The Mob Rules

(editor’s note: this post was initially started on 8/17. Things have only gotten dumber.)

The post’s title, a Dio Sabbath song–yes–was resurfaced in my mind palace by Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth. Yes, I am a fella who takes massive musical cues from the media I consume. Yes, I am very stupid.

Now, that aside, the PHRASE has been echoing (in tune, mind you) in my head for 3 (ed. note: 5) weeks. The Mob Rules (or, if you want the full hook: “If you listen to fools, the mob rules.”) The abject idiocy and spiraling insanity of the United States this month feels… faster, dumber?

….

So, I have a tendency to start on one of these deals, leave it for a while, and then complete it if the thesis of the moment still felt right about 3 weeks later, maybe a month. Well, this post got started the week of Aug. 18th. You can piece together what has happened since.

So, Charlie Kirk got got. Good Riddance/Time of Your Life, and all that. But that was just the capper on a truly brain-pulverizing stretch over the last couple of weeks.

We had the Epstein Birthday Book drop. We had the quasi-stroke/Trump disappearance. We had the Charlie Kirk shooting. (Not using assassination–you gotta be more important than THAT for me to use the same word I did for MLK, JFK, and the like.) That was a week, lol. Less, really.

The acceleration is concerning. I mean, on Friday (after Kirk’s capping), I was legitimately concerned that he was gonna be a Horst Wessel and that this was the beginning of the round up. Now, on the Tuesday after, they’re pathetically taking down their doxxing websites and begging people not to be rude to the dead fascist or his family. (No, lol.) Good. If I’m gonna get rounded up and put in a camp, I’d prefer that the inciting incident weren’t “ugly weirdo who you thought was on some pedo shit for hanging out with teenagers ALL THE WAY BACK IN 2015, WHEN YOU WERE MADE AWARE OF THIS GRIFT” gets shot by a different internet-poisoned white boy. (On that topic, I don’t care anymore what the actual motivations for mass shooters are–not that this was a mass shooting, beyond the mass of Charlie’s Big Head Mode perma-cheat. They’re all just internet poisoned zoomers to me. No use differentiating.)

While the fascists not being able to make a Reichstag Fire out of “Big Head, Little Teeth, HUGE Gums” is good, all of these stories (most concerningly and depressingly–especially the Epstein book) were eaten, metabolized, and shat out in a week. Any ONE of these would have been a term-defining Black Swan for a normal pre-2016 president.

I used to fancy myself a bit of an accelerationist. If you’re autistically schematic-minded and fell into Marx due to the completeness and intelligibility of the system (my dumb ass), then accelerationism has an allure. It makes sense, on paper! Real life? Jury is out, but the malign velocity of the current moment does not feel advantageous to the left. It feels numbing and designed to breed hopelessness and nihilism. Feels bad and immutable! Not good! But that’s where we live now–an ever-increasing speed limit in the left lane, feeling every speed wobble and curve in the road.

But that’s only a feeling. I don’t know shit and neither do you. We are in that Gramscian time of monsters, to be sure. The way I’ve been saying it to salve my soul? “This is one of those Bad Times in the history books, and humans made it through that.” But it’s only a feeling. We don’t know what’s coming next and any analysis beyond “that didn’t happen back in the day” will beggar conclusions and confound outside review–a black box of anti logic created just from trying to describe the moment in plain language.

We only have our feelings, then, and mine have been more right over the course of my life than yours. (Do not ask about the predictive capacity of my gut notions after 2016, let alone 2020, thank you.) What do my feelings say? “This is one of the Bad Times.” So, hunker down, smoke bales of weed, and hope that there’s something salvageable on the other side. That’s what I’m doing, at least.

Anyway, rest in piss to the babytoothed fascist and hold your loved ones. Loved ones are what make it worth struggling through this bullshit, after all. (If you don’t have loved ones, consider how cool it would be to be in the history books–just saying! Not a lot of ways to Make An Impact as a discrete individual–but I can think of a couple! Just mull it over, hypothetical unloved, unmissed person reading this. We have a group that meets Fridays at midnight under the Brooklyn Bridge and the password is Sic Semper Tyrannis.)