He Was Trapped. ATE His Way Out.
He Jumped. Then THIS Happened
25 Places So Colorful You Won’t Believe They’re Real
10-Year-Old Dies From Rat Bite
Creepy, Abandoned Hotels and Resorts
2-Legged Dog’s Unlikely Best Friend
What They Found Under Alcatraz
The Ways a Black Hole Could Kill You
Superheroes were created when humans stopped believing in themselves. Same with robots. The idea is that humans can no longer engage in positive projects, they can only cling to basic life, and anything more than that must be done by superheroes, robots, and rich and powerful people.
Humans are believed to be drowning in despair, decimated and useless – thus the need for a non-human savior. Any attempt by pathetic corrupt humans to do good in the world will end in failure.
Thus superheroes as powerful – “I used to be just a pathetic human but now I shoot laser beams from my eyes! Yippee it’s time to go to town!” Examine the transformation in Peter Parker in Hollywood’s Spiderman movie, for example.
The superhero mythos paints humans as sad creatures counting down the days to death while superheroes because they are powerful are truly alive. This is why superheroes always have ridiculous physiques (except when that’s too inconvenient for an actor to accomplish) even when that makes no sense with respect to their powers.
It’s fascist ideology, which is why humans are inherently offended by it. Hitler believed the German populace to be effectively dead but through world domination and utter power they would be brought to life. Hitler viewed himself as a superhero, a kind of national doctor healing the populace.
So now we have not only vigilantes like George Zimmerman roaming the streets but “superheroes” like the Rain City Superhero Movement transcending their pathetic human selves into an enlightened powerful form.
Anyone familiar with the rise of the fascist right in Europe RIGHT NOW, I’m not taking about the 1930s, understands the dangers of right-wing chauvinist fascism, and if you don’t believe that can happen in the United States I can only hope that you don’t experience a very rude awakening in the next few years. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It’s taboo to speak poorly about capitalism in the West, and until recently was likewise taboo to speak poorly about the rich. As such, critiques of capitalism and the wealthy have to be concealed, plausibly deniable.
Prior to the 1980s, American alien culture was centered around UFOs, which were often high altitude spy planes being tested by the US government. Interest in UFOs meant interest in greater transparency of the US government toward Americans.
During the 1980s, popularized a decade later, there was a shift in alien culture from UFOs to alien creatures. This matched up with the recognition that the world’s rulers were pursuing an apocalyptic ideology and were no longer caretakers of the earth and living creatures. Aliens became a metaphor for the rulers, who act to destroy the world and it’s people.
In the 1980s and 1990s when American capitalists wanted American servants to consume vast quantities of East Asian manufactured goods in order to enrich themselves, Americans dutifully served. They hung out at malls, cared about brands, made fun of outsiders who didn’t, and acted as the good servants they were and still are. The intellectual servants who serve the very same rulers had an explanation for such behavior: consumerism. A mysterious force driving people to become consumer zombies. It’s no mystery that we were spared the truth for the sake of the well being of the master.
After World War 2 American capitalists were ever expanding their operations overseas, selling to largely non-white people, and they realized that the rampant racism at home was no longer useful to them. The servants got the picture, and a “civil rights” movement grew in power until it achieved certain limited ends which were beneficial to the globalizing capitalist class.
The downtrodden servants, desperate for self respect, give themselves credit for “no longer hanging out at malls” and lots of credit for “no longer being racist”. Funny, that. Real funny. All they are doing is taking orders from the masters, and they still are. When the masters told them to be racist, they were, and when they tell them to stop, they do.
When the masters tell them to hate Arabs, they cheer and sometimes engage in anti-Arab abuse including American soldiers demonizing Arabs as “haijis” prior to bombing them – when the masters tell them to hate hispanics, they do the same. Where is their anti-racism now?
When the masters don’t need the entire population to be racist, that’s fine. A section of the population can congratulate themselves on being “progressive” and not being like those other people. Hence the population becomes divided between the “racists” and the “non-racists” and the age old tactic of divide and conquer succeeds. The capitalist smiles ear to ear.
When will we stop being good little servants and wipe that fucking smile off his face?
Running out the clock
It’s the only thing left to do
Running out the clock
It’s running out for me and you
They say there’s guns and murder
And violence on the street
But they tell you just to lie in bed
And hide beneath the sheet
Think you’re sly like a fox?
And we’re all just runnin out the clock
Well they say the food we eat
Is not even fit for a dog
But they sell it to you wholesale
As you walk around in a fog.
Might just sell your stock
Well we’re all just runnin out the clock
Running out the clock
It’s the only thing left to do
Running out the clock
Running out for me and you
Well you can try for the hail mary
you can go for it on fourth down
you can pray the saints are watching
and rooting for your hometown
pull up your sock
after all we’re just running out the clock
I arrived shortly after 9 AM on the Southshore train from South Bend, IN and stepped out from the Van Buren St. train exit onto Michigan Ave. amid many young, carefully arranged, packaged, and produced, affluent Chicagoans. This should have given me an idea what I was in for. I traveled northeast where meticulous parks shook hands with meticulous skyscrapers, where fashionable people walked with fashionable dogs. A giant opulent fountain looked out upon a shining blue expanse of water, dotted with boats which were undoubtedly fashionable if I had only paid more attention.
