Subway Conversations About Politics – Part 2

I was sitting at a coffee shop in Hell’s Kitchen, talking about Donald Trump, when the man with the plucked ostrich feather came by. I was making the point I usually make about Trump, since Paris and since he presided over the beating of a black protester by a majority white crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s not funny anymore, The man with the plucked ostrich feather overheard me.

He’d wended into the shop to pester the clerks, and was wearing a ratty costume of discard clothes, cloaked by a too-big suit jacket, colored black. “You gotta vote for Donald Trump,” he announced, breaking into my conversation. “He’s the only hope we’ve got!” The bell on the door dinged twice. He left the shop.

I saw him marching down the street in the white-blue sunlight, twirling his tall and picked-clean feather with both hands. He walked towards the water, and was gone.

Think Big

On Sunday, the sixth of November, the President of the United States addressed the nation from the oval office. The last time he did so was in 2010 – and his announcement concerned “the end of our combat mission in Iraq.”

His remarks on the sixth were less ambitious. Days before, two “radicalized” American Muslims shot up a workplace holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty. As massacres go, it was small potatoes – neither as gruesome or as organized as the assault Paris suffered in November. But San Bernardino is American soil, and the “holiday party” is a ritual of forced socialization required by many American workplaces. Fear, spreading like fire in dry woods, flared crimson across the internet.

Which is why the President spoke from the oval office on December Sixth. He used this platform to argue against overreaction – and any major alteration in policy concerning international and domestic terrorism. “The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory,” he said.

“We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,” he continued.  “ISIL does not speak for Islam.  They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world.” Islam, Obama implied, was a religion – ISIS, a cult. And more than that – a cult of “death.” A reality and a system of beliefs dedicated to the antithesis of life.

This election season, the President acknowledged, has produced a lot of odd and hyperbolic ideas. But “freedom,” he explained, “is more powerful than fear.” Americans, united by their “common ideals” can meet any challenge. “So long as we stay true to that tradition,” he said, “I have no doubt America will prevail.”

Others do.

The Wrong Composition – It Doesn’t Work on Human Flesh

I am excited about the prospect of atomic war.  Two days before Thanksgiving, a Russian warplane was shot down by Turkey, supposedly for a brief airspace violation. Vladimir Putin, I have heard, has dreams of dissolving NATO — of pushing some minor member-country to the point of invoking Article Five, and committing all the allied nations to war on its behalf. This war, Putin is supposed to suppose, will not actually occur — the leaders of the major NATO states are too cautious to risk a showdown with a nuclear superpower over anything but the most flagrant of attacks on the wealthiest of states.Not going to war, an effective breach of the great North Atlantic Treaty, would instantly transmute the iron of that postwar alliance into steam — and by such alchemy, Russia could remake the world. Writer Max Fischer rendered it in relatively complete form on Vox last summer. It’s been catching on.

I don’t like the word “belief.” It’s too small, too optional — it reads as something that can, and should, be altered by the acquisition of information and the accumulation of years. Beliefs are open to question. Realities are trickier.

Reality forms the context and the precondition of belief — it is the raw material from which beliefs are assembled, and the workshop where they can be modified, reinforced and discarded. Realities are also comparatively invisible. While belief is the subject of conscious examination, realities simply “are.” They can be held up or thrown out as beliefs can — but the cost of doing so is high. It requires thinking beyond the boundaries of one’s thinking – a process of dissociative (and sometimes physical) violence from which it is impossible to return.

NATO is a belief. The bomb is a reality.

The cold equations of troop distribution and weapon capabilities define the reality of war for the the military thinkers I have known.. All ideology fails in the face of these amounts: only so many bullets for only so many skulls, and a discrete number of missiles for a discrete number of cities. Everything beyond that annihilating fact can be negotiated, ignored, disproved, trespassed and sanctioned — but in the end, the harshest truths exert their power. Russia and the United States have the power to render our planet uninhabitable. Military expression is built from gestures, subtle and overt, towards this concealed power.

Writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in March of last year, Nikolai N. Sokov, a senior fellow from Vienna’s Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, summarized a disturbing modification of belief among Russia’s military thinkers. In 2000, spurred by a possible war in Chechnya, Russia’s Security Council developed a new doctrine regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “The doctrine introduced the notion of de-escalation—a strategy envisioning the threat of a limited nuclear strike,” Sokov explained. Essentially, this threat was built around the potential deployment of a relatively small nuclear weapon against a military target. Such tactics were meant to communicate to the United States, or any other nuclear power, Russia’s willingness to face annihilation for the sake of its interests. This show of force, it is supposed, will trigger “de-esclation” by necessity. Its inverse – escalation – remains unthinkable.

As Secretary of the Russian Security Council in 1999, Vladimir Putin helped draw up the founding documents of de-escalation. As President, a year later, he “signed it in,” accorsding to Sokov. De-escalation remains an important entry in Russia’s military vocabulary.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists still maintains their famous “doomsday clock,” a timepiece that ticks closer to midnight as the tangle of beliefs governing the planet’s nuclear arsenal approach the point of fatal accident – a nuclear war. Since January of this year, it’s stood at three minutes till – its latest hour since 1984.

We have built a pistol from scratch, polishing every piece and cog. Then, with great ceremony, we pointed it at our own heads and threaded a finger through the trigger guard. Everything since has been Russian roulette.

Common sense, and the rules of effective narrative, demand a discharge. Hence, Fallout.

War Never Changes – But Media Does

On November 10th, three days before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the fourth installment of the Fallout franchise was released for personal computers and home videogame consoles worldwide. The series, like many gaming juggernauts, has an excess of history. The original Fallout, subtitled “a post-nuclear role playing game” was released in September of 1997. In this game, and its sequels, players are invited to construct a personalized character who lives in a world annihilated by nuclear war. What remains of our civilization, in this reality, is ruin and rust — ironically styled after the pop-culture and industrial design of the Eisenhower administration. In Fallout games, your character picks through the rubble, encounters mutated ghouls and wasteland settlements, and cuts an individuated swath through a world where history has ended.

Fallout 4, released this year, is set in the environment of a post-nuclear Boston. It made more money in its first twenty-four hours of release than the new “Jurassic Park” movie has since June: seven hundred and fifty million dollars, derived from over twelve million copies sold. That’s roughly six copies for every subscriber currently boasted by the New York Times,, and all in one day. Who knows what the game will achieve as Christmas approaches.

Videogames are big business. Investment analyst John Markman, writing in Forbes last month, reflected on how little videogames are discussed by more traditional media, in spite of their financial success. “If the videogame industry were covered as heavily as Hollywood […], every director, character designer and scenarist in hit franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield would be a celebrity stalked by TMZ,” he wrote.  “Instead they labor mostly in anonymity and just vacuum up cash.” What makes this popular disinterest curious is just how much cash is involved. The videogame industry, Markman continued, is fast eclipsing film in terms of raw profitability: “Tech research firm Gartner sees the worldwide videogame market of console, online, mobile and PC products at $111 billion by 2016 and $128 billion in 2017,” he reported. Film, by contrast, generated only “$88 billion in worldwide revenue” this year.

In print and on television, videogames are treated as a mysterious haven for social misfits and amoral malcontents. In the United States, since the 1990s, they’ve carried almost as much blame for mass shootings as permissive gun laws. But this doesn’t bother gamers overmuch. After all, as John Markman pointed out, this relative impenetrability just means that the gaming industry gets to “vacuum up cash” without attracting the kind of gnawing, endless media commentary that churns in the wake of Hollywood… and Washington, for that matter.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the last seventeen years, writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik have uploaded a three-panel comic strip to www.penny-arcade.com, offering profane observations on the latest news in gaming. Each strip is accompanied by a brief “post,” or text piece, by Holkins. On the 23rd of November, this year, its subject was the relationship of gaming to its attendant journalists – the kind of people who blog about the subject professionally, or write for one of the industry’s few surviving magazines. “There was a period of time, not even that long a period of time in the grand scheme, where a kind of collaborative back-scratching arrangement was in operation between publishers, the developers in their charge, and the enthusiast press,” Holkins reported. As of 2015, “it has not been dissolved utterly, but you can tell […] that something key has changed.”

Kotaku [www.kotaku.com], the videogame blog operating under the auspices of the struggling Gawker Media, had just posted a story complaining of being “blacklisted” by several prominent game publishers as a result of unfavorable coverage — among the offending parties, according to Kotaku , was Bethesda, the company responsible for Fallout 4.  “I can understand why a publisher might determine that an increasingly hostile outlet whose business model is “Start Shit” might not be the best time or money investment,” Holkins wrote on the 23^rd.  “Why did it ever work this way?  Why would you be obligated to spend millions of dollars on something and then place it gently on the black altar of a hivemind cult, bowing as you retreat?” Why, in other words, should “journalism” be involved in games at all?

Consumers and publishers have access to the same Internet — and through that medium, the press releases and advertisements and pre-release content traditionally filtered first to an “enthusiast press” can be given directly to consumers. . Gaming blogs and websites, Holkins concluded, are becoming superfluous. “Having been the cowering creature beneath enthusiast media’s Eye of Sauron on more than one occasion […] I have no sympathy for these creatures,” he said. “Which is to say, I have the same sympathy they express for those outside their cloister.”

The maturation of digital games occurred at the same time, and often on the same platforms, as the maturation of digital communication writ large. Where the subculture specific to gaming is now, the larger culture is likely to be in three years, or five. Print magazines covering games lost their primacy around the turn of the century, for instance. Now, if Holkins is to be believed, the digital imitators of magazines are dying too. “These creatures,” as Holkins calls them, are journalists covering a very large and lucrative industry. And they are passing from the world.

On Monday, the 23rd, while Jerry Holkins was dancing on the grave of the “enthusiast press,” republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump repeated a controversial story on stage at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “During a speech recently, I said that I saw, in parts of New Jersey [Muslims] getting together, and in fairly large numbers, celebrating as the World Trade Center was coming down, killing thousands and thousands of people!” he said. To accentuate his point, Trump kneaded the air with his right hand — miming the motion a building falling inward.

“And I saw people,” the candidate continued. “And I saw em’ on television and I read about it on the Internet.” The press, however, was unconvinced. They called, Trump said “all day and all night,” pestering him about the veracity of his claim. “All of sudden I’m getting all of these tweets! ‘I saw it!’ ‘I was there!’ ‘I was this!’ But I saw it!” Dutifully, Trump rebroadcast his supporters’ accounts, and continued to do so over much of the next week. As far as he was concerned, this settled the matter. The press remained doubtful.

