Homelessness and the Trumpocalypse: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

[The homeless old man, Rashad the Cackler has returned with another diatribe. Gather round as he spills his guts to passersby on a big city street corner.]

Did you know, passersby, that there are homeless people? You may think you understand but you don’t, because the truth is hiding in plain sight. Ours is the age of futile investigation, when the establishment expends every effort in all manner of empirical inquiries, as though the horrors that need no introduction could be so easily dispelled.

Take, for example, the catastrophe of Donald Trump’s presidency. Currently there are seventeen investigations into Trump’s treachery and galaxy of frauds. You might as well research whether grass is green or 100 is a larger number than 2. Say you’re on the Titanic and the ship starts to sink. Instead of recognizing the direness of your situation, why not debate endlessly whether the ship is sinking or what it means to be on a sinking ship? And as the ship goes under and the frigid waters are up to your eyeballs, why not carry on the investigation right up to when you’ve reached your watery grave?

Add up the significance of all the scientific discoveries over the last century; their importance pales next to that of what we’ve learned about history and human nature from Trump’s presidency. But Trump has done us the service of hiding his monstrosity in plain sight, so no investigations are needed to understand what has thusly befallen believers in American ideals. This isn’t an appeal to common sense, which is often prejudiced in hindsight. No, the audacity of Trump’s mental disorders is revelatory and apocalyptic in the religious sense, meaning that we learn from Trump in the same way we’d learn from an angel or an extraterrestrial that descends to our material plain. You don’t have regular communications with such an interloper; rather, the newfound radical truth washes over you, because the message is conveyed at all levels of the experience. You don’t listen to what an angel from beyond says, since the real message is embedded in the medium, in the angel’s sheer existence on earth which falsifies consensual reality, ramifying throughout the rest of your life now that that theophany has reprogrammed your perspective.

To be sure, Donald Trump isn’t an angel or an advanced alien, but he is a transformative figure. Barack Obama was too feminized by the millennial constraints of late-modern liberalism to reshape the American mindset after the 2008 financial crisis called for a charismatic religious saviour to shepherd Americans to a new self-understanding or to reintroduce them to the New Deal. Inadvertently, Donald Trump is the false hero Americans and other individualists deserve but not the one they need (to paraphrase The Dark Knight). Trump is a demonic harbinger from beyond the political sphere. What his election, his character, and his power on the political stage teach us is both everything and nothing. His existence proves that human life is absurd and that while Donald Trump may be the world’s single greatest con artist, American culture itself is the greatest modern fraud.

The mass media have luxuriated in the profits to be gained from gossiping over Trump’s every word and deed, and so the public drowns in knowledge we weren’t meant to have. In his campaign for president, Trump boasted he alone could fix America and make that country great again, since the globalists had exploited Americans’ good will and ended their dominance in manufacturing. Never mind that the globalists in question were amoral capitalists like Donald Trump who would sell their grandmother to make a buck. Or that relatively rich Americans obviously couldn’t compete in manufacturing with machines and slave labourers in more oppressed parts of the world. At face value, nothing Trump says is worthy of attention, because he’s plainly an epic bullshitter and con artist. What’s historically monumental, though, is that a useful idiot of an international crime syndicate could come to rule the world’s most powerful democracy.

But rather than ponder the philosophical and religious importance of the Trumpocalypse, Americans are busy paradoxically burying their head in the sand, delaying their reckoning with horrific reality by investigating the causes of the catastrophe, and they’ll still be investigating long after the damage has been done and the chance to benefit by learning from this fiasco has been lost. 

Mental Health: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

Art by Alex Cherry

[The homeless old man, Rashad the Cackler has returned with another diatribe. Enjoy as he spills his guts to passersby on a big city street corner.]

How I relish the looks of derision on your faces, you calm and collected pedestrians! “Look at the homeless wreck of a man,” you’re thinking. “See how repulsive he is, with his long, matted hair and beard, his blotchy, wrinkled skin, his hunched back and bony arms! Hear as he spews his venom, how he’s nothing left to lose, not even his sanity!” The bitter madman, haranguing harmless middle class normies at the crossroads. What a cliché you’d make of me. But before you silence me with sedatives and a straightjacket, shall I disclose the secret of how you reward me with your sneers and scowls?

