Let’s start with an unfunny and ironic joke: so there’s a crisis, a small one, like say the economic recession of a failed war coupled with the final death rattles of a manufacturing base under a long, slow dismantling, with the ugly blemishes of systemic racism and repression that disfigure the imperial skin becoming increasingly hard to ascribe as benign outliers instead of the pressing symptoms of a deeply bound sickness requiring attention, with a cultural landscape and a populous beginning to be completely defined as a homogeneous commodity via hammer-like onslaught of corporate media and camps of sterile, constructed consumer meanings, a sort of crisis that a capitalist imperial power by inherent design is incredibly ill-equipped to solve – the options forward are socialism or barbarism; Bill the prez chose the third way. Put on the shades, hit the sax, be all about the pussy, extremely all about the pussy, but then also double down on vicious drug war pursuits, supercharge mass incarceration to before unseen levels, dismantle every check and balance remaining on the market. Trust the market. Trust the fucking market. Toss the gays a bone, open up the social security net just enough to make it seem like maybe you could possibly give a fuck about human life even a little. Be the country boy. Be the cool celeb. Don’t say the n-word. Bomb the browns. Don’t say the n-word. Be everything to everyone. Save the rain forest, folks, recycle, folks, your jobs and futures are secured, the money saved by dumping these chemicals in the water tables will surely grace your hands. Bring back the morals, bring back standards, seem open of mind but acknowledge tradition. Scrub the discourse, honorable and free of crude edges. Fiscally conservative, socially liberal. All of this, also, is a joke.
Given what comes next, given how well the table was set for what comes next, it’s fitting that certain circles call the late 90s the end of history. The Bush years have gotten a lot of bad press, which is a good deal for them considering prison and death sentences seem a more apt and just outcome – so, my interests fall on a certain lead I'd like to chase. Consider these convergent things: the dyspnoic political and social fabric of late 90s liberal capitalism with its empty PC veneer hand held by stunning displays of class/racial/state violence; the consolidation of absolute corporate power and the natural progression of total communal alienation that comes with it (think of the cultural touchstones of Office Space, Clerks, Dilbert, and Fight Club, to grab the most simple, immediate examples); the rise of 24/7 network news. Take these and introduce the internet. The DNA of our very different but very similar internet today, and by extension this ‘new’ internet fascism, is shared from the old internet’s commons. And like a diamond through the forehead, the carrier agent is jokes. The space was mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle class, mostly hopelessly sheltered. Outside world grows increasingly ridiculous and contradictory – riding off of gen x apathy and witnessing vacuous displays of unity pushed by equally vacuous vulture corporations and disconnected political institutions, the end of history as set meaning slowing bleeds from surroundings. On sites like Something Awful, a reflexive, detached and absurd interaction takes form – ironically racist, sexist, stupid, hostile, toxic, etc. The new freedom of identity and intent granted by the internet reacts and reels. Out of this spawns the chan sites. Onward and onward and outward and outward. The facets of identity and the facets of the joke grow ever more polar – this is almost twenty years ago now. What if someone like Steve Bannon (to pick just one low hanging fruit) notices what is happening as early as 2006 and becomes CEO of a MMO loot farm company? What if you spent much of your life in these spaces? What if you came in long after the joke’s premise was lost? What if you found this space today? Any oldfag I’ve ever met is either a leftist or a fascist – I don’t foresee any newfag leftists now.
