Poetics And Politics: Ezra Pound’s Influence On The Rise Of The Alt-Right

“Jesus wept.”
“Let not my tears fall unnoticed.”

September 24, 2016:

Ice water, which turned out to be gin, was clear in a glass tumbler. Beside it, a joint rolled in Top’s tobacco paper held in a heavily recycled cigarillo filter, rested in an empty ashtray on a small wooden table. A window opened to a foggy corner lit by an orange street lamp. I lay on a red mattress on the floor, a stolen black knit cap pulled over my eyes pondering the similarities between neoplatonism’s idealization of the One, and Christianity’s affiliation to the Kingdom of Heaven, after having gone through a copy of Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy that I had taken from a Little Free Library in front of the local charter school several days before. As a former fellow traveler of neoplatonism, and a devout atheist, the co-mingling of ideas cut a deep wound.

To me, it came down to the Other. A concept usually uninvestigated in analytical, English-speaking academia due to the increased role the individual and scientific empiricism is given in those societies, but common in more abstract, continental philosophical literature dating back to Hegel, infamized by Marx and Freud, growing in esteem through the existentialist French, until breaking through to the mainstream during the Civil Rights movement, whose ultimate goal was to expose and correct socio-economic oppressive relationships based on differences in race, gender, sexuality, age, disability, etc.

Propped up by pillows, back against to the wall, I shook an almost empty bottle of limeade and splashed some into the glass of melting ice cubes and gin, making a ghetto-taxed gimlet. A metal folding chair with a torn seat cushion sat in the corner across from an obsolescent desktop computer, whose fan hummed in the night. I stretched my arms in a black zip-up hoodie with rusted bleach stains on the front pocket.

Now sitting in a computer chair, phallically pondering a joint, spinning it between my fingers, tapping bits of marijuana which fell out back into the end, and chewing on its plastic holder. A white bendy straw, cut with a serrated steak knife in order to fit into the glass without falling out.   The ice had mostly melted by now, watering down McCormick’s sullied by cheap fruit juice. I’m not much of a drinker, but earlier in the day I had realized protestant reformists swindled me as a youth by sharing grape juice with me in a Lutheran effort to return the cup to the laity. This gave me a bad case of rhythmic bruxism, and after spitting in the typical symbolic gesture of disgust when one finds out they have been duped, I conferred that the only way to remedy the situation was undoing the sacred ritual by drinking cheap gin mixed with limeade, late at night, by myself.

After pouring the drink, however, the novelty wore off and all that was left was the reminder of migraines suffered from mixing alcohol and chronic neurological pain pills. But it would be this self-flagellation that would prove my devotion to the ministry of anti-theism. It was 2 AM, the morning after St. John Coltrane’s 90th birthday, I struck a match, lit the joint, and played A Love Supreme through my one remaining headphone.

“A             love

supreme…

A love supreme…

A love supreme…

A             love

supreme…”

The ice melted, the drink was warm, but I had yet to finish it. The joint was over halfway gone as the bassline to the “Acknowledgment,” faded. Next was Gov’t Mule’s cover of “She Said,” because the authoritarians at Youtube have suppressed the public’s right to hear the Beatles. The night before, I had caught the ending of Easy Rider on cable, and during the acid flashback Peter Fonda’s words were reminiscent of the themes in the song. I wondered if one had influenced the other, or if it was just synchronic cultural invention. Evidently, Peter Fonda had indeed told John Lennon he “knew what it was like to be dead,” which spawned the existentialist lyrics that Warren Haynes was now laying into with an undeniable Southern charm.

“You’re making me feel like,

          I’ve never been born”

It was getting late, and I still hadn’t touched the drink. A quarter of the joint lay on his lap, unlit, smelling only the way half-burned marijuana does, a potent reminder that there’s a job left to do. The tension was high, Chekov’s gun was loaded, something was going to give. I twirled the pulp of lime juice floating on the top of the gimlet with my straw. The harmonica of Warren Zevon’s “Splendid Isolation” played in my right ear. I relit the joint, took a hit and drank, finishing the glass before blowing out the smoke.

“Michael Jackson in Disneyland

Don’t have to share it with nobody else

Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand

And lead me through the World of Self”

The joint roach burnt to my fingers, I ashed it on the rim of a Mexican Coke bottle and let the smoldering remnant fall onto the pile of other ex-blunts and joints as the final harmonica solo faded out. The music, the marijuana, the drink were all gone. I bit the inside of my cheeks and leaned back in my chair.

Russell spoke of how Platonius “turned away from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world, to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty” (284) which is all well and good for Platonius, but when unarmed black people are being shot by police officers after 400 plus years of already unspeakably horrific oppression, it’s somewhat difficult to pretend everything is united under the oneness of the universe. Well, it’s easy if you take my hardline nihilist, Schopenhauerian-Freudian viewpoint that everything is chaotic and everything dies, so man had an underlying drive toward destruction anyways, but even this doesn’t entirely explain some of the political statements made today by the conservative right. Which in turn spawns a meek left-wing with no sinew or muscle because it spent its entire existence having to argue such topics as: whether Global Warming exists, whether Evolution exists, whether gays should get married, whether gays should get to join the military, whether or not we should invade Iraq after being presented obviously false evidence, whether women should have the right to contraception – let alone abortions, whether blacks should get to drink at the same drinking fountains as whites. The list, unfortunately, goes on. And will continue to go on. Which is why we can’t immediately take a neo-neoplatonic viewpoint without first giving a critical glance at the situation.

I think of some of the conversations I’ve had with, “Republicans,” heavy sarcasm due to the total disconnect between republicans of 2016 and republicans of 1864, something I find laughable to have to point out, yet due to Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention this year, calling the republicans the “Party of Lincoln” in an utterly vacant attempt to ring in more minority voters, I must.

“He said SOME were rapists and criminals not all and that is true because some who come over here illegally from Mexico have been convicted of rape and other crimes. You are lying for distorting what Trump said.”

“They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Donald Trump, June 16, 2015.

Or their attempts to idolize Ronald Reagan, whose most famous quote is,

“Tear down this wall!”

While now chanting at their political rallies,

“Build the wall!”

Republicans today obviously realized that there is no possible way for them to win anymore, so they have nothing to lose by saying anything in an effort to win the election. Even if what they’re saying covers both sides of the coin, even better in fact, because it casts a wider net over the populous they’re purposely dumbing down every chance they get, see: No Child Left Behind, merit pay, crippling our national educational infrastructure by implementing standardized testing, Ronald Reagan trying to get rid of the Department of Education, and removing funding from anything that can remotely be viewed as ‘Liberal,’ such as, the arts and music programs, drama departments. Embodied by the University of New Hampshire, who after receiving a multimillion-dollar donation from a former librarian at the school after having spent years saving in order to make the endowment, originally spent only 100,000 dollars on the library while spending millions on the scoreboard for the jocks.

In the year 2014, the percentage of box office number-ones with blatant Westernized propaganda and American Evangelical mythmaking was roughly greater than or equal to the percentage of films in Nazi Germany pertaining to blatant Aryan propaganda. White Europeans like Christian Bale playing the Egyptian-born Moses, Russell Crowe playing Noah. The Bradley Cooper “American Sniper,” produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, who spoke at the Republican National Convention four years prior, or the similar the Mark Wahlberg “Lone Survivor,” Mark Wahlberg who is now starring in a movie titled “Deepwater Horizon,” heroizing a worker on a deep water oil rig. The war-driven propaganda machine typified by the purely, by definition, Laconophilic “300: Rise of Sparta,” (a sequel). Both regimes seem to believe the best way to feed the public is through around 10% propaganda. Modern films other 90% is force-fed commercial escapism, which keeps morale high and the people’s minds off the evils of its governments, the evils which the other 10% works to ideologically polish and shine. Even the stereotypically liberal Hollywood is stoking the flames of the Second Peloponnesian War.

