As something of a radical contrarian, I often feel like my life is comprised largely of coming out of an endless procession of closets, often without even realizing I'm stepping through the doorway. What? You didn't know I was a pro-life feminist? You've never heard of a libertarian socialist? I genuinely can't keep up with all the peccadillos you partisan pussies find indigestible. All in all, with this experience of casually shocking boring people, it's little wonder I took to being queer like a fish in a frying pan.
But some closet doors are heavier than others and at this hybrid moment of Republicrat hysteria, they don't get much heavier than the simple fact that I have a great deal of respect for both Ilhan Omar and Tucker Carlson, which is a bit like being a unicorn that everyone hates for a different reason. How could this be possible? Well, for one thing, I've long held a soft spot in my bleeding heart for both shocking people and, well, shocking-people. As a kid, I couldn't seem to decide whether I wanted to be Mother Teresa or Marilyn Manson when I grew up. But more than any idiosyncratic character flaw, my respect for these two highly demonized figures stems from the fact that I am and will always be an anti-imperialist above all else. And regardless of their many many flaws both Ilhan and Tucker have been fairly consistent advocates for world peace.
I never expected to like Tucker Carlson and, for the most part, I still don't. His demonization of immigrants and trans people like myself is nothing short of revolting. But like most paleocons, with Mr. Carlson you take the good with the disgusting. Regardless of how you or I may feel about the bastard's social cluelessness, you have to be pathologically apoplectic to deny his post-partisan devotion to anti-interventionism. Where Tucker's beloved pseudo-isolationist Caesar, Donald Trump, has faltered, Carlson has remained courageously resolute.
Since taking the prime time slot of pandering grope-a-holic Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson has delivered some of the most breathlessly eloquent prose in defense of peace that this country has seen since MSDNC had Phil Donahue fired for speaking out against the war in Iraq, often going against the very president he rebuilt his career on defending in the process, and it's effect appears to be profound. Donald Trump seems to have only reversed his decision to commit mass murder in Iran after a brief phone call with his favorite Fox News host. With an impetuously impressionable man-child in the Oval Office, this xenophobic, binarist dick may have literally saved lives by sticking to his guns on America's existential need to drop hers. Hate the fucker for who he is, but game recognizes game, and Tucker is looking pretty damn familiar to this tranny peacenik. Crucify me for being big enough admit it.
Perhaps the only thing more enjoyable than seeing a neocon network hijacked by a modern-day Charles Lindbergh has been watching mighty little Ilhan make those same pigfucking giants sweat. While, as an anarchist, I may find Mrs. Omar's pseudo-socialist, big-government-solves-everything approach to domestic policy nauseatingly tiresome, she has proven herself to be the Lower House's most doggedly consistent critic of empire since Ron Paul.
She has been inspiringly fearless in her near unprecedented stance against the malign influence of the Israel Lobby, braving outrageous accusations of antisemitism from her own party to tell an increasingly Hitleresque Bibi Netanyahu to go fuck himself and the president he rode in on. She's called out Democratic sacred cow Barack Obama for his own war crimes, thrown her support behind Orange-Man-Bad's empty promises to pull out of Afghanistan and Syria and has led the charge in Congress to end our countries unforgivable involvement with the Saudi genocide in Yemen. All of this, however, is just gravy on top of her ruthless televised roast of Elliot Abrams. Nothing has ever gotten my unwanted cock harder than seeing that woman make that serial-child murderer belly crawl like the gutless invertebrate he is. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to anti-imperialist revenge porn and it was fucking divine. For that alone, Ilhan Omar has earned her place in paradise just next door to Malcolm X.
So why the fuck cant these two iconoclastic peaceniks just get along? Why does Tucker feel the need to further stain his reputation by dragging a woman who stands for many of the same things he does through the mud with ludicrous, xenophobic, conspiracy theories? Why do Ilhan's devoted Twitter followers waste their precious time trolling the private residence of the one talking head daring enough to speak out against both parties insatiable lust for war? Why can't radicals just get along?
The answer essentially comes down to the kind of garden variety bigotry that the status quo has relied on for centuries to keep people serious about peace divided. For Tucker and his audience, this bigotry is pretty obvious. The world is getting browner and queerer and they can't stand the idea that becoming a white minority may be inevitable. For someone in coach like me, it's more than a little hard to feel sympathetic for a bunch of old white men in first class bellyaching about getting only one side with their Salisbury steak. Which leads me to address the less obvious form of bigotry at play here, coming from the left, which essentially amounts to a bigotry against bigotry. I know this sounds absurd, but you can't expect every social group to evolve at the same pace. Sometimes we have to pick our battles, and dead children in Yemen is just a little bit more dire than being misgendered by MAGA hat wearing hicks.
This doesn't mean the left should lose its values. On the contrary, I think these values of tolerance and acceptance only benefit from finding common cause with those who stubbornly appose them. I've seen it first hand. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered hostility towards my gender identity from the right, only to see it neutralized by sharing a comradery for apposing violent globalism. I've become many a paleocon's one trans friend this way and I've gotta believe that that is a step in the right direction.
Both the far-left and the far-right have never been more visible in this country. We both appose many of the same things, namely the forever wars which have starved both our movements of the financial attention they so rightly deserve. If the radical center can find common ground in strengthening the warfare state, then why cant we on the fringe find common ground in destroying it. There will be plenty of time to claw each others eyes out over domestic policy once the troops come home. For now, I say we prioritize ending the killing. Lets build a contrarian coalition for peace.
