NINE FACTS, ONE LIE: MISSION STATEMENT

​1. As a young man I considered myself to have a rebellious nature. I would never have said that aloud, but it was certainly the performance I was understudying for. It took a while (ten years) to admit to my more confirmable skeptical nature that rebellion, at least in terms of popular culture, is just the search for a preferable version of conformity.

2. I mean, back when my (mosh) circle of pals were all wearing black leather jackets with Black Flag stickers on them, straight-facedly discussing Anarchy as if we knew what it meant, let alone was an actionable political ideology, we might as well have been rocking pinstripe Brooks Brothers and breaking down mortgage derivative scams. Which is to say, the form of rebellion whose intent is primarily to make uncomfortable those around you whose musical and cinematic interests appear tame in comparison was an exercise in self-indulgence.

3. Sure, I still prefer "Eraserhead" to "Pretty Woman", but true rebellion would have been to genuinely not care, let alone judge, what others choose to be distracted by. Or to think that wearing a David Lynch shirt with the sleeves cut off was a disruption of the status quo. Still, while protesting in the streets during the first Gulf War and loathing George Bush to an unquantifiable degree, I always felt there was a certain rational equilibrium to American politics and the many differences between Right and Left. Yes it was a game, but it had mutually agreed upon if not agreeable rules.

4. I still feel comfortable with having waved clever placards and yelled at riot police about the normalization of torture and extraordinary rendition masterminded by Dick Cheney (now a Left-hero?), but I never felt like Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rice were actively trying to dismantle the country on an institutional basis mostly out of a desire for personal retribution, cruelty fetishism, and/or cash. At that time Right and Left were already gearing up for a doomed Manichean view of one another that, despite constant lip service for the wishes of the Founding Fathers, is exactly the opposite of the way Ben Franklin and James Madison and Gunning Bedford Jr. (my personal favorite Constitutional signer) intended for our government to function. Compromise after all, however grudgingly, is the lard that greases the tracks, if not the lips, of Democracy.

5. And now, here we are, with The Grifter and Elon doing their best Leopold and Loeb impression, and for the first time in my life I think we have transitioned from a disagreeable but transitory moment of governance to genuine, utterly destructive and purely corrupt madness. Not to mention an irreversible analogy about flying a jet into the grim metaphor of the Manhattan office building of the allegory that describes our empire collapsing. Which is to say, in four or eight or twelve years, no canasta hand of possible Democratic presidents is going to magically pull up on the yoke, let alone be able to fix.

6. We as a people have become a people I do not recognize, no longer driven by cultural or theologic or even political differences. This country now runs, like an '82 Taurus with tires so bald it could cross the Gobi without leaving a single track, on pure diesel Grievance. MAGA is a movement not of rebellion or change, but unventable anger. Plus cash. I mean, if you're even slightly Republican (still reading? Kudos) and you're totally fine with a giggling, ferret-like unelected South African sociopath, who also just so happens to be the richest man in the world, circumventing congress to blindly and gleefully cut services for the poorest and most vulnerable, let alone pretty much the rest of us.

7. Let alone making enemies of the rest of the world and fellating our mortal enemy of those Bush years, Vlad The Poisoner, and tanking the economy, and conducting Tesla informercials on the White House lawn in which the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES bought a car in prime time in order to bolster the stock of his advisor, you are not a conservative. You are an enabler of end-stage Roman-style corruption. And any ideals you claim to possess are pure bullshit. I would have to say that honest, sometimes painful self-reflection is not a trait I've noticed in abundance in the Republicans who have come and gone in my life, but I used to think it was fine, and sometimes even preferable, to have intellectual disagreements. We are no longer in the mode of playing a friendly game of political chess.

8. Hey, with this second dip into GriftTown, I've tried to just hunker down and let the madmen do their victory dance, because they did actually win the popular vote for once, and therefore a plurality of Americans are willfully submerged beneath the surface of the con, breathing in Melania's tub water (now available for purchase in gilded Mason Jars, with memecoins and other non fungible tokens), and who I am to deny the popular will?
Well friends, It only took two months, but I'm off the morphine drip. What's the point of saying all this? We may require an actual rebellion. The very worst people in the world now run the world and even in a dystopian novel I will never read nor write I could not have imagined it getting this ugly.

9. And no, I don't think the way to rebel is by typing my misgivings into Facebook, also run by (surprise) a loathsome Caesar. I likewise have zero clue what we can or should do. Scream naked in the rain and beseech Poseidon to keep us from getting wet?

10. The only plausible stance I can take, right now, is to say we need to start talking about what is actually happening in a way that does not attempt to mollify or appear reasonable, or fall into the trap of not offending, or descend (further) into the anti-intellectuality of identitarian politics and keep eating ourselves from within. This is too fucking serious. This is close to Socrates drinking hemlock time. I am terrified, mainly because nothing about this state of being is even mordantly funny. George Bush, if nothing else, was hilarious. This is the Long Days Journey Into Night, because when it comes to pass that I can no longer laugh, the canary has died in its cage and the coal mine is a shaft full of rubble, nepotism, hypocrisy, unalloyed greed, and Clarence Thomas' morning breath.

Seizing the day is not logically possible, but it's probably time to Carpe Our Ruinae.
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Cause no one else is going to do it for us.