This re-historicizing, coupled with foreign policy blunders in Africa, the Middle-East, Southeast Asia, and South America, yet we wonder why we have global enemies. After 9/11, we played right into Al Qaeda’s demonic hands by starting an economic disaster of a war which necessitated the borrowing of more money from China in order to continue our military-industrial complex and, as predicted by Seymour Melman, reducing our standard of living in America. Simultaneously this gave terrorist recruiters fodder to demonstrate the evils of America to potential victims of their sinister brainwashing. As a child in America during the Iraq war, it was easy to assume there were children in Iraq who probably were none too pleased with our shenanigans and tomfoolery, lo and behold when I turn 18, the children there (who survived) turned 18 and started fighting back even harder for a group known as ISIS, which of course gave republican senators such as Lindsey Graham reason to suggest we, “send a force of 10,000 troops to Iraq to re-establish stability”. The operative word being “re-establish,” considering Iraq probably hasn’t been stable since Salman Rushdie wore crushed red velvet bell bottoms.

I’ve always thought that with their shared love of guns, hatred of Jews, Gays, and Women, that the Islamic fascists would have a lot in common with our home-grown conservative ones if they would only set aside their differences in length of beard.

Give ISIS a football team and let them battle it out on the gridiron.

The Fighting Irish out of Islamic State?

The Crimson Tide, but the Crimson is the blood of the Jews?

Their cheerleaders have the least sexy outfits, but it is pretty fun to see a guy run around in a giant Ayatollah Khomeini mascot costume.

“I love The Smiths, I think The Smiths are brilliant.”

It was morning, which meant more marijuana and more arguing with alt-right conservatives over the internet. In my current duel, it had taken me three days just to get the man to admit I hadn’t invented the word “McCarthyism,” after feigning ignorance as to what the term meant, finally admitting that it had been around since the 1950s – but originated with Marxist Propagandists. When in actuality, the term was originated by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Herbert Block.

“In calling McCarthy a fascist, Cronkite more or less shows his own red stripes.” August 15, 2016.

“Since when did being red become an insult?” The same man, September 22, 2016 3:43 PM. Apparently, not sensing the irony.

“I have no idea what you mean by ‘McCarthyism,’ it’s your term, not mine.” September 22, 2016.

“Yeah, you didn’t make up the word McCarthyism; you just use it.” September 25, 2016.

Note the semicolon, a true intellectual.

The man later claimed I “invented semiotic garbage,” obviously still insisting I had invented a term that’s been in use for the better part of a century. Finally, this is what happens if you have enough marijuana, alcohol, and spare time to go down the rabbit hole of fuckery in order to finally provoke an ultimate ideological spew of logorrhea. Ladies and gentlemen, a distillation of the modern conservative weltanschauung:

“Don’t be a bigot; embrace the red you.   Say it:   The white-privileged, Catholic, Christian, reactionary Capitalist, corporatist, 1%, police-state Republican, sis-gender [sic], breeding bourgeoisie has rigged the system in order to oppress the 99% female, transgender, black, LBG(T), AIDS-infected, Muslim, atheist, Satanist, abortion-choosing, black-lynch-mob (BLM), Democratic Party-championed proletariat.   Anybody who says otherwise is voicing McCarthyism . . . and is also Hitler.” LereJete, September 25, 2016, 6:21 PM.

His ellipses, not mine.

This is why I do what I do. Some writers try to invent worlds of fantasy, but the real world is often stranger than fiction, you have to be willing to let your soul die to enter the areas of darkness necessary to pull the large fish swimming in the ocean of the political unconscious. A leviathan that waits to eat any grassroots political movement and attribute its beginnings to fascism and communism, with a healthy dose of funding from George Soros. After decades of accruing patina, the republican political discourse in America has finally become a crypto-fascist Finnegans Wake.

“I self-identify as M-1 tank and expect you to refer to me as ‘Big Gun.’ BLM?   You tell me, is it a lynch mob, or isn’t it?   Hint:  maybe you can look up ‘lunch mob’”

I did look up “lunch mob,” and it was a lovely group of young adults sharing a healthy meal outside. It is always interesting to see what the conservative eventually chooses to mockingly self-identify with, because it is usually very compensatory and military-industrialized. Usually a gun or a rifle, but in this case being an actual tank itself is not only childish and pathetic, but I think potentially offers a symbolic key to enter the minds riddled by bigotry.

Jacob wrestled with an Angel. Jesus wrestled with Satan in the desert. Socrates with Athens. Plato with Socrates. With the heavy philosophical burdens uncovered, all that remains is a wasteland of anonymous conservative bigots who deep down know they’re wrong, but know even deeper that they’re ultimately useless, or at least feel that way, leading to an emasculation of discussing “feelings,” as a way to avoid facing one’s own existence. The feeling of existential nausea that Sartre unconcealed, the dizzying effects of realizing there is nothing at the bedrock of existence. Sartre was idolized for his conquering of this fear, but he was idolized because it was assumed he could have not conquered it, and crumbled into suicidal despair, the theme of Albert Camus. The superfluous men of Russia, and the nihilists of the 19th century were similar in fashion after Pushkin promoted a sense of man without meaning. Even Pushkin himself falling to the same despair of his own creation, following in the deadly footsteps of his masterpiece, succumbing to a duel in similar fashion to his own Eugene Onegin. Though, unfortunately for Pushkin and Russian literature, his superfluidity did not lead to victory, with an extremely stray bullet cosmically connecting with his opponent, like in his play, instead Pushkin was handedly dispatched by an adept former soldier and marksmen, challenging Pushkin for his beautiful young aristocratic bride who was the talk of high society in Russia at the time. In America, Poe examined the darkness of what is locked underneath the floorboards, or in the walls of the basement, or in the crypts inside the larger artifice which shows the facade. The true darkness that lies at the heart of existence, beating for only one to hear.

Figures become idolized because they conquer this darkness, but what becomes of those who, when faced with the reality of their true being, recoil from the possibilities and fall into the abyss. This is the embryo that grew into a monster of different pieces fashioned together that needs to be sent fleeing toward the North Pole. They lack a sense of self and know the only way they can maintain power, the only way they can gain authority, the only way they can make people look up to them, the only way they can gain respect, is by desperately clinging onto any oppressive institution they have left that has yet to be rectified.

Thus, the unmitigated use of police force goes unchecked. Not just unchecked, not just justified, but almost willingly accepted as over-the-top, images of police using almost aerosol can sized pepper sprays on student protesters who were sitting in a row. Years later the officer then sued saying he faced hardships from being criticized for doing his job. The students weren’t even standing physically, they weren’t even necessarily standing for anything ideologically. Conservatives fling accusations that the university campus has become a breeding ground of meaningless movements, which it may well have become. A place where young adults finally out from underneath the hierarchy of their traditional family, find disparate groups which give them a sense of self-identity and purpose. But if you believe that this makes them groups with no real objectives other than to exist, what is the point of macing them like watering a rose garden?

Following the conservative line of thought it becomes obvious they are purposefully sadistic. They believe that what university student groups are protesting is meaningless, they believe that university student groups should be pepper sprayed for what they’re protesting. If their purpose for their protesting is nothing, however, then they believe that university students should be pepper sprayed for nothing. Inflicting pain upon others for no reason is the definition of sadism. This is frightful because it shows that when faced with the meaningless trudge of modern life, large sectors of society, particularly ones with access to weaponry, fall into a sadism upon members of sectors that promote equality and peace. The civil rights movements promote peace, but what is the peace? Peace with whom? Why isn’t there peace? It’s not so much a call for peace, as a call for the bullies of society to stop punching them in the face. This is why it becomes a vicious circle. The bullies get mad that you call yourself a non-bully, because it implies they are a bully; and when bullies get mad they get more violent.

By being the non-violent sector of society, who simply existed and did nothing. Nothing but sat at lunch counters. Sit-ins. Walking all the way across a bridge, and then turning back – even when the police force surprisingly separated to allow them to cross. The civil rights movement simply acted as the Other. As a mirror for the public with an infantile sense of self in a newly suburbanized and segregated society to look into. Once one looks into the mirror, one can see who one truly is. And to see the one is truly helpless. This leads to aggressive attacks on those who embody peace, non-violence, the helpless, the oppressed.

“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” George Orwell, 1984.