You sane ones, do you know what “sanity” means? Mental health is fitting in. The psychiatrists’ textbooks call this “social functionality.” You’re considered mentally unwell if you’re suffering from an inability to perform your social obligations. You have to want to fit into society and yet be mentally prevented from doing so to be the victim of a mental illness.

So congratulations, you joiners and normies, you who’ve adapted so well to social conventions! You’re esteemed as healthy because of your normality. But have you stopped to wonder what you’re fitting into? What are these functions you perform so efficiently? What’s the total effect of normal human effort? What do human functions as a whole accomplish?

Would it surprise you to learn that your health is supremely ironic? You belong to that which is most alien in the universe, not just to life but to a godlike species that rises above nature and the animal kingdom, surveys the vastness of space and time, and creates a contrary world of culture and technology. As you play your assigned roles as worker or family member, as friend or foe, bully or clown, you submerge yourself in that which most stands out. You’re part of a titanic monstrosity.

Let’s not pretend your happiness is innocent, you spinning cogs. You relax or rejoice in your success at fitting in, but you only outsource the horror and agony that any monster can be expected to inflict. You raise your living standard at the cost of perpetrating a holocaust against all other animal species, which you don’t think twice about enslaving, torturing, or exterminating. And the wealth of you middleclass busybodies depended on the drudgery of human slaves or of impoverished toilers languishing in Western-backed dictatorships—until the advent of the machine, whereupon you’ll be made obsolete and will inherit the pain.

So you bright and shining sane ones, my compliments! You’re one with the savage Anthropocene. You’ve thrown in your lot with the tyrannical overlord of savage evolution, threatening all life with extinction because of your hubris. You’ve sidled up to a starry-eyed little boy who carries an oversized shotgun in either hand and plays at being God; you submit to the whims of this child as he pretends he knows what he’s doing. And if you perform your functions so smoothly that you disappear as an individual, you fit right in with that vicious abomination, as those billions of duties and conventions add up to mammoth barbarity, to ironies so absurd they mustn’t even be whispered. To tell this secret is to be in danger of being locked up as a madman.

A curious title I wear: “madman.” For what have I to be mad about? Only my standing apart from the behemoth of humanity, from the bumbling pack of mini despots, as I’m condemned to witness the grotesque drama and to be ignored even as I hurl rotten tomatoes onto the stage. And what kind of man am I, abnormal and dysfunctional in my inability to hold down a job, own any property, or start a family? No, no madman am I—only one estranged subhuman beholding the antics of alien humanity from my perch on Mount Nowhere.

Fools' God: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

[The homeless old man, Rashad the Cackler is back with another rant. Enjoy as he spills his guts to passersby on a big city street corner.]

Laugh at the homeless wreck of a man who stands before you! Wrinkle your nose in disgust at the rags I wear, coated as they are in weeks-old urine, vomit and body odour. Mock me for my failure to lie for a living in your warped rat race. Here I am with no family to weigh me down or bind me to your monstrous society. Look at me and see the outsider, the scapegoat hurled into the wilderness who survives the void and returns to you with ghastly news.

Mock me, will you! You upstanding believers in imaginary gods? Have you really no inkling that your pride rests on a laughable jumble of errors? You presume the common wickedness in your barbaric nation is excused because your gods permit it as a means to a greater end. That the secular progress which depended for decades on Third World slavery, which is creating legions of bitter anti-globalists who’ve lost their jobs to more productive machines, and which is busy killing the planet—you presume that this marvel of neoliberal ingenuity is only leading more swiftly to the second coming of Jesus, who can now no longer tarry since only supernatural wisdom can extract you from this mess you’ve made. That only God can heal the world you’ve polluted with your sins.

You imagine that a Jewish hippie who supposedly was executed two thousand years ago was really God in disguise, and that that puritanical anarchist, mystic, and pacifist who failed to stop Rome’s oppression of the Jews, because he thought love could conquer the planet—you’re actually convinced that that deluded victim of imperial brutality would reward you champions of American imperialism? Have you forgotten that the American hippies became disillusioned and drug-addled before selling out their ideals as the yuppies of the 1980s? Would you really be astonished to learn that had Jesus been allowed to grow up, he too would have sold out the ideals of his youthful naiveté, succumbing to the temptations of social power like any other cult leader? Or are you truly unaware that Jesus is, in any case, just a fictional character in a work of blatant propaganda for the Christian religion that effectively sold out Jesus’s values on his behalf? The meek little lamb of Jesus: mascot for the Church that spread its good news by the sword.

