bolivia in 1966 where he got more than he bargained for. Less than a year later he would be dead at the hands of a CIA death squad. But his dream remained, festering just beneath the flesh of a thousand banana republics.
Flash forward to a half century later. Just a few jungles north-west of Che's grave, in the embattled nation of Venezuela. May 1st, May Day in this year of our lord Satan, twenty-hundred-and-nineteen. Everything should have gone perfectly. Everything was in place for Washington's latest Latino coup de tat. After softening up the oil rich left-wing pariah state with decades of crippling sanctions and economic sabotage, the stage was finally set. Uncle Sam's latest camera-ready caudillos, Juan Guaido and Leopoldo Lopez, a couple of scrumptiously fuckable brown choir boys who appear to have been hand plucked from Manudo by the School of the Americas had secured the loyalty of a score of Venezuelan power brokers from the Supreme Court to the Presidential Guard. The night before, Guaido announced his final triumphant putsch in the form of a march to his master's house at the American embassy in Caracas. A profound publicity stunt in which the entirety of Nicholas Maduro's fiercely loyal army would join him in overthrowing their own democratically elected government. His Employer in Chief seconded the motion vis a vis Twitter. It all should have gone perfectly, like a thousand times before.
To say it didn't would be an understatement to say the least. To say the most, Guaido's latest recital of counter-revolutionary puppet theatre became the geostrategic equivalent of Donald Trump shitting his tux on prom night. Guaido's little victory march turned into a laughable pity parade, with Kid Pinochet joined only by a handful of rent-a-thugs in military cosplay. His calls for open revolt fell on deaf ears in all but the toniest barrios of the capital where the entire spectacle was epitomized by the sight of bougie rioteers in Dolce Gabbana, chucking Molotov cocktails. The Supreme Court and the Presidential Guard may have played hooky but the peasants didn't. Upon word of Uncle Sam's latest plan to pervert their nation, even Maduro's enemies flooded the streets in rallies for his defense and, more importantly, the defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. If it wasn't for the cowardly actions of one role-crazy tank driver in Tienanmen mode, the whole flopped coup may have been a virtually bloodless affair.
Naturally, the Administration Who Couldn't Shoot Straight excepted defeat with all the honor and modesty of the Bad News Bears. Trump's troika of tyrannic twats, Mike Pompeo, Elliot Abrams and Lucifer's favorite mental midget, John Bolton, went berzerk scrambling for excuses to explain their complete and total humiliation at the hands of a porno-stashed ex bus driver nearly universally despised by his own people. It was Russia! It was, it was China! No! Hezbollah! No Cobra Kai! John Kreese himself coaxed Maduro off the tarmac with a hardy pep talk and told him to sweep the leg. Yeah, that's it. No! It was those wily Cubans again, just like in Grenada. According to Satan's push-broom, half their goddamn army blocked a sure thing without firing a bullet. Stealthy motherfuckers, those Cubans. Like goddamn ninjas, not one naked eye saw them coming or going. Anything, any excuse, any explanation other than the simple fact that Trump got punked and shit the bed. How did this happen? Latin American coups are supposed to be America's last growth industry. We use to overthrow another democracy every other week back in the Dulles days. What have we become? What went wrong?
The most painfully obvious reason, at least to anybody outside the swamplands of the Beltway, is that the American Empire has become a joke and Trump is the punchline. Lets face it, somebody should, after Ahmed Chalabi and the boys from Tel Aviv convinced the indispensable nation to hand half the Middle East over to Al Qaeda in a doggy-bag we became a little less indispensable. But aside from the inevitable decline of the west, the best answer for why the Bolivarian Republic couldn't be flipped like Honduras or Ukraine is the simple fact that it is indeed a republic, a democracy who's foundation predates even Maduro's far more honorable predecessor, Hugo Chavez, with the creation of the grassroots council communist experiment of the Barrio Assembly of Caracas in 1991.