The face is the one looking back in the mirror held up by the non-violent protesters. In modern society, a college student was arrested for dressing up in overalls and a gorilla mask, hanging bananas by nooses and passing them around at a Black Lives Matter protest. This led the University President to say, “We are exceptionally proud of the students who were peacefully participating in the event and the manner in which they exercised restraint, thoughtfulness, and strength in the face of inappropriate and offensive behavior.” It’s why they fear the homosexuals and transgendered community. Those in that community actually faced who they were and made a stand to say they were something, and who they were was someone the majority of society did not accept.

Europeans had already been in contact with the Other for nearly a century, Marcel DuChamp’s famous photograph as a woman. The shattered gazes of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Dadaists and Surrealists harvesting on the fertile land of the unconscious that Freud had discovered. Paris became a refuge for Jazz artists. Hip-hop artists to this day remain more welcomed overseas in places such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, and of course Japan. There is an appreciation on the Continent, if not because of the Hegelian influence of the Other, in the very least because the fans there understand not just the distance traveled in space to get to across the Atlantic, but the distance in time it took for the artist to acquire not just the years of time it takes to gain the technical facility over his craft and the musicality of his personal melodies, but the years of time it takes to acquire the stories the artist conveys. While commodity fetishism has led to ghostwriters diluting the mainstream market, undoubtedly Hip-Hop began as a series of musical storytellers wrestling with one another to sharpen their personal images of hardship they had seen growing up as youths in the crack era of Ronald Reagan, particularly in the projects of New York City: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens. Places where drug dealers once killed one another and civilians for petty cash, because of the lyrical mastery of their chosen crafts when left with no other options but words themselves, become household names – N.W.A’s Compton, KRS-One’s Union Square, MC Shan and Nas’ Queensbridge, Wu-Tang Clan’s Shaolin/Staten-Island, the Notorious B.I.G’s Bed-Stuy, Jay-Z’s Marcy Projects, Tupac in Oakland. One was indebted to solidify a personal sound for where one came from, because where one is in life is truly personal, the Polyphemian cyclopid eye that only one can see. The eye of the gaze upon the Other, which became the camera, which became the lyrics for Hip-Hop’s greatest emcees. Greatest because they gazed with such clarity, wrote with such vision, that others were able to connect on elevated personal and spiritual levels through the music.

Now Tipper Stickers fearfully plague most of this music with a suburbanite mark of Cain, “PARENTAL ADVISORY”. “We don’t agree with what they’re saying, but we’ll sell it. Just know it’s not what ‘Society’ thinks is acceptable for children.” Well I don’t think what a 14 year-old Inspectah Deck saw was acceptable for a child, where’s the sticker I can put on the structural institutions of oppression that led to a ruined socio-economic infrastructure? The cause of this plague would be unsurprising to Freud. Al Gore’s wife hearing their daughter sing the lyrics to Prince’s “Darling Nikki” about masturbating in a hotel lobby with a magazine. A perfect example of modern life, politician’s children are so repressed they don’t even know what “masturbating” means to the point where they don’t have the social wherewithal to not sing about it in front of their own mother. If Al Gore’s daughter wasn’t so ignorant, CD’s album artwork would be a lot more aesthetically pleasing. Parents, children, masturbating, censorship. Four words that could both equally relate to the stupid politicized stickers on the front of all our music, or to Freud’s idea of psychological repression of the unconscious. If politicians are good for nothing else, at least they make strikingly remarkable psychoanalytical case studies.

It was night now, I was smoking half a joint filled with some of the weed picked from my plant in the backyard that while drinking a Huckleberry soda from the Americana company. Youtube was lagging The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Cut Dead,” into my right ear,

“What can I do…
That’s gotten me beaten black and blue”

There was no online arguing to be done, and I read an article about how to use blackstrap molasses in your marijuana garden.

“Call me your messed up boy…”

Someone sped through the stop sign on the corner.   Another joint that smelled like strawberry cheesecake, as INI’s “Mind Over Matter” played in the night. Picking up a warm bottle of Huckleberry soda off the ground and slowly pulling, attempting to avoid my facial neuralgia.

It was 4:20 the next day, a joint cured on the windowsill in the sun. It was a hot day. Somewhere in an alternate universe where Al Gore became president and didn’t reject the Kyoto Doctrine, it might not be 89 degrees in late September in Oregon. August of 2016 had been the hottest month ever in recorded global climate history, which was good for my marijuana plant but probably not for our great-grandchildren. This was the gem provocated from the ongoing siege of LereJete:

“Millions of indoctrinated useful idiots think just like you that tolerance and non-discrimination are absolute virtues”. 6:59:59 September 26, 2016.

Most people have souls, they’re too smart, they’re not pathetic enough to actually engage with this side of society. By doing so, by taking the high-road and disregarding them as subsidiary, as radical side-wings of the larger conservative base, these offshoots were allowed to grow and fester in the darkness of hatred and bigotry for decades. Propaganda indoctrinating them to the point where there is so much misinformation on their side of the argument, that many people spend their entire lives waist deep in the ideology. Every possible historical fact is used as ammunition. Africans being enslaved by,

“Muslim traders in the Sahel before being sold to traders headed for the New World–in many ways bettering conditions by comparison with Irish hirelings whose value as laborers wasn’t much more than their hides would fetch, let alone the price of a slave”

Another quote by Mr. LereJete, concisely demonstrating two underground, extreme right wing beliefs. That slaves conditions were bettered by “traders,” bringing them to the New World, and basically the idea that the middle-class/“Irish hirelings” are slaves anyways due to wage-labor. No mention of the inhumanity of slavery, in fact appearing to humanize it in comparison to the plight of the Irish, merely pointing out that “Muslim traders in the Sahel,” started it, so anyone who criticizes Europeans that bought and sold human beings are using “revised historical clichés that oversimplify reality for the gullible,” in LereJete’s words.

I keep these petty online debates going because they succinctly demonstrate contemporary politics. People like LereJete used to be considered lunatics, but this assumption was wrong. If people like LereJete are crazy, then nearly half of the country is crazy. It seems like a slight to crazy people. It lets them off easy. These are not merely the ramblings of the insane, I keep these long online debates going to show many of these people attribute quotes to Jefferson, Robespierre, Marx. LereJete even sarcastically suggested I read Theodor Adorno. These people may be conspiratorial, but they’re not insane. I’ve been in mental asylums, schizophrenics are very easily defeated at chess, and they accept when they’re in a losing position long before you deliver checkmate, what most would consider a polite thing to do. People like LereJete will fight to the very last pawn, holding out hope that you will somehow turn into a vegetable and blunder all of your pieces allowing them their personal Waterloo. People in mental asylums usually have some traumatic event in their life that they’re trying to console within themselves. People in mental asylums admit there’s a problem within and that they need to try and fix it. People outside mental asylums, like LereJete, are on the opposite end of the normal distribution of life. They’re at the top of the curve. They have luckily lived their entire lives without any sort of misfortune. Any attempt to upset the status quo has potentially devastating impact upon them, so they try to regulate the rest of society as much as possible and patrol for changes in social equilibrium.

In the early 21st century sitcom Malcolm In The Middle, the Emmy Award-winning, twentieth episode of the second season entitled,   “Bowling”, was a parody of the 1998 film Sliding Doors. The episode involves two split realities depending on whether either the mother, or the father takes the children bowling. In the father’s patriarchal reality, Hal, played by Bryan Cranston, goes to the bowling alley and begins to bowl a series of strikes after doing seemingly meaningless actions. Taking a sip from his soda one strike, adding on zipping his pants the next, doing everything the same way each time. This continues, of course, and Hal begins to mandate everyone in the bowling alley to do exactly what they did before. Creating a vacuum of perfection, where everything is always the same, and you always get the same results, and the results are always perfect. This is a comedy of course, the tension has been built, and just as Hal nears the end of the perfect streak, his son Malcolm, played by Frankie Muniz, comes crashing down from the pin setting machine with a girl, ruining the 300.

The alternate fantasy of the universe, the patricianly domination over the situation, the usurp by the eros of the young son, even the Spartanly “300” of the perfect game of bowling – everything in the episode perfectly, symbolically represents the fantasy belief of suburban, white males that if they can get everyone to do everything the same way, forever, that everything will turn out perfect. The hidden agenda being, he’s the only one benefitting from the perfection. The situation is only perfect for him, no one else is truly benefitting on any level. Except perhaps his sons, who are free to fight and make out as their father’s gaze is focused on his goal. Even the son’s act of love overthrowing the totalitarian regime strikes a resonant unconscious chord, making the episode memorable even 15 years after having first seen it.