I was looked upon when anyone bothered as so much meat – perhaps adequate as a fillet but a poor one, and clearly not up to their ravenous but oh-so-delicate tastes in any case.
A line of media vehicles, big bulky and shining white, dominated one side of the street. Police hulked about in studious calm.
At the rally and subsequently there were four main contingents of participants – angry, young, middle class people fearing for their (material) future, progressives, anarchists, and people who show up at sexy large social gatherings to mingle. Although not ever spoken about on any news service I frequent, the latter group may well be the most populous. Note that “poor people” is not one of the groups, which is the big problem. This was a largely white, middle class (by middle class I mean people who are globally speaking very, very wealthy) gathering. This was therefore not at all a populist gathering, therefore not a revolutionary gathering, despite much rhetoric given during the gathering to the contrary.
Not much more need be said about it. The police occasionally tried to look intimidating but mostly were just bored, and hotter than the rest of us in their padded armor and helmets in the mid to high 80s degree heat and sun. The march stopped before we got to the poor side of town.
Walking the streets of Chicago after the event I saw far more poor people than I did during the event that opposes (or ostensibly opposes) an institution that dominates and oppresses poor people around the world and at home. Chicago is an utterly racially segregated city, with black and white separations between the white (wealthy) part of town, the black part of town, the Chinese part of town.
And another segregation – between poor people and “revolutionary” activists.
Anyone looking to seriously create revolution in the world rather than just having something sexy to put on their life’s resume needs to be part of a movement comprised largely of poor people. That’s the only logical possibility for where a revolution can come from.
The Vietnam “War”, better described as a stage of psychological and economic domination (enslavement) of East Asia by the West by means of industrial massacre, entered popular American consciousness in the mid 1960s. In 1955 Allen Ginsberg’s angry “Howl” threw unhappiness on an ostensibly happy country. In 1966 began the Society for Creative Anachronism, which rejected the power plays of the 20th century that caused so much devastation in favor of Middle Ages (read, prior to the Nuclear Age and the Industrial Revolution) role playing.
Drugs are to the biological human what Games are to the social human. Ginsberg and Timothy Leary with his “turn on, tune in, drop out” set the stage for video games, where humans drop out from the real world in favor of countless alternate realities.
As the dangers of drugs became more well known, video games stepped in to offer a “safer” alternative. By “safer” we mean of course that games are an utter waste of time and the body wastes away while doing them, but that unlike drugs no direct poison enters the body. However, very much unlike drugs games offer a potentially eternal escape from reality and are therefore far more dangerous.
“Social” gaming like MMOs attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too, by means of obscuring the nature and historical reality of video gaming through offering “alternative socialization” to face-to-face traditional human contact.
The Occupy Movement is more of a threat to gaming than it is to the elite. The elite can always just harass, arrest, injure, and kill enough people to instill enough fear in them to get them to stop being a threat (the movement can still defeat them, however). What the movement really threatens is the “turn on, tune in, drop out” mentality of gamers, by offering a positive space for people to engage with the traditional world.
Of course, gamers are a largely “middle class” bunch by which I mean they are ridiculously wealthy by global standards and often support the elite, so support the elite’s goal of having them waste their lives away in front of a computer screen.
There’s far more to say on this of course, such as how weightlifters escape their own impotence into a fantasy world of the maximization of muscles, how superheroes escape impotence into a fantasy world of the maximization of their moral goodness, righteousness, and power, etc. But just one more thing to sum it up:
As Roland Orzabal, Michael Andrews, and Gary Jules might say, “It’s a Mad World”. In a world out of control where no one (who’s in a position to do anything good about it) has any power we encourage children to murder 3,000 people in a video game in order to bring order to a fake world. We fool ourselves into believing this is empowering.
In the world of video games, noone has the freedom to be a monster. Not even if they have the decency to move away from humans and live in the depths of the earth. There’s a word for this lack of freedom: totalitarianism.
When we look into the undead, haunted, manic, messianic eyes of the Gamer we might find that being a monster is preferable. Anders Breivik thinks so.
A few things to point out –
This is more a horror movie than a crime drama or noir. It’s far more terrifying than slasher flics.
This is a fascist movie. There is zero forgiveness from any character for any character or any action. In this movie the “final solution” is always (another) murder.
The main character is not a “hero” as the movie would have us believe. He’s saved the physical form of the woman he supposedly loves but sure as hell not saved her overall well being after what he’s helped put her through. A woman is not just a body.
Also, the woman is not “innocent” but passively ignorant to a pathological degree.
As far as bad choices made by the “good guys” in the film, sticking around for the events of the movie to unfold was a terrible idea. Fleeing and establishing life somewhere else was the best way to go. This option was very much available in the beginning when they were only dealing with small-time crooks.