So, yeah, dearest motherfuckers, I'm a little bit Ilhan, and god help me, I'm a little bit Tucker too. Aren't we all? Consider that closet door obliterated. I have no more room for shame when it comes to my lust for peace.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Hatebreeders by the Misfits
* The KKK Took My Baby Away by the Ramones
* Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash
* Obsessed by Hatchie
* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits
* Rock 'n Roll Nigger by Marilyn Manson
* Good Ones by Slaughter Beach, Dog
* Rebels by Tom Petty
Dedicated in loving memory to Dino Zakarya. Another proud Muslim rebel who couldn't be bothered to follow the rules. Rest comrade, we'll carry your gun.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Smash All the Camps (Or Sympathy For Willem Van Spronsen)
I sympathize with Willem Van Spronsen. Maybe that's a bad way to start this post but it feels like the most honest way to start this post. A mentally ill anarchist, not unlike myself, Willem wanted to end his life but he wanted to end it for a cause. So he attacked an ICE detention center with pipe bombs and let the cops do the rest. I've never made my disdain for Antifa a secret, I've befriended too many right-wing anti-imperialists caught in their crossfire, but god help me, this struck me as a move in the right direction for Pacific Northwest anarchists, who have lately been far too busy bombarding alt-right imbeciles to confront our growing police state.
My sympathy is not exclusively political however. My sympathy comes from a place of very personal outrage and my outrage comes from a deeply traumatic childhood. I can usually retain a pretty jaded gonzo snark with my writing, stemming from my misanthropic drag queen sense of humor. But when you've been fucked with by role-crazy adults as a child, part of you will always be that child. So when I see kids in fucking cages, I see myself brutally misgendered in a confessional waiting for hell. And that's when I flip my proverbial shit and get downright histrionic. The only reason why I haven't gone full Kaczynski like Willem, aside from the fact that my meds are working and I generally appose initiatory violence, is because I'm usually too livid in these moments to handle anarcho-home-ec projects like IED's. I'm also probably too pissed off to write a completely lucid blog post, so this time I decided to wait a week and take a closer look at the issue of the camps.
It's very tempting to drop the lion share of the blame on a loud-mouth bully like Trump. He's certainly made the immigration issue more personal by declaring entire classes of people war criminals and encouraging his beloved gorilla juice-heads in ICE to get their Gestapo on. The harsh reality that the media has chosen to ignore however is that there is nothing particularly new about Orange-Man-Bad's persecution of pint-sized undocumented line-crossers. In fact, the bastard still comes in fourth behind the last three presidents in mass deportations. The modern militarization of the boarder actually started decades before Trump with another sanction-happy rapist named Bill Clinton (I believe the two may have met once or twice at one of Jeffrey Epstein's Pretty Baby-Eyes Wide Shut Parties) which was just one small part of his fascistic war on children, the hallmark of which was his draconian Biden-approved crime bill which essentially declared black childhood to be a felony. And this is where we meet the concentration camp question.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generally puts me to shame in the histrionics department (the bitch also looks way better in heels) but she hit the nail on the head when she had the ovaries to call our countries desert tiger-cage day-care centers concentration camps. No single race of people owns the rights to that specific genre of inhumanity. This country had concentration camps for Indians long before Germany was even Germany. A concentration camp is anywhere where large groups of people are concentrated against their will behind bars and concertina wire. You don't have to be a limp-wristed open-borders loving panarchist like me to find that concept repulsive, especially when it involves children. Ankle bracelets are cheap and locking up toddlers is terrorism. But why are we picking favorites here? When it all comes down to it, aren't all prisons concentration camps?
There are millions of people in cages across this country, more than any other country, not just in general but per capita. We make China look like fucking Burning Man for Christ's sake. And what does all this barbarism achieve? Nothing. Not rehabilitation. The American prison system is a factory that gobbles up the children our equally heinous public schools fail and spits out hardened criminals, pathologically incapable of existing anywhere but prison. It's an emotional crippling machine. Recidivism rates are through the roof and a huge portion of this countries permanent prisoners suffer from untreated mental illness. That just leaves us with some hideously arcane Hobbesian sense of frontier justice where we essentially throw people's lives away who hurt us because it makes us feel better about creating a society that makes this pain inevitable. Forgive my bluntness, but this is fucking stupid. We're kicking the dog for biting us because we kicked the dog. Maybe if our schools weren't glorified prisoner factories we would have learned that two wrongs don't make a right, two million wrongs makes a catastrophe and concentration camps are never right.
So I welcome Willem's rage, but I also welcome it to be put in the proper perspective. If you appose the camps on the boarder, you should appose their northern supermax cousins. Tribes managed to effect restorative models of justice centuries before the relatively recent invention of the modern prison. There is no reason why our communities, towns and neighborhoods can't do the same. When a society becomes too modern for mercy, it has ceased to evolve into anything worth protecting. Maybe we can get back on track by spending less time and money on violently reacting to societies ills and more time fixing them. The best way to prevent the proliferation of violence in society is to prevent child abuse. Let's start by letting them out of those goddamn cages. Until then, I will continue to have more sympathy for the Willem Van Spronsen's of this country than the comfortable state terrorists they assault. Make of that what you will.
Smash all the camps, dearest motherfuckers, from Yuma to Attica. Either we all get free or nobodies free. No justice? No peace.
Piss, Vinegar & always Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Rusty Cage by Soundgarden
* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon
* Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash
* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash
* Poor Poor Pitiful Me by Warren Zevon
My sympathy is not exclusively political however. My sympathy comes from a place of very personal outrage and my outrage comes from a deeply traumatic childhood. I can usually retain a pretty jaded gonzo snark with my writing, stemming from my misanthropic drag queen sense of humor. But when you've been fucked with by role-crazy adults as a child, part of you will always be that child. So when I see kids in fucking cages, I see myself brutally misgendered in a confessional waiting for hell. And that's when I flip my proverbial shit and get downright histrionic. The only reason why I haven't gone full Kaczynski like Willem, aside from the fact that my meds are working and I generally appose initiatory violence, is because I'm usually too livid in these moments to handle anarcho-home-ec projects like IED's. I'm also probably too pissed off to write a completely lucid blog post, so this time I decided to wait a week and take a closer look at the issue of the camps.
