Last night I ate ramen, but it should not be a cause for worry because I did it ironically, at least for now.

In the same spirit as going to an Indian casino for Thanksgiving–an act most likely to be filed under A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

I used to believe in the temporizing gray area of lesser-evilism, but as my life moves toward twilight I grow more obtuse and willful. The blacks deepen and the snow whites grow rare but not less glorious. More. It’s a hell of a way to live.

The pic was clipped from a video by the bad-ass Primo Radical.

In my pious and inflexible old orthodoxy, I say to you again: Everything, yes everything they heap vast tons of money into influencing you to believe, too often with complete success, is a god damned lie told in the service of the end boss, Moloch.

This includes of course propaganda about domestic economics, and geopolitics, but also homily advice on what to wear to work, and the cranberry relish recipe they play on NPR every year. Yes that’s what I’m saying. The recipe is a lie designed to force you into believing things about what good consumers do for the holidays. But never mind that. It’s a throwaway.

The major difference between almost-2023 and 2004 is that back then, you could toss the truth out there offhandedly, so long as you did it with some credibility and style, and in the pages of a periodical not many people were likely to read.

Nowadays, if you want to take your chances and go around telling truths about Emperors, or clothes, you better have your own website for it, and have either millions of readers (like Russell Brand) or very nearly none (like me). Otherwise, down comes the banhammer, or in the wily pre-Elon Twitter style, the shadow-ban hammer.

Primo got his next to last strike on YouTube five months ago and went silent before they silenced him. Now in the darkness he’s on fire again, but only on Rumble, where he can be safely dismissed by the good smart people of the PMC as a fringe kook, or a “right-winger”, which nowadays means simply anybody who doesn’t swallow gallons of media sewage every day and spit it back out on anyone unlucky enough to be in range of their foul, creepy, and misleading second-hand opinions. They splash “right-wing” on RB, on Glenn Greenwald, on Jimmy Dore and Primo too, on anyone, no matter how ludicrous the labeling. It’s the new cry of “Fascist!” by all the people who gladly serve the modern essence of present-day literal capitalist fascism.

(Which isn’t to say there are no real and dangerous right-wingers. Only that the sheep who baa Wolf have done themselves a mighty disservice by flinging the term around until it means nothing.)

To jam-shift gears on you somewhat, I offer Mr. P. Radical’s interview with a man named Keith McHenry, who co-founded an outfit called Food Not Bombs.

I put off watching it for a while because it sounded like another tepid interview with another aging activist. But I was floored by Keith and the scope of his work, and the depth of his thought. This is what real practical living anarchy looks like, and he’s been at it for forty solid years.

I’m tempted to be ashamed of what little I’ve accomplished over the same span, but I counsel myself again that shame is useless, and that this entabout or at least shouldn’t be about, all me all the time, because that’s dull and unsexy and it’s my job as a belletrist to seduce you.

By the end of the hour it was somehow heartening instead of depressing.

Or maybe the light is just getting ready to return again for a while.

Anyway and whatever the reason the storm is melting back and the scowl is melting with it. I can’t promise you any flawless optimism about anything now or ever. Only that despair has been pushed back an increment or two, and that my voice is cracked but found.