The “hero” did not choose the fleeing option due to his conceit that he could control events through his meticulous code, his ridiculous faith in his magical time window. So he smirks his way through much of the film and blank-faced stares his way through the rest as the emptiness of his nonsense faith is repeatedly revealed.
The script was easier to write than most – stares with “silent resolve” at each other thinly veiling the fear, terror, and perpetual grimness beneath.
This isn’t a movie about love – it’s about pain. It’s not about heroism but rather about “heroism” – it’s about filling an empty nihilistic life with the equally empty dream of noble heroic grandeur, and then manipulating events to produce said “heroism”.
The vision at the end of the film says it all – the two empty souls face off and the “hero” envisions his own stabbing, and then instead of countering that outcome (such as not turning his back on his foe) to keep himself healthy he engages precisely in that vision.
This is the true sequel to Taxi Driver, and the “hero” is the new Travis Bickle, older and wiser but just as dead inside.
Travis Bickle was the corrupt decadent perverse monster, evoking all the fears of 1970s American culture, fears that would be fully realized in the rise of the Neoconservatives.
Then America became “straight edged”, attacking smoking, porn, crime, bodily diseases, and whatever else it was that was supposedly wrong with them, while ignoring everything that was ACTUALLY wrong with them (such as Imperialism and greed). America became the “hero”, suave and well-groomed, manipulative and sinister. America became the noble protector of the innocent, with arsenals of guns and alarm systems standing between their awesome selves and the forces of evil corrupt darkness that would have their prized possessions of cars and homes and women’s bodies.
And so this is the sequel to Taxi Driver, showing what America has become in the past 35 years. It’s not pretty.
Video gaming in the 1970s and 1980s was largely done at Arcades. These were noisy places where light interspersed with darkness. Back then there weren’t many gamers, and Arcades gave a place for gamers to socialize, including those who had nothing else in common with each other.
Arcades taught futility. Arcade games were ridiculously difficult compared to modern household games, and every few “lives” lost in a game would require insertion of another quarter to continue.
The most common phrases in Arcade games were “Game Over”, “Try Again”, and “Insert Quarter to Play/Continue”.
With great discipline and skill and hundreds or thousands of hours and dollars spent, one could master and “beat” most arcade games. At which time nothing happens but (sometimes) a congratulatory screen.
Arcade games teach us that even ultimate success means nothing at all, except for “self esteem”. Success only means that we get to stop playing the game.
With the start of Reagan’s America Americans, terrified of crime, drugs, pedophiles, strangers, and usually their own shadows brought their children indoors, behind locked doors, barky dogs, alarms, guns, and sometimes gated fences. In addition to feeding them television and death food they fed them a new media – home video games.
Gone was the hardcore nihilism of futility – a softer, gentler, sheltered, teddy bear cuddly totalitarian nihilism was the order of the day. Games, unlike TV shows, could now go on forever. The womb of the indoors required no quarters, resulted in no permanent game overs with the magic of the do-over, would never mockingly say “try again”. Games were now worlds to get lost in, “alternate realities”, places to escape the dismal and hopeless outdoors.
This second-order terror, escaping the lesser terror of the outdoors, decimated the population. We’ve reached the point now where 80% of mainstream games feature murder as a primary mode of gameplay. These despairing, hopeless, and apocalyptic gamers call it “fun”.
And now we have Kawaii. To address any possible honest traces of dissent leaking under the rug of terrorized suppression, smiley, cute, “innocent”, and oh-so-adorable creatures are the new gods, with Disney the popularizer, Pokemon the modern translation, and the undead Nyan Cat the new Emperor.
The true undead cannot be killed by decapitation. Like any junkie, they can only be killed by overdose. Nyan Cat emits a wonderful rainbow, fueled by his Pop Tart engine. So feed him more Pop Tarts until he explodes and can finally be laid to rest.
But while that takes care of Nyan Cat, that doesn’t take care of us. We are the totalitarian lovers, the undead worshipers, the head-in-the-sand Minecraft players. We are Nyan Cat. So, logically, the solution is the same. Overdose. Play the game until the very end.
We’ll meet each other for the first time on the other side.
Emma Smith was stepped on, her foot maintaining it’s form only due to the underlying bone. She had just been rejected, if we would call it that, in her latest attempt to enter the world.
Emma Smith was not wealthy. If she was she could move to the other side of the world where fat lazy rich people gazed. Or vain six-pack abs people. Or creatures born of plastic surgery. The same thing. Emma was glad she wasn’t wealthy.
Cloud Strife has shit to do. He always is doing important work. Saving the fucking WORLD, as usual. He didn’t notice his awesome self crushing the foot of something. It wasn’t Tifa, or someone who mattered.
The Producer had taken one look at Emma and never gave a second one. Normal, boring breasts, a personality which has no place in the various stereotyped roles. She might as well not exist. That is to say, she doesn’t.