If we may, let’s drink from the poisoned, public well of REALS over FEELS. If given the opportunity and support, what is the conclusion of fascism? If we follow this exhaustively bleak and dumb road all the way to its end, what is there? Fascism is thoroughly a post-modern political ideology – its purpose is to gain power via any available avenue for the sake of power, it seeks power foremost and the justification does not matter and is subject to change and revision, its values shift like a xenomorph and it adheres to contradicting elements of histories and cultures in a fuzzy, incoherent fevor. I find it very very difficult to not see the groundwork of Nazi imagery and rhetoric within the same frame as we see the ‘new’ rising fash utilizing and reappropriating memes. The logics are built on vague shifting sands. Vaporwave fash, a nostalgia for a history mis-remembered. We should be reluctant to label the subjugation and following genocide of an ‘Other’ as a tenet because this is a means to maintain power – the ‘Other’ is always ill-defined and another ‘Other’ is always constructed. There is only a dead end. There is only exceedingly granular death. The classic fascist hero embraces death, there no higher honor than to give your life to the state, to your race, to whatever nebulously defined group or purpose – I cannot personally imagine a more abject terror, a more fever pitch manifestation of consummate existential horror, than to embrace the world’s destruction and your own destruction in service of a superstructure of a void, except what has risen now all these years later. A Cthulhuian form of fascism has been birthed by failing global capitalism and the internet. If we do not face this enemy that shifts among our communities, our families, our governance, every single thing is lost – in total, full stop.
I can’t think of anything more boring than pondering over what could be the reason behind the rising tide of alt-right or why Trump got elected or how we ‘mend the divide’ in America. Of mouth breathing in front of a ‘complex and intricate issue’, hand wringing in a frightful pool of blood and bile, face completely slack as simple fascists smirk and sneer. The American fash (which has been neatly exported internationally) is a closed circuit, a limping logic that shuts out everything else. The white middle class is finally starting to feel the shuddering weight of the imperial core running out of flesh to tear apart and they are buckling like fragile babies, desperate to hold on to their toys and their ‘culture’ – I cannot think of a more pathetic life, these precious little gnats that will feast upon the emptiest cum shot from any dick they can squint at and imagine as their own. Terminally slighted, failed and hollow, what a stark and public tantrum. They do not believe in equal rights, they do not believe in free speech, they do not believe in protests, they do not believe in non-violence – this is obvious to the point of being dull. What the fuck is owed here? What is the point of stomaching this petulant virus of fucking death? There is no divide worth mending here; cut this shit loose. Again, what is gained? We are continually ceding territory to genocide – and not just the comfortable genocide that we’ve done in pursuit of ill-gotten wealth and capital that has been justified by scumfuck global liberalism, not just the snowballing genocide of our future via complete, shortsighted desolation of our planet, but utter fucking free-fall barbarism, total extinction of soul, creed, life, and meaning.
It seems pretty fitting that the tip of the spear of an eternal-self-suck endworld movement is formed around a pointless expression of cargo-cult corporate consumer identity. A wall of corpses as a trade for cartoons and video games and super hero movies. A world to be sacrificed for a series of chain restaurants and cheese burgers. A particularly dumb way to wrap up this whole fucking cataclysm. Isn’t that an almost perfect joke? Let me convince you how perfect this joke is: I watched someone walk through blood as though through his own eyes. Livestreamed out for the entire world, he walked with operator boots into pools of blood running out piles of bodies in a mosque, corralling families and worshipers into the corners of what is to be the safest of havens, a place where a soul can feel the touch of God, and gutters of blood pour from huddled masses, and I watch him, as though through his own eyes, fire and laugh and fire and laugh with a rifle covered in white symbols, while ear rape meme songs played from a playlist and a very tinny smart phone speaker that cuts through horrible and endless screams. I watched children crumble to gunfire as though through his eyes, as if it was me, and there is remove kebab and laughing and screams. How deep is this joke. How many levels of irony deep is this. What is there, underneath, anymore. Look into this hole and tell me what is within. Is there something less than nothing, is there something more empty and unknowable than nothing.
