It’s all over the news today that the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq has reached 4,000 after five years. This is certainly tragic in the sense that any needless deaths in violent conflict are tragic.
Forgive me, however, please, for being more concerned with the 80,000 civilian deaths which have occurred thus far in the war. Funny how we don’t like to talk about that on the news.
You and I are living in the swollen heart of dead America. We are in the cold clammy hands, the blank stare fixed on every television screen and wondering which box office hit might be our new Messiah; we are every muscle, aching, stiff with rigor mortis, unwilling to relax our failing grip knowing that we are dead even if we are not consciously aware of that reality, seeing speaking hearing no evil and disregarding any indication that we are not Superman and baseball and apple pie and that this is not our world to plunder any longer. We are the hard cock yearning to subjugate and conquer because otherwise we might be the willing split between thighs spread wide, or worse, unwilling and unavoidably vulnerable. We are sweat and blood and excrement accumulated and not yet dry, layers on layers of fresh toil and pain and fear caked on with each passing year to hide the reeking evidence the past has left behind…beneath it all, America does not even wear skin on its skeleton to shield its delicate and vital machinations from exposure: this emperor, like all others to come before and after him, has no clothes, no function, no blood beating through his veins and thus no humanity, no soul.
You and I are mired, here, within this lumbering monster of a nation, denying we are staring out its eyes into the sky from the bed of an unfinished grave.
The specifics of geography and location do not exactly matter; this is a systemic condition and the same stores-in-a-box and burger joints can be found, now, in Anytown, USA., can be observed with a clinical distance and dispassion in any number of cancerous microcosms working their destruction across the face of the whole. But you and I are here, in the midst of a quiet unassuming Denver suburb whose name means Town of Thorns on an empty and desolate Sunday afternoon.
This place is slow poison; nothing can flourish here, nothing can grow, this is not like the city where there is color or the country where there is life. This is not skyscrapers miming Babel and homeless vets huddled in blankets of newspaper, and it is not rolling prairie or purple mountains’ majesty. This is not art galleries and it is not a stroll so breathtaking in altitude our mutually asthmatic selves must pause for air as we stare down at the city below. This is not pleasure in pain, it is not happiness, and it is not life.
Check out Submission and Coffee! They discuss my post I am not damaged: the intersection of queer and kinky on the latest episode, #126.
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This is the Great American Scream, this is the sound of one million disenchanted voices waking from their fairytale slumber to see the devastation laid before them, the havoc and destruction wrought upon us by our fathers and our mothers and their fathers and mothers and each successive preceding generation — back to ancient times when the first woman alive plucked knowledge of right and wrong from the Kabalistic concept they call the Tree of Life, shortly before Manifest Destiny was decreed and Eden was paved over to make way for a Wal*Mart Superstore and a McDonalds, so no one knew what right or wrong was anymore, ever, anyhow.
This is the agony of separation, imaginary friends behind bars like the common thought criminals they are and the real kind virtually imaginary; this is the sound of grandma’s funeral or a dead pet or unrequited love combusting in the ashes of the WTC towers like your own private Hiroshima and that of an entire generation; this is the girl crying out beneath her lover’s expert hands as he manipulates her, contorts her with pleasure and anguish in ways she did not think possible until now; this is the pulse, the breath, the heartbeat, the collective sob, the universal gasp for air underwater; this is the voice that is better seen and not heard; this is ecstasy in anarchy, order in chaos and chaos in order; this is the What Would Jesus Do and Follow the Rules collapsing beneath the colossal weight of their own bullshit; this is a rape victim sentenced to 200 lashes for speaking up about it, this is 70ยข to a man’s dollar, this is fuck-me heels and miniskirts and lipstick and upraised arms with hairy pits brandishing smoldering bras in defiance of the natural order; this is the raised middle finger, the turned back, the Fuck You mingled with ecstatic cries of Fuck Me; this is suicide bombers and Jessica Lynch and Tim McVeigh and Malcolm X; this is the vacant lot of the American Dream, and it has been condemned, boarded up, demolished; this is We Don’t Need No Education remixed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; this is Yeats’ dream of WWIII slouching towards Iraq to be born; this is the thousand eyes of Moloch screaming without mouths, without words, and they are our eyes; this is the children of privilege being marched down the assembly line, realizing that the guillotine gleaming red with the life of every AIDs-infected starving Ethiopian child is still sharp and polished and hungry; this is a divorced single mother whose blood could stop cold in her veins and who could not pay a doctor to keep her from dying, while Congress issues orders to keep a woman who cannot drink or chew or swallow or move with no brain activity alive just in case, while a man’s teeth rot inside his face because nobody cares what happens to you if you don’t have a perfect white Hollywood smile, you might as well crawl into a ditch if you can’t find room at the inn or the shelter, you might as well die.
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Today the Washington Post ran pretty much one of the worst articles ever. Shakesville and Pandagon tackle the article so you don’t have to read it.
Jill on men’s “right” to anonymously threaten women.
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Casting Director Fired from “Shelter” Flick
Just ’cause I love this story and it has cheered me up immensely today: Hereville