White, straight men feel free to say whatever they want. That is the exact reason why I’m doing this. The fact that they are the ones who can say these things proves they are the ones in power. It is statistically impossible for forty-four presidents in a row to be male, forty-three white males, in a country half female, without there being some some sort of institutional discrimination. I find this a painfully obvious point to make. Below elementary positions. Women couldn’t vote for chrissakes, children understand this point. The only ones who don’t are grown adults who have had the years to be broken down and the parts used to rebuild a new ideological monster. LereJete happened to write this comment as I was writing the last paragraph:

“The truth is like an equilateral triangle.   If you stand on the side with the square angle, it looks impossible to climb.” LereJete, September 27, 2016 5:24:10

They are so broken, that mathematics and geometry are turned inside out. Whenever they feel affronted, they speak out. They feel free to say whatever they want, without fear of being rebuked. While everyone else fears speaking out against them. This shows where the power lie in society. Citations are somewhat meaningless in this floating world society, one of the reasons for this writing is to chronicle some of the zealotry harbored in “contemporary” society. Contemporary, where it was assumed we would use technology for the betterment of humanity, but that is a modern myth that needs to be broken. In actuality we use technology, computers, the internet, not to connect with one another, but to politicize and divide. Owning, pwning. To flame and harass. Gamers, people who identify themselves by their personal relationships with technology, freely used “rape” and homophobic slurs. In fact, as part of the soulless online culture I can attest, the more absurdly violent the better. My point isn’t to condone those using violent language while playing violent games, it’s natural to use exaggerated obscenities in reactions to games where one rips out the opponent’s spine. My point is to show that the myth that technology is a breeding ground for equality is obviously not totally true. Here are some comments from a video on Youtube titled, “MILO YIANNOPOULOS CRUSHES A FEMINIST”:

“Dr Mingeflapper was a functional moron. ‘I am a teacher and a tutor!’ OMG one to one with the kids, pumping her hateful worthless bilge straight in place of evidence. These people are gigantic dykes to block the flow of argument, realisation and comprehension. A religion. Lesbyterianism” (eleven likes)

“Yup…the double standards…I swear women have nothing better to do now that they’ve fought all the important civil rights battles”

“I’d still hit it.”

“She’s fit; too bad she’s a feminist”

Mr. Yiannopoulos in his article the next day stated he could find no “misogynistic comments” cast by his followers toward the woman he was arguing. He referred to a previous altercation with a feminist who “claimed that a barrage of hateful and misogynistic comments arrived on her doorstep after she lost her temper during the discussion. That time, once again, I couldn’t find an example of what she was talking about,” Well Milo, if you had a difficult time finding misogynistic comments among your fan base, there’s some right there.

Whenever you go to any of these videos, the title is usually in capital letters, and uses typical words of domination, in this case it’s “CRUSHES”. Then there’s the video, which is usually a random feminist versus one of the Oswald Mosleys of our age, in this case Milo Yiannopoulos. Articulate, handsome, well-dressed. This is why he’s the one on tv, all the other anti-feminists raging in the dark wouldn’t look nearly as good on television. He uses a bevy of facts and figures to come to some bigoted opinion, this mirrors his following’s belief that they are Buckley-esque figures, capable of great debate, armed with facts logic on their side. All of these are untrue. The person voicing their bigoted opinion is merely smart enough to recognize there was a demographic with very low self-esteem that could not come to the light of day without showing who they truly are. So people like Milo Yiannopoulos today, or Ann Coulter of the last generation, realized that if they can step in and be the “voice” of the movement, then they will be privy to all the media attention and accoutrements that comes with it. Mr. Yiannopoulos on a radio podcast complained of living in and out of hotels, never sleeping in his own bed. I hesitate to say they have “followers,” it’s more there was a “following” and they stepped in to take the crown, or shepherd’s crook. The crook that leads the sheep. He existed in the minds of people like LereJete before existing in the real world. The pure white guy who could take on all these goddamn’ feminists and civil rights leaders, or Social Justice Warriors, SJWs, as they like to call them. “To stir up brutish instincts” as The New York Times put William Buckley, Jr.’s 1965 New York City mayoral campaign, to instigate “fear, ignorance, racial superiority, religious antagonism, contempt for the weak and afflicted and hatred for those different from oneself.” To smash the mirror that reflects the Other.

This brings me back to the existential darkness. Some people recognized there’s no meaning to life, there’s nothing to existence. They realized that they could then commodify and brand themselves. Like Buckley and his National Review, or Yiannopoulos and his Kernel. Sartre himself was even guilty of this to a certain extent once he opened the pandora’s box. In existentialism, one creates who they want to be. These people created a persona that would make money off an incredibly dumb sector of society that say things like “equilateral triangles have right angles”. Once they create the public persona, they must become well-versed in rhetoric and political warfare, they learn “how to play the game,” you learn who your fan base wants you to attack, you learn buzz words they expect you to use, and know that if you go on tv and use facts and statistics and seem erudite, people who already believe what you believe will now think you’re an intelligent purveyor of their ideas, and thus you will gain more supporters. In this case, he is jumping in on the debate surrounding the statement by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Tim Hunt that women are a distraction in science. Our conservative controversationalist brings up figures,

“If you look at Bangladesh versus Norway, what you notice is the number of women in science and technology goes down when the level of equality goes up.”

I’m not prepared nor willing to argue with such a position, I’m merely suggesting that by citing obscure countries like Bangladesh and Norway he presents himself as intelligent to the person at home. My point being, misogynists at home are usually very dumb, and hearing a man espouse views similar to theirs on television while seeming to cite statistics which make gender inequality seem universally settled, galvanizes their position that they are right. This makes them like the controversationalist more because they boosted the misogynist’s   self-esteem.

Modern conversationalists realized there is nothing to existence, so they created a persona that would benefit off of people. Such as Milo Yiannopoulos “selling his online tabloid magazine The Kernel to Daily Dot Media in early 2014.” direct quote from Entrepeneur.com. In creating their persona, they also realize that the people they’re making money off of aren’t smart enough to pull off the con, so they probably aren’t smart enough to develop a full sense of self when faced with the angst of existential despair, so it is easy to gain a large following quickly by stroking the collected masses ego. An almost identical con was pulled off by the Unification Church, a cult from Korea who founded their own conservative print, The Washington Times, in 1982. Reagan read them everyday and praised them the following letter,

“The American people know the truth. You, my friends at The Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn’t always the popular thing to do. But you were a loud and powerful voice. Like me, you arrived in Washington at the beginning of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And—oh, yes—we won the Cold War.”

Promoting hawkish ideas of war in order to benefit their own pockets. In Korean, “Tong-Il” is Korean for “Unification” and the Church’s Tong-Il Industries manufactures parts for military equipment. Tong-Il is headed by one of the Church’s founder’s sons, who himself was the founder of small arms manufacturer Kaar Guns, which produced pistols used by the NYPD referred to as, “The Moonie Gun”. In short, The Washington Times promotes conservative ideas like war and guns in order to boost profits for Tong-Il Industries and Kahr Guns, a group of companies whose owners are all within the same family.

I lit a joint and played They Might Be Giants’ “Everything Right Is Wrong” which is how I’ve generally felt since Bush was re-elected in 2004.

Gimlets are delicious. My father said his father drank vodka gimlets, “with lime to keep the scurvy out”. I was stirring mine with the same manicured straw as before, all the ice had stuck together and I was trying not to have a Eureka moment, where pushing the mass of ice would make the liquid inside spill over. I was trying to drink, and I did intend to smoke this joint.

You may say all I do is stay inside and do narcotics in the dark, however, if you actually go outside in this society it will ultimately send you running back to your cave, surrounded by the electric fire of your computer. Outdoor political rallies become places where rams go to butt heads. You can see it in their eyes, locking up with someone of an opposing creed, marching up, and aggressively decrying the other with their outflung chins.