The path forward is always empathy and to appeal to humanity – to understand others as human, much the same as yourself. And I believe in love. And, with that in mind, I am interested in violence; a pivot towards hate appeals to me. I believe in enemies. Our enemies are not monsters – they have families they love, people who care for them, they draw from the same deep capacity of tenderness and love and understanding as you or I do, they have the best of intentions to help and protect their community and family – but see that they have failed, that they have acted selfishly, no matter how noble or sincere their intent, see their soul as an equal to your own and destroy them, because they are voided, they usher death, they do not see you in themselves. If you are willing to take the energy and the goodwill you have and try to change minds and ‘save’ people, I support you and I truly wish you the best – seizing every single tool within our reach is necessary, this is good and significant work. What is also good work is to lash out. These ideas do not deserve a compromise or a seat at the table. There is no prize or pride in being nice, there is nothing to gain, we are not trying to be friends. This is a horrible mass of toxic children who feel constantly attacked by a woman in a movie or a black person being their neighbor or trans people having the nerve to exist – so attack. Cultivate a healthy belligerence. Do not be understanding. There is no trying to understand what is so easily and immediately understandable and what deserves nothing but derision and cruelty in kind. Give nothing but constant aggression, attack them personally, do not be drawn into a discussion, do not let them fall back on their script and talking points – answer with a stream of bile and nonsense, make them feel uncomfortable. Bring shame. Bring humiliation. Their mind is made up. You may imagine that this is some kind of chess match, that with the right selection of moves and counters, you will ‘win’ but in chess there are rules and win states agreed upon. It is an illogical, factless safe space they strike out from. Shatter it and invade. Deplatform. Destroy their means of comfort. If I can give even a moment of suffering, then it is worth it. I do not believe in civility – there is no place in civilization for these ideas. There is no place in civilization for the people who hold them.
Spit in the faces of anyone urging you to be civil. They are cowards, they are gutless. They do not serve your interests. Before us is a litany of enemies. Anybody urging you to civility, to taking the high road, to whatever kind of weak compromising, they are complicit in the fash, either unwittingly or directly – and that is a distinction that doesn’t particularly matter. Pelosi’s ‘sarcastic’ clap to own the cheeto, that not even she could claim as anything more than respect for a sitting president. Schumer’s fucking dogshit prissiness as he oh so defiantly ‘shut down’ five billion on a wall while literally signing off on two billion and for drones and more border patrol paramilitary – how brave, how polite and respectable, please make sure the cannon fodder in the camps fully understand how civil he was. When the children in space blankets inside their chain link vacation summer camps finally come of age, they can look back and smile warmly that these fucking ghouls fought as vigilantly as they could within the confines of manners. Remember, these are just disagreements – are we not the exact same as the right if we show even an ounce of fucking disdain. Please keep in mind all violence is equal if not done by the state, that there is literally no difference between breaking a store front window and careening a car into a crowd of people. If something can’t be achieved with open hearted words and goodwill, then it is not worth having – let’s not be soiled. What is the worth of this kind of dignity? Is there any dignity in being a fucking pisspig preaching a convenient, passive idea of unity in the face of a consuming death cult?
There is a dark big mood coming and I wonder what its shape will be. I wonder if what we are destroying everything to protect will exist within our life time. Are your interests being served? Or are we, continually, ceding territory – ceding power to what is a literally blasted future? I won’t have children, but my siblings do. I have a seventeen year old brother who is getting ready to fully enter this world and I just really wonder, and I smolder with anger instead of fear. An old friend of mine is a fash and what he told me was this: he imagines the future as very dim warring states, in a ruined world, and he wants to be on the side that will win. So I wonder how often he has actually looked at the world now. Is there anything more dystopian than regional apocalypses – of life continuing, perhaps ‘flourishing’, to heights never seen in human experience while large swathes are blotted out, not only the buildings destroyed or the infrastructure and resources hollowed or even all human life scrapped from it, but that there are now, currently, areas beyond a salted earth. Complete, irredeemable pockets that will never recover, will never have anything to reconstruct. It’s hard to imagine. Something like a soul recoils, it seems so hard to grasp, this very real physical manifestation of abject existential horror – a literal abyss that is visible, whose dimensions and whose laws you can technically know but cannot understand.
What exactly is gained on this course? Every single day rendered anchor-less and removed from outside indicators, new and worse and eerily similar to every other – history doesn’t matter, context doesn’t matter, memory subject to change, no understanding, no joint experience, just a mass of disconnected marching into dim, unfastened wastescapes. Unthinking, begging for a human to flinch. Are we not in a waiting room with no clear appointment.