On Sunday the 29th, Trump called in to NBC’s storied political talk show, “Meet the Press.” Its host, Chuck Todd, exercised his journalistic prerogative: challenging the frontrunner on the veracity of his remarks. “Let’s go to this Jersey City comment,” Todd began. “You said you saw this [celebration but] nobody can find evidence […] Where did you see this?”

“Chuck,” said Trump, sadly. “I saw this on television. So did many other people […] I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump organization saying ‘we saw it! It was dancing in the streets!'”

“This didn’t happen in New Jersey,” Todd pressed, citing a litany of sources. “There were plenty of reports.”

“It did happen in New Jersey,” Trump maintained. “I have hundreds of people who agree with me.”

Todd continued to protest. “But they want to agree with you!” he said. “That doesn’t make it true!”

“Meet the Press” dominated the other Sunday shows in November, in terms of viewership. According to Rick Kissel, writing in Variety, ” It averaged 953,000 adults 25-54, besting ABC’s “This Week” (907,000), CBS’ “Face the Nation” (808,000 for its first half-hour) and Fox’s “Fox News Sunday” (502,000). And in total viewers, its 3.424 million held off “Face the Nation” (3.390 million) and “This Week” (3.232 million) and nearly doubled up “Fox News Sunday” (1.716 million).”

Donald Trump’s twitter account, where the “truth” of his New Jersey claim has been affirmed again and again, has over five million subscribers.

In media, as in war, beliefs must yield to certain mathematical reality. “Meet the Press” has more “prestige” than Twitter – just as The New Yorker has more prestige than a magazine like PC Accelerator, which once tried to boost sales by putting a sexy orc on the cover. But if more people watch Trump’s twitter than “Meet the Press,” the “truth” offered there is given a larger footprint than Todd’s debunking. The traditional press and its digital descendants, the papers, are still with us – still influential. But for how long? “You may feel very confident that there are conversations at every publisher now, wondering to what extent they are required to eat shit from these people,” wrote Holkins on the 23^rd. I am equally confident that our political campaigns are entertaining the same idea.

Give the People What They Want

Fallout 4 begins with a short movie, designed to ease players into the recreational world they have purchased – a meticulously crafted model of an American city in ruins. It begins like this:

“In the year 1945, my great-great grandfather, serving in the army, wondered when he’d get to go home to his wife and the son he’d never seen. He got his wish when the U.S. ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

What followed, the film explains, was a golden age, where “people enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction.” But “years of consumption lead to shortages of every major resource.”  In the end, “the entire world unraveled.”

“In the twenty-first century,” the game gravely concludes, “People woke up from the American dream.”

Everyone is talking about “dangerous rhetoric” these days. This variety of it – a poetry of national disillusionment – is a good way to sell twelve million copies of a sixty dollar game. It’s also a good way to run for president.

On Monday, December 7^th, Donald Trump dropped a bomb of his own. He suggested, in an official statement issued by the Trump campaign, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

He was denounced by everyone – except the voters.

All our “common ideals” seem to be on the table this year. Beliefs are dying, being replaced – but our reality, as it has existed since the Second World War, is being progressively revealed.

Our freedom is the consequence of fear. Our nation’s geopolitical position has been predicated, for the last seventy years, on our willingness to employ the machinery of global suicide. Whether we remain willing or not doesn’t matter. The fact of what we are is waiting in the pit of our stomachs.

There are many of “cults of death.” Some bigger than others.

***

You can read all of the “Salem 66” dispatches here.

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Dispatch #8 – December 10, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

By Don Jolly

Introduction

After the war, in the years of flood and famine, the profession of history was all but forgotten. Once the last of the universities were shuttered and the last of the great cables destroyed, the intellectual life of human beings retreated into the solitary dens of monks and archivists; there, the words of the past were preserved in archives and the works of the future undertaken by isolated hands. Such communes and cloisters served as home to the great scholars of those chaotic centuries, a mysterious and time-lost lineage of genius that includes such famous names as DannyBoi, Wolfpack10 and -=Da_Big_Fucker=-. To them, and to their anonymous supporters, the course of human civilization owes an immeasurable and eternal debt.

Obscurity and death are not at all the same thing. In fact, the former is, under the right circumstances, a prime defense against the latter. Freed from schedules and accreditations, the historians of the tribulation produced many interesting studies — and one work of legitimate greatness.

Written by a nameless scribe sometime in the middle of the twenty-third century, this magisterial achievement of art and scholarship provides the most lyrical and most well-documented account of the American empire’s decline and fall. In spite of its age, and the troubled circumstances of its composition, this seven-volume masterpiece remains an essential part of contemporary scholarship on the American epoch. It is grand not only in what it attempts, but what it definitively achieves — and in this author’s opinion, it shall never be surpassed. All of us who pursue the craft today stand meanly in its shadow. One Hundred Years of Solid ‘Tude: A Definitive History of North America in the Days of Trump is the best of the grand histories, and a monument to the tenacity of human achievement.

What follows is an excerpt.

Chapter For: No, Fuck You!

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the empire of the American States comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the least civilized portion of mankind. Its princes, their thrones diffuse and specialized, ordered the realities of almost every human occupation, defining by whim and accident the nature of the globe. This rulership, as was explored in the preceding chapters, was rarely recognized and rested on an infrastructure of circumstance. Few of America’s princes were conscious of the power they held, and multitudes of its serfs adorned their self images in royal silk — feeling, in a measurable way, responsible for the direction of the state.

This, as Bartman666 has ably explored in his .txt file “Anarchy Balls,”is the net effect of democracy, when its ideals alone serve as the central faith of a society whose practical functions have escaped control. The American States, in the years before Trump, held the globe hostage with such obtuse and unnamed powers that the greatest portion of their empire was allowed to pass anonymous and unidentified. To America, the Earth surrendered its stores of rare metals, its oceans of hidden slime, its blooms, its blossoms and the back-breaking labors of its most ignored inhabitants. This commerce, however, conducted itself without banners, and the princes who commanded it were allowed to operate as both merchants and secret priests. They advanced the interest of the nation without bearing its name or ideology, and amassed such vast reserves of lucre that the machinery of American government ground its gears according to their bidding, its operations unimpeded by the interchange of executive or congressional power. These true rulers, unnumbered and forgotten, were untempered by even the traditional concerns of tyrants. Insulated from detection by the mediating organs of a priestly press, America’s unspoken kings built great machines of trade and industry. And these machines, in turn, grew like fat amoebas, consuming and consuming until their bulk was so fantastic that no single ruler or council of command could hope to direct their initiatives in full. In this way, the true mechanisms of power slipped away from human hands — and America, imagining herself lean and ethical, began to decompose.

It was jacked up — just jacked up to hell.

November of 2015 arrived with a flush of new enthusiasm in the camps of the politically inclined. Donald Trump, not yet the American Commodus, was involved in the early stages of a contentious fight for the nomination of one of his country’s two major political parties. Careful analysis of voter attitudes, assiduously collected by a press fully indoctrinated in the democratic religion and wholly faithful in regards to the augury of statisticians, placed Trump in the lead of most contests, commanding something between 25% and 30% of the vote among the population’s relevant subsection.

Journalists themselves, and Trump’s opponents in the opposite party, were galled by this ascendency. For them, the rise of Trump seemed to be a refutation of reality and many articles of their cherished faith. To them, Trump could only be proof of the electorate’s stupidity, its re-emerging racial animus and its bloodthirsty disregard for the rules of political decorum. Such an interpretation, however, still relied on the basic faith to which the press was pledged. For Trump to be a brutal ruler, it must follow that he was contending for a post of rulership. Trump’s supporters, laughing to one another through the digital aether, were followers of a different and more modern God — to them, the joke of Donald Trump was, in truth, the joke of American power. They supported an unserious president because, from their perspective, the office was itself unserious, and the sacred franchise of their democracy was no more or less than an ability to minutely effect the content of television shows.

November delivered Trump his first true correspondent in the race. This rival was a retired neurosurgeon named Ben Carson, famous for his hand in shaping successful books of inspiration and his outspoken devotion to an ancient Roman crucifixion cult. Carson, too, commanded 25% of the vote according to most measures and, in some November polls, even more than that in Iowa. The achievement was particularly attractive, given that Iowa was a province noted for its evangelical character and prized for its position as one of the first of the voting territories. Carson’s lead in Iowa might indicate that the so-called “Christian right” was breaking away from Trump, and hampering his ability to translate popularity into electoral success.

Carson’s rise was trumpeted by the organs of the press, so anxious were they to conjure a narrative of the frontrunner’s decline. “For the first time since The Times and CBS News began testing candidate preferences in July, the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has displaced Donald J. Trump as the leader of the large Republican field,” wrote journalists Jonathan Martin and Megan Thee-Brenan in the October 27th edition of the New York Times, an outlet remembered today primarily by virtue of its dull and insulting videogame reviews. “The difference is well within the poll’s margin of sampling error,” they continued, in a note that was oft ignored in the weeks ahead. By virtue of this poll, and others, Carson became either “the” frontrunner or “a” frontrunner. As a consequence, he fast became a target of investigation.

Carson was, in truth, a candidate much like Trump. He lacked any experience in the political class, and his cult was, primarily, one of personality. Whereas Donald Trump was boisterous, parodic and immoral, Carson, however, operated within an affect of comfort, moral good and calm — at least to for his supporters. The groundwork of this personality was laid by a public combination of surgery and spirituality, which had been simmering in the media for thirty years.

Throughout the 1980s, Carson made headlines with various feats of brain surgery performed on imperiled children, and held onto them by the force of his virtuous personality. On 23rd of August, 1987, for instance, Carson commanded more than a full page of the “People/family” section of the Kokomo Tribune, the storied hometown paper of Kokomo, Indiana, a once-was town in the region known today as “the big taint.” Carson’s ministrations, the Tribune reported, saved the lives of “eight youngsters” through “the surgical removal of half of the brain.” In addition, continued Nancy Shullins, a reporter for the Associated Press, “Carson took no credit for his skill in the operating room. It is the unwavering belief of the 35-year-old neurosurgeon that a higher power guides his scalpel during surgery.” God, dissected brains, and a happy ending. Who could resist?

Carson, a black man, had grown up in Detroit — and the narrative of his life, as presented in the press, was a narrative of adversity overcome. Although Carson was plagued by the handicaps commonly attributed to his race in the American imagination, he had subdued them all — transforming anger into mildness and disaffection into discipline. “Carson’s first experience with sharp objects and divine intervention came at the age of 14,” Shullins reported. “In his inner-city Detroit neighborhood, he attempted to stab another teenager.” Luckily, a belt buckle blocked the blow, and Carson resolved to give his anger up to God. He became a surgeon, and cultivated an attitude that led to his earning the nickname “Gentle Ben,” which was also the name of a television bear famous for not killing Clint Howard, in spite of numerous opportunities.