Restaurants today have turned into “brewpubs,” the evolutionary offshoot of the “gastropub”. A place where the owner has a beard that you hope doesn’t shed into your 8 dollar IPA. You watch the people around pretend to care. We all know it’s bullshit. We look back and cringe on the 1980s, all the day-glo pink, the neon hot pink shorts, the side ponytails, the moonboots. We look around today and see a bunch of hipsters buying out old buildings and refurbishing them and cringe, asking what will the gastropubs become in 15 years? Like the resurgence in vinyl record stores. I can remember when I was a kid and all the vinyl record stores closed, and usually became a coffee house. Now all the coffee houses are closing and becoming record shops. As Q-Tip put it,

“Back in the days when I was a teenager

Before I had status, and before I had a pager

You could find the Abstract, listening to Hip-Hop

His pops used to say it reminded him of bebop

I said well Daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles

Way that Bobby Brown be amping like Michael”

Because of national surveillance, the entire country feels equally public and private. Drifting from your house to your job to your school, there’s never a moment where you don’t feel, at least potentially, that you could be watched. The whole point of houses was so you could not be seen. With that barrier removed, everyone’s personal guards went up. It was all we had left, the only bastion of privacy was that people couldn’t read our thoughts. These thoughts became bottled up, people started stockpiling them, rummaging through the broken ruins of a crumbled empire, picking up pieces of a shattered dream to create a private identity. After years and years of internalized pressure, cracks started to form in these edifices. People began to feel the need to let some of the internal life they had formed out. Once they did, many immediately around them may have disagreed, but eventually cells of like-minded individuals began to gravitate toward one another. They felt the need to support the internal lies each other had created in order to re-affirm their own twisted beliefs. People long ago lost the capability of critical thinking, and any possible conspiracy became fair game so long as it could be tied in to creating a firmer sense of self in the face of existential despair. Bush knocking down the towers. Obama being from Kenya. These ideological factions usually revolve around a major figure. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.

So, I begin my conceit. I know something about alt-right conspiracy theorist conservatives that they don’t know. I know more about them than they know about themselves. I know the original sin that caused the fall of their party. As they grope in the darkness, searching for a beacon of light to guide them, I can see who they truly are.

The Secret of the Federal Reserve was the first book published on the topic of the Fed in the United States of America. It was published by a man named Eustace Mullins, who was the final protege of a man named Ezra Pound. This book would serve as the basis for the entire contemporary conservative movement.

Not only is it enough to say I know the original book that brought up many of the issues today associated with the right, I know the dark underbelly of why the book was written and the historical, socio-political reasons for writing it in the first place.

This book was the origin of the mating between the conservative movement, and the conspiracy movement — which is basically the definition of the conservative movement in modern America today, considering Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gained his footing in politics on the grounds that Barack Obama was not born in America. By tilling on such absurd fields the conservative movement grows strange fruit. The sleep of reason, as they say, produces monsters.

Ever eaten half a cheeseburger from out of a garbage can, then washed it down with a gimlet made from bottom-shelf gin and commercialized limeade? Well, I am.

A man on the internet informed me that, “Women don’t want to be CEOs” and that’s why there aren’t more women CEOs.

When he was young, Ezra Pound decided he would know more about poetry than any other man by the time he turned thirty, I contend he accomplished this feat, more-or-less. Pound’s quest to conquer poetry led him around the world through literature, his mature work cryptically littered with titles and poems in different languages and different alphabets. Rediscovering poetic forms and reusing their rhythms for his own personal poems, there remains a recorded version of Pound himself reading “Altaforte,” a poem which powerfully demonstrates Pound’s command over a complicated form of 12th century french poetry, the Sestina, the poem itself a metaphor for his command over any possible poetic form that should come in his path. Eventually breaking away from all form, the originator of vers libre. His early translations of Chinese poetry remain beautiful to this day, in harmony with the ideals he set out to adhere to. His investigations into the artistic use of language in Chinese is a well of potential ideas. Predating Wittgenstein, Pound noticed how words gained meaning through an overlapping of different ideas. Pound also noticed the artistic simplicity and economy of language within Chinese, all these ideas influenced him to found his own poetic movement, the Imagists and an associated art movement, Vorticism. Their magazine BLAST played a significant role in pre-War Europe, redefining the limits of poetry in the same way cubism was redefining the temporal dimension of painting. The greatest writers in the world converged on Paris, and Ezra Pound edited them all. Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, T.S Eliot dedicated his masterpiece The Wasteland to him, which also referred to him as the “IL MIGLIOR FABBRO” for helping Eliot slash away at the poem. He himself suggesting for Eliot to begin on the second page, on the famous line “April is the cruellest month,”. Helping to be the first to publish Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in serial form.

A man of great genius, an interlocutor among the highest caliber of writers during any period of history, and always an eccentric, there is a famous instance of Pound throwing a banquet in an ancient castle, and serving peacock among other festivities, the World Wars played a significantly detrimental effect on his mental health. In his position prior to the War, he was a central hub for the Parisian literary community, which in turn put him into contact with many artists, who were subsequently drafted and many killed. Seeing those around him slaughtered affected him dramatically, and he searched for a reason why all his friends had died. He found the scapegoat in international Jewish bankers. His mental health deteriorated, and by the Second War, he was a raging anti-Semite, launching in radio broadcasted polemic, anti-American attacks in fascist Italy.

“I do not want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go get slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism,” this encapsulates Pound’s fear that more young men were being sent to slaughter by Jews.

Anyone who doubts Ezra Pound sowed the seeds of today’s contemporary conspiratorial conservative movement need only to compare the rhetoric used then, and now.

Then: “Don’t shoot the President. I dare say he deserves worse, but . . . [a]ssassination only makes more mess.” Ezra Pound.

Now: “‘If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,’ Mr. Trump said … He quickly added: ‘Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is,’” New York Times, August 9, 2016. Their emphases.

Or somewhere in between, Mohammed Khatami’s declaration from September 24, 1998 that Iran would “neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie.” In relation to The Satanic Verses controversy.

Considering Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts were only first compiled and published in 1978, I highly doubt there is any remote possibility Donald Trump ever personally read Pound’s broadcasts to steal talking points. The case is, Pound was the first to move from petty The Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-semitic lunacy, where fraudulent documents were manufactured in order to degrade minorities, into in-depth investigations marrying conspiratorial historical facts and figures with American politics, which 60 years later, bore fruit.

From one of Pound’s radio broadcasts during World War II:

“If anyone takes the trouble to record and examine the series of talks I have made over this radio it will be found I have used three sorts of material: historical facts; convictions of experienced men, based on fact; and the fruits of my own experience. The facts . . . mostly antedate the fascist era and cannot be considered as improvisations trumped up to meet present requirements. Neither can the beliefs of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln be laughed off as mere fascist propaganda.”

This may be the original unholy coniunctio of conspiracy and American history. An insidious marriage that birthed the contemporary conservative right’s obsession with mixing perceived “historical facts” say, Milo Yiannopoulos citing statistics from Bangladesh and Norway; “the convictions of experienced men” which includes oneself, such as Milo Yiannopoulos claiming to have thoroughly researched feminist assertions of misogynist comments directed at them after their debates; and the outrageously absurd declamation that modern conservatives love to use so very much these days, that I myself even have a difficult time putting into words; I’ll of course never do the whole thing justice, because their arguments are somewhat of a Chinese Line, pardon the term, but by the time you include all their wild accusations, historical revisions, and outright lies, a brand new idea takes the stage that the whole of the conspiratorial monster must latch onto.

It is difficult to bring this darkness to light, I have deadened my intellect to put this collection of thoughts together, but in effect, modern conservatives believe their ideas represent the ideas of the Founding Fathers. And so, you cannot call them fascists without in turn calling the Founding Fathers of America fascists. Pound points out the word ‘fascism’ didn’t even exist before the 20th century, so it is, therefore, impossible to denounce what he is saying as fascist propaganda because his fascist ideas were based on the founding fathers whose ideas predated the invention of the term fascist. Modern conservative Americans co-opt this argument. Notably during the McCarthy era, when anyone who derides what you say becomes a communist, anti-American, useful idiot, whose only purpose is to further accuse those who go against communist ideals of racial, gender, and sexual equality of fascism. “I can’t be wrong, because what I’m saying is what the Founding Fathers are saying, so by saying I’m wrong you’re only revealing yourself as anti-American.” You can’t call me a fascist propagandist without calling George Washington a fascist propagandist.

