Healing the Monster

The role-playing group set out to kill the monster. They would reduce it’s hit points until it died. They would then scour it’s corpse for valuables and leave it’s hacked, bloody, oozing corpse out in the open where flies and bacteria would take the rest. So was the plan.

Funny, isn’t it? These misfits, these social losers, bullied and ostracized at school turn to fantasy to allow themselves to bully others. They enter dark dungeons, where they really need not be, and abuse goblins, kobolds, orcs, and whatever else they can sink their swords into.

All in the name of fun. It’s amazing what fun allows. Just ask any serial killer.

But we’ve gotten lucky this time. Our “heroes” aren’t going to be committing their usual mass murder today. This is a tale not of redemption, which is too much to hope for in this dark age. Rather, one of basic compassion and how despite what our culture constantly disinforms us of, human limitation helps us.

Meeting the Monster

The RPG group, with swords and spells full of death, minds full of happy teamwork, arcane statistics, and characterization fantasies, set out on another kill party, another dungeon beginning virginal and leaving well and fully dominated.

Man, that troll was big. The party hacked and slashed, zipped and zapped, plotted and trapped, but to no avail. This inconsiderate troll would not be conquered.

Nor did the party suffer. The troll defended himself but did not injure the group. So the party’s healer, having nothing to do, took a look around, and examined the troll. What caused it to turn it’s back on humanity and become a monster? It lives as an outcast, in the dark, skin scaly and oral hygiene non-existent. Like all monsters, it’s primary feature is it’s ugliness.

The healer blinked and looked at the group’s wizard, or rather the human being the wizard, perhaps for the first time. Acne-riddled, skewed teeth held in place by braces, arrogant and a social disaster. An outcast, in the dark, skin…. oh my.

Oh no… what degree of self-loathing have we here? Unlike the troll who is happy living apart from humans, the dungeons and dragons nerd lacks the courage of his convictions. He longs to be the popular one, the handsome one, the acne-free, straight-toothed, socially at-ease master of the universe. He longs to be precisely what he is not.

He longs to be a mass murderer, such as the powerful American state, thinking nothing of killing hundreds of thousands of poor brown-skins.

In the world of dungeons and dragons the nerd becomes the blond-haired blue-eyed Arian superhero while the nerds within that world, the goblins, kobolds, orcs, and trolls are lambs to be slaughtered.

Somehow I don’t think “Cure Light Wounds” is going to work here.

The Age of Desperation

Beautiful Decay

Those who long for death smile at decay. Making the decay beautiful is their goal, and so they fiddle in a hauntingly lovely way while Rome burns.

Digital Evil

According to video game developers, young males fantasize about mass murder. This can fairly be concluded by A) most gamers are young males and B) 80% of mass-marketed commercial video games feature mass murder.

Making matters worse, the video game player is almost never put into the position of stopping all the killing. That would be counterproductive, as he is the one doing much of it.

It can fairly be said that this killing is hardly realistic – polygons on a screen. But one long-standing goal of the video game industry is to become more realistic.

Global Attention

Countless terrified Americans, who never want to set foot on the streets hence they be accosted by actual people, are desperately trying to accomplish just that by making a living out of producing youtube videos. Their dream of avoiding a mundane job in reach, they pour their hearts and souls into Warhol’s nightmare of achieving global fame. Their circle jerks (err, “shoutouts”) are filled with their paranoid desperation.

Capitalist Seduction

It’s simply good business to ever-expand one’s customer base. So we should not be surprised that capitalism loves racial minorities, loves women, loves homosexuals, loves everyone and everything as long as they have money to spend.

The one person capitalism will never love is the pauper, dressed in rags, deemed morally insufficient for not accumulating wealth to himself, embarrassing dreams of capitalist utopia with his misery.

According to capitalism, those people should be shunted aside and ignored, or murdered if worthwhile.

Americans, in their undying wisdom, have decreed their love for racial minorities, women, and gays to be about the Christian brotherhood-of-man or enlightened decency. The needs of global capitalism have nothing whatsoever to do with it, of course not, that would just be silly.

