Two years. I just needed two years off to finish my second tour of academia and reduce my drinking to three days a week. With that short break, I could come back as a better class of clown. I trusted you people to take care of yourselves in the interim.
I can’t imagine why I thought that was a good idea.
In two years, you’ve managed to shit all over our gilded cage. You divided yourselves into two cults of screaming tribalist monkeys, and handed power to the dumber cult. Said cult has turned their winking flirtation with fascism into a passionate affair. I could almost live with it, if they didn’t insist on displaying their affection through church fires.
I’ve come back to the first chapter of a bad cyberpunk novel, without the technological progress or free sunglasses that usually make up for the collapse of human reason. The incoming president combines Warren G Harding’s integrity with Mussolini’s love of diversity.
There’s been, if nothing else, an enjoyable sense of novelty. Until now, I’ve never seen a stable nation-state put a revolver in its mouth, pull the trigger, and blame Facebook for the splatter. I wouldn’t call it unprecedented (the next World War should be a trip), but I’ve certainly never seen it live and in the first person.
It almost doesn’t matter if the bankrupt post-Soviet bear tipped the scales. Enough of you fuckwhistles were dumb enough to fall for it. The fact that the geriatric Dorito got more than three votes (himself, his mail order bride, and Giuliani’s zombie) is a symptom of a terminally ill society.
The talking heads say to reflect on my own role in this. I will admit, the “set my churches on fire” t-shirt was in poor taste. But the real mistake was expecting better. After twenty-five years of living with exceptional American idiots, pattern recognition should have set it. Reading tea leaves is easy when they’re shaped like a swaztika.
I’m blowing the dust off of this platform. Not out of any misguided hope of convincing a nation of bullshit addicts to take the needles out of their eyelids. I’m not even that interested in making you people laugh anymore I just want a soapbox to scream from until the first cobalt bomb drops.
Live from the Western Roman Empire,
Blind Monkey