This character arc, dorky and unbelievable, can elicit only crunchy lols from the modern poster. It should be cautioned, however, that such mutant narratives were shaped, in large part, by the limited media of the twentieth century. Winning press, especially in the storied outlets like the Kokomo Tribune, required a delicate admixture of uplift, moral certainty, and the grotesque. The pressures of natural selection, working on the numerous applicants for fame, shaped their stories in ways that seem parodic and alien to us today — but which may have seemed, to their original audience, more real and consistent than the lives they lived themselves.

“There are not a lot of role models for black children,” Carson told the A.P., to justify his presence in the paper. That was why he spoke so freely about his life, he said, and why he took his speaking on the road. Carson was a frequent fixture of school assemblies and religious gatherings throughout his thirty years in the public eye prior to his presidential run. He was,an enthusiastic evangelist of “the American dream,” the imagined capacity of that vanished nation to allow its citizens to reinvent themselves and achieve beyond the meanness of their upbringing.

Less than a month after his profile in Kokomo, Carson again made news — this time for removing the deformity of a pair of twins born with their heads conjoined. This supreme demonstration of skill, accomplished over 22 hours and as part of a well-populated team of surgeons, rocketed Dr. Carson to television, where he became the focus of an episode of ABC’s 20/20. His first book, Gifted Hands ghostwritten by the prolific Cecil Murphy, appeared in 1990 and offered, in expanded form, much of the same material that had been highlighted by Carson’s early press appearances. It reproduces the near-stabbing as follows:

“I was in the ninth grade when the unthinkable happened. I lost control and tried to knife a friend. Bob and I were listening to the transistor radio when he flipped the dial to another station. ‘You call that music?’ he demanded. ‘It’s better than that stuff you like!’ I yelled back, grabbing for the dial…In that instant, blind anger — pathological anger — took possession of me. Grabbing the camping knife I carried in my back pocket I snapped it open and lunged for the boy who had been my friend.”

The salvific buckle, in Gifted Hands, is depicted as a symbol of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, an archaic youth military organization with which Carson was intimately involved. Again, such buffoonish symbolism must be read in context — and taken as both a remnant and accusation towards a world that was rightly ruined.

Following this incident, Carson descended into a fit of trembling. “I knew that temper was a personality trait,” Gifted Hands reported. “Standard thinking in the field [of psychology] pointed out the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of modifying personality traits.” Still, the future Doctor had to try. “I sank down on the toilet, sharp mental pictures of other temper fits filling my mind,” the story continued. “At one point I slipped out of the bathroom long enough to grab a Bible. Now I opened it and began to read in Proverbs. Immediately I saw a string of verses about angry people and how they get themselves into trouble.”

Carson lost himself in the text, moving his lips to the words without speaking them aloud. “The words of Proverbs condemned me, but they also gave me hope,” Gifted Hands concluded. “After a while peace began to fill my mind.” Through the grace of God, and the elegance of language, he was delivered. Gifted Hands was meant to serve a similar function — its words, clunky and simplistic, are also a promise of transformation. Carson and Murphy expanded on the promise with many successive volumes, and won a multitude of souls. By November of 2015, those who believed in not just the events of Carson’s life but in the capacity of his work to inspire and encapsulate personal change were supporting his bid for president. It was a movement long in coming, but to the obtuse instruments of journalists it registered as a cold quarter of the electorate, indistinguishable from all the rest.

Soon, the press felt obligated to review Carson’s various narratives and appraise their factual accuracy. His standard of truth was found wanting, especially where the stabbing incident was concerned. What followed was a confusion of bizarre headlines, as the press followed up with those who knew Carson in adolescence — and who remembered a very different boy than the one upon which Carson’s redemptive fame was predicated. New York Magazine ran a story by writer Eric Levitz titled “Ben Carson Defends Himself Against Allegations That He Never Attempted to Murder a Child.” Gideon Resnick in The Daily Beast declared: “Ben Carson’s stabbing story is full of holes.” The Washington Post, in a play for long-forgotten dignity, opted for the relatively neutral “Ben Carson defends recollection of formative stabbing story.”

This public doubt proved an irritant to Carson, and prompted him to denounce the press loudly and often — even going so far as to decry their tactics from the stage of the fourth primary debate, which was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 10th. “I have no problem with being vetted,” Carson said. “What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth.” The truth, of course, was that he had tried to stab that boy. It had been true all the way back to 1987, and the Associated Press’s writing in the Kokomo Tribune. Doubting that was tantamount to doubting all that followed from it — the salvation of the psalms, the transformative power of “hard work,” and the character of “Gentle Ben.”

For Carson’s supporters such conclusions were unthinkable. Carson had, for better or worse, come to represent more in their minds than just a man or a surgeon or an inspirational writer. His promise was tied into America’s promise and, not accidentally, into the promise of the press. For years, long before his flirtation with politics, newspapers and magazines and television programs had spit out Carson’s narrative verbatim, using it to score points of “human interest” and provide an uplifting thread of story to run between the advertisements which remain the truest and most advanced expression of American art. To many, the sudden skepticism of the press must have looked like an admission of guilt — another place where the friendly skin of Empire had worn away, revealing its inhospitable bone.

Donald Trump, regrettably, did not allow this grand mistake to run its course. Instead, he joined the press in denouncing Carson as a liar, and further compounded his mistake by doubting the Doctor’s religious convictions. By virtue of this rhetoric, a Trump rally held on the 12th of November at Fort Dodge, Iowa quickly ascended to a perch of public infamy — there, as the press reported, Trump mocked the physics of Carson’s belt buckle claim and had the audacity to ask “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It looked like a disaster to many who witnessed it.

Trump’s error was the same as the error of the press — his doubts were not restricted to the intelligence of his audience, but to the legitimacy of their ideals. For Trump, of course, the revelation of illegitimacy was stock-and-trade. Carson’s brand of it, however, was sincerely held and cultivated by years of earned exposure. It was also, sadly, part of Trump’s pitch – his superficial appeal to American’s resurgence. It revealed Trump for what he was, but what he could not be if he hoped to win a majority of Iowa republicans — an American apostate. In the years to come, Trump would be freer with his thoughts. But 2015 was a time of transition, and his victory was not yet assured.

In the press, Trump’s performance was floated as a breaking point — a moment when the frontrunner had fatally overplayed his hand. Journalist Jenna Johnson, writing on the following day in the Washington Post, reported that as the night wore on ” Trump appeared to unravel on stage… Rather than sticking to his usual, tidy 60 minutes, Trump kept going and going,” his pronouncements sprouting odd shoots and leaves of psychopathic color as the clock ticked onward. “Those standing on risers behind Trump — providing a backdrop of Iowan faces — eventually gave up and sat down in a falling cascade,” Johnson concluded, poetically. In her mind, it seemed, the corner had turned — and Trump was on the wane.

Had the mechanisms of fate wound themselves in some alternate arrangement, there is a chance that Johnson’s line about the crowd sitting down at last might serve as the gravestone of the Trump movement, and a signal the perpetuation of the old style of American power. But this was not to be.

A recording of the speech uploaded to YouTube shortly after the event by Trump supporters, bore the proud title of “FULL Speech HD: Donald Trump BEST Speech EVER in Fort Dodge, IA.”

Trump arrived late in Fort Dodge, but conducted himself with an appropriate energy. America, he told the crowd, was in a state of decline. Its spirit was whipped, he said, and its military stymied by chaotic conditions in the Middle East. “We’re not proud of ourselves anymore,” he said, repeating a great canard of his previous stumps. “We’re embarrassed. We can’t beat ISIS. We can’t beat Iran in a trade deal or in a nuclear deal. We can’t beat China, China’s killing us…”

It was not, however, a hopeless situation. “How do we recover from things like that?” Trump asked. “You recover by getting smart people to make deals!”

“I love war in a certain way,” he continued. “But only when we win! We never win — by the way, when was the last time we won a war? Our wars are always politically correct.” In part, he continued, the fault was one of leadership. Trump, positioning himself in opposition to the mild wisdom of his predecessor, Barrack Obama, advocated for a new kind of American military man. “I need tough and mean and really really smart,” he said. “Like general Douglas MacArthur…General MacArthur was the number one student in the history of West Point…and he was a great general!” More important, the candidate continued, “He had the image! He’d get off the thing, y’know, the plane, with the corncob pipe and the hat — he loved it!”

This, Trump knew was the important piece. The image — like Carson’s quelling of his internal violence, or the credulous distraction of politics itself. The Age of Trump was, in truth, the age of the image’s perfection and liberation – the era of the full divorce between inhuman power and human vanity. Trump, in that moment, asked the crowd to imagine a better class of video clip – and admitted that it was all he could reasonably offer them.

Later, Trump revealed his plan for “beating” ISIS:

“They have certain areas of oil that they took away — they have some in Syria, some in Iraq,” he said. “I would bomb the shit out of them. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refin — I’d blow up every single inch — there would be nothing left! And y’know what? You’ll get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild the sucker, brand new, it’ll be beautiful!”

The candidate then fanned his arms away from his body, standing in the spotlight like a witness to transcendent truth. “And I’ll ring it,” he said, of the oil fields. “And I’ll take the oil. And I said I’ll take the oil.”

The applause that night was lackluster.

Less than a day later, Paris was in flames, and the course of history decided.

***

The post Dispatch #7: One Hundred Years of Solid ‘Tude appeared first on The Revealer.

By Don Jolly

Subway Conversations about Politics, Part I

It was just after ten o’clock at the Jay Street platform, and the train was late. Like everyone else, I was exhausted. I was reading a book about Adolf Hitler.

“How bad was Hitler?” asked a voice beside me.

“The worst,” I said. I was only halfway through the introduction, but felt this was probably the desired response.

“I don’t know,” said the voice. It belonged to a middle-aged black man with sleepy eyes a light blue fall jacket. He seemed bored and restless. The train still hadn’t come.

“You don’t think Hitler was that bad?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I think we should mind our own business,” he said. “Take care of our own people before we go running off someplace else.”

“No foreign entanglements,” I offer.

He nodded. We shook hands. I introduced myself. His name was Young. When the train arrived we rode it together, packed in a standing crowd.

“I went to school with Jay-Z,” he told me. “I.S 318, where he shot that video, Hard Knock Life. He ain’t have no hard knock life. His hard knock life was getting chased around by me.” Young spent a few years in the army after highschool. Now he works for the M.T.A..

In 2008 and 2012, he voted for Barack Obama. “That came back and bit me in the ass,” he says. “Voting for a Democrat.” Now he’s for Donald Trump.

“What do you like about him?” I asked.

Young looked at me as if he couldn’t tell whether or not I was kidding. It must have resembled the look I gave him when we were talking about Hitler on the platform.