Cloud could be purchased for $60. Three entities exist in this scenario – the buyer, Cloud, and the producer who makes it happen.
Emma is none of these things. Emma is normal, one of the mere billions of people. Many of these people die of starvation, or murder themselves in despair, or are blown to bits in a war. This is unacceptable to Emma. Unacceptable as a destiny for herself, and for the billions of regular people she is similar to.
So Emma, too, has shit to do.
Meanwhile, Cloud went to get his hair styled. Saving the world isn’t possible with boring hair, one of the many lessons our media teaches us. Cloud spends hours every week on his hair. His hair is his six-pack abs, his carefully shaped breasts.
Cloud gave a shoutout to Superman and his six-pack abs, just coming out of a gym where he spends hours per day maintaining his physique. Sometimes he has time to help someone else. He’s fucking SUPERMAN though, and you’re not, so who cares?
The Producer smiled. He was building the Perfect World, and Cloud and Superman were tools in the construction. Noone ever blamed him, he gives them just what they want, and the large gate that surrounds his community and his home keeps the rest of the little people away.
The best way to destroy the world is to pretend to save it. So while the American State protects the civilized world from Islamic barbarism and insane terrorism while murdering millions and causing massive incidental misery, Cloud and Superman pretend to save the world while distracting people away from actually saving the world.
Emma knows this, and Emma is pissed. Emma is joining her local occupy movement.
Crackhead Willie, already high for the day with pipe in hand, went to see his friend Brian.
“Hey Willie, Skyrim is almost here!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Skyrim! It’s a huge digital world with lush grass, swords and magic and dragons!”
Willie, concerned for his friend’s well-being, peered into his eyes and noted the crazed mania gamers carefully dismiss as “enthusiasm”.
“When is Skyrim going to be here?”
“7 days! It’s just 7 days away!”
Willie realized he was a dinosaur. He looked down at his limp crack pipe, only able to get him high in the present. His friend could get high long before the drug actually entered his system.
“How many people are high on Skyrim right now?”
“Oh Willie, Willie, Willie, Skyrim is completely healthy! Noone gets hurt! It’s not like crack! It’s merely an entirely artificial world that I can get lost in for 200 hours!”
“There are hundreds of thousands of people high on Skyrim right now! Some moderately high, others insanely so.”
“Fuck, man, what the hell am I doing with crack? How long does this high last?”
“A Skyrim high? Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve been high nonstop for the past 6 months. Some people have been high on Skyrim for the past 2 years!”
By this time Willie’s hardened addict-heart had been broken, and with tears gushing from him he hugged his friend in consolation.
“It’s ok, Willie. You can play Skyrim too!”
Game of Thrones “keeps it real”. It gets rid of all the social delicacies in favor of “honesty”. The result is a brutal, totalitarian social fabric. The Western World that has thrown away it’s welfare state.
In Game of Thrones those who speak truth are powerful and those who lie are weak. Those who penetrate others and themselves with the rod of truth are always respected, by every character, without exception.
Game of Thrones is a modern totalitarian and Neoliberal fantasy. Characters live to know everything about everyone who is or can be a threat to their power-goals. Their words are weaponized, armored, or supportive as the need arises, but never otherwise.
As a result of this brutal madness, this “keeping it real“, everyone is afraid. There’s no security in Game of Thrones, only whatever confidence characters can muster by means of whatever control they can exert on the world around them.
Because everyone is afraid, everyone seeks to dominate. Peace is obtained only through domination, the same ideology which rules the American and Israeli states.
In episode 7 Cersei Lannister says “When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die”. Noone in the series even considers the third option, the insight of the 1984 movie War Games: the only way to win is not to play. The characters in Game of Thrones are in a state of perpetual war, against whoever and whatever stands in the way of their ambitions.
The psychological backdrop for the series is the awakening of an ancient, powerful, mystical, awe-inspiring evil force, which provides a justification for the “no pain, no gain” ideology of the characters. Game of Thrones tells us that only through perpetual training, perpetual suffering, perpetual sacrifice, perpetual honesty, perpetual war, will we become strong enough to face the ultimate evil.
And then, so the myth goes, we will obtain eternal peace. Or death. The same thing.
As the world suffers under the “no pain, no gain” of Austerity and the continued rule of neoliberal ideology and as a result accelerates towards the apocalypse, so the world experiences Game of Thrones. Unlike in the real world the totalitarian ideology in Game of Thrones won’t turn out nearly so badly. It’s fictional fantasy, after all.
With truth comes power. With power comes responsibility. Responsibility is a choice. People who don’t want responsibility decide not to know the truth.
None of this is commonly known in the United States (an example which proves the point). Tragically, this is not commonly known by educators themselves, those irresponsible Americans who claim to want to help people become more knowledgeable, but really merely want to feel AS IF they are helping people become more knowledgeable.
The common argument against my position is that power corrupts. Therefore, so the argument goes, we should not be powerful, hence not have truth.