It's very tempting to drop the lion share of the blame on a loud-mouth bully like Trump. He's certainly made the immigration issue more personal by declaring entire classes of people war criminals and encouraging his beloved gorilla juice-heads in ICE to get their Gestapo on. The harsh reality that the media has chosen to ignore however is that there is nothing particularly new about Orange-Man-Bad's persecution of pint-sized undocumented line-crossers. In fact, the bastard still comes in fourth behind the last three presidents in mass deportations. The modern militarization of the boarder actually started decades before Trump with another sanction-happy rapist named Bill Clinton (I believe the two may have met once or twice at one of Jeffrey Epstein's Pretty Baby-Eyes Wide Shut Parties) which was just one small part of his fascistic war on children, the hallmark of which was his draconian Biden-approved crime bill which essentially declared black childhood to be a felony. And this is where we meet the concentration camp question.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generally puts me to shame in the histrionics department (the bitch also looks way better in heels) but she hit the nail on the head when she had the ovaries to call our countries desert tiger-cage day-care centers concentration camps. No single race of people owns the rights to that specific genre of inhumanity. This country had concentration camps for Indians long before Germany was even Germany. A concentration camp is anywhere where large groups of people are concentrated against their will behind bars and concertina wire. You don't have to be a limp-wristed open-borders loving panarchist like me to find that concept repulsive, especially when it involves children. Ankle bracelets are cheap and locking up toddlers is terrorism. But why are we picking favorites here? When it all comes down to it, aren't all prisons concentration camps?
There are millions of people in cages across this country, more than any other country, not just in general but per capita. We make China look like fucking Burning Man for Christ's sake. And what does all this barbarism achieve? Nothing. Not rehabilitation. The American prison system is a factory that gobbles up the children our equally heinous public schools fail and spits out hardened criminals, pathologically incapable of existing anywhere but prison. It's an emotional crippling machine. Recidivism rates are through the roof and a huge portion of this countries permanent prisoners suffer from untreated mental illness. That just leaves us with some hideously arcane Hobbesian sense of frontier justice where we essentially throw people's lives away who hurt us because it makes us feel better about creating a society that makes this pain inevitable. Forgive my bluntness, but this is fucking stupid. We're kicking the dog for biting us because we kicked the dog. Maybe if our schools weren't glorified prisoner factories we would have learned that two wrongs don't make a right, two million wrongs makes a catastrophe and concentration camps are never right.
So I welcome Willem's rage, but I also welcome it to be put in the proper perspective. If you appose the camps on the boarder, you should appose their northern supermax cousins. Tribes managed to effect restorative models of justice centuries before the relatively recent invention of the modern prison. There is no reason why our communities, towns and neighborhoods can't do the same. When a society becomes too modern for mercy, it has ceased to evolve into anything worth protecting. Maybe we can get back on track by spending less time and money on violently reacting to societies ills and more time fixing them. The best way to prevent the proliferation of violence in society is to prevent child abuse. Let's start by letting them out of those goddamn cages. Until then, I will continue to have more sympathy for the Willem Van Spronsen's of this country than the comfortable state terrorists they assault. Make of that what you will.
Smash all the camps, dearest motherfuckers, from Yuma to Attica. Either we all get free or nobodies free. No justice? No peace.
Piss, Vinegar & always Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Rusty Cage by Soundgarden
* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon
* Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy
* Suedehead by Morrissey
* Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash
* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash
* Poor Poor Pitiful Me by Warren Zevon
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Nukes For Peace?
Surrounded by trigger happy Tonkinesque gunboats and drowning in debt, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made the risky decision to play the last card left in their deck; to defy the P5+1 Deal in order to save the P5+1 Deal. It's a hell of a gambit but it already has those pussies in the EU clamoring for new talks with the embattled nation. Under the circumstances, I would argue that Iran's decision to enrich Uranium past the amount allowed in the deal but still far short of anything potentially lethal isn't just tactically savvy, it's the right thing to do.
Iran offered Europe and the US everything but a weekly colonoscopy with that deal and we've given them jack shit in return for their patience. While Trump shredded the agreement in a reckless Israel-friendly hissy fit, Europe has sheepishly reneged on their promises to stand up to Orange-Man-Bad and ease their own sanctions. Their indecision isn't just an embarrassing display of geostrategic cowardice that would gag Charles de Gaulle like a gimp, it's a brazen violation of the very deal they claim to remain committed to. In this dire situation, for Iran to continue to sit on their hands, would be a betrayal of both international diplomacy and their long suffering citizenry who these values are supposed to protect.
But this move also begs a bigger and rather uncomfortable question for peaceniks like me. Could Nukes be good for peace? Just typing those words feels blasphemous on my fingertips, but history speaks for itself. Iraq and Libya both forfeited their own nuclear weapons programs for the sake of self-preservation and both ended up brutally mugged for their efforts by the world's preeminent nuclear superpower. Further more, international law on this regard, is little more than a sick fucking joke. Iran has been hounded for decades by an illegally nuclear armed Israel and the only nation to ever use one of those goddamn things while even the intelligence agencies of these very rogue states admits that this program is a total fiction. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue their own flagrantly illegal arms race while being bathed in buckets of western aid. And evil Iran should what, be the last boy-scout while they get ransacked? It clearly doesn't make any fucking difference whether they actually have the bombs or not, so why not arm up?