Over a decade later, this movement was consecrated with its own popular revolution, not with the election of Chavez but with his defense in the streets during America's most successful or rather least unsuccessful modern Venezuelan coup attempt in 2002. Revolution is the original direct democracy. Once a people have fought and bled for a republic or any cause for that matter that they can call their own, it becomes very hard, even with state reinforced poverty, to convince them to sell it up the river for a song, especially if the lyrics are in English. This is why Cuba still stands firm as a viable anti-colonialist boogeyman after decades of Yanqui skulduggery. If anything, Trump made Maduro more powerful, which leaves him with all out war as his last option.
This is where Che comes in again. That's right, dearest motherfuckers, full circle time. Chances are, Trump is simply flexing his flabby glamour muscles for those decomposing fossils back in Little Havana. But if Bolton has his way, and never count that sick fucker out, every bluster will end in a ground war and a ground war in Venezuela would be a complete and total unmitigated disaster for the world's last superpower, an Iraq sized black hole in the heart of Bolivar country. This disaster however could be an unexpected gift from the devil himself to Latin America's flagging anti-imperialist left, from the fearsome collectivos to the resilient Shinning Path. Che spoke at length about the strategic value of creating two, three, many Vietnams to sap the American Empire of its resources across the Third World. With Afghanistan, Syria and possibly Iran, a costly war south of the border could be the final Vietnam that Che dreamed of and died for in Bolivia. Trump's war in Venezuela could be Che's revenge.
Call me a communist, dearest motherfuckers(we actually prefer Kropotkinite-American), but I can't think of a more fitting end for a more despicable Imperial experiment. Death by greed on the stoop of Potosi, in the dark heart of where it all began, with Che's wicked laughter hanging like cigar smoke above the ruins. I hate war, but with any luck this could be America's last.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Every Body Here Hates You by Courtney Barnett
* Police Truck by Dead Kennedy's
* Tough Enough by Ex Hex
* Fake Empire by the National
* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
* Ahead by Wire
* North American Scum by LCD Soundsystem
* Mousetrap by Some Velvet Sidewalk
Flash forward to a half century later. Just a few jungles north-west of Che's grave, in the embattled nation of Venezuela. May 1st, May Day in this year of our lord Satan, twenty-hundred-and-nineteen. Everything should have gone perfectly. Everything was in place for Washington's latest Latino coup de tat. After softening up the oil rich left-wing pariah state with decades of crippling sanctions and economic sabotage, the stage was finally set. Uncle Sam's latest camera-ready caudillos, Juan Guaido and Leopoldo Lopez, a couple of scrumptiously fuckable brown choir boys who appear to have been hand plucked from Manudo by the School of the Americas had secured the loyalty of a score of Venezuelan power brokers from the Supreme Court to the Presidential Guard. The night before, Guaido announced his final triumphant putsch in the form of a march to his master's house at the American embassy in Caracas. A profound publicity stunt in which the entirety of Nicholas Maduro's fiercely loyal army would join him in overthrowing their own democratically elected government. His Employer in Chief seconded the motion vis a vis Twitter. It all should have gone perfectly, like a thousand times before.
To say it didn't would be an understatement to say the least. To say the most, Guaido's latest recital of counter-revolutionary puppet theatre became the geostrategic equivalent of Donald Trump shitting his tux on prom night. Guaido's little victory march turned into a laughable pity parade, with Kid Pinochet joined only by a handful of rent-a-thugs in military cosplay. His calls for open revolt fell on deaf ears in all but the toniest barrios of the capital where the entire spectacle was epitomized by the sight of bougie rioteers in Dolce Gabbana, chucking Molotov cocktails. The Supreme Court and the Presidential Guard may have played hooky but the peasants didn't. Upon word of Uncle Sam's latest plan to pervert their nation, even Maduro's enemies flooded the streets in rallies for his defense and, more importantly, the defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. If it wasn't for the cowardly actions of one role-crazy tank driver in Tienanmen mode, the whole flopped coup may have been a virtually bloodless affair.
