Chaos Angel Spanner
Interlude 13: This Is Not America
Interlude 13: This Is Not America
Revolution, n.
In politics, an abrupt change in
the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
In politics, an abrupt change in
the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
These are my last words, the last I will ever write. I have no idea if the world will survive. It could burn in nuclear fire, become so poisoned it can no longer support life, or blow up. They say they’re saving America, but I know for a fact they’ve destroyed everything it ever stood for, possibly forever. But I won’t be around to see any of it. I will soon be dead.
Shira:
(wailing between bombs)
Kiraaaaaaa!
(wailing between bombs)
Kiraaaaaaa!
They did it: they pulled off a revolution from above against American democracy! They’re the chosen ones, the ones destined to lead, and in their fervor they’re duty-bound to revolutionize the whole world and the infinite kingdom of space.
And intoxicated by revolutionary fervor, thousands of converted former Communists and Christians worshipping America at the Conservative Political Action Committee chant as their tribal war cry the curse of Che Guevara:
One! two! a hundred Vietnams!
One! two! a hundred Vietnams!
right-wing corporatism: a senile diseaseThe Russian revolutionary Lenin once wrote a famous essay calling left-wing Communism an infantile disease. But then the Soviet Union died, and Communism with it. The Conventional Wisdom (CW) now claims that right-wing Corporatism is the only possible form of government ever or, in the breathless words of a neocon Corporatist named Francis Fukuyama, “the end of history.” Right-wing Corporatists is what left-wing Communists decay into when they become old and demented without losing their infatuation with revolution.
Back in the day, the fashionable radicals sent out the call to action to an unstable alliance of Yippies, Hippies, Rockers, nudists, libertines, rebellious students, ghetto blacks, women’s-liberationists, gay-liberationists, Communist Parties not Russian, and the Radical Youth. In this day and age, radical fashion clumps together Corporate plutocrats, born-again nationalists, Rand-LaRouche cultists, moral prohibitionists, sports hooligans, free-gun militias, intellectual worshippers of glory and Empire, and the Radical Old.
Right-wing Corporatism is a senile disease. It is the moral mad-cow of late-capitalist politics.
the fall of the american republic:
25 august 2012.
The world exploded in fire. Mechanical angels of death flew above the Washington Mall and dropped hellfire onto the democratic masses. Again and again God spoke: his word was pure fire that destroyed the old world.
Shira was there—but Kira was gone! She tried to find her sister among the charred torn corpses on the killing field. Again and again, she screamed her sister’s name—but all she could see was the mocking one-eyed man drunk on murder, pointing his pistol at the tempting target between her eyes. She shot back a hard stare full of pure hate, into him and through him and into his black heart. She ran away to resume her search for her lost twin, leaving him screaming and twitching on the ground.
Superheroes, wardrones, and faith-mad Patriots captured all the liberal leaders; those who did not sell their souls to Jesus America were either sacrificed to him or sold to the Prison-Industrial Complex to advance its profits. The next day, as if an assimilant has transformed them into a botnet, the government and the corporate media announced with one voice that the humanistic heresy of democracy had been abolished and the Kingdom of God established at last on earth. . .
25 august 2012.
The world exploded in fire. Mechanical angels of death flew above the Washington Mall and dropped hellfire onto the democratic masses. Again and again God spoke: his word was pure fire that destroyed the old world.
Shira was there—but Kira was gone! She tried to find her sister among the charred torn corpses on the killing field. Again and again, she screamed her sister’s name—but all she could see was the mocking one-eyed man drunk on murder, pointing his pistol at the tempting target between her eyes. She shot back a hard stare full of pure hate, into him and through him and into his black heart. She ran away to resume her search for her lost twin, leaving him screaming and twitching on the ground.
Superheroes, wardrones, and faith-mad Patriots captured all the liberal leaders; those who did not sell their souls to Jesus America were either sacrificed to him or sold to the Prison-Industrial Complex to advance its profits. The next day, as if an assimilant has transformed them into a botnet, the government and the corporate media announced with one voice that the humanistic heresy of democracy had been abolished and the Kingdom of God established at last on earth. . .
the sons of the profitsKarl Marx called the captains of industry (“bourgeoisie” in his peculiar jargon) a revolutionary class. He said of their system that it melted everything solid into air. He refused to say they were the pinnacle of human evolution any more than the feudal lords they replaced were. That was for the misnamed Social Darwinists.
Herbert Marcuse blamed Marx’s working class (“proletariat” in the peculiar Marxian jargon) for Hitler, called them buffaloes and troglodytes. He sent out once again the call to battle of Louis Blanc and the Synarchists, that only the enlightened vanguard can win the revolution and rule.
Ayn Rand loathed Marcuse’s revolutionary outcasts, and Marx’s proletariat was her personal enemy. She proclaimed the identity of the one and only true revolutionary vanguard, the only men capable of creation: the robber barons and the captains of industry. To rule was to be their destiny and their duty; to get in your way was their sovereign right and privilege, but you had to get the hell out of theirs.
