It is as if we all synchronized our nightmares—or, rather, in a world of neoliberal austerity, we have run out of night-time horror tales and need to all share the same moth-eaten, unraveling, tedious bad dream. We have a tsunami of infected shit pouring mightily through our paper mache sea wall—a fierce, eternal heat wave, More
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Image by Timon Studler.
It is as if we all synchronized our nightmares—or, rather, in a world of neoliberal austerity, we have run out of night-time horror tales and need to all share the same moth-eaten, unraveling, tedious bad dream. We have a tsunami of infected shit pouring mightily through our paper mache sea wall—a fierce, eternal heat wave, wars and genocides, fires, storms, poisons, plastics, and perverts oh my, and to make matters worse, our so called Democratic party has just discovered that the refrigerator went down in a blackout and the carton of milk turned as dank, sour, and foul as raw sewage. I am talking about Joe “I-supply-weapons-for-genocide” Biden, who just yesterday was as vibrant and clever as, uh… a normal person… and now, in a snap of the fingers, stares blankly into eternity like the two knotholes in your attic wall.
This sour milk emergency has provoked the Democratic Party big wigs—the people who could not possibly have known that Joe Biden’s wits had taken the uptown A-Train to oblivion without so much as leaving a note—to run in every direction at once in a frantic search for a warm, corporate friendly body to stuff into the empty ballot. I swear that if Curly of Three Stooges fame had gotten Ilse Koch pregnant, she might have given birth to the Democratic Party. The admixture of evil and slapstick ineptitude defies imagination. How do you not fucking know that your standard bearer, your champion of freedom and apple pie, has been stumbling into walls and wandering naked in the woods at night?
It appears as though the Democrats will finally put the gong show hook around grandpa’s waist, and call Kamala, or Pete Buttigieg, or Ronald MacDonald out of the storage bin to save our democracy. Fortunately, we live in the greatest country ever created and have so much freedom that we can’t figure out what to do with it all. We are free to vote for the Democratic clown car ticket, or the alternative, Night-of-the-Living-Dead party that just nominated Darth Vader and Heinrich Himmler as their candidates. Forgive me for my metaphoric extravagance—not the Vader/Himmler ticket, but Donald Trump and whatever evil fuckwit he bites in the throat to be his VP.And the beautiful thing about a Donald Trump/Joseph Goebbels ticket is that your vote automatically brings forth Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Stephen Miller, and Ted Bundy… oops, I mean Ted Cruz.
That is the lovely thing about democratic freedom and your choice to be yourself and vote for whomever the fuck you want, so long as it is a Democrat or Republican. We get to vote Clown Car or Nazi wannabe in a free and fair election. You get to “drill baby drill” or bomb Gaza into the sea of Armageddon.
We have free will and free choice: you get to live happily ever after in the stupor of our surrealistic dystopia, or you can (if you wish) bang your head against the padded walls of the insane asylum that is America. If this was some other country, some other planet, some other dimension of being, we might be out in the streets shutting it all down, but there are Amazon orders to wait for and TikTok videos to watch. We live in our perfectly ordered reality where nothing can shake us up. If a giant lobster from Andromeda landed in Wyoming wielding inter-galactic death rays in either pincer—so what?
The U.S. has an honorable history of mass protest. We all recall that Abbie Hoffman nominated a pig for president in 1968 Chicago, and that the mighty U.S. army turned tail in Vietnam and left Henry Kissinger with a mouthful of blood and guts looking for new outlets for his cannibalism. We have stopped wars and kicked scoundrels out of office. But those were simpler times. A mere four years ago we had millions in the streets over the police murder of George Floyd. How did that fizzle out and leave us all washed up—a nation of beached whales? The big question is this: how passively can we watch the planet burn to a crisp and remain as fatalistic about our political perpetrators as we all appear to be?
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