Naturally, the Administration Who Couldn't Shoot Straight excepted defeat with all the honor and modesty of the Bad News Bears. Trump's troika of tyrannic twats, Mike Pompeo, Elliot Abrams and Lucifer's favorite mental midget, John Bolton, went berzerk scrambling for excuses to explain their complete and total humiliation at the hands of a porno-stashed ex bus driver nearly universally despised by his own people. It was Russia! It was, it was China! No! Hezbollah! No Cobra Kai! John Kreese himself coaxed Maduro off the tarmac with a hardy pep talk and told him to sweep the leg. Yeah, that's it. No! It was those wily Cubans again, just like in Grenada. According to Satan's push-broom, half their goddamn army blocked a sure thing without firing a bullet. Stealthy motherfuckers, those Cubans. Like goddamn ninjas, not one naked eye saw them coming or going. Anything, any excuse, any explanation other than the simple fact that Trump got punked and shit the bed. How did this happen? Latin American coups are supposed to be America's last growth industry. We use to overthrow another democracy every other week back in the Dulles days. What have we become? What went wrong?
The most painfully obvious reason, at least to anybody outside the swamplands of the Beltway, is that the American Empire has become a joke and Trump is the punchline. Lets face it, somebody should, after Ahmed Chalabi and the boys from Tel Aviv convinced the indispensable nation to hand half the Middle East over to Al Qaeda in a doggy-bag we became a little less indispensable. But aside from the inevitable decline of the west, the best answer for why the Bolivarian Republic couldn't be flipped like Honduras or Ukraine is the simple fact that it is indeed a republic, a democracy who's foundation predates even Maduro's far more honorable predecessor, Hugo Chavez, with the creation of the grassroots council communist experiment of the Barrio Assembly of Caracas in 1991.
Over a decade later, this movement was consecrated with its own popular revolution, not with the election of Chavez but with his defense in the streets during America's most successful or rather least unsuccessful modern Venezuelan coup attempt in 2002. Revolution is the original direct democracy. Once a people have fought and bled for a republic or any cause for that matter that they can call their own, it becomes very hard, even with state reinforced poverty, to convince them to sell it up the river for a song, especially if the lyrics are in English. This is why Cuba still stands firm as a viable anti-colonialist boogeyman after decades of Yanqui skulduggery. If anything, Trump made Maduro more powerful, which leaves him with all out war as his last option.
This is where Che comes in again. That's right, dearest motherfuckers, full circle time. Chances are, Trump is simply flexing his flabby glamour muscles for those decomposing fossils back in Little Havana. But if Bolton has his way, and never count that sick fucker out, every bluster will end in a ground war and a ground war in Venezuela would be a complete and total unmitigated disaster for the world's last superpower, an Iraq sized black hole in the heart of Bolivar country. This disaster however could be an unexpected gift from the devil himself to Latin America's flagging anti-imperialist left, from the fearsome collectivos to the resilient Shinning Path. Che spoke at length about the strategic value of creating two, three, many Vietnams to sap the American Empire of its resources across the Third World. With Afghanistan, Syria and possibly Iran, a costly war south of the border could be the final Vietnam that Che dreamed of and died for in Bolivia. Trump's war in Venezuela could be Che's revenge.
Call me a communist, dearest motherfuckers(we actually prefer Kropotkinite-American), but I can't think of a more fitting end for a more despicable Imperial experiment. Death by greed on the stoop of Potosi, in the dark heart of where it all began, with Che's wicked laughter hanging like cigar smoke above the ruins. I hate war, but with any luck this could be America's last.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Every Body Here Hates You by Courtney Barnett
* Police Truck by Dead Kennedy's
* Tough Enough by Ex Hex
* Fake Empire by the National
* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
* Ahead by Wire
* North American Scum by LCD Soundsystem
* Mousetrap by Some Velvet Sidewalk
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Boredom and Suffering and Safety and Liberty
I'm not going to lie to you, dearest motherfuckers. My life is kind of a dumpster fire right now. In fact, it's been kind of a dumpster fire for the last few years. Even aside from my clinical crosses to bare: anxiety, depression, OCD, ADD, IBS, Lyme disease, dysphoria, bubonic plague, etc: The last few years have felt like a Macy's Day Parade of Ballardian car crashes. My grandmother gets dementia and has to be moved through fifty different fucking homes because none of them can be bothered to treat her like a goddamn human being unless their paid in speed boats. My cat and loyal companion of nearly twenty years loses both thyroids, shits everywhere and slowly dies on me. Then my best humanoid friend since high school up and moves to a different goddamn continent. Then my father gets run over by a sleep deprived paper-man and finds out he has cancer in the emergency room. Then some sick fuck shoots a geezer and blows his brains out next door to my loony Nana's latest nursing home. Then the cops murder another friend in cold blood for being autistic while black. And then and then and then and then....