The wizards and warlords of Wall Street and the City of London listened to all of them and absorbed their words. But they had ecstatic prophets of their own: the prophets of seed money, wealth consciousness, name-it-and-claim-it, junk bondage, debt monetization, greed-is-good get-rich-quick; the prophets of survival-of-the-fittest, drown-it-in-the-bathtub, imperial glory, total world domination, the-blood-is-the-life sexual puritanism; and Leo Strauss.
They became the new revolutionary vanguard. They proclaimed themselves the pinnacle of creation and the incarnation of the end of history.
They proudly called themselves: the sons of the profits.
The radical élite were itching for a revolution. But the failure of the Sixties left the liberals wishy-washy. But look to the Right: the Conservative élite had all the fervor of Bolsheviks, yet they wanted to take America back to its Cold War glory. The radicals joined them.
And on the parking lot that used to be the Washington Mall, hundred of thousands of elderly Sixties radicals, who warred against democracy from the Left and now war against democracy from the Right, chant the word of revolutionary nostalgia:
Bring! back! the good old days!
Bring! back! the good old days!
the transcendental illumination:
21 december 2012.
The House of Dracula called it the Plan. They believed it existed before mankind. On the summer solstice when the zodiacal age was to shift from Pisces to Aquarius, they struck.
They had collected special people with self-healing powers, people from a mystical line: the Factor Positives, the ones with the X Factor. They removed them from society, farmed them, harvested them for their special blood that like the flesh of the mermaid granted immortality.
The willful ones, the ones who realized they wanted to live, escaped. The Dragonites’ weapon against them: the Men in Black, mind-slave proxies of the Slender Man.
The proxies caught them, several thousand known. They shackled their bodies, enslaved their minds, transported them back to the Feudal castles, Corporate villas, secret temples of the Dragon Court where the Dragonites feasted on their blood, achieving illumination, gaining amazing superpowers, and possibly becoming immortal.
And then when the proxies’ task was finished, the Dragonites sacrificed them. . .
21 december 2012.
The House of Dracula called it the Plan. They believed it existed before mankind. On the summer solstice when the zodiacal age was to shift from Pisces to Aquarius, they struck.
They had collected special people with self-healing powers, people from a mystical line: the Factor Positives, the ones with the X Factor. They removed them from society, farmed them, harvested them for their special blood that like the flesh of the mermaid granted immortality.
The willful ones, the ones who realized they wanted to live, escaped. The Dragonites’ weapon against them: the Men in Black, mind-slave proxies of the Slender Man.
The proxies caught them, several thousand known. They shackled their bodies, enslaved their minds, transported them back to the Feudal castles, Corporate villas, secret temples of the Dragon Court where the Dragonites feasted on their blood, achieving illumination, gaining amazing superpowers, and possibly becoming immortal.
And then when the proxies’ task was finished, the Dragonites sacrificed them. . .
the ecstasy of goldThe history of America is a series of quests in search of the ecstasy of gold that began with the elusive El Dorado. Yellow gold created San Francisco and Seattle. Black gold created Texas, Detroit, the World Wars, and the great gilded age of America supremacy. Fool’s gold created Phoenix, Florida, and the Great American Conservative Revolution. White gold created the Syndicates. The illusion of gold created. . . more illusion.
Next to power, money is the most addictive and dehumanizing of all drugs. The more one gets, the more one craves, creating that paradoxical feeling of absolute poverty in the men of infinite wealth that is the defining mark of the Corporate caste, whose war cry is that too much can never be enough. Western civilization’s legions of Cassandras have long said that money cannot buy happiness. The Corporates laugh at them, murder them, erase them from memory; for them, the only possible way to happiness and enlightenment is to buy them—and if you have to ask the price, you’ll never be able to afford them. Price no object.
In the early twentieth century, the intersection of Hindu spirituality, Western occultism, Social Darwinism, and eugenic pseudoscience created a belief among Corporates that they earned their wealth because God created the blood of their Houses out of gold. We know the horror this led to. In the early twenty-first, some Dragonite Feudals passed onto those Corporates’ descendants a vogue for eating gold in monoatomic form. . .
Uplift the strong, weed out the weak: isn’t that what revolution is all about? isn’t that why we need leaders? So says the traditional Corporate faith. Corporates have always put faith in the power of gold to purify their blood.
And at the establishment of the Eugenics Institute, where Sigmund “The Doktor” Heiler reigns as a genetic Doctor Strangelove, the assembled High Corporates chant their demand for the purge of the races for the purity of the race:
Let them die!
Let them die!
Let them die!
too much is not enoughDuring the late-1960s revolt of the left-wing Communists, the Youth International Party (Yippies) led the chant: “What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!” The Hippies rejected that slogan as the way to ecological and civilizational suicide, but the Rockers adopted it as their tribal philosophy and lived it.
In the 1980s, the former left-wing Communists who discovered Ayn Rand (the Karl Marx of Market Freedom), EST (Lavoris for the mind), and the cult of Ronald Reagan became the Young Urban Professionals (Yuppies) who boldly claimed everything and resolved to acquire it now. They claimed as their generational war cry that signifier of the Rock ’N’ Roll decadence of the previous decade: “Too much is not enough.”