This is the God you Western fools claim to worship, the one who couldn’t stand the sight of us wayward mortals proceeding headlong to disaster in hell, and so he clothed himself in human flesh to show that he wasn’t some monotheistic abstraction, that he could understand our plight firsthand. Only instead of thanking God for going that extra mile, the Jewish and Roman powers hounded him, spat on him, and nailed him to a cross as a common criminal. What’s the lesson, then, of Christianity? That after we demonstrated the corruptness of our souls, by failing to recognize God’s humility and love for us, we should follow the lead of those first Christians and proclaim Jesus our lord and saviour? That we should be thankful for God’s unconditional love? What, I ask, is the value of such love that holds up Adolph Hitler as being inherently equal to Mahatma Gandhi? If nothing we do matters, because God can forgive all, how can it be just for him to punish unrepentant sinners for eternity? How can our actions be simultaneously meaningless and all-important? And wouldn’t Jesus, in any case, resent our having spurned him in Judea? Isn’t that the point of Christianity’s unforgivable innovation, the doctrine of hellfire? How can God be so loving as to be able to forgive even the sins of Hitler, and so vengeful as to punish nonbelievers forever in hell?

I’ll tell you the true meaning of your religion’s evident grotesqueness. This great religion of humanity that boasts over two billion followers was literally cobbled together by various political committees that canonized certain texts and anathematized the Christian Gnostic ones. And your religion was tainted from its inception, since its primary purpose has always been to make excuses for the absurdity of its founding narrative. The gospel’s implicit message is that Jesus’s values have no place in this world and that God’s love of humanity is a lie, which is why enlightened Christians feel no shame in compromising with every ugly secular expectation. You ignore God with your selfish behaviour just as God’s refused to return like he supposedly said he would, centuries ago.

And you wear the cross around your neck as a symbol, as though Jesus would want to be reminded of our failure to have risen to the occasion of his incarnation as a man. All parents make excuses for their children’s imperfections, but show me a parent who would reward her child in heaven for having murdered her with a gun and for having gone as far as to celebrate the make and model of that weapon, to wear a carving of it on a necklace and to hand down the hallowed tale of that child’s evil so that billions in the future could wonder at the alienness of that parent for having had such a depraved child in the first place. Show me such an inhuman parent and I’ll show you one who deserves to have her children taken from her by the state. 

Power and the Abuse of Language: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

[The homeless old man, Rashad the Cackler is back with another rant. Enjoy as he spills his guts to passersby on a big city street corner.]

***

We’ve got these democratic, capitalistic societies we’re so proud of. That’s how we “progress,” right? By voting and making money and buying stuff we don’t need.

I’ve been trying to figure out, though, why politicians and pundits make a fetish out of the word “appropriate.” I saw it once on CNN: it was a typical American political negotiation. President Trump had dragged a Democratic senator’s wife into the Oval Office and ordered his henchmen to gang rape her right in front of the senator and his children. They went to town on her, because it was televised so they had to make it a spectacle. I saw a Taser and a cat o’ nine tails and a flaming trident. A donkey got in on the action, and in the end they cut her up into ribbons and vacuumed her remains off the carpet.

The press turned to the senator for comment and all he could say was, “Mr. President, that was inappropriate.”

Why are the world’s most powerful English speakers so averse to telling us what they really think? Does power make you hostile to the prospect of looking up some words in a thesaurus? Do you go to law or business school to learn to have contempt for genuine communication?

It’s like the time that politician went on a psychotic rampage in the streets, stabbing folks left and right, and when the press caught up with him, he confessed only that he’d “made a mistake.”

Did you think a Western politician is capable of evil? No, only of “inappropriate conduct,” meaning an action not currently sanctioned by some body of bureaucratic regulations. Our leaders can be guilty only of a “mistake,” of something like putting their left sock on their right foot or like dialing the wrong phone number. Their language has made evil impossible at the highest levels of our technocracies, because capitalism and democracy can do no wrong, by definition. Anyway, morality is religious or philosophical, so it’s for losers.