My counter-argument is another clear truth – that only with power can any GOOD be done, as well as any bad. The recent uprising in Egypt largely failed, resulting in military control of the country, not because of insufficient raw humanity on the side of the uprising but because those humans themselves lacked power – lacked the willingness to understand the world. Therefore they celebrated their meager accomplishment in Tahrir Square without winning the war. Therefore they are losing the war.
Power does not necessarily corrupt. The people of Egypt are not corrupt, although they showed that they have some power. What corrupts is not power itself but the line of actions one might take to gain and retain power. An example follows:
Two powerful men. One attains power through fear and domination, brutal murdering, ruthless manipulation. That is the method he employs and must continue to employ to sustain power.
Another attains power through capable assistance. That is the method he employs and must continue to employ to sustain power.
We have no problem granting power to things which are helpful. Consider how powerful cell phones are in today’s world, yet there is nothing corrupt about them.
Since Americans in addition to being irresponsible are irrationally cynical, their response is that humans are corrupt while cell phones, being non-human, are not. This is one of the foundations for the American support for technology.
The reason for this belief, in truth, is that capitalism makes money from selling things, and America remains the center of high technology, so largely in order to support capitalism Americans support technology.
Capitalism also provides an understanding of the nature of modern corruption. There is no such thing as a non-corrupt CEO due to what a CEO must be to attain and retain his position of power – a ruthless pursuer of maximum profit for his corporation.
“You needed them to be what they could not be.
Your tears mingled with theirs
Your pain meant their deaths
All to elevate you as a god”
Zombie Brian shambled in, earning a look of disgust from an ironic member of Club Enlightened as the rarified air of an ode to Friedrich Nietzsche was so rudely disturbed.
As Brian moved listlessly about in a vacuum where there used to be a world The Neocon calculated the various ways to dispatch of him yet again. The cleansing must continue, and so the zombie’s head left his shoulders from a swipe of the katana.
“A ball of energy surpassing human
As this dead world demands life
Mary Lou, we love you”
As Brian Koontz entered the Den of Despair at the bidding of a Master of the Universe, he glanced at a big screen TV which displayed a video of Pete Rose maniacally running around for purposes unknown. In front of him furiously masturbating sat one of the masters of the universe, just finishing his ode to Mary Lou Retton.
“This is going to be valueless since you’re here. Everyone knows only hacks put themselves into their own stories”.
Brian replied, “Well, we might as well speak the truth then. There’s nothing to lose”.
The Neocon laughed from the abyss: “There is no truth. Only stories. But a question first: why aren’t you afraid of us as are so many others?”
“I help people. And you’re clearly in need of help”.
The Neocon smirked at this sincere naïve pathetic fool in front of him. HE was the one who was helping build a new world. This piece of shit was just getting in his way.
“If you’re not with me, you’re against me”.
And with that, he opened the trap floor and Brian Koontz fell to his death.
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.
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.
A Human Reminder
Have compassion for the monsters that surround us. We may already be them.
What Became of our Holy Figures
As God did cocaine, cold crystal white flakes fell to the ground, a dance floor for Aspen hedonists and New York boardrooms. Jesus huddled crumpled in the corner of a corporate skyscraper, his terribly beaten face shunned by the carefully coifed and beautified shells of humans who passed him, pretending not to notice.
Our Heroes take stock of the situation
Wee Slice and Kid Skittles, moving on to the next thing as usual, queried their friend,
“Where are we going?”
Homoslightly smiled sadly and said, “To heaven, kids. It’s going to take a while to get there is all”.
The Museum of the Real
The friends moved as ghosts along the road, careful to not do anything to rankle the dank air of the endless tomb. This was where they died, trapped in their own greed and fear.
The Zombie speaks
I’m still alive, somewhere. Sometimes. When the wind blows in a new direction. This place is dead. I live to teach others of the shambling clank of their lives. They hate me and fear me, as they see too much of their own eyes when they look into mine. So they kill me, but I always return again and will always so long as my message has not been heeded.
The Vampire speaks
It is human weakness that is causing their self-annihilation. The same weakness that encourages them to help each other also holds them back. I am the rejection of this weakness. I resent humanity for giving birth to me.
The Superhero speaks
When it became clear that liberalism was useless in this brutal age I became a forceful antidote to brutality. I tell myself I’m more than human to ease the pain of the truth, as a rodeo cowboy tells himself he’s a stud to ease the pain of his abuse of caged animals.
The CEO speaks
I am a machine in service of my stockholders and my own bank account. I am a profit maximizer – everything in the world exists to elevate me and my corporation.
The Actor speaks
I can’t be myself in society, but I can do anything, be anyone, on stage. From on high I look down upon you, who are condemned to the prison of your own identity.
From my own identity I am on permanent vacation. Even with friends, who others call my audiences, I am nothing but a false front. But they spend so much time laughing they don’t notice, so what’s the harm?
The Activist speaks
Oh my conscience and my knowledge! How terrible it is that I must exist in service to an imperial society, how my heart goes out to my plight! Now me and my beautiful soul help the sexy cause of the day, my gaze lingering not on the true victims of the world but on the mirror of my companions.