This has essentially become the policy of North Korea, who originally sought little more than to update their dusty moribund nuclear program for the use of hard-water power to help them weather the post-Cold War winter. When confronted by an increasingly belligerent Clinton Administration on the issue, they decided that they might as well double-down and go back to making bombs until Jimmy Carter went rogue on the White House and cobbled together a peace deal that held until Bush decided to follow in Clinton's imperial footsteps with more baseless dick-wagging and saber-rattling. North Korea simply flipped that New England hick the bird and diligently returned to their nukes, braving power both soft and hard, until being offered another equally precarious deal with our current Schizophrenic-in-Chief. North Korea didn't exactly come out of this thing unscathed. Millions of their citizens have starved beneath the weight of our crippling sanctions. But they're still standing and without the taste of Uncle Sam's cock in their mouth. So why not Iran?
This is a question the western world will have to answer as Iran has chosen a middle ground, between Iraq and Korea, to throw the ball in our court. Expecting exposed third world nations to embrace nuclear dovery runs as patronizingly hollow when all the rich countries singing Cat Stevens songs are armed to the fucking teeth. Iran has never invaded a single sovereign nation and yet its expected to play Gandhi to a gang of colonialist bloodhounds who've left rotting carcasses on nearly every continent they've ever raped with a flagpole. In what hopped up universe is this mindset anything but atrociously racist and downright rude? I still think sticking to that deal as long as they did showed the world a lot of class on Iran's part. But class wont cure kids with leukemia or keep food on the table. When it comes to Iran's nuclear weapons program, whether it ever becomes more than fictional or not, don't hate the player, hate the game.
You want peace, dearest motherfuckers? Me too. In fact I wage to bet even those dastardly Mullahs do. But the cowboy in the red, white and blue hat is gonna have to drop his pistols first. After all, he's the only one who's been caught using them.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Imagine by John Lennon
* Peace Sells by Megadeth
* Peace Train by Cat Stevens
* Reign In Blood by Slayer
* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats
* What About Us by Ministry
* Shinny Happy People by REM
* Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana
* Museum of Love by Daniel Johnston
* Andre by L7
Iran offered Europe and the US everything but a weekly colonoscopy with that deal and we've given them jack shit in return for their patience. While Trump shredded the agreement in a reckless Israel-friendly hissy fit, Europe has sheepishly reneged on their promises to stand up to Orange-Man-Bad and ease their own sanctions. Their indecision isn't just an embarrassing display of geostrategic cowardice that would gag Charles de Gaulle like a gimp, it's a brazen violation of the very deal they claim to remain committed to. In this dire situation, for Iran to continue to sit on their hands, would be a betrayal of both international diplomacy and their long suffering citizenry who these values are supposed to protect.
But this move also begs a bigger and rather uncomfortable question for peaceniks like me. Could Nukes be good for peace? Just typing those words feels blasphemous on my fingertips, but history speaks for itself. Iraq and Libya both forfeited their own nuclear weapons programs for the sake of self-preservation and both ended up brutally mugged for their efforts by the world's preeminent nuclear superpower. Further more, international law on this regard, is little more than a sick fucking joke. Iran has been hounded for decades by an illegally nuclear armed Israel and the only nation to ever use one of those goddamn things while even the intelligence agencies of these very rogue states admits that this program is a total fiction. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue their own flagrantly illegal arms race while being bathed in buckets of western aid. And evil Iran should what, be the last boy-scout while they get ransacked? It clearly doesn't make any fucking difference whether they actually have the bombs or not, so why not arm up?
This has essentially become the policy of North Korea, who originally sought little more than to update their dusty moribund nuclear program for the use of hard-water power to help them weather the post-Cold War winter. When confronted by an increasingly belligerent Clinton Administration on the issue, they decided that they might as well double-down and go back to making bombs until Jimmy Carter went rogue on the White House and cobbled together a peace deal that held until Bush decided to follow in Clinton's imperial footsteps with more baseless dick-wagging and saber-rattling. North Korea simply flipped that New England hick the bird and diligently returned to their nukes, braving power both soft and hard, until being offered another equally precarious deal with our current Schizophrenic-in-Chief. North Korea didn't exactly come out of this thing unscathed. Millions of their citizens have starved beneath the weight of our crippling sanctions. But they're still standing and without the taste of Uncle Sam's cock in their mouth. So why not Iran?
This is a question the western world will have to answer as Iran has chosen a middle ground, between Iraq and Korea, to throw the ball in our court. Expecting exposed third world nations to embrace nuclear dovery runs as patronizingly hollow when all the rich countries singing Cat Stevens songs are armed to the fucking teeth. Iran has never invaded a single sovereign nation and yet its expected to play Gandhi to a gang of colonialist bloodhounds who've left rotting carcasses on nearly every continent they've ever raped with a flagpole. In what hopped up universe is this mindset anything but atrociously racist and downright rude? I still think sticking to that deal as long as they did showed the world a lot of class on Iran's part. But class wont cure kids with leukemia or keep food on the table. When it comes to Iran's nuclear weapons program, whether it ever becomes more than fictional or not, don't hate the player, hate the game.
You want peace, dearest motherfuckers? Me too. In fact I wage to bet even those dastardly Mullahs do. But the cowboy in the red, white and blue hat is gonna have to drop his pistols first. After all, he's the only one who's been caught using them.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Imagine by John Lennon
* Peace Sells by Megadeth
* Peace Train by Cat Stevens
* Reign In Blood by Slayer
* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats
* What About Us by Ministry
* Shinny Happy People by REM
* Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana
* Museum of Love by Daniel Johnston
* Andre by L7
Sunday, July 7, 2019
The Revolt Against Adulthood
Why don't you grow up, Nicky? That's the tried old refrain that never seems to get older than I do. It seems like I hear it from pretty much all the token adult figures in my life; my parents, my therapist, my government. And maybe they've got a point. I am over thirty, unemployed, painfully single and I still live at home. To be fair, I'm also certifiably mentally ill. As a slowly recovering shut-in, my lingering agoraphobia makes it damn near impossible to hold down even a part time job. But If I'm to be 100% honest to a gut-shiving fault, which is pretty much my whole shtick, my aversion to adulthood is far more complex than my inability to properly regulate good and bad stress.