Even when speaking of the social progress we’re supposed to be capable of, politicians fall back on platitudes. When they have no idea how to solve a problem, they’ll say, “We’ve got to move forward.” That’s how you make things better when no one has a clue. You’ve just got to step forwards, never backwards. Because history lessons are anathema, I guess, for businessmen and politicians who need consumers and voters to be as dumb as possible, to enable the sociopathy that always rises to the top.

“Appropriate,” “mistake,” “forward”—these are magic words in so-called advanced industrial societies, for folks who are supposed to have outgrown the need for superstitions. We surrender to managerial platitudes and banalities. And those who care about English and authentic communication? They write books which hardly anyone reads anymore. Writers make a pittance, because Amazon siphons most of the profits. Is that the secret of capitalism? Not that in business you should profit by alienating your workers who don’t control the means of production, as Marx said. No, that’s only for old-school manufacturers. In postindustrial societies, where everyone’s a middleman, the trick is to convince society that your brand of uselessness is actually indispensible. If you’re one of a thousand administrators or vice presidents in your company, you’ve got to “lean in,” since only in a society where everyone’s mass-hallucinating and nothing truly important is happening would the mere effort of leaning in be a sure sign that you’re one of the good ones.

Progress is supposed to be about the maximization of pleasure or some such Enlightenment promise. But real progress is all about perfecting the use of power. The tyrants of old were more bloodthirsty than modern captains of industry, but that’s because we’ve made a science out of domination and exploitation. We don’t waste subordinate populations by slaughtering the males. We put them to work as wage slaves, conquering lesser societies with banking regulations and neoliberal tomfoolery. We don’t trivialize life by publicly torturing criminals, like they did in the medieval period; instead, we sustain the myth that life is precious so that consumers will become so full of themselves that they’ll buy all the garbage we’re selling.

We’ve taken to the next level the sociopathy that accompanies the concentration of power: witness the advent of the machine, the perfect vehicle for cruel logic. This is how we think of progress: poor countries are worse off because they can barely afford the necessities of life; rich countries can afford not just the necessities but the luxuries no one needs, until the rich people themselves can be dispensed with, and the whole postindustrial utopia runs on autopilot. By using our smart phones 24/7, we’re training the machines that will replace human workers and consumers; we’re ensuring our obsolescence, but that’s still progress because the machines will be the more perfect dominators—calculating, remorseless minds running superhuman bodies, ravaging the earth before heading to outer space. 

Sex is Ridiculous: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

[The homeless old man, Rashad the Cackler is back with another rant. Enjoy as he spills his guts to passersby on a big city street corner.]

***

Politics and business are cesspools, right? But family, that’s our sacred cow. I wonder why, though, we still get married with all the pomp and circumstance when we don’t believe in the religious or romantic myths anymore. Yeah, finding someone who’s attracted to your bullshit is a miracle and an excuse to throw a party and celebrate with friends and family, but that’s not why we still go through the weird rituals of telling public vows and wearing expensive rings, and indulging the priest or rabbi or secular administrator as he issues his magic blessings. What is it about marriage that’s still sacrosanct, that calls for such solemnity?

I’m pretty sure it’s the sex. Marriage is a license to have guilt-free sex. It’s like a driver’s license: only you are legally entitled to drive your car, because you have the special piece of paper, and if someone else drives it without your permission, they’re stealing your car. If someone else has sex with your husband or wife, they’re stealing what’s yours.

They used to think that sex before marriage is sinful because God’s watching, but that’s silly because God’s supposed to be like an uptight Jew, Christian, or Muslim, not a pervert who pays close attention to whom we’re having sex with. The gods of organized religions would avert their eyes while we’re fucking each other, so religion can’t be the reason we still take marriage so seriously.

What’s so dreadful about sex outside of wedlock? How about this for a fancy hypothesis: what’s missing from that sex is freedom from being blackmailed. Hear me out! Even if you’re going steady, without all the symbols and rituals of the wedding ceremony, you still feel at liberty to change your mind and see someone else. And once that happens, you’re free to cheat in the worst way imaginable, not just by having sex with someone else but by spreading rumours about what sex was like with the person you were once supposed to be faithful to. And not just rumours, but photos and videos. And if your partner or ex found out, he or she would of course die of embarrassment.