The train stopped. People got off, and on.

Young shrugged. “Trump,” he said, “is tough. Not like these Democrats.”

He got off at the next station. I kept reading.

I stand by my assessment of Hitler.

A Cracker Before Dawn… The Embarrassing Destruction of Jeb Bush

The papers spoke, arrayed in broad agreement. Jeb Bush was finished (or, perhaps, still is) – and all because of a few seconds of back-and-forth with his former political pupil, Senator Marco Rubio, broadcast live from the CNBC debate stage at the Coors Event Center in Boulder, Colorado. Some samples:

“Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate was critical for Jeb Bush … it was do or die,” wrote journalist Jamelle Bouie, the chief political correspondent for Slate. ” Bush died.

Michael Barbaro, writing in the October 29th issue of the New York Times, described the confrontation like the last fight in a Rocky sequel – an action scene that effectively summarizes the character traits of those involved and repeats, in miniature, the drama which preceded it. Bush was “avuncular” and “scolding,” Barbaro said, when he pushed Rubio on his absenteeism in the Senate. Rubio, by contrast, was “unbothered” and “deft” when he accused Bush of playing politics with his remarks. “The only reason” to raise the issue, Rubio said, “is because we are running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.” It was an answer that won him “a thunderous round of applause.”

“Mr. Rubio, the upstart that the Bush inner circle never believed would enter the race … out-maneuvered Mr. Bush on live television with millions watching,” Barbaro concluded. It was a play that “echoed the exasperating pattern of the campaign for Mr. Bush, whose bulging war chest and formidable family network have added up to painfully little so far.”

About a week before the debate, on October 23rd, Reuters reported that the Bush campaign was “cutting salaries across the board and reducing staff in a money-saving effort intended to concentrate resources on early voting states.” Bush’s fundraising, as reported to the Federal Election Commission on October 15th, was disappointing. The retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson raised more money, and both Carson and Donald Trump were far more popular with small donors — an important, and potentially sustaining, source of income. Many of Jeb’s supporters, having given the maximum amount allowable by Federal law, are essentially exhausted. Small donations, however, can be solicited again and again. Since Fall began, Bush has been dispatching rafts of pleading e-mails, begging for single bills. One signed by Jeb’s son, George P. Bush, is particularly debasing.

“I’ll keep this short, Friend,” it began. “You still haven’t entered to win a free trip to Houston to meet: My grandparents, President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush [and] my uncle, President George W. Bush.” To enter the contest, you only had to “chip in $1.”

Jeb and his wife were going to be in Houston, too. In the mailer, however, George P. described them as “my parents,” leaving Bush supporters to fill in that detail – and thus ensuring that only the diehards who know the generations of the Bush clan will receive it. At the end of the message, and after a flashy image advertising George W., George H.W. and Barbara, the mailer repeated its pitch: “You don’t want to miss out on meeting my grandparents, President George H.W. and Barbara Bush; my uncle, President George W. Bush[…]” I imagine George P., the current Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office pausing significantly here and then, saying, at last: “and my dad, Jeb.”

On Saturday, October 24th, Donald Trump mocked his opponent’s woes at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida. “Bush has no money, he’s meeting today with mommy and daddy,” he said. “He’s a guy wants to run our country and he can’t even run his own campaign… I put up less money than everyone else, and I’m number one.” Trump hosted Saturday Night Live last week – a job which pays about five grand.

Jeb Bush has been accused of leaning on his name before – most notably in 1994, when he was running for Governor of Florida. According to an Associated Press report published on the 2nd of November that year, “Bush often…sought help from his celebrity parents” during his campaign, especially as an aid to fundraising. “Jeb Bush’s parents raised a million dollars each time they’ve toured with him, charming crowds with White House anecdotes and gushing praise for their son,” the A.P.reported. His opponent, the incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles, thought this was a fact too good to pass up. “[Chiles] has ridiculed the younger Bush for getting help from ‘momma and daddy,’” the story continued.

An accomplished Southern democrat with an excess of charm, Lawton Chiles could get away with saying “momma.” When he debated Jeb Bush, on November 1^st, 1994, his performance was easy, smiling and genuine. Bush, as now, put his money on “avuncular.”

Bush’s opening statement made him sound like an aggrieved class president. “I believe there’s never been a clearer choice for Floridians as this race for governor,” he said. “On matter of crime, taxes, regulation, spending, welfare and education we’ve tried it the old way for a long, long time — and it doesn’t work.” Bush, in a classical political maneuver, promised “change.” He also, as in 2015, made efforts to present himself as the adult in the room, too serious a candidate for petty name-calling.

“If governor Chiles has come here to discuss public policy, as I hope he has, rather than personal attacks and the things that he’s done over the last month of this campaign,” Bush began, ignoring a chorus of boos, “then the voters of this state will have more information to be able to make their choice.”

Chiles, Bush implied, was an old liberal — out of touch and ineffective. To that, Chiles concocted the ultimate retort.

“I wanna call attention to this old liberal liar [thing,]” Chiles said. “Y’know, that goes on and on and on and on. My mama told me ‘sticks and stones may break my bones — but names will never hurt me!’” Thunderous applause.

He continued, leaning conspiratorially against his podium. “But lemme tell you, one other thing about the old liberal: the old he-coon walks just before the light a’ day!”

More applause. Bush looked around the room, seemingly in disbelief. He lost the election. Chiles spent part of his inauguration day in a coonskin cap. When he died, on December 12^th 1998, the House Judiciary Committee rushing towards the impeachment of the first President Clinton paused in its task to observe a moment of silence at the suggestion of Robert Wexler, a representative from Boca Raton. “Gov. Lawton was, I think, in most Floridians’ eyes […] a throwback to the age when partisanship didn’t play the role it plays,” said Wexler. And he “embodied what’s good about America.”

The St. Petersburg Times was more direct. “Florida will never see another He-Coon,” wrote Lucy Morgan, the paper’s Tallahassee Bureau Chief, in a story published on December 13^th.

The “He-Coon” line had wormed its way into political lore by the end of the decade, but, its exact meaning remains obscure. Most seem agreed that Chiles meant to convey that he, like the He-Coon, was crafty – an early riser who hunted the best meat while his competitors were sleeping. But the specific meaning of the line is less important than its sheer, brilliant, creeping strangeness… Like the He-Coon itself, the line seemed to run in from the woodland – a flash of sudden nature, unexpected and untamed. The sheer inexplicability of the line made it irresistible for the press. Chiles’ victory was narrow, and his approval rating when the race began was low enough for some in the Democratic establishment to consider him a liability. As the years pressed on the details of the race – advertisements and direct mail and get-out-the-vote efforts – withered, swallowed by the hungry symbol of the He-Coon. A somewhat illegible phrase became, at last, legible – a sign of Chiles’ skill, and a reverent tribute to the only four seconds of poetic language in the whole Florida gubernatorial race. Then, as now, the Bush name carried a certain cachet. Its rupture and Jeb’s defeat make more sense if his opponent is lauded for being strategically nonsensical. It’s no coincidence that Chiles was eulogized as a He-Coon – to read some accounts of the race, it was the animal, not him, that won the governorship in 1994.

Jeb hasn’t pulled out of the race, this year. He’s also held onto most of his base of monetary support – although Paul Singer, an influential Republican donor, did endorse Marco Rubio before the end of October. Jeb Bush “relaunched” his campaign on November 2^nd, promising to combat the “new age of cynicism.” The next day, Donald Trump (who is still, to our collective dismay, driving the media narrative of the race) celebrated the release of his new book, Crippled America.

As of this writing, he continues to thrash Bush in the polls.

The Trump phenomenon is being propelled by a number of variables, I think – primarily a rising tide of white male despair and the growing importance of elements of an Internet culture concerned mainly with dismantling any culture perceived as “mainstream.” This combination of factors may actually win votes, or it might not. Either way, a He-Coon moment is in the offing. Such is the fate of political rumblings which challenge the expertise of experts and the expectations of expectant dynasties. Rational explanations never live long, when contested with the ineffability of God – or the inscrutability of raccoons.

***

The post Dispatch #6 – October 26 – November 9, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

By Don Jolly

Adult Books

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton, if you read the papers.

“Papers,” in this usage, is a polite euphemism for television news, magazines, and the sometimes-unwieldy websites maintained by the surviving mass media of the last century. Since newspapers themselves are too weak to hold on to the title, I think it’s time for repurposing.

Here’s what they had to say:

According to journalist Jonathan Martin, writing in the New York Times last week, Clinton delivered a “commanding performance” at the first democratic debate of the season, offering “crisp answers to nearly every question” while demonstrating an “an aggressiveness her rivals did not seem ready for.” John Heilemann, writing for Bloomberg Politics, was less measured in his assessment. “The first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 cycle was a complete and utter rout,” he said, in his first story on the subject. “[Clinton] didn’t just win or even win decisively. She kicked ass from here to Sunday.”

The good news kept coming. On Tuesday, October 20th, Clinton’s only serious correspondent for the democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden, announced he would be sitting out the race. And yesterday, in her appearance before the House select committee on Benghazi, Clinton offered eight hours of Teflon testimony to a roomful of irate and ineffective congressmen. She has emerged from these public tests not just unscathed — but stronger.

Biden, in his remarks from the Rose Garden, promised that he “will not be silent” in the months ahead, however. “I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”

Later in the speech, he did so — by swiping, “clearly and forcefully,” at Hillary Clinton. “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies,” he said, offering a clear retort to one of those “crisp” answers Clinton offered at the debate — when she named “Republicans” as the enemy she was proudest to have, scoring enthusiastic applause.

Barring an unforeseen disaster at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines this Saturday, this may be the week that Hillary Clinton locked up her party’s nomination — leaving Biden, and the rest of her critics, to snipe from the sidelines.

On Facebook and Twitter, aggrieved Bernie Sanders supporters have been registering their dismay at the Clinton victory narrative since the debate. In its immediate aftermath, online polls registered Sanders as the overwhelming winner — including a poll posted by the hosts of the event at CNN. Sanders did better on Twitter, too — after the debate, he gained over 40,000 new followers, around double the number gained by Clinton. To some of his supporters, ignoring this data reeked of conspiracy.

There were accusations that CNN deleted their own poll to hide the truth (they didn’t), and that their parent company, Time Warner, may have been behind it all… Intriguing stuff, but not exactly Satanism and spy satellites. Today’s conspiratorial world demands a more creative class of theory.