It’s a political three card monte. A bait-and-switch substituting ones hateful rhetoric with the politics of the founders of the country, in an effort to make their critics out to be against what the founding fathers stood for, as opposed to what conservative critics really stand against, the racist, bigoted, anti-semitic, sexist language that is purported to be the conservative’s political ideology.

This goes hand in hand with another republican tactic, they realized that in polite society, one who calls someone they’re arguing with a “racist,” “homophobe,” “zealot,” “bigot,” etc. are viewed as poor debaters who are resorting to ad hominem attacks. So, if used subtly enough, they’re given a carte blanche to use any racist and bigoted rhetoric, because if anyone calls them out on it, they can scoff and say “Oh, so just because I think that I’m a racist.” Then go back to their conservative friends, and all have a laugh about how liberal feminazis always call them racists. I’ve demonstrated how twisted this can get them, such as the instance of a man claiming Donald Trump called “SOME,” illegal immigrants rapists, when in actuality he called “some” of them good people. The man recognized that calling illegal immigrants rapists is a racist thing to say, so he claimed to make the case that Donald Trump never said it in the first place, and was only speaking on “some,” of the illegal immigrants. This would be redundant, of course, because Trump ended his statement by saying “Some of them I assume are good people.”

Therefore, the man I was arguing with claims that Trump was giving a speech originally on “SOME” illegal immigrants, and that at the end mentioned “some” of those “SOME” were good people. This is obviously redundant. Trump was obviously originally speaking about “all” illegal immigrants, and that “some,” of them were good people. It is impossible to say otherwise. Yet the conservative arguing with me himself had so much cognitive dissonance, that he willed himself to believe it to be the case that I was merely a liberal distorting what Donald Trump said in order to make him out to be racist. Again, this shows the man recognizes what Donald Trump said was racist, but instead of arguing against the point, he just argues that Trump never said it in the first place.

Maureen Dowd on the Nightly Business Report just told Gwen Ifill she wanted to be a political watchdog that didn’t become friends with politicians and go to dinner parties with them. Immediately following, she told Gwen Ifill a casual story about having lunch with George H.W. Bush, where the former president called Donald Trump an epithet. She then expressed hope that the ol’ poor, senile, Georgey-Porgy Sr. didn’t watch the Clinton-Trump debates because he would not be able to comprehend such vitriolic and low-brow politics. Yes, the man who just called Donald Trump an epithet at your casual luncheon is too frail to watch Donald Trump flail his tiny hands while calling other people epithets. Bless his heart.

Thanks Maureen, for sticking up for the previous head of the C.I.A during a time when missiles were being sold to Iran in exchange for cash to use for funding Nicaraguan Contras, who would then manufacture cocaine, which we then sold on the streets to inner city youth instigating the Crack Epidemic and exploding our prison populations, meanwhile Nancy Reagan was propagating her miserable failure, the “Just Say No” campaign. Thanks Maureen, thanks. It’s always nice to see a woman going on television in order to promote her book and defend a poor (extremely wealthy), old, white man. Former U.S presidents, the most discriminated against group in the country. Maureen Dowd, fighting for the rights of former dynastical American presidents everywhere to not have to see Donald Trump call illegal Mexican immigrants rapists. Stay the course, Maureen, thousand points of light and all that.

If that nonagenarian did manage to turn one of his reptilian eyes to the debate, he would have seen Donald Trump espouse his broken windows policy belief that the racist Stop-And-Frisk police technique used in New York City under his cohort Rudolph Giuliani is the cure to Chicago’s crime problems. These men have not read history. These men’s urban policies are in the 17th century. Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani, who held dominion over the umbilicus urbis mundus, the center of the world, New York City, espoused as their political platforms in the 21st century, ideas originally used by Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie to clear up the Cour de Miracles of Paris in the 1600s.

If the man who started America’s imperial conquest into the middle-east by invading Kuwait did happen to turn a beady eye to the 2016 presidential debates, he would have seen Trump’s Police Policy based off of 17th century France, and he would have seen his immigration policy which mirrors the Naturalization Act of the Alien and Seditions Act of 1798, which at the time made it more difficult to become an American citizen, which was defined as a “white, male,” and was deemed to be a law in favor of National Security, when in actuality it was an attempt to deport those who did not support the Federalist Party. In the same exact way, modern republicans today are trying to, “Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it,” because they know that the latino demographic doesn’t vote republican, so by keeping out as many latinos as possible, the better it is for the future of the republican party.   Thomas Jefferson then repealed 3/4 of the Aliens and Seditions Act, including the federalist’s Naturalization Act, after becoming America’s third president, and the part we did keep FDR used to inter Japanese during WWII. Republicans are digging up and rehashing some of the very first issues we dealt with as a country. Thomas Jefferson put an end to their arguments before we even owned the Louisiana Purchase. Before any American had laid eyes upon the Rocky Mountains.

This is in full accordance with modern republican ideals, however. Claiming to be the inheritors of the Constitution, while trying to undo precedents set by the founding fathers. In the 1790s, America was on the verge of war with Muslim pirates around the north of Africa. Remarkably similar to how we’re at war with Muslim terrorists now. War with Muslim extremists was the first war we faced as a young nation. Our response was the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1798, which stated, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Republicans today cry out that they want “To Make America Great Again,” but if their policies aim to scrap legislation and treaties we set forth in the late 1790s and early 1800s, then the America republicans must want to return to is around 1776, giving them the opportunity to re-invent the wheel. Perhaps proof that the conservative party wants to return to an America pre-Constitution, is the fact that Trump’s campaign held a rally attended “by scores of Amish people,” a religious order in the United States of around 300,000 who live their lives as if it were still 1693, on Oct. 1, 2016, a day before the 10-year anniversary of the heart-breaking West Nickel Mines School shooting in an Amish schoolhouse, which took the lives of five young girls and injured six others.

They don’t want to “Make America Great Again,” they want to have a blank slate of their own to write on. They want their own chance to build a country from the ground up. They want a place where latinos, Muslims, gays, women, blacks, anyone who doesn’t vote for them, doesn’t get to be a citizen. They don’t want to admit it, they want to still claim to be the successors of the Founding Fathers. Unfortunately for them, history repeats itself. Today we find ourselves in the same situations we were in the 1790s, and the Founding Fathers decided what was best for the country then is exactly the opposite as to what republicans suggest now.

This radical retelling of American history to suit personal politics, I claim, began with Ezra Pound. It seeped down and leached into modern American politics through his instigation of Eustace Mullins to be the first person to investigate the Federal Reserve. The apocryphal story as told by Mullins goes, Pound once asked him to pull out a dollar, pointed to “FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE,” and asked him to suss the whole thing out. Mullins then spent the next year basically living in the Library of Congress doing as much research as he could. This was the impetus for the modern conservative movement. All the modern concern over the gold standard, the Fed, questioning whether we’re slaves to big banks, deregulation of finance capital, liberal control over New York, and New York control over Wall St., all these ideas tying conspiracy theories with American socio-political economics through misrepresented historical facts, all began at this cultural epicenter.

These ideas that serve as the basis for contemporary right-wingers. Turning the conservative agenda into this shaking ground of conspiracy that lets Donald Trump stand upon it, getting his foot in the political door by hounding Barack Obama for his birth certificate. Then not even giving up once the documents are begrudgingly produced. Claiming to send investigators to Kenya. Claiming to have it on very good sources that the Hawaiian birth certificate was a forgery. Political satirists have had a fun time hanging conservatives out to dry by leading them along the branch of “What would it take for you to believe Obama was born in the U.S.?” getting replies such as “Well if there were witnesses, other than his mother.” Some outright claim there is no way to convince them of otherwise. If half the country believes it, it could be true they ration.