I was raised in the wrong fucking gender by an establishment of adults who I was led to believe held the mandate of god himself, the ultimate adult figure. By in large, growing up, the adults in my life were cruel, petty, two-faced zealots who had their way with my trust until it quite simply ceased to exist. There is a very firmly moralist part of me that yells at the top of her deeply closeted preteen lungs, WHY THE FUCK WOULD I EVER WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!
I've talked about this disembodied voice before. The invisible girl who's tired of suffocating beneath the biological trappings of manhood. She wants to come out and play with matches but she's not particularly intrigued by the late capitalist banality of modern adulthood. And, in 2019, she's not alone.
It seems like I come from an entire generation of kids who are downright allergic to adulthood. We are a lost generation that has chosen in overwhelming numbers to stay single, unemployed and live at home. We also seem to be a culture that is defined by our collective nostalgia. We've somehow managed to make washed-up boy bands and thirty year old cartoons a downright viable industry. we've gathered on the Internet into rabid cults devoted to everything from anime to My Little Pony. In the process, we have also become the butt of an endless barrage of jokes from older generations for refusing to conform to what their interpretation of what adulthood is. But isn't that precisely what adulthood is? An interpretation, not unlike other equally subjective concepts like normality and sanity, of what constitutes a successful existence in a collapsing society running on fumes?
So what is an "Adult" in 2019. What earns one that cherished class distinction in the waning hours of the American Century? According to postmodern western society, an adult is someone who pays their taxes and votes for sensible centrist warmongers.
An adult is someone who works their fingers to the fucking bone for some half-lit cubicle despot who treats them with all the respect of branded cattle.
An adult cuts their hair and dresses like a goddamn ventriloquist dummy just to fit in with the other miserable fakes in the herd.
An adult builds them self an oversized suburban prison cell over virgin forests with granite counter tops and cathedral ceilings on the ocean floor of a raging sea of debt.
An adult gives into the peer pressure of competitive monogamy and pumps out two and a half kids before pushing their demons on them and punishing them for not being properly spoiled and jaded by the shining success of our empty neoliberal existence.
An adult beats their spouse after the home team loses and then sauces them self to sleep on a cocktail of hard alcohol and sleeping pills.
An adult is a faceless, spineless, living corpse who does as their told. And this is the "success" my generation of missing children should aspire too? Let me speak for all of us right now and tell the mincing successful adults in the room to go fuck themselves. Even the purgatory of delayed adulthood is better than the hell of their empty existence. Enjoy the Beamer and the fake tits, champ, you've earned it.
And my generation's search for something meaningful in what this toxic society deems meaningless is hardly an anomaly. Many lost generations living in moribund societies pregnant with their own demise have chose to play hide and seek among the wreckage of their ancestors. In the final days of Weimar Germany and the Roman Empire, whole generations chose to abandon the responsibility of keeping their rusted hulk states alive in favor of indulging in the fantasy of burlesque houses and post-pagan orgies. Perhaps these are more than just contractions before the miscarriage. Perhaps there is something hardwired deep into our primordial lizard brains that still thirsts for a return to the natural world when the modern one is in shambles. One only capable of sustaining life in the years before we had been so thoroughly subjugated and assimilated by those gulags of adulthood called schools and the workforce.
There was an age in which we were all children, or primitive as the condescending gatekeepers of history in the Ivy Leagues call it. Before agriculture and property and adulthood, we hunted and gathered our collective resources and spent the lion share of our time engaging each other, irrespective of age, in meaningful play. I've known some much maligned folk who continue this tradition deep in the hollers of Appalachia. They receive the same amount of disrespect from academia as our primitive ancestors and they give same amount fucks about the adult world as I do. It's easy to typecast those who embrace absurdity in absurd times, be they hillbillies or millennials, but maybe, just maybe, we're all responding to something we've been robbed of by the progress of modern adulthood. And maybe it's time we took it back.
This isn't to say that my generation has it all figured out. We just know that the world is fucked up and it doesn't have to be this way. Sadly, some of the decomposing adults are wise enough to acknowledge our discontent and shrewd enough to harness it to consolidate their own plush positions in a crumbling kingdom of shit. Ageing scions of malignant adulthood like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have offered us the faulty illusion of safety beneath their condescending guardianship. These toxic father figures have offered us a candy store of goodies like free healthcare, free tuition, great big walls and even bigger battleships to turn this desperate land into one big safe crib as long as we agree to play nice and let them rape mamma with factory farms and smart bombs.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you kids, but this is one (wo)man-child who's not falling for the stranger's candy again. I say we sneak out after dark and run amok on their wrinkled asses. I say we give the adults a taste of their own fucking medicine.
I say we stop giving the bullies our lunch money and use our would-be tax dollars to buy PlayStations, dope and electric guitars. I say we turn the census into a colossal game of Madlibs. I say we decorate every government building we can find with toilet paper and rotten eggs. I say we all show up to jury duty in blackface except the blacks who show up dressed as white powdered judges. I say we throw a gigantic water-balloon fight on the graves of Arlington with one red-nosed clown for every tombstone. I say we jam up the tailpipes of every police cruiser from Queens to Ferguson with Twinkies and bananas. I say we dose Washington's water supply with homemade moonshine. And I say we all play hooky with a nationwide collective strike and gather at the National Mall to eat fluffer-nutters, make out and play Dungeons and Dragons until the adults step down and give us back our goddamned democracy.