My attempt is as follows:

Americans have a lot of blind spots when it comes to politics. The biggest, and the most obvious, is the confusion of “events” as they are instantiated in media with “events” as they occur in the world. All media is an imperfect lens, shaped by both the internal rhetoric of its content and the method of its transmission. Popular political thought, as it appears in the papers, is a literary style with centuries of history and orthodoxy and accepted wisdom. Clinton, in both her debate performance and her subsequent triumphs, has performed within the expectations of this field — embodying its perfect, polysemous and unflappable political hero. She looks like a winner, in other words, because she is behaving like those who have won before.

In explaining why, precisely, Clinton “kicked ass from here to Sunday,” Bloomberg‘s John Heilemann made no effort to disguise the aesthetic basis of his argument. When Clinton said she was a “progressive who likes to get things done,” the commentator praised the line’s concision. It “captured her political philosophy accurately, authentically, and at bumper-sticker length,” he wrote. Its craft, not its content, was the recipient of praise.

Jonathan Martin, in the Times, focused on the thread of Clinton’s debate performance which drew her closer to the sitting President. “She portrayed herself as Mr. Obama’s partner,” the journalist reported, “the candidate who would perpetuate and enhance the president’s legacy.” It was a complex strategy, Martin implied. Not only did drawing close to Obama help Clinton align herself with a President still popular among democrats, it served as a veiled dismissal of Biden. The President, Martin implied, can only have one “partner” at a time.

In the aftermath of the debate, Martin explained, “many Democrats unaligned with Mrs. Clinton or her rivals began describing the closing, if not the slamming shut, of a door on Mr. Biden.” Whoever those “many Democrats” are, it’s a sure thing that Jonathan Martin — and maybe Joe Biden — agreed with them. In any case, the door did close.

There is a conspiracy at work here, of course — but it’s a conspiracy of taste, not finance. Bernie Sanders, at the debate, spoke the way his supporters expected him too — he railed against Wall Street, avoided political niceties (with one significant exception) and sketched, through aggravated tones, an image of the United States as a society on the brink of catastrophe. He spoke, in other words, to the internet — and on the internet, he won.

Clinton sharpened her one-liners, perfected her double meanings and played to the pundits — and she won, too, albeit in a different and more influential arena. The Democrats are, at the moment, a far more cohesive party than the Republicans, and much more responsive to the expectations of American political rhetoric. The democratic collations of constituents are largely settled, the mechanisms of their party politics adamantine. For now, at least, they gain nothing by embracing a new rhetoric – no matter how well it’s working for Donald Trump.

Fifteen million people watched the Democratic debate on CNN. About 2 million people read (or at least receive) the New York Times John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s “With All Due Respect,” an excellent political news program, is “ranking #4 in online video viewers among all political news outlets,” according to the head of Bloomberg Television, Al Mayer. Their show for the 22nd of October, posted on YouTube yesterday, has 1,134 views as of this writing. This video, by a videogame playing Swede, has over 200,000 – and it went up two-hours ago.

There are over three-hundred million people in the United States. Most of them have no idea what kind of week Hillary Clinton is having.

It’s only ignorance if you read the papers.

The post Dispatch #5 – October 17-25, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

Edward George Ruddy Died Today

On Tuesday, the thirteenth of October, the Democratic party held their first primary debate of the season. It was, as Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley explained in his closing statement, “a very, very different debate from [the one] you heard from [the Republicans.]”

“On this stage,” he continued. “You didn’t hear anyone denigrate women, you didn’t hear anyone make racist comments […] and you didn’t hear anyone speak ill of another American because of their religious beliefs.”

He was right. The night was a performance of conspicuous civility. Bernie Sanders elected not to hit Hillary Clinton on the subject of her private e-mail server, speaking on behalf of “the American people” who are “sick and tired” of the scandal. O’Malley won some rare applause by describing the opposition’s frontrunner as a “carnival barker,” in contrast with the statesmen sharing his stage. Overall, the night focused on the issues as the candidates themselves choose to articulate them: Sanders railed against oligarchs on behalf of the middle class, Hillary Clinton attacked the National Rifle Association with poised intelligence and Jim Webb rambled in a low, gravely whisper about Vietnam.

After the debate, Sanders stuck around for a backstage interview with CNN, the network responsible for broadcasting the proceedings. He echoed O’Malley’s point. “I think the American people want substantive discussions of substantive issues,” he said. “Look: the middle class in this country is disappearing. We have twenty-seven million people living in poverty. We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt. The rich are getting richer, everybody else is getting poorer…

“I think the point needs to be made … while there are differences of opinion up here, this was a serious, substantive debate on the major crises facing our country — unlike the Republican debate, which was naming calling and which seemed like a food fight.”

CNN made out reasonably well regardless. According to Brian Stelter at CNN Money, the debate “averaged 15.3 million viewers,” making it “the highest-rated Democratic debate ever.”  Of course, the Republican debate broadcast by CNN last month “averaged more than 23 million viewers,” making them “the highest rated new ‘show’ of the Fall TV season,” but some drop off had been expected — after all, “Republican and Democratic debates [are] ‘apples and oranges,’” Stelter concluded.

I watched the debate with some neighbors in Brooklyn. Nancy, a stand-up comic and ardent Sanders supporter, agreed with Stelter and her candidate of choice — the democrats were for real, she said. “They’re classy and they respect each other. They’re on this other level — governors, senators, a secretary of state…

“The Republicans are all under qualified,” Nancy concluded grinning ear-to-ear, “and the Democrats are all overqualified!” Victory, it seems, was in the bag.

The sideshow is the sideshow. But the relevant authorities agree — our country will, most likely, remain in capable hands.

But That Was It, Fellas

In our last dispatch, I began talking about the basic rhetorical strategies of the internet underground — the anarchic dodge and weave that the users of massive message boards have employed for more than a decade to stay ahead of mass media’s grinding orthodoxies. This year, and this election cycle, have seen those techniques of rhetoric congeal into political positions stable enough to serve as the engine of a dissident alternative media.

For now, they shape the race.

On the morning of the 13th, hours before the Democratic debate, the New York Times ran a beautiful piece by journalist Jennifer Steinhauer about the impossibly task facing congressional Republicans in appointing a new Speaker of the House, to replace the disgraced John Boehner. The internet was frustrating the process, she said.

“House Republicans and their staff say millions of Republican primary voters have their opinions shaped by sites like Beitbart.com,” Steinhauer explained, citing a popular rightwing media platform. But Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, claimed to wield no control over his readers. “Our goal is not influence,” he told the Times. “It is reporting and highlighting stories important to grass roots conservatives… to those in Congress and on the national political stage who want to better understand the constituency’s interests and worldview, we feel Breitbart News is a good place to start.”

And it is – if you want to understand the “interests and worldview” of a diverse coalition of reactionary voices from both political and apolitical corners of the internet. Among this grouping, the internet natives posting on places like 4Chan are particularly well represented. Breitbart has, over the last few years, made common cause with the internet’s most deliberately perverse.

The loose alliance between “grassroots conservatives” and the internet underground announces itself clearly in Breitbart’s coverage of GamerGate — a shitstorm of internet drama so labyrinthine and hyperbolic that it has lasted for more than a year and grown to encompass multiple police investigations, a serious bomb threat at a Miami conference center and a United Nations report on the issue of “Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls.” Somewhere, in all that mess, some people are arguing about the cultural future of videogames. But that hardly matters anymore.

As with most ongoing Internet dramas, GamerGate is a deceptively broad term applied to many discrete arguments, incidents and brush fires that have been playing out on various platforms since August of last year. One side of the debate, speaking roughly, is composed of videogaming elites – journalists, players and developers who feel that the medium needs to “grow up,” and abandon the adolescent boorishness which became a defining aspect of its community in the wake of hyperviolent 1990s games like Quake and Doom.

Their opponents are, primarily, rank-and-file gamers — such as the active posters on 4Chan’s videogame board, /v/. To them, games without adolescent boorishness are hardly games at all, and the idea of moderating online discourse on any subject looks like a surrender to the mainstream.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer most publically identified with GamerGate, penned an admiring tribute to the internet underground on September 1st of this year. The crude gamers, he argued, were like the Hobbits from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — a subculture so far from the currents of power that their alienation has become an asset. “Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins,” wrote Yiannopoulos “[they have] proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians” – his euphemism for the global left.

“The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents,” Yiannopoulos continued. But 4Chan posters, and those like them, have no reputation to destroy. The world — or at least the mass media — already thinks of them as socially stunted and potentially insane. Which makes them, in Breitbart’s complimentary view, invincible. “When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank,” concluded Yiannapoulos.

“Dank,” is a common 4Chan term – a good word to describe powerful weed. “Dank memes” are posts or images that satisfy the people who consume them, and prove both popular and shareable, within limits. On 4Chan, if a meme gets too big it becomes regrettable — a mass idea in need of subversion, rather than one capable of being subversive in itself. Last week, for instance, I detailed the rash of posts that sprung up in the wake of the recent community college shooting in Oregon, imitating the shooter’s supposed warning. The pattern was simple – imitate the format of the original, but substitute pop-cultural, political or historical figures for the original maniac: “Some of you guys are alright, don’t go to [X] tomorrow.” On October 13^th, a variation on this was posted next to an image of Luke Skywalker – “some of you guys are alright, don’t go to the death star tomorrow.”

Response was tepid: “this meme is now completely out of gas,” read the first reply. It lasted longer than some, and went farther. But in the end, it died. It wasn’t the dankest meme, in the end – but it wasted some minutes on a brilliant fall.

If Yiannopoulos had been writing a similar tribute in 2002, he might have said “comedy gold” instead. That was the complimentary term favored by Something Awful when tribute.avi was posted. But it’s 2015, now, thank god… “Dank” sounds better – wetter, more earthy.

Comedy, it seems, has become an ancillary goal.

Is Dehumanization Such a Bad Word?

On Tuesday, hours before the Democratic program began, Donald Trump posted a drawing of himself as Pepe the Frog. Pepe, as I reported in the last dispatch, is 4Chan’s unofficial mascot — a sadsack amphibian used to illuminate the emotional state of those posting him. Different Pepes can connote anything from murderous rage to lonely resignation, but Trump’s image, which has over 5,000 “retweets” and “favorites” as of this writing, depicted Pepe smiling smugly, holding a hand contemplatively beneath his chin. Just as the Pepe posted before the Oregon shooting was equipped with a pistol, Trump’s frog came complete with a suit, an American flag lapel pin and the candidate’s signature swept-right hair. He was shown standing beside a podium, on which was reproduced the presidential seal. “SEAL of the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES,” it read, its seriffed font contrasting with the crudity of the frog.

In his attached message, Trump made his allegiance plain: “You Can’t Stump the Trump,” he wrote.