I argue this came out of the existential realization during the 20th century that life was meaningless, so people began to grasp onto bits of their shattered existence from before that gave them some sense of meaning, authority, power in life. They then began to look for others who could confirm the beliefs they were holding onto, and in the most demonic form of quid pro quo, agreed to believe the little conspiracies others were holding onto if they agreed to re-affirm their own beliefs. Eventually, these turned into small factions of like-minded individuals, these factions then looked to other factions, again, to re-affirm their beliefs as before; and the process happened all over again until all the factions eventually rubbed against one another creating one hulking mass of ideological conspiracy.

For those looking for empirical evidence that an unread American public can be easily swayed into a hysterical fervor by an intelligent person with access to the airwaves, we merely need to look at the night of October 30, 1938. Orson Welles radio broadcasts his adaptation of H.G. Welles “War of the Worlds,” a text about an invasion by Martians that sent New York City into a furor, tying up phone lines for hours. While media historians debate the actual impact of the panic, what cannot be disputed is the American public will believe anything they are told if it’s from someone in a position of authority, on the radio, on television, in print.   I’m sure there were many politicians who recognized the importance this lesson. Father Charles Coughlin, raving anti-semitic priest out of Detroit, was another one of the first people to make efficient use of public broadcasting in order to perpetuate his fanatical beliefs. If the public is stupid enough to believe America is being invaded by aliens from Mars, they will definitely be deceivable enough to trick into thinking that America is being invaded by aliens from Mexico. Alien Seditions Act, Aliens invading from Mars, Aliens invading from Mexico, today we have not just a show called, “Ancient Aliens” on the supposed History Channel, we also have a show called “Action Bronson Watches Ancient Aliens,” where an obese white man watches “Ancient Aliens,” while sitting around, getting high, and eating with his friends. It’s like Cloak & Dagger meets Caligula.

Hawk-eyed, evangelical Christian conservatives apparently don’t read the forefathers, nor do they read their own religious texts.

“And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.” Book of Revelations 9:3-4, King James Bible.

Which sounds a lot like flying robot drones coming out of the sky to kill anyone who is marked a terrorist; but that’s just me, and I do a lot of drugs. I’m just saying that maybe if they want to be good Christians, they shouldn’t be sounding the fifth trumpet of the Apocalypse. Or maybe they should, and getting the Jewish people their Holy Land is also part of getting happy fun time smiley Jesus to come down and get rid of that ne’er-do-well, Satan. My rhetorical question to Christians is, does the Devil not have the Bible? Does he not watch C-Span? Does he not know that you all know about his evil plans for world domination?

“Hey, Satan…” some high ranking demon, Azrael for instance, says to the dark Lord.

“Yeah, what is it?” Prince of the Underworld responds, obviously busy with some infernal bureaucratic paperwork.

“They know.” The Angel of Death informs him.

“What?” asks Satan, looking up from his desk.

“They know about the Apocalypse.”

“What!” stunned and appalled, Lucifer declares, “who told them about the Apocalypse!”

Azrael then hands Satan his reading glasses and a copy of the Bible, which he thumbs through to the end, muttering things like “anti-christ…wh-” “leviathan…wha-” under his breath until eventually, gasping,

“Armageddon! Who told them about Armageddon! Steve? Was it you?”

I mean, if you aren’t a good Christian, you go to Hades. Satan is the ruler of hades, and most people aren’t good Christians. So Satan is in control of most of the souls that have ever existed. Which means he holds dominion over more souls in Hell than God holds dominion over in Heaven. Why would he want to ruin a good thing?

Going down the conspiratorial rabbit hole of darkness, I’d like to thank the Duclod Man for pointing out the previous verse from Revelations. He also warned that when his website is taken down, to “watch out because the real thing is coming”. One of his most outlandish ideas was that of the “garbmutt,” half-man, half-dog. Implausibly laughable you say. Over the last summer, my brother and I have both had experiences with a group of young teenagers dressing up in wolf costumes, standing around farmers markets, or in front of local churches. As someone raised in the dark underworld of the internet, I’ve been well aware of their Furry subculture for a decade now, been friends with various “pups” who like to “yiff” and crawl around. Duclod Man was either a prophet or had seen some things in the various men’s bathrooms of the 80s and 90s where he scrawled his unfunny, cryptically personal jokes.

Jokes were a major part of the Duclod Man’s existence. One of Freud’s earliest texts was on “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” where he basically lays out the idea that jokes allow us to express what is socially taboo. The superego dominates the ego, and jokes demonstrate the severity of that dominance. In the Duclod Man’s instance, his superego is one of constant paranoia and sexual repression. On his website, one can click a random joke generator, which pops up a random website I assume he devised himself. The joke I received was rather long but in summary,

A boy steps on a honeybee, his father tells him he’ll go without honey.

The boy steps on a butterfly, his father tells him he’ll go without butter.

The mother steps on a cockroach, and the boy asks his father who should tell her.

As you can see, the entire point of the joke is an expression of suppressing the father’s “cock,” for the mother. It can be inferred from Freud’s assumption, that this joke expresses the man’s superego, which appears to be focused on sexual suppression. Following Freud, if his superego is focused on sexual suppression, then his ego should be as well. Which leads to the revelation, that the Duclod Man spent his conspiratorial career sending letters to almost college graduates, threatening to oust them for their sexualities. Letters full of jokes that no one understood except, of course, the Duclod Man himself. In support of Freud’s analysis that society can impose restrictions on the mind, which then become embodied by the ego, take the case of Wendigo Psychosis, which only appears among those cultures who impose the belief in such supernatural entities. These cases of psychosis only decreased when the tribes who held the custom started coming into contact with the larger societies who did not. The Duclod Man invented a culture for himself, which became in contact with the real world through the conduit of the Duclod Man’s truly sick sense of humor.

Continuing Oedipally, I told my father this evaluation of the Duclod Man, and he sat rolling his head hoping I wasn’t slowly losing my mind, which I am, and becoming a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, which I might be. After, however, I explained that while, yes, the Duclod Man is crazy, if half the country believes in conspiracy theories, we can’t just ignore them anymore. He was kind enough to remind me of Trump says what he doesn’t say. Using the example that an hour after saying “That makes me smart,” while interrupting Hillary Clinton’s reference to him paying nothing in taxes. Trump was then asked what he meant by saying he was smart by not paying taxes, to which he replied, “I didn’t say that.” My father, a man of his generation, then quoted:

“When I have nothing to say,

My lips are sealed.

Say something once,

Why say it again?”

“I hate people when they’re not polite”

It appears the Talking Heads post-punk, ironic march into dystopian suburbia was the clarion call for middle America.

“Are we not men?

We are DEVO!”

The present state of republicans is the fulfillment of a prophecy started as a joke by art students in the 70s, culminating in their own parody cult, The Church of the Subgenius, where everyone subjects themselves to pipe-smoking, lawn-mowing, 100% All-American, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, hallowed be thy name. Bob Dobbs would be a significant aesthetic improvement over the slobbish, goblin-faced Donald Trump, who makes me want to get out a d2o and roll for initiative. While Evangelical Christians try to raise money for the second coming of Jesus Christ, I’ll continue to pray for the return of the messiah of slack.

“The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,

Among it’s desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.”

― W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden titled this poem “August 1968,” in reflection of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but if I could suggest a title, it would be, “Donald Trump”.

“Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.” Revelations 12:15.

Evangelical Christian neoconservatives don’t read their religious texts, they don’t read the political texts of the founding fathers, and they don’t read the religious texts of their forefathers. James Smith Bush wrote in More Words on The Bible, that the Bible didn’t represent the literal word of god written down in stone tablets and handed down, but was rather the work of “frail and infallible men.” Which is concerning, considering his great-great-grandson George W. Bush claimed to read the bible everyday, and that God told him to invade Iraq. Even while casting the same skepticism toward the Bible in televised interviews. So if the president is willing to throw shade on the very text he spends every day of his life reading, the guiding moral text and the foundation of his being, then where’s the harm in a little snuffing of the Constitution? Where’s the harm in unwarranted searches and seizures? Who’s un-Constitutional torture going to hurt? Terrorists, that’s who.

