I am waiting for the stupid-ass, self-aggrandizing thing to burn. I will wait for the careers & reputations & legacies & aspirations & monuments & expectations to catch the wild spark that will carry them out of this present hell and into finitude. I will wait, and continue waiting, and when the cinders are starting to cool, I will wrap some nice potatoes in tin foil and slip them into the ash.
There is no coming back from this. You all know that, right? We're never going to put every one of these malingering whoremongers in jail. Punishment is beyond our remit, as a citizenry; we are neither actively encouraged nor permitted to actually advance our progress, as a society, and it is our economic system that's at fault for that, first, and it is our vaingloriously up-its-own-ass legal system that makes it not only possible, but certain, that we will take uncountable lives and poison our environment, for war, and the profits from war, and the potential for profit above all.
We have thirsted for a god-king to spotlight & underline the essential rottenness of the american myth, and we got the fucker. Racist grandpa is the one. There's never been an example like this: and america is, politically speaking, the zenith of Bad Examples. Roosevelt dreamt like Cthulhu itself of corruption & invidious largesse, forever, but even Roosevelt's distended id couldn't conceive of the beast A.I. rampant and bloody-handed in the marketplace. This is the one, friends.
And hey, I'm waiting for him to die. Who doesn't like to dream a petty dream? I'm a big fan of waiting for the inevitable. I'm sure either Rubio or Vance will prove to be incompetent and ditzy enough to satiate the average Saturday Night Life fan thirsting for a different set of personality tics to scoff at. My money's on Rubio getting the seat next. But however it rolls, believe me when I say it does not matter whether the shits won or not, anymore, because the fault was all ours for believing in this thing.
This two-party thing. This set of false binaries. This shell game.
I was not raised to believe in it. Like some skin tag with delusions of being Athena, I grew from the brow of a peanut farmer. Carter was the failure that bore me, specifically, just as my parents were failures for their dim abreactions to the Nixon administration, believing Kennedy, Johnson & co had established the furtherest limits of cupidity, avarice, and war.
Every last one of these names, deluded and rotten, my parents barely elevated amongst them. Bad hippies & intransigient dope fiends, believers in technocracy & science fiction, believers in ice magick & the power of art, my parents founded their fucked-up little fam based on a surfeit of fabricated evidence. They thought they'd seen enough to prove they knew how it would roll out.
And then they got Reagan, and that's when we all realized we had the math wrong. By Reagan it was already too late. My dreams, as a youth, were founded on apocalypse. Though I did not know it. Everything was the eschaton, everything was gaining momentum, the fundamentalists were prepared, plans in hand when the neo-liberals were barely hatched. The game, as some stable genius neatly put it, was rigged. American culture & American society is predicated on there being an End Time. To have America, one must have a decline & a stop. There is no dream without the wakeup.
There is no false dream of revolution without rubes to sell it to. Grant Morrison needed an audience to sell the Invisibles, and he had exactly that in millennial-edge America, with our cute need to gobble ecstasy and attend Burning Man. Lucky fucker. He got me. Morrison isn't fussed about pronouns anymore, are they? Mozzer got filthy lucre and a Big Name in lights and even a settlement from the Wachowskis. Who could ask for more, from America?
Dream a little dream. Dream the littlest dream.
In the 80s we all held our breath and waited for Orwell's little book to come to pass, and were relieved when it proved to only be another anniversary, another birthdate, proving only the advancement of our gilded age. 1976 was the centennial, and we celebrated it with hack songs & a country twang. Minted a special quarter. Whoopie shit. At least we got an Altman movie out of it. The 250th is a cage match for human animals with no talent beyond basic brutality, a guest list of hasbeen disappointments-- including its Special Guest Speaker & Master of Ceremonies, the gilded birthday boy his own suety self --and a case of box office theft to rival Woodstock 50.
Ahh, that number. That special, meaningless integer.
I am fifty this year. I grew up dreaming about Skynet, and the ruins of Great Cities, and a mechanized heel sundering a human skull. And here we are. Here we bloody are.
I love you. Whoever you are, reading these words. We had a fun run. Set your alarms for 2027.
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