How curious, then, that the views and attitudes of Americans have so closely coincided with the changing needs of global capital. Back when America dominated the world and didn’t particularly need blacks as customers, or need women in the workplace, American attitudes were against them. But as other areas of the world became more competitive with America, these groups were more fully integrated into the American economy, at the precise time that American attitudes changed to support such integration.

This narrative I’ve created has one big problem – all it is is true. Unlike the false narrative of “progress though increasingly enlightened attitudes”, it doesn’t make Americans feel good about themselves. Thus they reject what I’ve written.

And just to annoy you further with this silly thing called truth, consider the timing of Martin Luther King, Jr., consider that up to a point he was accepted by capitalism, and consider that he was far more popular with capitalism than Malcolm X, who himself became more popular with capitalism later in life, and ask yourself why.

What is the American attitude toward paupers? Well, they are no homosexuals, that’s for sure. Homosexual paupers make Americans confused.

Why we desperately want aliens to come

We loved to hate and fear communism. Thus there was quite the panic when the Soviet Union ended. Into this terrible void stepped the ultimate other, aliens.

Aliens have the convenience of not existing. Thus they cannot defend themselves from accusations of being hideously ugly, or of wanting to enslave us, or whatever else our cultural minders care to bestow upon them.

As we in America have no other values, we hope for the presence of aliens in order to unify the populace against the alien menace, just as communism did as well as the current menace, “terrorism”.

They are so Amused

People are not so much people anymore as entertainers. They consume endless amounts of media, a large majority entertainment, and become what they eat. They develop a mass-media hive mind, making endless references to their life experiences, which are mostly the things they see on screen. One long circle-jerk later and they go to bed, satisfied, and do the exact same thing the next day. These are insular, circular, introspective people who keep others at bay with the excuse of libertarian morality.

Dogs, Guns, and Drugs

Three American institutions, more important than ever in this paranoid, insecure, pathetic hellhole of a place – dogs, guns, and drugs.

All three keep the world at bay – the world is no place for the chosen people living in their City on a Hill.

However much they wish to strike fear into the man on the street with their “beware of dog” signs, their “beware of guns” looks, and their pill-popping hands, they will never successfully transfer their fear.

I rather enjoyed having a buffer, but you didn’t, and that’s what’s important

Benton Harbor, Michigan is currently being run by someone appointed by the state’s governor. All groups with any democratic component (city boards, commissions) have been disbanded.

These kinds of coups are associated with corporate power, a desire to run places to more closely align decisions with corporate interests and less so in the interests of the people living there.

In the late 1990s I was taking a university economics class which included how to legally minimize one’s tax obligation. When I mentioned to the class that I enjoyed paying my fair share of taxes to benefit society I was given a look by the teacher and some of the students that said I ought to be committed to an insane asylum.

Americans are far smarter than I am. I, dummy, thought that having a progressive tax structure (poor people pay little, rich people and corporations pay a lot as they receive more societal benefit) along with using that tax revenue to improve the well-being of the country as a whole could only be a good thing. Having some power invested in government, which acts as a buffer between the capitalist monstrosity of private corporations and vulnerable individual human beings is a good idea, so I thought. My fellow Americans in their vast tolerance and decency put up with this kind of nonsense-thinking, while attempting to curb my errant ways with their glances.

Congratulations, those who gave me that look and the many Americans like them – you’re getting the world you want while I get to write angry treatises and keep looking for political groups to join that never exist.

The Big Lie

Hopes for Superman keep us looking up into the sky and seeing nothing, while the earth is tortured. Then we look down and say, “What happened here?”

The Age of Desperation

People today feel helpless and terrified, as if they are drowning, and they desperately seek help. Then they become cynical and misanthropic, sometimes sociopathic or psychopathic when they don’t receive any help, believing the people around them to be self-serving assholes.

These people are unduly optimistic. The reason why they are getting no help is that everyone around them is drowning too.