“Can’t Stump the Trump” has become, since August, a common phrase in internet discussions around the candidacy of the current Republican frontrunner. It’s funny, it makes him sound invincible — and it rhymes. It’s “I Like Ike” with fangs. What’s more, it speaks to the power of alienation gestured to by Yiannopoulos, and implicitly, sanctions the strength of the politically untouchable. With this tweet, Trump has announced himself as the presidential candidate equivalent of a shut-in dork, a raging skinhead and a morose mass shooter – someone so far out of the mainstream’s spectrum of acceptability that the disapproval of the powers that be means nothing to him.

Trump isn’t the first right-wing media figure to embrace this rhetoric. On September 2nd, a day after Milo Yiannopoulos compared arguing about videogames online to tossing the errant Ring of Power into Mount Doom, a celebrity of somewhat recent and controversial vintage, replied to a Twitter question in the negative, and received great acclaim across the underground. The question was: “Is it possible for you to be bamboozled? fooled? … Flim flammed?” Its questioner was referring another charismatic phrase born of Internet contrarianism: “Can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.”

The “zim-zam” is George Zimmerman, the Florida man who shot and killed a black seventeen year-old named Trayvon Martin in February of 2012. He earned the moniker in 2013, when the Internet underground was laughing at the perceived incompetence of the prosecutors seeking to convict him of the crime.

Today, George Zimmerman has a respectable following on Twitter: over fifteen-thousand people receive his messages.

His response to the question on September 2nd was short, and to the point.

“Nope,” he said. The crowd went wild – comparatively. His tweet was linked far and wide, but earned few favorites.

George Zimmerman and Donald Trump (by Matthew H. James)

Trump’s Twitter resembles Zimmerman’s in style, although the candidate is markedly more restrained and, to best of my knowledge, has never murdered anyone. On July 25th, for instance, Trump made news by sniping at then-candidate Scott Walker. “@ScottWalker is a nice guy,” Trump wrote, “but not presidential material.” Zimmerman weighed in on the Walker on September 10th: “Scott Walker should be a spokesman for Downy, ’cause boy, is he SOFT!!!” Thirty retweets, sixty-four favorites.

On the Eighth of August, Trump won twenty-thousand favorites and over twelve thousand retweets by noting that there are “so many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country.

“We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!” he concluded.

Zimmerman, too, is no fan of political correctness. “Thank you, Patriots for supporting the fight against political correctness,” he wrote, on August 31st, linking to a print of the Confederate Battle Flag he’s been selling online since summer. “Rebel flag print sales are going strong!”

All boats, it is said, benefit from a rising tide.

The Corporate Cosmography of Arthur Jensen

On Twitter, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders gained just below fifty thousand new Twitter followers. Hilary Clinton, anointed as the night’s winner in much of the press, scored less than half that total.

But Trump beat them all — his drab and disengaged live commentary on the evening’s events won him more than 95,000 new followers.  For good or ill, all those people will now get their news of the world — at least partially — from Donald Trump.

Maybe the democrats, and CNN, are right. Maybe there are still adults in the room. Maybe civility will win out, in the end. Maybe “the American people want a substantive debate about substantive issues.”

But you still can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.

The post Dispatch #4 – October 11-October 16, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

DogWelder was an Australian who, in later years, wrote short horror stories to some acclaim. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, he wrote a brief comment on the forums of the then-popular website Something Awful. The thread was titled: “the World Trade Center is on fire.”

“Oh my fucking god,” he wrote. “Another plane just hit the second tower, a 767 or something.” Line return.”This is fucking insane.” Below this lay his signature: a jpg image of Tyler Durden, from Fight Club, hunched above a cluttered desk, engaged with splicing together two lengths of film. With one hand he points upward, to a dark oval above his head. “In the industry we call these… cigarette burns,” read the text, attractively arranged in an acid-eaten font.

In Fight Club, both the film and the book, the “cigarette burns” line is one of many useful facts imparted to the viewer by Durden — a macho phantasm dedicated to the anarchic collapse of industrial civilization. Cigarette burns, he explains, signal film projectionists about approaching reel changes. They blip across the screen, barely noticeable, reminding the savvy among us that the illusion of film is not magic, but mechanism… Armed with this knowledge, and employed as a night projectionist, Tyler is free to explore “interesting opportunities… like splicing single frames of pornography into family films.” And why? Why not, basically… Tyler Durden, who became a guru for angry young men at the turn of the century, saw nothing in mainstream society worth respecting. It all needed to be subverted, insulted and, ultimately, destroyed.

The Something Awful people loved him, in 2001.

DarthVersace, who is now a respected author of comic books, chimed in several minutes after DogWelder. “The BBC World Service is pissin’ itself,” she wrote. “I’ve never heard the Brits so flustered. They don’t know anything. No one knows anything. And I don’t know anything. But if I had to hazard a guess, kiddies…”

She attached an image of Osama Bin Laden, smiling and self-satisfied.

“ROTFL Owned Great Satan.”

Her signature at the time was a piece of her artwork — a randy looking young man with horns and pointed ears. “THE DEMON LOVE ARMY,” read its caption. “Because jesus won’t give head, THAT’S WHY.”

In those days, new users were publically shamed. Their “avatar,” or representative image, was a baby wearing sunglasses, decorated with the rainbow caption “FORUM NEWBIE.” After making a certain number of posts, a user could trade up for a more advanced title, like “Attention Whore,” and a more humane image – like a close-up of a corpulent woman smiling through jpeg artifacts.

ToasterOven, who had registered that June, was not shocked by the attack on New York. “It was inevitable,” they wrote. “Thank God it wasn’t a nuke.”

Oxymoron, a more seasoned user, speculated as to the pilot’s motives. “This could only mean three things,” they said:

“a) both pilots were members of anti-capitalist terrorist groups or suicidal

b) some terrorist group hax0red* the planes to automatically crash into the towers

c) pilots are fucking idiots and rely on their navigation systems despite the fact that they’re on collision course with a freaking skyscraper.

This also kind of reminds me of SimCity 2000, where I used to build my arcologies as close as possible to the airport.”

A brief time passed. Then, Oxymoron altered the message: “Edit,” began the postscript. “I forgot about the hijacking possibility.”

“WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR,” wrote monkeu.

“If this was terrorism (which it appears to be) the smoking crater left over where Terrorist HQ once stood will be [its] start and the end,” added GPF.

“We need to turn the fucking desert into a sheet of glass,” wrote graedus.

DarthVersave followed up the thought with a jpg of a mushroom cloud. “I’ll open the bay door if you’ll ride it down, graedus. Time and place, just say when and I’m there. These fucking people are no goddam good to anyone.

“Of course, they probably say and think the exact same thing about us.”

Small Gods of Simi Valley… a big win for the Cable News Network…

Like many of those currently under thirty , I exist at pains to watch as little CNN as possible. Which is why last month’s republican primary debate, broadcast by the network from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California looked more like a three hour car accident than a policy discussion. I tuned in, and so did the rest of the country – but at what cost?

For those three hours, on September 16th, CNN commanded what Brian Stelter, writing for the network’s financial news offshoot, CNN Money, called “NFL-level ratings.” Twenty-three million people watched the event, on average… a total slightly below Fox News’ August debate, but far in excess of any previous CNN programming. The network’s 9/11 ratings are difficult to procure, but unlike the debates, that particular disaster was presented without commercial breaks. Simi Valley was, in a way, more real… You can sell those kinds of numbers to Pepsi Cola.

Donald Trump immediately took credit for the inflated viewership, in keeping with his usual strategy of taking credit for everything. “Just announced that in the history of @CNN, last night’s debate was its highest rated ever,” he wrote to twitter, on the day following the contest. “Will they send me flowers & a thank you note?” More than 10,000 people “favorited” the remark — whatever that means.

Trump didn’t score much in the debate itself. His biggest hits that night were both non-verbal: a disbelieving series of facial expressions and an enthusiastic low-five offered as a congratulation to Jeb Bush. Both have been memorialized in numerous gif files – a candidate in pantomime.

CNN might still owe him flowers, though. What Fox News did on accident in their August 6th program from Cleveland, CNN accomplished by design. Fox, eager to assert their position as the media gatekeeper of the Republican party, ran that first debate like a state firing squad… From their initial question (“is there anyone on stage … who is unwilling, tonight, to pledge their support to the eventual nominee … and pledge not to run an independent campaign against [them]?”) the machinery of the night was turned to singular purpose: embarrassing and destroying Donald Trump.

And it worked. For about forty-eight hours.

On Friday, August 7th, the day after the Fox debate, Trump lashed out at one of its moderators, the journalist Megyn Kelly, in an audio interview with CNN. “There was blood coming out of her eyes,” he said, recounting her approach. “Blood coming out of her wherever.” In response, Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of the right-wing website RedState, withdrew Trump’s invitation to a gathering of Atlanta conservatives. For Erickson, the “blood” remark was a clear allusion to menstruation, and a step too far outside of common decency. As the weekend arrived, Trump took to the air again and again. “Wherever,” he explained, was meant to refer to a few of Kelly’s socially acceptable orifices: her nose and ears. Anyone who thought different was a “degenerate.”

On Saturday, Roger Stone, Trump’s most experienced political adviser, resigned his position, citing dissatisfaction with the “high volume” of “provocative media fights” surrounding the candidate. Writing for the Washington Post, journalists Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported that “Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge … now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse.”

Dark days, apparently. But Trump stayed on the offensive, calling in to practically every outlet that would have him. Every outlet, that is, but Fox. To the consternation of the network, messages from viewers grew increasingly hostile. They thought Donald Trump was in the right, and that Fox News hadn’t given him a fair shake. They also, apparently, sent death threats to Megyn Kelly.

On Monday morning, reported Gabriel Sherman for New York Magazine, “ [Roger ]Ailes called Trump ‘multiple’ times yesterday morning ‘begging’ him to tweet out that they had made peace.” Sherman’s source was, the journalist explained, “briefed on the negotiations.” Trump’s tweet was more direct: “Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews,” it read. “His word is always good!”

The firing squad had missed. Victory had been declared on Twitter.

An alien world reveals itself… a reality of degradation and shame… you wanna be safe? Buy a bomb shelter

In 2015, it appears, cable news can’t coronate anyone. It can, however, still attract ratings. The only thing the networks lost is their last vestige of prestige.

Almost every question asked at Simi Valley was constructed as a direct attack, quoting one candidate’s unfavorable remark about another and then demanding an address of the insult from both parties. As an example, take the night’s first query, which was directed at Carly Fiorina.

“Booby Jindal has suggested that your party’s frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as president,” said Jake Tapper, one of the night’s moderators. “You as well have raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament …would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?”

Where do you go from there?