So why are we so afraid of being cheated on? Why in high school does the cheerleader go into seclusion or slit her wrists because the jock who banged her and then dumped her spreads rumours about how her nipples are cockeyed? Why are we so desperate to keep our partner monogamous that we put our faith in the obsolete marriage ceremony?

It’s because sex is ridiculous.

Sex is shameful not because God’s watching, but because we look pathetic while we’re having sex. That’s why we have to keep our sex acts secret. That’s why we’d be mortified if word got out what perverted things we do with our sex partner-in-crime. And that’s why we fear being blackmailed by our partner if he or she should go rogue. So we put a ring on their finger to make them feel guilty of even thinking of telling their friends that we have our partner pretend they’re Angela Merkel or Donald Trump while we’re screwing them. The vows and the rings don’t guarantee anything, of course, but we love drinking Coca-Cola’s shit water, so what do we know?

I know, I know, monogamy is also about protecting the bloodline and making sure we’re not being cuckolded, but that’s only the animal reason for human families. Ask a biologist what the evolutionary explanation is of adult spanking or Japanese sex robots or any of the thousands of other unnatural human fetishes. You won’t stump the biologist, because the biologist’s imagination is infinite. She can guess at an evolutionary reason for why you prefer one kind of shit water to another. But that’s the point: we can think of everything, but animals can hardly think of anything.

And that’s why sex is so humiliating and traumatic, because it’s what all the animals do. Those are the same animals we’ve slaughtered or conquered, the same ones we own as living machines or livestock; the same ones we keep on leashes as our pets or slaves; the same animals we run over and leave to rot on the side of the road, with no thought of burying them—these are the creatures that are also happy to fuck each other in broad daylight. We’re the arrogant animals who imagine we have the dignity of being something miraculous: we’re people, not just animals. So why are we still so eager to touch each other’s private parts? If you have audiovisual evidence of your partner having sex, you better keep it secret, because if you can prove he or she is an animal, someone might just come along and run your partner over with their car and call it road kill.

Coca-Cola: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

[Rashad, also known as the Cackler, is an old homeless man who has wandered North America for decades and is notorious for his stream of diatribes on a wide range of subjects.]

*****

Where to begin when the folly and madness are everywhere?

The other day I saw this Coke commercial. Ever notice how on TV they’re always drinking Coke out of glass bottles, never out of cheap-looking plastic ones or tin cans—which are the only ones you can find in the real world? When was the last time you saw a glass Coca Cola bottle outside of a commercial? They get those glass bottles from the 1950s with a time machine, from when doctors told kids that smoking cigarettes makes you as healthy as Hercules. Back then the saintly medical doctor advised mothers, “When you pack your kid’s lunch, don’t forget to add the box of smokes right between the apple and the ham sandwich.”

But I’d like to know why the actors that are paid to look orgasmic from drinking sugar water on TV aren’t as celebrated as those that win Academy awards for their movies. Which kind of acting takes more skill, acting ordinary in an Oscar-bait drama or gaslighting the audience into normalizing corporate weirdness?

Coca-Cola is weird as fuck. The soft drink is chemically engineered to fuck us over. It’s “soft” because it’s not as hard as alcohol. Alcohol is hard and sugar is soft, I guess, because alcohol puts you to sleep when you drink too much, so you smack your face on the floor, but sugar makes your ass or belly soft and flabby.

The Coke Company, though, has an army of predatory engineers that look over every aspect of their product, and all they’re asking is whether their witch’s brew is sufficiently diabolical. Besides sugar, Coke is filled with sweeteners like Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Neotame, and other wicked unnatural shit they extracted from the remnants of a comet that visited us from another galaxy. Why add just one sweetener when you can whip up fifty?

In the ads, Coke is served in glass bottles to make the drink look as precious as wine—even though Coke is shit-hued brown; their slogan, “Coke is it” does us the service of reminding us subliminally that Coke is shit. Coke is made from toxic garbage and like the dump you take that wreaks the bathroom for hours, even the Coke ads steer clear of their product.

If Coke is it, what exactly is it? It is anything you want it to be. That’s why the ads sell everything under the sun except the sugar water. Coca Cola itself is just shit, but we’re encouraged to imagine that shit can be happiness or helping your neighbour or peace on Earth. But they never sell the drink itself. How could they? The drink is essentially shit.