More importantly, I say we stop saying 'Yes mam' and 'No sir' to people who don't treat us with the respect to earn such knee-jerk platitudes. I say we take care of our parents, even if they are condescending dicks, instead of shoving them into homes. I say we tell our friends that we love them before they're gone. And I say we make those friends and family a higher priority than making money to hand over to government thieves. I say we start doing what makes us happy rather than what makes us and the government rich. I say we stop dropping bombs on people for not playing the right games. And I say we start treating all children, young and old, with the kindness and respect we wish to be treated with. No more patriarchy. No more ageism. And no more second class citizens, shamed into the conformity of adulthood. No more invisible girls.
To put it frankly, fuck adulthood, dearest motherfuckers. It's an overrated concept crafted by the dying to enslave the living. Our only responsibilities should be to each other and against the systems that divide us. Let the Nickelodean revolution begin and let it begin with me.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Essentially by Japanese Breakfast
* Teenage Dirtbag by Phoebe Bridgers
* Our Secret by Beat Happening
* We're Going To Be Friends by the White Stripes
* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* Superbike by Jay Som
* Come As You Are by Nirvana
* I Go Home by Daniel Johnston
* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski
* In the Garage by Weezer
* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub
I was raised in the wrong fucking gender by an establishment of adults who I was led to believe held the mandate of god himself, the ultimate adult figure. By in large, growing up, the adults in my life were cruel, petty, two-faced zealots who had their way with my trust until it quite simply ceased to exist. There is a very firmly moralist part of me that yells at the top of her deeply closeted preteen lungs, WHY THE FUCK WOULD I EVER WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!
I've talked about this disembodied voice before. The invisible girl who's tired of suffocating beneath the biological trappings of manhood. She wants to come out and play with matches but she's not particularly intrigued by the late capitalist banality of modern adulthood. And, in 2019, she's not alone.
It seems like I come from an entire generation of kids who are downright allergic to adulthood. We are a lost generation that has chosen in overwhelming numbers to stay single, unemployed and live at home. We also seem to be a culture that is defined by our collective nostalgia. We've somehow managed to make washed-up boy bands and thirty year old cartoons a downright viable industry. we've gathered on the Internet into rabid cults devoted to everything from anime to My Little Pony. In the process, we have also become the butt of an endless barrage of jokes from older generations for refusing to conform to what their interpretation of what adulthood is. But isn't that precisely what adulthood is? An interpretation, not unlike other equally subjective concepts like normality and sanity, of what constitutes a successful existence in a collapsing society running on fumes?
So what is an "Adult" in 2019. What earns one that cherished class distinction in the waning hours of the American Century? According to postmodern western society, an adult is someone who pays their taxes and votes for sensible centrist warmongers.
An adult is someone who works their fingers to the fucking bone for some half-lit cubicle despot who treats them with all the respect of branded cattle.
An adult cuts their hair and dresses like a goddamn ventriloquist dummy just to fit in with the other miserable fakes in the herd.
An adult builds them self an oversized suburban prison cell over virgin forests with granite counter tops and cathedral ceilings on the ocean floor of a raging sea of debt.
An adult gives into the peer pressure of competitive monogamy and pumps out two and a half kids before pushing their demons on them and punishing them for not being properly spoiled and jaded by the shining success of our empty neoliberal existence.
An adult beats their spouse after the home team loses and then sauces them self to sleep on a cocktail of hard alcohol and sleeping pills.
An adult is a faceless, spineless, living corpse who does as their told. And this is the "success" my generation of missing children should aspire too? Let me speak for all of us right now and tell the mincing successful adults in the room to go fuck themselves. Even the purgatory of delayed adulthood is better than the hell of their empty existence. Enjoy the Beamer and the fake tits, champ, you've earned it.
And my generation's search for something meaningful in what this toxic society deems meaningless is hardly an anomaly. Many lost generations living in moribund societies pregnant with their own demise have chose to play hide and seek among the wreckage of their ancestors. In the final days of Weimar Germany and the Roman Empire, whole generations chose to abandon the responsibility of keeping their rusted hulk states alive in favor of indulging in the fantasy of burlesque houses and post-pagan orgies. Perhaps these are more than just contractions before the miscarriage. Perhaps there is something hardwired deep into our primordial lizard brains that still thirsts for a return to the natural world when the modern one is in shambles. One only capable of sustaining life in the years before we had been so thoroughly subjugated and assimilated by those gulags of adulthood called schools and the workforce.
There was an age in which we were all children, or primitive as the condescending gatekeepers of history in the Ivy Leagues call it. Before agriculture and property and adulthood, we hunted and gathered our collective resources and spent the lion share of our time engaging each other, irrespective of age, in meaningful play. I've known some much maligned folk who continue this tradition deep in the hollers of Appalachia. They receive the same amount of disrespect from academia as our primitive ancestors and they give same amount fucks about the adult world as I do. It's easy to typecast those who embrace absurdity in absurd times, be they hillbillies or millennials, but maybe, just maybe, we're all responding to something we've been robbed of by the progress of modern adulthood. And maybe it's time we took it back.
This isn't to say that my generation has it all figured out. We just know that the world is fucked up and it doesn't have to be this way. Sadly, some of the decomposing adults are wise enough to acknowledge our discontent and shrewd enough to harness it to consolidate their own plush positions in a crumbling kingdom of shit. Ageing scions of malignant adulthood like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have offered us the faulty illusion of safety beneath their condescending guardianship. These toxic father figures have offered us a candy store of goodies like free healthcare, free tuition, great big walls and even bigger battleships to turn this desperate land into one big safe crib as long as we agree to play nice and let them rape mamma with factory farms and smart bombs.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you kids, but this is one (wo)man-child who's not falling for the stranger's candy again. I say we sneak out after dark and run amok on their wrinkled asses. I say we give the adults a taste of their own fucking medicine.