It's gotten to the point where I've begun having weekly panic attacks reducing me to sobbing jello thrashing violently on my bathroom floor. It didn't use to be this way. Its times like these I actually miss being a shut-in. During the agoraphobic half of my twenties my days were typically structured around doing whatever the fuck I felt like whenever the fuck I felt like it. I could binge watch a half dozen French horror movies or completely lose myself killing cops on Grand Theft Auto and sink a week into researching the finer points of Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Therapy. I had no friends, no blog, no job, no obligations whatsoever. When the outside world got too menacing I could just make myself disappear like a ghost in my parents basement where they'd never find me. I had nothing to fear and that was the point. The universe had grown too goddamn big for me to cope with, so I chose to make the universe go away and become a hermit with no worries. No worries, that is, except my crippling loneliness, my total disgust with my biological sex, my fear of dying alone in that goddamn basement and my downright terminal boredom. And that's the trade off.
Madame de Stael once mused that, in life, one must choose between boredom and suffering, and I've spent the better part of the more stressful half of my twenties learning this lesson the hard way. My life in isolation may have been safe but it was also totally unfulfilling. As terrifying and painful as the last few years of my life have been I have fucking lived them and I've lived them my way. I've turned my little blog into a genuine menace to society. I have embraced the Lokian spiritual chaos of my fluid gender identity. I have made friends with everyone from single-black mothers to neofascist wack-jobs, the two most dangerous kinds of people on earth. I've also become a contributing editor to the worlds most dangerous website, Attack the System, not to mention a regular contributor to the vanguard of the Fifth Estate, CounterPunch. I've found my place in a tribe that I've been searching for my whole life and I volunteer handling diseased piss and blood for my people at a free AIDS clinic. Not only have I embraced my participation in the joyful suffering of the world but I've embraced outright danger. I have embraced anarchy, not just as a philosophy but as a lifestyle, and those things are very much related.
In life, one must chose between boredom and suffering. Similarly, I've come to believe that in politics, one must choose between safety and liberty. As a shut-in, I embraced safety, not just as a lifestyle but as a philosophy. I was a dutiful state socialist and the idea of a well regulated egalitarian society was as appealing to me as the shelter of my parent's basement. As a recovering hermit in the mad world I've come to find my past affection for benevolent statism to be almost as stifling as the mask of my former gender identity. The truth is, that a world of strict gun control, Scandinavian style welfare and the prohibition of victimless crimes probably would be safer. But it would be as boring as living in a human zoo. Sure, we'd all be well fed and taken care of, but we wouldn't be free. Like my former existence as a shut-in, it would be safe but totally unfulfilling. And for some people maybe that's enough, but I simply can't bare to live that way anymore. I didn't choose the terrifying liberty of the outside world to be a part of a society that's just as safe as my parent's basement.
So I've decided to embrace suffering, even with all its heartbreaks and panic attacks. And I've decided to embrace the liberty of anarchism even with all it's overdoses, border jumpers and active shooters, because, like another quotable corpse named Zapata once quipped, I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Come hell, dearest motherfuckers. Come hell.