Jeb hits Trump, and yet survives… The great reptile revealed…

There was a curious Trump-Bush exchange that night. The original question was both fair and interesting — Hugh Hewitt, the former Reagan staffer and current right-wing radio host, pushed Jeb Bush on the familiarity of his foreign policy advisors. What, exactly, would he do to distinguish himself from his father and brother on the world stage?

Bush dithered, promising an unconvincing policy of “peace through strength.” At which point, Trump attempted to break in. Hewitt allowed him to, by pivoting his question to the frontrunner. When would he announce names for his foreign policy team?

“I’m meeting with people that are terrific people,” Trump said, before pivoting himself. “I am the only person on this dais,” he continued, “the only person who fought very, very hard against us … going into Iraq…”

He circled the point several times, swiping at Rand Paul in the process (this, alone among the nights indignities, prompted gasping in the crowd). Jeb, hitting back, accused Trump of poor judgment for calling Hillary Clinton a good negotiator. This got Trump riled.

“Your brother and your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama,” spat the mogul. “Because it was such a disaster those last three months that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected!”

“You know what?” said Bush, in a voice trying for steely. “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe. I don’t know if you remember, Donald… You remember the — the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arm around it?”

The crowd — mostly establishment republicans — burst into thunderous applause. They remembered.

Neither candidate in the above exchange actually answered the question asked of them. Their foreign policy strategies, and the composition of Trump’s team, remain vague. Even “Peace Through Strength,” a good old-fashioned Orwellian buzzword, went over like a wet fart.

But there were cheers – long, sustained cheers, for “he kept us safe.” And they rose for the images: the “rubble,” the “firefighter,” the World Trade Center on fire.

Trump is right, in part. The Bush administration of the twenty-first century did give us Barack Obama –his success does owe much to his predecessor’s failures. But Obama isn’t the only thing we gained. The Bush years gave us everything.

Since this century began, we’ve been reacting and reacting and reacting… adding our jokes and our plans and our lies and our anger to a thread of human thinking that began fourteen years and twenty-some-odd days ago. We are not reacting to the event itself – some of us aren’t even sure what it was. We’re reacting to the images.

Those constructs of words and pixels and celluloid were chosen well, if arbitrarily. The rubble, the firefighter — the World Trade Center on Fire. We avoid them and enshrine them and worship at their secret altar. These images are CNN – proof of its value and prestige. They are Fox News – the unspoken paranoid drive behind their swirling flags and garishly patriotic sets. Their importance cannot be questioned in mass media, because doing so would mean questioning the utility of mass media itself.

In January of 1942, Tiffany Thayer, then the editor of the Fortean Society Magazine, a publication dedicated to radical doubt, proposed that the Second World War was really a sham. “We can shut off the radio, stop reading newspapers and stay away from the movies,” he wrote. “Their ‘war’ stops automatically as soon as you do these three things.”

It was heresy, of course. Thayer lost friends. But in much of America, I’m sure, his prescription was true.

Mass media presents us with a cosmography – a model of the universe that takes special care to delineate our place within it, and our responsibilities to the whole. As sure as Billy Sunday, it demands belief.

And people might tune into it. They might read it and watch it and share it. But they can’t be compelled to believe it – at least not wholesale.

The rubble, the firefighter, the World Trade Center on Fire – they’re not just images that orient us as Americans in the twenty-first century. They’re evidence of the mechanism by which that orientation is enacted.

Cigarette burns.

And now, the hero of our story…

In October of 2002, there was another thread posted to the Something Awful forums. This one was called “anything+benny hill theme = funny.” Its premise was layering the theme from Benny Hill, Boots Randolph’s swinging “Yakety Sax,” over incongruous video footage. At the beginning of page 2, a user named DrScorp posted a link to a video file: tribute.avi. It combined Randolph with footage of the towers falling from CNN, played back at faster than normal speed.

The reviews were unanimous:

“I think there are only a few times in my life when I’ve laughed so hard,” wrote Cutlass Supreme.

“I can’t help laughing,” said MDDevice. “I can’t STOP laughing.”

“I lost bladder control at the 40 second mark. I can’t believe it.”

“Words fail me. There is only laughter.”

Vorheese, a user registered that February, wrote a brief play about the video:

“50 years after watching tribute.avi

Satan: Hello

Me: Hello Satan

Satan: You know why you’re here, right?

Me: Oh yeh”

That was a catchphrase, at the time. In an awkward way, it was meant to convey victory – to laud a post that had succeeded in being funny. Since Something Awful was a comedy forum, at the time, “gold” was synonymous with their stated goal. The funnier something was, the more attention it generated.

CNN and Fox are playing a game for attention, too – but measured by different and less personal metrics. They move slowly, and hold on to the images and concepts which they broadcast for a long time, comparatively. For them, and for the audiences of their debates, the images of 9/11 are still sacred.

People like Vorheese recognize that they have crossed a line – but, in the end, they can’t bring themselves to care. Next to lols, damanation don’t mean shit.

See you space cowboy… grim chatter beneath the escutcheon…

4chan is an anonymous message board which began as an offshoot of Something Awful. The 4Chan culture, however, eschewed usernames and registration dates and the strange gradations of newbies and veterans in favor of total, democratic anonymity. Everyone has the same voice on 4Chan, and the same tools of broadcast. Posts succeed or fail based largely on popularity alone, regardless of their author’s pedigree. It’s been the Internet’s most accessible red-light district for years – a place to share bestiality videos, child pornography and, occasionally, jokes.

On the 30th of September, a warning appeared on 4chan. “Some of you guys are alright,” it read. “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest.

“happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning

so long space robots.”

On October 1st, an angry man named Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killing ten and wounding seven. According to an eyewitness, he ordered his victims to stand and state their religion — then fired.

That same day Barack Obama, in grieved comment given from a White House briefing room, again made his case for gun control, advocating for the formation of a less intractable advocacy organization than the N.R.A. “And I would particularly ask America’s gun owners who are using those guns properly, safely…to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is speaking for you,” he said.

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking in a New Hampshire town hall on Monday, October 5th, took the line a step farther: “What I would love to see is … responsible gun owners, hunters, form a different organization and take back the Second Amendment from these extremists,” she suggested.

The N.R.A. has yet to make an official response.

4Chan, like all “new media” is more nimble.

The post on September 30th was clearly constructed by someone familiar with the cultural conventions of the board. “Happening” is a phrase commonly used on their political board, /pol/, to refer to a blooming scandal or disaster — and typically, a scandal or disaster that seems to portend some larger societal break down. “See you space robots” is a riff on the traditional closing line of Cowboy Bebop, a popular Japanese cartoon from the 1990s about bounty hunter astronauts with impeccable taste in jazz. Each episode ends with white italics in the bottom right of frame. Typically the sign off is “see you space cowboy…” but like The X-Files, special episodes mix it up a little. The show’s finale concludes: “You’re gonna carry that weight.”

The culture of 4Chan, speaking broadly, is one of shame and paranoia, bleeding into white-hot rage. Its most socially awkward posters, sometimes called “robots,” see themselves as fundamentally separated from the mainstream of human life. In post after post, these nameless and faceless young men complain about “chads” and “staceys,” the “normies” who have no trouble fitting in, going out and getting on with the activities of modern work and leisure. Part of this divide is sexual — “robots” and “betas” (short for “beta males”) can’t get laid, while the “chads” of the world can. But that’s only part of it. Despite what you may have read, 4Chan is not a “men’s rights” collective – or any other kind of organized hate group. They’re a disorganized hate group – and a far more unnerving thing by far.

Reading 4Chan can be melancholy. Many of its posts are focused on emptiness and alienation – adolescent paeans to the feelings of “robots” who feel hectored and bullied by a world that barely notices them.

On October 5th, while Hillary Clinton was grabbing headlines with her milquetoast position on the N.R.A., another post appeared on 4Chan. Like the pre-shooting post on the 30th, it ran beside an image of Pepe the Frog — a kind of unofficial mascot for the board and a visual stand-in for every nameless “beta,” “robot,” and “virgin” posting on it. In the warning, Pepe was depicted as scowling and brandishing a pistol: “Pepe_gun.jpg.” The post on the 5th was more downbeat. Its image, of Pepe sitting morosely on a couch, was “alone at party.png.”

“At parties all the time,” it read. “No one ever talks to me… they know I’m there but they never include me … I don’t know why I stay around … I can barely manage a squeak when I talk to people.

“Paralyzed by fear of losing ‘friends,” it concludes.

On Friday, October 2nd, another post appeared, this one beside a masked Pepe. “The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” it began. “On October 5th, 2015 at 1:00 PM CT, a fellow robot will take up arms against a university near Philadelphia. His cries will be heard, his victims will cower in fear, and the strength of the Union will decay a little more…

“I plea to thee, brothers! We have only once chance, one spark, for our revolution. The United States will soon condemn us to the status quo forever …Don’t let our one chance at winning history slip away.”

There was no shooting in Philadelphia on October 5^th, thank God. But there was a slew of news stories about the post and, by the weekend, an official statement of caution was issued by the Philadelphia field office of the F.B.I. Gawker and Salon registered their disapproval, and images of the “beta uprising” threat spread far and wide.

It may not have pulled in NFL numbers, but it was, in the small manner of an internet post, a rousing success. It was seen and it was meant to be – and, in my estimation, it was about as tasteless a maneuver as CNN leading its bacchanal with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Whadda you got — an Oreck?

As of today, on 4Chan, parodies of the September 30th post have become a trend.

A picture of Hitler running beside “some of you guys are alright, don’t go to Poland tomorrow.”

Gavrillo Pincip, the assassin of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, warning against going to Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. “Some you guys are alright,” he says.

Jim Carey’s version of the Grinch, masked and armed: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to Whoville tomorrow.”

George W. Bush, smiling and raising a glass: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

“happening thread will be posted later

“so long space robots.”

***

* http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hax0red

The post Dispatch #3 – September 19-October 10, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure

On September 11^th, 2001, three thousand people died in New York and Washington – but in Texas, one life was saved. Jeffery Eugene Tucker’s lethal injection was scheduled to have taken place that day. Governor Rick Perry granted him a temporary reprieve. The closing of federal courts “would not have given Tucker full opportunity … for a last minute appeal,” explained the Hood County News.

In the Summer of 1988, when Rick Perry was still a state representative, and a democrat, Jeffery Eugene Tucker was looking for a way out. He’d been nabbed for marijuana in Collin County, jacked for forged checks in Tarrant, and sent up for auto-theft in Plano Pinto. He was through with Texas.

Allegedly, he made a plan.

Less than a month after being paroled, in the Summer of 1988, he combed through the classifieds in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, circling a few car notices before settling on an ad for a white GMC pickup truck and tan travel trailer. Using an assumed name, he made an appointment with its owners: Wilton and Peggy Humphreys.