I say we stop giving the bullies our lunch money and use our would-be tax dollars to buy PlayStations, dope and electric guitars. I say we turn the census into a colossal game of Madlibs. I say we decorate every government building we can find with toilet paper and rotten eggs. I say we all show up to jury duty in blackface except the blacks who show up dressed as white powdered judges. I say we throw a gigantic water-balloon fight on the graves of Arlington with one red-nosed clown for every tombstone. I say we jam up the tailpipes of every police cruiser from Queens to Ferguson with Twinkies and bananas. I say we dose Washington's water supply with homemade moonshine. And I say we all play hooky with a nationwide collective strike and gather at the National Mall to eat fluffer-nutters, make out and play Dungeons and Dragons until the adults step down and give us back our goddamned democracy.
More importantly, I say we stop saying 'Yes mam' and 'No sir' to people who don't treat us with the respect to earn such knee-jerk platitudes. I say we take care of our parents, even if they are condescending dicks, instead of shoving them into homes. I say we tell our friends that we love them before they're gone. And I say we make those friends and family a higher priority than making money to hand over to government thieves. I say we start doing what makes us happy rather than what makes us and the government rich. I say we stop dropping bombs on people for not playing the right games. And I say we start treating all children, young and old, with the kindness and respect we wish to be treated with. No more patriarchy. No more ageism. And no more second class citizens, shamed into the conformity of adulthood. No more invisible girls.
To put it frankly, fuck adulthood, dearest motherfuckers. It's an overrated concept crafted by the dying to enslave the living. Our only responsibilities should be to each other and against the systems that divide us. Let the Nickelodean revolution begin and let it begin with me.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Essentially by Japanese Breakfast
* Teenage Dirtbag by Phoebe Bridgers
* Our Secret by Beat Happening
* We're Going To Be Friends by the White Stripes
* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* Superbike by Jay Som
* Come As You Are by Nirvana
* I Go Home by Daniel Johnston
* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski
* In the Garage by Weezer
* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Godspeed Justin Raimondo, You Brilliant Son of a Bitch
The son of a bitch promised he wasn't gonna go. That's what goes through my grief wrenched mind tonight, as I learn that Justin Raimondo, easily the greatest writer of the Paleoconservative Movement and total unapologetic son of a bitch to the bitter end, has passed after a white knuckle brawl with lung cancer, at 67. He can't be dead. Their has to be a catch. He was so certain that he could kick that bastard disease back to hell where it belonged that he made you believe it too. Justin Raimondo, America's own Yukio Mishima, an abominable twin-fisted fag who punched mountains just for the exercise between cigarettes is dead? No. No fucking way. Not possible.
To those of you who don't know Justin and his work, I have no words to give you. There is simply no way to possibly describe to the uninitiated how massive he was to the Antiwar Movement. But I grew up, a pissed off anti-imperialist queer in my own right, enthralled by the Old Testament grade power of his sublime diction. It made little difference that he was a Buchananite isolationist and that I was a lefty-Yippie-anarcho-punk. He was radical. His enemies were my enemies, Kristol, Horowitz, Hitchens, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and he cut them down mercilessly like a shogun vigilante who's katana thirsted only for the blood of chickenhawks. I had never seen somebody so antiwar be so cruel and it was fucking beautiful. He was brilliant, cunning, merciless, and he was on our side. Those neocon pussies didn't stand a chance. He was our secret weapon, an action movie style wringer for the Peace Movement and he and Eric Garris' antiwar.com remains the finest viable resource in any die hard peacenik's arsenal.
This isn't to say that the old bastard couldn't piss me off. He could make my blood boil like bacon grease, especially when he became a seemingly unshakable defender of our current foul Caesar and refused to admit that the revolution had gone sour after the Donald began racking up war crimes like the politician Justin assured us he wasn't. I raged over this hypocrisy, not because I hated Justin but because I loved him so goddamn much that I couldn't bare to see some slick corporate welfare queen make a fool of my sensei, simply because he wanted so badly to believe that this orange bulldozer could pave the way for the antiwar revolution that we both ached for.
But it's important, for me as much as anybody else if not more so, to remember that Justin came from the Murray Rothbard school of anti-imperialism. With every position he took, right or wrong, he put peace first, no matter how much it hurt, whether this meant endorsing Che or the SDS or Nader or Trump. Justin could care less about Trump the candidate. What he saw was an opportunity for Trump the movement. He saw barns full of Southern Baptist crackers chanting America First and he saw an opportunity to push anti-imperialism into the mainstream zeitgeist. I still, quite violently, disagree with this M.O.. Frankly it smacks of the kind of ends-justify-the-means style tyranny that turned me off of Leninism. But, much like Lenin, Justin was a complicated beast who sometimes let his bleeding heart drown out his enormous brains. And even for this mortal sin, I can't help but to love the old bastard a friend of mine once aptly described as the gay Sicilian Archie Bunker.
Never the less, Justin never stopped fighting like bloody fucking hell for all the right reasons. He vehemently apposed all war, every war this twisted wretch of a country ever invested blood and treasure into. He made no exceptions. Justin took Washington to task for crimes no one else even bothered to cover. No one did finer coverage of the NED sponsored Color Wars which would form the bedrock of the current Second Cold War. No one spoke more eloquently about the collective hunger of the Korean people for reunification which has only recently blossomed into once unthinkable peace talks between those divided nations. His mind was a veritable encyclopedia of world history. A weapon of mass destruction that even the feds failed to contain during their Bush-era witch hunt against antiwar.com. The powerful feared Justin and rightly so. He saw their demise coming back when Trump was still groping teenagers at their fundraisers. Justin had a vision for imperial blowback that was 80/20. He could see certain disaster from miles away. Except for his own.