Peace, Love, Suffering and Liberty- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Is Why We Fight by the Decemberists
* Human Zoo by Built to Spill
* The Running Styles of New York by the Tallest Man On Earth
* Me and My Dog by Boygenius
* Neat Neat Neat by the Damned
* Wild One by Iggy Pop
* Wedding Singer by Modern Baseball
* My Way by Sid Vicious
* Imitations of Life by REM
* Shades of Blue by Yo La Tengo
* Free at Last by PUP
* Float On by Modest Mouse
It's gotten to the point where I've begun having weekly panic attacks reducing me to sobbing jello thrashing violently on my bathroom floor. It didn't use to be this way. Its times like these I actually miss being a shut-in. During the agoraphobic half of my twenties my days were typically structured around doing whatever the fuck I felt like whenever the fuck I felt like it. I could binge watch a half dozen French horror movies or completely lose myself killing cops on Grand Theft Auto and sink a week into researching the finer points of Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Therapy. I had no friends, no blog, no job, no obligations whatsoever. When the outside world got too menacing I could just make myself disappear like a ghost in my parents basement where they'd never find me. I had nothing to fear and that was the point. The universe had grown too goddamn big for me to cope with, so I chose to make the universe go away and become a hermit with no worries. No worries, that is, except my crippling loneliness, my total disgust with my biological sex, my fear of dying alone in that goddamn basement and my downright terminal boredom. And that's the trade off.
Madame de Stael once mused that, in life, one must choose between boredom and suffering, and I've spent the better part of the more stressful half of my twenties learning this lesson the hard way. My life in isolation may have been safe but it was also totally unfulfilling. As terrifying and painful as the last few years of my life have been I have fucking lived them and I've lived them my way. I've turned my little blog into a genuine menace to society. I have embraced the Lokian spiritual chaos of my fluid gender identity. I have made friends with everyone from single-black mothers to neofascist wack-jobs, the two most dangerous kinds of people on earth. I've also become a contributing editor to the worlds most dangerous website, Attack the System, not to mention a regular contributor to the vanguard of the Fifth Estate, CounterPunch. I've found my place in a tribe that I've been searching for my whole life and I volunteer handling diseased piss and blood for my people at a free AIDS clinic. Not only have I embraced my participation in the joyful suffering of the world but I've embraced outright danger. I have embraced anarchy, not just as a philosophy but as a lifestyle, and those things are very much related.
In life, one must chose between boredom and suffering. Similarly, I've come to believe that in politics, one must choose between safety and liberty. As a shut-in, I embraced safety, not just as a lifestyle but as a philosophy. I was a dutiful state socialist and the idea of a well regulated egalitarian society was as appealing to me as the shelter of my parent's basement. As a recovering hermit in the mad world I've come to find my past affection for benevolent statism to be almost as stifling as the mask of my former gender identity. The truth is, that a world of strict gun control, Scandinavian style welfare and the prohibition of victimless crimes probably would be safer. But it would be as boring as living in a human zoo. Sure, we'd all be well fed and taken care of, but we wouldn't be free. Like my former existence as a shut-in, it would be safe but totally unfulfilling. And for some people maybe that's enough, but I simply can't bare to live that way anymore. I didn't choose the terrifying liberty of the outside world to be a part of a society that's just as safe as my parent's basement.
So I've decided to embrace suffering, even with all its heartbreaks and panic attacks. And I've decided to embrace the liberty of anarchism even with all it's overdoses, border jumpers and active shooters, because, like another quotable corpse named Zapata once quipped, I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Come hell, dearest motherfuckers. Come hell.
Peace, Love, Suffering and Liberty- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Is Why We Fight by the Decemberists
* Human Zoo by Built to Spill
* The Running Styles of New York by the Tallest Man On Earth
* Me and My Dog by Boygenius
* Neat Neat Neat by the Damned
* Wild One by Iggy Pop
* Wedding Singer by Modern Baseball
* My Way by Sid Vicious
* Imitations of Life by REM
* Shades of Blue by Yo La Tengo
* Free at Last by PUP
* Float On by Modest Mouse
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