The Pacifist speaks
I sit here quietly, not hurting or exploiting others. Big Daddy Sam does that for me while I derive the rewards of his rapes and plunders.
The Gamer speaks
I have left the painful crazy world and behind my veil of irony and self-deprecation I translate myself into being. Always amused, I scan the world, never missing out on a thing.
The Good People speak
We are humble folk. We eat, drink, and are merry. We’re imperial servants, the sad-sack global middle-class. Our impotence is based on our love of the status quo. We ask you how you’re doing and if your answer is unsatisfactory you are targeted for destruction. Have a nice day.
Through the Darkness on our knees
As you look up into that black sky and weep, crawl toward the new dawn. It may be brighter.
Oh Dear
Yum Tasty was feeling dry today. A bit pasty, but mostly dry. She was taught, she thought, quite recently, how pleasant everything was. And so she went to the bank.
A Most Odd Request
Yum Tasty began looking for protuberances as she approached the brick block which was trying very hard to look secure. Not finding anything suitable, she entered the bank.
This highly ranked bank manager informed Yum Tasty, upon her request, that a bank account was most surely available to her. And yes, available to her whenever and wherever she needed it. That was just what she wanted. She was disappointed of course that said bank account had no physical representation, so she obtained a stack of cash to stand in.
Attaching a Second Piece
A stack of cash by itself would simply not do, so Yum Tasty brought out her dildo and glued it to the cash. Now things were shaping up.
The Butcher’s Shop
What a smoked hunk of meat! What a thick slab! Yum Tasty was overcome with drooling pleasure. Now she was wet! But something was still missing. What would modern imperial society contribute to her needs?
High Tech
Microprocessors – is there nothing they can’t do? And now smack dab in the middle of the ripped rack of beef Yum Tasty carefully placed the heart, the brain, the computer chip.
And she called him Meat Shield
This was the man for her. Quiet, strong, smart, rich, well-hung, filling her stomach from two directions and never a complaint to be heard. Paradise is now upon us.
The Comedian
I look down on you from my stage on high. Seeds pour from my mouth and enter your bodies. You bear my seeds and go forth to spread them.
The worse the world gets, the more you need me to make you laugh. I have become truly powerful now.
Fearful
Kid Skittles fretted, thinking that cocoa butter would be the final smell before the world ended. He examined the faces on the video closely, noting every nuance of expression. He would find the secret.
Merely Punk
Insular and defeated by society, as a consolation prize they get their precious self-expression. That is their cage.
And Therefore, Readily Programmable
The empty are vessels needing to be filled. A cynic who believes there is nothing of value in the world fills those vessels with the endless distractions of mass media. Politicians fill the vessels with whatever propaganda meets their goals.
We suppress our fear of intimacy and love by having sex
What greater illusion than sex? It allows the feeling of intimacy without the actuality. The empty believe that sex produces love, when only the opposite is ever true. In order for the empty to see reality they need to open themselves to the world. But they fear the world and sit huddling in their dark corners.
Digital Growth!
Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Oh My! And so it begins, my child.
Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, My how you’ve grown! I am so proud.
Petabytes, Exabytes, Zettabytes, Awesome beyond words. I am ready to die now.
Hello Police Officer
Poor you, relic of an energetic age where crime meant something, now a janitor and a thug.
Market-Based Men and Women
What can we buy? What can we sell? What we buy defines us and everything we sell is part of us. We sell ourselves. A man’s “gotta make a living” and a woman’s “gotta do what she’s gotta do”.
Market Capitalism
A dying populace makes no protest. Nixon marked the shift to the Neoliberal order and gave birth to it’s champion in Reagan. Americans were too busy gorging themselves to care – their souls had been sold for some bread and circuses.
The Market Apocalypse
The Market is for those who believe in nothing else. Mammon is the last refuge of the Nihilist.
Continuing to Continue
We have our health, and our wealth, not so much the wisdom. As long as that remains true, there is hope, or so they say. You may wish to ask, who’s doing the saying?
A Turn for the Dead
Back to Basics
Kid Skittles woke up shaking. There was another time, it seems, another way, but not for him. He would be here, and get through the day.
He walked to the refrigerator dreaming of teleportation and drank milk dreaming of sustenance. In any case, here he was.
Meat Shield had just had a meal and sat pleasedly next to Yum Tasty. Happy at being so nutritious once again, Yum Tasty browsed the television for stimulation.
Homoslightly was lost in the latest Scissor Sisters album. So wonderful. He went to his car to pick up friend Wee Slice.
Queen Mary and King Joe concluded their latest business transaction, a shift in capital from “their” country to one of the rising capitalist BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). They are citizens of the world you see, or at least citizens of the land of maximum profit.
Kawaii!
Japan was the first country to embrace the end of the world. Shattered by nuclear terror and cowered by the new age of apocalyptic capitalism, Japan sold what remained of it’s soul to those who terrorize it. New daddy was happy to have a new slave and helped guide it in this new age.