Forget smearing lipstick on a pig. What if the Coke salesman had to be honest about what he’s selling us? There’s a knock at your door and 1949’s Willy Loman is standing on your doorstep. He’s stuffed a steaming turd into a glistening glass bottle. He tells you to guzzle the stinking, wretched filth because it’s not shit, after all. The turd is only it—not shit, but Joy and Friendship and Progress and God Almighty. Worship Coke because Coke is everywhere and it’s shit, and shit is what we deserve because God is dead and we killed him.

How did we get addicted to shit? If our brain’s pleasure center can be so easily exploited, how can any of our judgments be trusted? Is it possible we could be wrong about practically everything?

Bounties of Liberty: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

Rashad, also known as the Cackler, is an old homeless man who has wandered North America for decades and is notorious for his stream of diatribes on a wide range of subjects. He appears in my novel God Decays. This is the second in a series of his collected works of dark prose poetry, which his acolytes across the continent record for posterity.

* * *

I was sleeping on an airport bench and was rudely awoken by a wall-mounted television screen playing a CNN interview with an American politician. I had to scramble to avoid being infected by the politico’s anticommunication and hit my head as I rolled off the bench. What a cruel joke the mob plays on itself by electing cynics to office and then standing by to degrade itself as it watches the farce play out on the news! As if anyone with much more power than you is worth listening to even for a moment; as if he’d level with you, telling you what you need or deserve to know, instead of taking advantage of your weakness. The pundits and journalists feed off politicians like vampires: they’re content to betray their journalistic principles as long as they can be physically near the powers and principalities, to imbibe their inhuman energies, the officeholder’s sociopathy converting into the reporter’s pretense of savviness. It’s a game for the courtiers to play with the crowd that needs to forget its child emperor is running around with no clothes on. Are you one of the ignorant sheeple, fast asleep in your collective psychosis? If you are, you’ll flock to your TV or your Facebook page for the political news, to hear the latest empty sound bite from one of the monsters in charge. If instead you’re a savvy member of the corporate media, who has the stomach for a degree of cynicism that can only fall short of the politician’s, you’ll fawn over the monsters to earn your paycheck, but you’ll pride yourself on being different from the mob. You know better than the gullible viewers; you’re privy to the dreadful secret of democracy. You’ll send out obnoxious signals to the viewers that even though you’re in league with the inhuman demagogues, providing the platform for them to degrade the public discourse with their doubletalk, sophistry, pandering, platitudes, fake statistics, and spins, you’re halfway as cynical as the leaders and so naturally you’re not personally buying any part of what they’re saying. You see through it all and can pick it apart with your insider analysis. You keep it real to enlighten the viewer, so you can face yourself in the mirror and pretend that you’re performing a service for the good of democracy, that a functioning free society is worth having, in which case the voters must be kept informed. So you inform them as much as your limited cynicism will allow. You peel back the curtain only part of the way, because if you could see the whole truth you’d be as crooked as the elected officials. You’d be a player like them, a predator competing for power with your share of dark energy and attracting know-nothing followers in the petty betrayals that pass for honourable conflicts between the emasculated, civilized leaders of a democracy. Instead, you’re a functionary, a useful idiot whose outsized ego the leaders know how to stroke so that you sell the viewers out in spite of yourself as you bend to your masters’ will, lobbing them softball questions instead of shutting down the matrix. Where do politicians go to learn how to speak like a politician? Is there a secret school somewhere hidden from the rest of the world, like Hogwarts? Where do the ambitious snakes learn how to conceal the depth of their misanthropy? What textbook instructs them how to pretend to uphold the ideals of America’s noble lies, to seem like selfless statesmen who respect their constituents? And how toxic and soulless must our leaders nevertheless be for their contempt to spill out in spite of all those self-defenses! What discipline they must have to endure the fraud of making public statements to millions of people, each of whom they despise, to flatter the masses even as the vacuity or dishonesty of their rhetoric reveals that they are, of course, just traitors. There’s no such secret Machiavellian Institute. The predators are born among us. They’re mainly the popular alpha male bullies in high school, the ones who get all the girls and whose rich parents gift them all the toys, the elites driven to join the impotent student council not by anything as insipid as love for the school, but by their contempt for the majority that never shows any interest in leadership. Their extracurricular activities are so many bogus displays of a well-rounded character, so many disguises for the little psychopaths as they begin to take their first steps across the backs of their inferiors. They fudge their résumé, filling it with bureaucratic business-speak that sounds like it was written by a robot not programmed for human warm-heartedness. And they use their good looks and psycho charisma to fail upward until they’re in position to test the strength of their resentment in an election for high office. If they can prove they secretly hate the other citizens more than their rival parasites can, they’re awarded with the power of that office. And so their journey to the dark side is complete. And all the while the voters cling to the lies spewed by these charlatans—not because they have any interest in policies and not even because they respect their elected representative. No, the political theater provides the masses only infotainment and an excuse to feel like they, too, are discharging their obligations as free citizens. They’re riveted by the fake political scandals that the corporate media thrive on, because superficial political conflict can play out like a slow-motion disaster movie or a wrestling match, which the consumers are trained to favour. But these free citizens are engaged and informed all year round, because they’ve decided to shoot themselves in the foot whenever they listen to what the politicians and corporate media tell them, instead of running for the exits at the first sign of their disinformation. Anyone who voluntarily listens to a single sentence spoken in public by a politician thereby commits a crime against humanity. It’s not a question of thinking critically about your sources of information. Merely being there at the receiving end of the politico’s inhumanity is bad enough; merely participating in the charade is dehumanizing. Nothing of value is ever learned from hearing a single word spoken by a politician in the post-television era, since none of that creature’s words is even remembered or is worth remembering. That’s because the inhuman leaders never say anything! Their crafty pseudo-statements cancel each other out like matter and antimatter, leaving only the vague impression that a VIP has just been there on the screen but has since vanished as soon as the viewer becomes bored and changes the channel. What lingers isn’t useful info or a political promise offered in good faith, but the pretense that the democratic society is peaceful and high-minded. See how the leaders are no blood-thirsty tyrants but are suit-wearing, well-spoken men and women, trustworthy professionals who have the public’s best interest at heart! After all, they subject themselves to interrogations by a ferocious press, don’t they? And they don’t storm out of the room or have the interviewer arrested when pressed on some unpleasant subject. No, they merely tame the interviewers, stroking their egos by giving them access to the dark powers that be in the first place; they exploit the fact that American journalism is a business owned by multinationals that profit not from subversive investigations but from infotainment; and they merely ignore any wayward question that slips through the cracks, running out the clock until the next block of ads, with their trusty talking points. Thus together, the politicos, courtiers, and neopeasants preserve the illusion of a functioning, inoffensive democracy. This is the cost of advancing from an old-fashioned tyranny to a free society. We’re free from oppression so we can be ourselves, even as we’ve been degraded so none of us deserves to live; we’re free to speak our mind, even as we have no idea what ought to be said; we’re free to go wherever we want, even as the fraud of our civilization has rendered all places absurd. Wake me when it’s time to vote, won’t you? So I can smear my feces all over the ballot.