The next morning, Tucker stopped in an Arlington pawnshop and bought a .38 caliber pistol. He lied on the necessary paperwork (Federal Form #4473), and paid with a stolen check. There was no waiting period.

Around three, Tucker arrived at the Laguna Tres development outside of Granbury, where the Humphreys lived. The couple had just purchased a recreational vehicle, they told him, making their old truck and trailer redundant. Wilton was a member of the Good Sam Club, an international association of R.V. owners, and a “wagonmaster” in his local chapter. He helped keep the Good Sams’ group camping trips comfortable and organized. After some visiting, and a test drive, Tucker agreed to take the truck. He and Wilton drove off for Granbury, to finalize the paperwork.

Just after four, that day, the body of Wilton J. Humphreys was discovered on Goforth Road in Parker County, Texas, between the towns of Aledo and Whiskey Flats. According to an account that appeared several days later in the Hood County News, penned by staff writers Leland Debusk, Lynna Kirkpatrick and Melissa Howell , he’d “been shot several times and run over repeatedly with some type of vehicle.”

The truck was gone, and so was Tucker.

It was the eleventh of July.

O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place

I am in the crowd, behind the police barricades, watching the protesters evangelize. It’s a cool afternoon in September, and I am standing in front of the World Trade Center PATH station, beside the equestrian statue built to commemorate the achievements of Special Forces units in Afghanistan. Behind me, tall fences enclose a wing-like structure of white beams, arching overhead like massive ribs. “Oculus,” Santiago Calatrava’s radical contribution to the WTC transit hub, is still under construction. Huge signs, hung on its surrounding wall, point the way to the memorial fountains. It is Friday, September 11^th, 2015.

The protesters are operating from behind a line of poster boards, spread flat on the asphalt: The WTC Debris Pattern… 9/11 and Iraq: The Elusive Link… EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE! … Shouldn’t these Questions Have Answers?

A man with shoulder-length gray hair is addressing the crowd: Kevin Canada. “What’s that eyeball doing here?” he demands, indignant, indicating Calatrava’s pavilion. “These buildings are designed that way for a reason!”

“It’s all part of the effort to bring in the Satanic new world order!” he concludes. People hear him out, and a few accept his literature. Other protesters are more technical – they talk about structural engineering problems posed by the “official story,” about the melting point of steel and the physical evidence of thermite. Some are friendly, others intense. Canada, however, speaks casually — and with total conviction. He’s a poet.

“It was raining like crazy, the last two days,” he tells me. “I believe to keep people out of here.” Those in control, he says, have access to advanced nanotechnology and a network of clandestine satellites, capable of emitting dangerous energy. “We’re electromagnetic beings,” he says. “They’ve learned how to tap into our system.”

The signs, he explains, are everywhere. Goats and eyeballs. Satanic hand gestures. It’s in government, civil engineering – even in churches. “Our ministries ain’t what they used to be,” he sighs. “They’re 501cs, part of this illuminati… The C.I.A. has known for a long time that the best way to control people is through religion.”

The world Canada describes might be frightening, but at least it’s definitive. Its secret masters employ clear symbolism, announcing their plots to the public, albeit in elaborate code. “The date, the time – everything about this was significant,” he told me. “These fuckers are lying. They lied about the weapons of mass destruction and they’re lying about this.”

His eyes were steady – even grave. He spoke the truth: “I know we’re in a battle for this country,” he told me. “An epic battle.”

My days are passed, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart

While I was talking to Canada, Rick Perry was talking to the Eagle Forum in St. Louis. It was there, in a tent erected by a Marriot hotel, that the longest serving governor in Texas history called off his presidential bid.

Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham were there too, but neither one was ready to call it quits. And why would they? Carson is currently riding high in the polls, bolstered by his evangelical constituency. He also bragged about separating conjoined twins in front of Megyn Kelly and God at the first Republican primary debate. That same night, at the runner-up event for low-polling candidates, Graham promised that “ If I am president of the United States, we’re going to send soldiers back to Iraq,” which might be considered a gaffe if anybody, right or left, thought Lindsey Graham had a hope in hell of being president. He and Carson are still “serious” candidates – more or less. Only Rick Perry is considered an embarrassment.

For him, perhaps, the epic battle is over – but victory remains in question. After the expected political biography, Perry turned his remarks to a sentimental journey he undertook with his father: revisiting the old man’s corner of the Second World War. “Dad and I went back to his old air base in England for his first visit in 55 years,” said Perry. “Then we crossed the channel and visited the American cemetery that overlooks the bluffs at Omaha beach.”

“On that peaceful, wind-swept setting, there lie 9,000 graves,” the governor continued. “It struck me as I stood in the midst of those heroes that they look upon us in silent judgment.” What would they think of America today? “Are we worthy of their sacrifice?”

Barack Obama sure ain’t. Perry called him a “divider,” a cheap demagogue who achieved fame by enflaming economic and racial tensions. Again and again, Perry said, Obama has failed us all.

“We were told America needed to improve its reputation abroad. Now we are neither liked nor respected,” he said. Today, ”ISIS has ripped a swath through the Middle East as large as Great Britain,” all the result of “a naïve campaign promise took priority over stability.”

“Naïve policies gave us the Iranian nuclear deal,” Perry argued, calling it “an agreement that fuels Iran’s nuclear ambitions rather than prohibiting them.” Speaking of Obama’s economic policy and his use of executive power, Perry refrained from using “naïve” again. Those missteps, he implied, were the result of something more sinister: a consolidation of power under the federal government, to the detriment of the states.

“Each state should chart its own course,” he said. “I support the right of states to be wrong, like Colorado legalizing pot. I would rather one state get it wrong than the whole country.”

In Texas, under his fourteen-years of leadership, Perry claimed to have already solved the principle problems of the Obama administration. “There are two visions for America,” he said. “The government-run welfare state of Washington, New York and California, and the limited government freedom state pioneered in places like Texas.”

This fight is too important, Perry explained, to be left to any single campaign or personality. “2016 is the most important election of our lifetime,” he said, gravely. “I know we say this every election, but this time it is actually true.” The forces of “freedom” are contesting with the forces of control – and everything hangs in the balance.

In that existential struggle, the governor concluded, the name and reputation of Rick Perry don’t matter all that much – they’re dwarfed by the will of God. “ Today I submit that His will remains a mystery, but some things have become clear,” said Perry. “That is why […] I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States.”

Perry’s “Remarks at the Eagle Forum” have gotten a respectable amount of press. Fittingly, most of it has been about Donald Trump.

Perry thumped the abstruse mogul on the way out the door, they say. And it’s true – the governor did devote some of his speech to chastising Trump for being more “rhetoric” than “record.” He took the frontrunner to task for indulging in “nativist appeals that divide the nation further.” Being from Texas, Perry’s approach to the Mexican border has always been more complicated than Trump’s — it has to be. But he’s still the governor who deployed the National Guard along the border last year, as an upswing of nativist paranoia was catching in the far right…

“Where I come from, talk is cheap,” he said, to the Eagle Forum. “And leadership is not what you say, but what you do.”

Indeed.

Should a wise man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?

I have a theory.

I don’t think Rick Perry dropped out of the race last Friday. I think he redefined the terms of his engagement, especially towards Donald trump. His attacks on the frontrunner were the same ones he’s been making for weeks, and the same ones that have consistently won Perry the few headlines his 2016 campaign has rated. At the Eagle Forum, however, he didn’t mention Trump’s name – but he did mention Obama’s. Perry didn’t couch his resignation in an admission of weakness, but in an assertion of strength. My policies, he said, my experience – these are the only things that can get America back from the black man who stole it. But my name? That doesn’t matter.

Rick Perry and Donald Trump have similar brands. Both of them see America as waning – in decline. And both of them promise a solution – and, primarily, an economic one. For Perry, it’s his record in Texas – For Trump, it’s his record in the private sector. Both of them throw sparks on the subject of the southern border, and both of them have worked to court the far-right without alienating the mainstream.

On August 6^th, when Perry plead his case at Fox’s consolation debate for low-pollers, he concluded with his typical argument – that he’d performed an economic miracle in Texas, and was ready to do so on a larger scale. “Our best days are in front of us,” he said. All we need is “a corporate executive type at the top who’s done it before.”

There’s already a “corporate executive type” at the top of the polls. Then, as now, Perry looked redundant to a lot of people – especially in his former base.

I think things are different, after the Eagle Forum. I think Perry is trying to publically divorce his experience from his political ambitions. He’s applying for a job – maybe the job – in the still unlikely Trump administration.

On Twitter, last Friday, the usually acerbic Trump was unusually respectful. “@GovernorPerry is a terrific guy and I wish him well,” wrote Trump. “I know he will have a great future!”

The signs are everywhere.

It all means something.

In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind

When Perry dropped out, I got a call from every Texan friend of mine who cares about politics – a small but meaningful cross section of the people I grew up with. None of us like the guy, exactly – but for fourteen years (the same fourteen years that have passed since the terrorist actions of 2001), Perry has been more than a governor in Texas. He played the state like a fiddle, and redefined his office in the process. When he lost the name of that department on the debate stage in 2011, we lost something too.

Perry, we thought, was a canny operator – the kind of guy capable of putting the entire apparatus of a massive state government under his heel. His policies may have been disastrous, his rhetoric embarrassing – but his skill, we believed, was beyond question. That changed after “oops.”

For brief, blinding instant Texans became aware of two realities: the first, in which Perry is a savvy politico, speaks relatively well of the people he’s manipulated. The second – in which Perry is the kind of ignoramus that leaves the fries out of a McDonalds order – was less complimentary. I’ve been trying to reconcile the two ever since, with little success.

I need my theories. I find the alternative unthinkable.

On Friday, I leave for Texas, to explore the issue further.

Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews

Trauma breeds religion. When the unthinkable arrives on a curtain of flame, or erupts from the barrel of a gun or seeps from the wound of some public embarrassment, people begin rethinking the boundaries and mechanics of reality. In a new cosmography, we hope, our pain can be transformed – or at least avoided.

On August 27^th, 1988, the Hood County News ran a brief story by Kathleen Buxton, recounting a recent outing of the Good Sam club. “Granbury Good Sams held their monthly campout July 21^st-31^st at Comanche Trails R.V. park in Comanche, Texas,” she wrote. “Twenty-one member rigs attended.”

There was barbeque. They played dominoes. “Several members also attended the rodeo in Brownwood.”

“The campout was saddened by the death of a Good Sam member, Wilton Humphreys,” Buxton reported. “In the words of the club members, ‘He was a good man, a good friend and a Good Sam. He will be missed by all who knew him.’”

On Sunday, their chaplain read selections from the Book of Job.

***

Illustrations for Salem 66 this week are by Don Jolly.

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