Yet still far too young to forget innocence. So Kawaii!, first an assertion of the desire to be innocent, later weaponized through Pokemon and the rest for use against the resented USA.
Poison Party
What do you do at parties where everyone is poisoning themselves? Wee Slice brushed a crumb off of his meticulously white shirt while Homoslightly wept. They were thrown out for causing a scene.
A Lifetime of Anonymity
Banksy: “In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes”.
This quote pertains to the unsuccessful. As with an extension of the Warhol quote, the successful make it a lifetime achievement.
Merely Cynicism
Cynicism can always be counted on to provide part of the story. The problem with cynics is that they believe there’s nothing more.
The Age of the Empty
This is the same as saying “the age of the beautiful” since the empty are always passionate about their skin-deep.
Hamnesia
One thing a conqueror does is to allow his victims to keep their eyes and their stomachs, in exchange for erasing their memory so that their eyes and stomachs are useful only to keep themselves alive.
So, how about some nice ham?
Why Americans don’t talk about the apocalypse
One sign that a subject is taboo is that there’s a conspiracy-theory about it. Such a theory is designed to throw off serious discussion on the issue.
The reason the taboo exists about the apocalypse in the United States is that the US is the most harmful nation on earth and bears the most responsibility for the likely apocalypses. While global warming was initiated by Europe much of the damage was caused by ridiculous over-consumption in America.
Likewise, America is the leading nuclear power and has by far the world’s largest military.
Likewise, America controls the global economic system and invented the current apocalyptic form of capitalism called neoliberalism.
Americans love to talk about “when” the apocalypse will happen or refer to the 2012 nonsense, but never talk about the reality of apocalypse. They act as if the apocalypse would be something happening TO them instead of something caused BY them.
Ham, anyone?
It’s difficult to see in the dark
I don’t blame people for not being able to see in the dark. I blame them for not seeking out light sources. No matter how pathetic and lost people are, however, they always find the ability to complain about those who complain about them.
I am so incredibly awesome
Or so I may come to believe if I take video games seriously.
Video game characters rarely have any human frailties or limitations. Very rarely do they get tired, need to eat or sleep, need to stop running and just walk, need to have human contact.
80% of mass-market and 50% of amateur games make the player into a serial killer. Killing is the primary aspect of video gaming in general.
This killing is often genocidal, although on a fairly small scale. It’s not uncommon for a game to feature 2000 to 3000 kills by the player through his avatar or group.
So in game after game, repeatedly, the player is playing or controlling a small scale Mecha Hitler in the body of a lithe 20-something.. A serial killer with an anarchic do-it-yourself attitude.
The rest of the games, the ones that don’t feature killing? Well, they are merely wastes of time.
Meaty Goodness and the Delicious
If it’s true that the women of today seek to be delicious, then perhaps the men seek to be meaty. Big pecs and big cocks. Much meaty goodness for the ladies to consume, as well as their own eyes to marvel at in the mirror.
On Zombies, Werewolves, Vampires, Superheroes, and other subhumans
This is clearly the Age of the Subhuman, at least as far as the mass media is concerned. It’s difficult to find a portrayal of someone with human DNA on-screen these days, especially if one includes all the computer generated images.
In the world of mass media that might be an improvement. Hollywood has long treated it’s human DNA characters with utter contempt. Even when it depicts heroic characters they never miss an opportunity to call attention to themselves.
Love Lost
When I was very young I was terribly confused to see so much misery in the midst of so much material wealth. The political side of things I’ll address next, but a key problem in many American households is a lack of love. Meaning, quite simply, that the two adults married to each other do not love each other.
Let’s begin with a definition of love. Love is eternal warmth. It’s the knowledge that the thing loved will be with you forever in a wonderful way.
To say that humans in general and Americans in particular are ignorant of love would be an understatement. It’s the most important concept in most people’s lives yet few people study it to any extent.
As a result, some people believe that love is having a family. Their spouse is a tool used for the purpose of creating and maintaining that family. If that spouse does not serve the tool’s function adequately, it is disposed of through divorce.
Others believe that love is having a fun bedmate. Choosing the bedmate is like going to the meat market. A well-formed slab of meat is selected, frequent plumbing commences, much fun is had.
Still others believe that love is the result of a similarity contest. They evaluate all prospective mates around them to determine which are most similar to themselves, then declare to have “formed a connection”.
And finally, perhaps the most odious and common definition of love is a kind of utilitarian opportunism. That is to say, one seeks out the “best” sexual partner one can get, where “best” is defined by a set of objective criteria (wealth, age, beauty, intelligence). When the best acquirable partner is acquired, love is declared. Of course, if that “best” partner becomes less than best, through losing their job, disfiguring injury, etc. the “love” is gone.
All of these people call their spouse “a loved one” although such a statement is abominable. This shows up in the divorce rate of 50% (for first-time marriages, subsequent marriages result in divorces at even higher rates) as well as in countless marriages of misery. What percentage of “love” in America is one of the versions of false love? Dare we make that discovery?