The Birth of the Slosh Pit

To get to downtown Portland, usually where concerts are held, you usually drive about 15 minutes west to the Hillsboro Transit Center, then get on a bus or a MAX train to Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Oregon Zoo, or in this case, Providence Park. I was in a line of cars turning left into the Transit Center’s parking lot, and a very poor driver caused me to miss my train. Unsurprising for Oregon drivers, who seem incapable of learning how to turn properly. I’m sure this problem is confounded by another one of Oregon’s idiosyncratic laws, including our lack of sales tax and mandatory gas station attendants, that were passed in an effort for Oregon to say, “See, we’re not California!” “Look everyone, we’re crazy! Governor Tom McCall is totally cool with right to die, physician-assisted suicide laws!” the law allowing drivers to make a left turn on red, but only when turning onto a one-way street. Most Oregon drivers read this as, “blah blah blah, I can turn whenever I want.” Poetically encapsulated by one of my Oregonian friends on facebook,

“Dear ppl who drive,

When u r making a turn at a crosswalk and ur light turns green and so does the little walk signal for the person, U R SUPPOSED TO WAIT FOR THE PERSON TO CROSS. Not almost run them over and then laugh and give them the finger as they stop for u.

Assholes.”

I now had to wait 15 minutes for the next blue line MAX to run. MAX usually have two separate passenger carriages, I was sitting in a row of seats in the middle of the front car when a pock-mocked man with a short, spiked gel haircut came up to me:

“Hey man, do you have a cell phone I could use?”

I sat looking down.

“My girlfriend broke mine, so I was wondering if you had one I could borrow” he said, pulling out a smartphone with a shattered screen.

“No, man.” I said, as he continued toward the front of the car, giving other patrons the same line.

A word of advice to petty criminals out there, if you’re trying to scam someone for their cell phone number, don’t admit that you have an incredibly poor taste in women. “Hey man, I associate with some really crazy and violent people, can I see your expensive piece of technology?” Terrible form.

I got up and moved to the other passenger car. Again, I sat in the middle row of seats. As the doors closed, one of the other passengers, a very slender elvish character in a striped pastel pink and green sweater, pulled over his head, holding a bicycle with tassels on the handlebars yelled out for the entire train car to hear:

“It’s time to blast off!”

Oh, joy.

During the otherwise silent 15 mile ride to downtown Portland, the sprite pulled out a can of coca-cola and poignantly made the statement of opening the loud obnoxious tab to release the carbonation. Once he finished his drink, he had no shame as he began to crinkle the aluminum can, for his own amusement. This gained no attention. At some point I was trying to convince myself, “Y’know, people think they really don’t give a fuck, but there’s a guy who doesn’t give a fuck. Keep on keepin on, man.” Then he began his quasi-Christian call for brotherhood. I can never remember the entirety of these modern soap-box preacher’s speeches, but there was definitely something about “There being room for all!” and that he “Hoped people were eavesdropping!” Oh, I was buddy.

This is not to ridicule the MAX riding, broken phone hustlers, and pseudo-schizophrenic religious ravers,, it is to be a bit of a nestbeschmutzer and point out that for all the talk of Portland being a progressive, understanding, tolerant, society, the fact that every single train car has a mentally ill person, the tolerance is less communal welcoming, and more of, learning how to fake understanding of their rantings, trying to keep them away from you so you can get to where you need to be. It’s been this way for the 16 years I’ve lived here, every MAX ride having some sort of whacky occurrence that you have to schedule for. The cities perpetuated progressive attitude seems to include a lot of sweeping under the rug. I’m throwing the dirt back into the nest.

“Keep Portland Weird!” the bumper stickers on the back of their Subarus say. The people who don’t ride public transportation. Who don’t have to cope with the day-to-day realities of decaying, or even non-existent, mental health infrastructure. It’s like a safari for the suburbanites of the West Hills to drive around and gawk at the ill, ranting in the streets, the pickpockets trying to steal your phone, the homeless sleeping in the parks and under the bridges. Those addicted to heroin nodding off, bent over, then sitting up, vomiting onto the sidewalk under the lights of the Providence Park MAX Station.

I watched the man wake up to throw up three times, the third he looked around as if trying to figure out where he was only to nod off again using his backpack as a pillow. While all this was happening under the bright fluorescent train terminal lights, within the sight of a security camera, at least one police car, and two police SUVs drove directly next to and in front of the addict. I’m sure they were thinking, “Ah you see a lot of crazy things in the streets, I’ll let him sleep.”

The suburbanite safari attitude, the bourgeois lack of care for the underclass. Safely observing the harsh reality of mental illness, crime, and drug addiction, behind the tinted windows of their minivans. This attitude that carried over into the realm of online journalism. I recently read a well-investigated piece on the H&M brand of clothing’s hypocritical ad campaign featuring women who were not airbrushed or photoshopped: body builders, elderly women, transgendered models, and, of course, a woman with armpit hair. The writer of the article pointed out how in India, it is H&M’s routine policy to fire women who become pregnant. Syrian refugees being used in their factories.

Still, the piece was posted on a website named “Global Hobo,”. A derogatory term used to refer to the homeless. How would people like it if had a well-informed article for homeless advocacy on a website named “Global_Insert_Misogynist_Slur”. There would be an online uproar. Which there isn’t in this case because the homeless are notorious for their lack of online presence. So even the editor-in-chiefs of feminist newspapers still have intersectionality problems when it comes to the non-discrimination of the mentally ill and homeless. This critique isn’t meant to undermine the valid points the article made concerning H&M’s abhorrently misogynistic corporate practices, it is to show that groups with one self-interest have a hard time dealing with the Other. Even groups who were founded on such theoretical grounds. By this I mean, feminism was born out of women dealing with the effect of the Other in the form of men’s systematized patriarchy. Yet, the pro-women writer of the article is still writing for an organization that shows some discrimination toward those in a community with a lack of mental health. This is also shown by how “fourth-wave” feminists often deal with online bullies. They usually cast them in the light of mental illness, which does not do much to help those fighting for mental health advocacy.

Today, feminists join in the choir of liberals who merely scoff, denounce, and laugh at the online conservative trolls of today. The feeble Left who merely ignore the reasons for the birth of the online conspiratorial misogynists that routinely attack feminists. Instead, they simply post sarcastic cartoons (such as the one on the H&M article) where it is an overweight white man, with a greasy ponytail, with the word bubbles:

“Why won’t she answer me?”

“FEMI-NAZI”

“I’ll post this triggered meme, that’ll show her.”

I don’t understand the simultaneous attacking of people for being obviously insane social misfits, meanwhile trying to say that their ideas are socially justified enough to be vilified. If these are the thoughts of deranged “incels,” involuntary celibates as they like to be called, then why are we attacking the ideas they espouse as if it were a social system of oppression keeping women down? Why give them any credence? Why act as if they are on any level of feminists? As if they should even be debated? Why acknowledge them? The only possible answer is that the “incels” are the ones in control of the social system of oppression. Which is what my case is, by laughing at the opposition and turning away to drink wine in your brewpubs with all your other liberal, postmodern friends, in the words of Simon & Garfunkel:

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

By failing to try and consciously unravel the reasons for misogynists on the radio, anti-feminist online trolls, conspiracy theorists, and the like, they were able to grow and fester in the cesspit of darkness, bulking up into a malignant terminal tumor on society. Accruing years of misinformed data, so by the time they finally broke the surface, the whole mass of their ideology remain underwater. The ideas they voice are the tip of the iceberg. One must enter the terrifying, dark waters of the unconscious to discover the unseen reasons for their existence. By actually reading and engaging, provoking them to express more and more of their beliefs, it becomes more clear that they have crises of the existential variety, they realized there was no meaning to life, and that they had no true purpose. The purpose they held before, being the defenders of democracy, the crusaders, taking up the white man’s burden, gave them the belief that they were important. With this big stick cut from underneath them, they were left clawing at the bark of the tree as they fell to the ground.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
Cradle and all.”

The wet, black bough of Ezra Pound has broken, and the crying baby of his inception has come tumbling down to the ground, cradle and all. No longer held high in the branches of privilege so as not to be seen by women, blacks, gays, and other oppressed minorities, who could only look up into the canopy of the tree of Liberty. Now that they have fallen, and too are grounded, it is easy to see the wickedness of their true beliefs.