Justin's furious fighting spirit extended to his own personal health. When faced with a death sentence after smoking half the tobacco in Virginia, he looked the reaper deep in the socket and snarled bring it on like a Spaghetti Western cowboy. Like peace, Justin fought for his life to win, even when the odds were insurmountable. He was one of the greatest writers of his generation, a head on my Mount Rushmore right between Hunter Thompson and Gore Vidal, and he helped light a fire in me when I had all but given up on the art itself. My own personal Renaissance from an agoraphobic has-been/never-was to a literary fire-starter began on the message boards beneath his columns on antiwar.com. After flaking out of college with a nervous meltdown, I was ready to give up my lifelong dreams of becoming the genderfuck Raul Duke. Justin proved to me that you didn't need a newspaper to burn down the Pentagon. All you needed was the grit to look power deep in the socket and snarl bring it on.
The son of a bitch promised he wouldn't go. And if this lefty-Yippie-anarcho-punk has anything to say about it, that promise will be kept. Justin's war is my war, and that war doesn't stop until every American war does. Someday, on the grave of this crumbling empire you will find "Justin was here!" scrawled in my lipstick and that's another promise I aim to keep.
To those of you who don't know Justin and his work, I have no words to give you. There is simply no way to possibly describe to the uninitiated how massive he was to the Antiwar Movement. But I grew up, a pissed off anti-imperialist queer in my own right, enthralled by the Old Testament grade power of his sublime diction. It made little difference that he was a Buchananite isolationist and that I was a lefty-Yippie-anarcho-punk. He was radical. His enemies were my enemies, Kristol, Horowitz, Hitchens, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and he cut them down mercilessly like a shogun vigilante who's katana thirsted only for the blood of chickenhawks. I had never seen somebody so antiwar be so cruel and it was fucking beautiful. He was brilliant, cunning, merciless, and he was on our side. Those neocon pussies didn't stand a chance. He was our secret weapon, an action movie style wringer for the Peace Movement and he and Eric Garris' antiwar.com remains the finest viable resource in any die hard peacenik's arsenal.
This isn't to say that the old bastard couldn't piss me off. He could make my blood boil like bacon grease, especially when he became a seemingly unshakable defender of our current foul Caesar and refused to admit that the revolution had gone sour after the Donald began racking up war crimes like the politician Justin assured us he wasn't. I raged over this hypocrisy, not because I hated Justin but because I loved him so goddamn much that I couldn't bare to see some slick corporate welfare queen make a fool of my sensei, simply because he wanted so badly to believe that this orange bulldozer could pave the way for the antiwar revolution that we both ached for.
But it's important, for me as much as anybody else if not more so, to remember that Justin came from the Murray Rothbard school of anti-imperialism. With every position he took, right or wrong, he put peace first, no matter how much it hurt, whether this meant endorsing Che or the SDS or Nader or Trump. Justin could care less about Trump the candidate. What he saw was an opportunity for Trump the movement. He saw barns full of Southern Baptist crackers chanting America First and he saw an opportunity to push anti-imperialism into the mainstream zeitgeist. I still, quite violently, disagree with this M.O.. Frankly it smacks of the kind of ends-justify-the-means style tyranny that turned me off of Leninism. But, much like Lenin, Justin was a complicated beast who sometimes let his bleeding heart drown out his enormous brains. And even for this mortal sin, I can't help but to love the old bastard a friend of mine once aptly described as the gay Sicilian Archie Bunker.
Never the less, Justin never stopped fighting like bloody fucking hell for all the right reasons. He vehemently apposed all war, every war this twisted wretch of a country ever invested blood and treasure into. He made no exceptions. Justin took Washington to task for crimes no one else even bothered to cover. No one did finer coverage of the NED sponsored Color Wars which would form the bedrock of the current Second Cold War. No one spoke more eloquently about the collective hunger of the Korean people for reunification which has only recently blossomed into once unthinkable peace talks between those divided nations. His mind was a veritable encyclopedia of world history. A weapon of mass destruction that even the feds failed to contain during their Bush-era witch hunt against antiwar.com. The powerful feared Justin and rightly so. He saw their demise coming back when Trump was still groping teenagers at their fundraisers. Justin had a vision for imperial blowback that was 80/20. He could see certain disaster from miles away. Except for his own.
Justin's furious fighting spirit extended to his own personal health. When faced with a death sentence after smoking half the tobacco in Virginia, he looked the reaper deep in the socket and snarled bring it on like a Spaghetti Western cowboy. Like peace, Justin fought for his life to win, even when the odds were insurmountable. He was one of the greatest writers of his generation, a head on my Mount Rushmore right between Hunter Thompson and Gore Vidal, and he helped light a fire in me when I had all but given up on the art itself. My own personal Renaissance from an agoraphobic has-been/never-was to a literary fire-starter began on the message boards beneath his columns on antiwar.com. After flaking out of college with a nervous meltdown, I was ready to give up my lifelong dreams of becoming the genderfuck Raul Duke. Justin proved to me that you didn't need a newspaper to burn down the Pentagon. All you needed was the grit to look power deep in the socket and snarl bring it on.
The son of a bitch promised he wouldn't go. And if this lefty-Yippie-anarcho-punk has anything to say about it, that promise will be kept. Justin's war is my war, and that war doesn't stop until every American war does. Someday, on the grave of this crumbling empire you will find "Justin was here!" scrawled in my lipstick and that's another promise I aim to keep.
As the good Doctor Gonzo would say, there he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. Godspeed Justin Raimondo, you brilliant son of a bitch. We'll keep the fire burning for you until it catches on.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* You Cant Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders
* All Apologies by Nirvana
* Left of the Dial by the Replacements
* Knockin' On Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan
* A Better Union by Titus Andronicus
* Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones
* Stuck Between Stations by the Hold Steady
* Make You Better by the Decemberists
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Queer Power!: Because Pride is Not Enough
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
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 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
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