When Hunter Thompson, at the peak of his powers, was surgically dissecting The American Sickness through the lens of the Nixon years, he felt compelled to invent whole new rhetorics of hyperbole to paint the evil he was witnessing first-hand.
He cribbed from Dante, he summoned Hieronymous Bosch. When it seemed over the top, it was only beginning to scratch the surface.
But back then, in the uneasy years of my first full decade on the planet, a cold hope still breathed.
All it would have taken was one decent man like George McGovern to turn things around with a relieved breath of narrow escape, or so it might have seemed. HST believed it, at least to a point.
But McGovern lost in a landslide, Kucinich never got off the launch pad, and Bernie Sanders dissolved into a puddle of muddled good intentions and pragmatic haplessness that smelled like something you stepped in and regretted it instantly.
Machine politics did take a breather from outright domestic assassination after the horrors of MLK, the Kennedys, and countless other attempted and actual murders. But bullets were replaced with ploys no less deadly to the democratic project or the vain hopes of the working classes.
Obama the “community organizer” wiped his ass with his promises.
Most lately the people were offered a presidential choice between a nouveaux-riche racist goon and a brain-damaged imperialist on loan from the financial sector, formerly known as The Senator From Citibank.
There’s no reason for electoral hope or turning the ship around, any more.
The capitalist death cult is literal and real. We boil slowly in a fossil fuel soup, and it doesn’t even matter that much, because our lives are rarely worth living now anyway. People fall off into poverty and die unremembered, for profit. There is no health care, for millions, or shelter, for hundreds of thousands. National media preaches a narrative that the unvaccinated should die, and no one bats a fucking eye.
China waits patiently for the crumbling to reach a tipping point.
The evictions proceed while the Savior Squad performs satanic theater for a day or two and then disappears, reappearing on the other side of the stage in dresses that cost a year’s wages for the average drone.
There are so many cold cases in the files of the greater American crime, but a day of reckoning and atonement draws ever closer, riding into Omaha on four apocalyptic horses.
The American Century is twenty years in the rearview mirror, but still there are eight hundred military bases in nearly every country in the world, burning up the revenues stolen from the pockets of the workers, trillions upon trillions, year after year. But look–here’s a song about Wet-Ass Pussies for you.
Are you not entertained?
The worst of it is simply this.
If collaboration with the system has brought you a good life with plenty of money in it, you’re going to support that system implicitly.
You’re going to weep for the few brave service men and women lost in a random incident at the tail end of a fucked-up war, but you won’t even see the thousands upon thousands of civilians routinely blown up whole families at a time with bombs manufactured next door to you and delivered by your neighbor Chad, the friendly drone pilot who always has time for a driveway smile.
You’re going to vote, and bloviate on the importance of voting, even when there’s literally no one and nothing to vote for.
You’re going to quack brainlessly about horse paste, your lips moving in sync with Rachel Maddow’s, whenever somebody questions Fauci’s blatant lies, or the government starts leaning authoritarian on the question of what people should be forced to put in their own bodies.
You’re going to cheer when your social media company abusively censors free speech, if you find that speech the least bit dubious or threatening or, you know, trumpy, oh ick.
Because the system has rewarded you for rewarding the system. It educated you well. It paid you well. It made you an ‘opinion leader’ and a swing voter, and every commercial you see is going to be aimed straight at your brain pan and model the life that’s yours, right down to the furniture coasters on your couch and the brand of car you can afford to drive.
Everything’s fine. Everything’s great.
Except for THOSE people. The deplorables, the red-staters, the anti-vaxxers, the January-sixers, the people who see the police as a deadly enemy, instead of the defenders of your property rights.
Defund them? Absurd. They’re our protectors, our boys in blue. Without them … anarchy!
Anarchy, my dears, is governance without rulers and their hired goons, not governance without rules.
Maybe just maybe, a life without rulers would not actually be to your liking.
I respectfully dissent.