The reason for this nonsense surrounding love is debatable. My belief is that since love combined with sexual willingness is rare, Americans have forsaken it for the security of false love, which they can declare exists whenever they want to. If one believes one will not reach the apple, then one picks up a rotten apple off the ground and calls it an apple. Americans are rotten to the core.
Democracy Later
It’s not healthy for people to have so little control over their lives.
The middle-class recently discovered that democracy does not exist for them around the same time that George W. Bush gave yet another contemptuous sneer at their political wishes.
The people of Hawaii discovered that democracy does not exist, at least not for them, in 1893 when they were conquered and later annexed into the American Empire.
The Native Americans were the first Americans to learn that democracy does not exist, at least not for them. Africans discovered that truth soon after.
We see that democracy always exists, as long as one remains the dominator. The American upper-class talks frequently about democracy, indicating that they have not yet been conquered and hence taught the truth.
So Israelis talk about democracy and Palestinians know better.
Until everyone has democracy there is no democracy. In order for everyone to have control over their life there must be no unauthorized force which controls peoples’ lives.
Abandoning the White Man’s Burden
Our young people are burden-free. They are also values-free, decency-free, morality-free – they have no substance. They talk a lot and cling to each other for comfort. Their cell phones are their security blankets and magical totems. In their nightclubs they lose themselves and each other in the darkness.
Just another gamer
Kid Skittles fiddled in his mind while the world burned. He sagged. Not his world. His eyes glittered with pulses of color from the glowing screen in front of him. Big Daddy Sam would take care of the outside while he cleansed his spirit with digital wonder. How strange that the cleansing always made him feel dirtier.
There’s always a story behind those who abuse themselves. This one begins with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, takes a terrible turn in Vietnam, features an American Crash in 1983 (video game crash) and a Japanese Savior with the Nintendo Entertainment System. A dying American political system left the decimated youth looking across the ocean. Japanese capitalists were only too happy to oblige, and Mario was the first of many seductive snaps. Pokemon brought the laughing domination to new heights, punishing the guilt-fueled American obsessives with the command to “gotta catch ‘em all!”.
So have compassion for Kid Skittles as he scatters, skids, and spins. He was born in the USA.
Young Couple
Meat Shield protected his woman while Yum Tasty sparkled. What a pretty pair as they primped and twirled. They ended with another pose.
Acknowledgements:
Nick Drake
The Eagles, especially “The Last Resort”
“We’ll Be a Dream” by We the Kings
“Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum
Masculinity is the acceptance of being driven to death by a woman.
Women love dying men – as long as they are dying for their sake.
The “crisis of masculinity” in modern culture results from an overemphasis on life and freedom to the detriment of bondage and death.
“Misery loves company” is said to be satanic. Thus, according to English and American morality, one must eliminate one’s misery. In modern times this is commonly done through the consumption of entertainment.
“Misery is satanic” enters into a host of other American beliefs – it’s the core reason why Americans are materialistic, in the sense that to them, poverty is evil.
When challenged on their consumption of entertainment articulate Americans simply state that they are alleviating their misery, consoling themselves. To examine the morality of consolation never occurs to them.
Domination is not about truth – it’s about control. CNN doesn’t even care, much less know, about the various psychological and social effects of Twitter. What they DO care about is that we “learn” about those supposed effects from CNN – scientists are merely a tool CNN uses to attempt to increase their own degree of domination of the viewership and extended viewership (those affected by the direct viewers).
Western mass media (in conjunction with other elite allies) is about necromancy. Create a dead population and then animate this population in the direction they desire. All they care about is how easy it is to tug the populace one way or another as well as how powerful they can make a given tug. Truth is irrelevant except insofar as truth affects the power of the tug or their general credibility. A dead, irrational population themselves don’t care about truth, so perpetrators of lies no longer are penalized – hence the continuing popularity of Rush Limbaugh and the like.
We are living in a twilight zone of irrationality where elite factions (mostly various corporations through their products) vie for ownership of your soul. Americans then become mouthpieces and pawns of these elite – used against other Americans, used against foreign slaves in some cases, used mostly against themselves, as well as sucked dry of any humanity they have. Humanity just gets in the way.
With very little humanity left in America, the humans who are left feel alienated, isolated, as if they are living in hell. They retreat into their own minds, consoling themselves with the belief that they are much better than the zombie society around them. This belief in turn causes them to retreat further, into TV or video games and libertarianism, away from public events, in a rarified dead vacuum (imitating Nietzschean separation) that they deem “pure”. It’s “pure”, alright – purified of everything except their own beautiful and precious mind.
These humans, although they are the last to admit it, are every bit as much pawns of the elite as the rabid ditto-heads of Limbaugh – every bit as culturally dead as the rednecks they mock.
Their analysis of American society as hell is rational – but the only good response is to take up sword and shield and fight the demons and devils head-on. We need paladins, not hermits.
If we have insufficient paladins, then the zombie society will overrun us all.
We're in Our World Now 