In the late 1990s, when the series of increasingly devastating economic bubbles began that culminated in the Conservative Revolution, finance turned into sorcery and mathematics turned occult. They fervently prayed over the seed money they planted and harvested it by transmuting the spiralling debts of the middle class into infinite profits. Consumption became competition. They proudly proclaimed: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
The Conservative Revolution resulted when the ecstasy of gold fused with the lust for power, the hunger for glory, and the romance of empire. When the left-wing Communists had at last transformed into right-wing Corporatists and sacrificed the American Republic on the altar of Empire, they let out their cry of victory: “What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!”
the closing of the digital frontier:
january 2013.
Underground hackers did not bring down the Internet. Governments did. The Infowar was the final phase of the Conservative Revolution.
Corporatism cannot survive without total censorship. The first thing the new post-democratic Imperial American régime did was to give its surveillance megacomputer Echelon power that few gods can bear. First, it launched a massive cyberattack on the Empire’s bitter rival, Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited, that continues today. Then it abolished the open Internet.
The Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war. But it could not easily withstand the transformation of entire nations into gigantic botnets. The last remaining freedom in most of the world was obliterated by the unholy alliances of extremist factions, criminal gangs, and giant corporations behind Corporatism. Government lost; the people lost; even the corporations and the Party lost. The winner was Echelon, the infinitely paranoid Eye.
Hackers retreated to an illegal Darknet where freedom survives, an underground sanctuary from the Revolutionary inquisitors and their ever-paranoid Eye, to launch a guerrilla infowar against the New World Order under the name of Anonymous—but the Syndicates set up a black market in drugs, weapons, pornography, slaves, and exotic animals, to profit from the Revolution and then take it over.
Those left out, those who fight back, were left to ghetto-tech means. Keep your eyes on the Pony Express: thrill seekers delivering the mail by car, bus, bicycle, gypsy-cab taxi, and hoverboard, cargo and contraband and illegal words of freedom beneath the eyes of the Eye. . .
january 2013.
Underground hackers did not bring down the Internet. Governments did. The Infowar was the final phase of the Conservative Revolution.
Corporatism cannot survive without total censorship. The first thing the new post-democratic Imperial American régime did was to give its surveillance megacomputer Echelon power that few gods can bear. First, it launched a massive cyberattack on the Empire’s bitter rival, Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited, that continues today. Then it abolished the open Internet.
The Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war. But it could not easily withstand the transformation of entire nations into gigantic botnets. The last remaining freedom in most of the world was obliterated by the unholy alliances of extremist factions, criminal gangs, and giant corporations behind Corporatism. Government lost; the people lost; even the corporations and the Party lost. The winner was Echelon, the infinitely paranoid Eye.
Hackers retreated to an illegal Darknet where freedom survives, an underground sanctuary from the Revolutionary inquisitors and their ever-paranoid Eye, to launch a guerrilla infowar against the New World Order under the name of Anonymous—but the Syndicates set up a black market in drugs, weapons, pornography, slaves, and exotic animals, to profit from the Revolution and then take it over.
Those left out, those who fight back, were left to ghetto-tech means. Keep your eyes on the Pony Express: thrill seekers delivering the mail by car, bus, bicycle, gypsy-cab taxi, and hoverboard, cargo and contraband and illegal words of freedom beneath the eyes of the Eye. . .
heute die welt, morgens das sonnensystemFirst they reduced the world’s middle classes to proletariat. Then they reduced the proletariat to helpless poverty. Then they reduced Western civilization to subjection. Once they were in complete control, the Corporates proceeded to use their Empire’s infinite supply of zealous and bloodthirsty Nation-cultists to invade the world in their insatiable quest for the ecstasy of gold.
Too much can never be enough for men who compete to die with the most toys. They have sworn by God Almighty to conquer what they invariably call the infinite kingdom of space.
I hear you reply: is not right-wing Corporatism the terminal senility of the capitalist world? are not the Corporates going beyond the limits of growth? will they not burn their wings off and fall headlong into the sea like a flock of elderly Icari? The sons of the profits laugh in your face and shout at you through the barrel of a gun: “so much the worse for reality!”
The one true Revolution—why are the winners fighting each other for the spoils? This is America, my friend! Competition is the Corporate way! Everybody wants to rule the world and the infinite kingdom of space.
And the rivals riven by heresy and ambition square off against each other, each faction representing the only true revolutionary élite, and they dig in their heels and all chant at each other:
You! lie!
You! lie!
You! lie!
You! lie!
Kira:
(coiled up and sobbing in a dark cell)
Shira, where are you?
Please come back.
(coiled up and sobbing in a dark cell)
Shira, where are you?
Please come back.
People, nations, reality itself are infinitely malleable objects to them. In their hubris they’re trying to remake the universe in the image of their own Egos, and they tell us they have all the money they need to do it. If this goes on, nothing will be the same, and this is the end of the world.
Every revolution evaporates
and leaves behind only
the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka
and leaves behind only
the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka
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[Revision 4 Final, 4/4/13: Originally planned for the incomplete First Revision under the name “America Burning”; now completely rewritten for the Final Revision. The news-report part originally planned will become the new Interlude 14 that begins Book 2.]
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