Manjaws: A Rant by Rashad the Cackler

Rashad, also known as the Cackler, is an old homeless man who has wandered North America for decades and is notorious for his stream of diatribes on a wide range of subjects. He appears in my novel God Decays. This is the first in a series of his collected works of dark prose poetry, which his acolytes across the continent record for posterity.

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The other day I was watching TV through a store window and I saw another female news anchor with manjaws. Do you know what those are? They’re square jaws. Lantern jaws. The kind you would have seen on William Wallace as he sliced off the limbs of the English. Or the kind that were clenched by a marauding Neanderthal, sweaty, hairy and bloodied from carnage on the plains of Africa, way back in the mists of time. Maybe he’d singlehandedly slain a Saber-toothed tiger but then he was magically transported to our era and he decides not to hunt us down but to read us the evening news that there was another stabbing or a car pileup—only, surprise! The macho champion of men whose jawline is so square you’d drop everything just to follow him into battle—because all men with weak jawlines are cowards who would double-cross you at the first opportunity—anyway, surprise: the dude is a chick. You were anticipating the face of the News Corporation to be the quintessence of masculinity, to reassure you that men still rule, so your country is stable and there’s nothing to fear, no confusing realignment of power on the horizon. But they’ve replaced that face with a woman’s, and just to rub it in they’ve picked the one-in-a-million Wonder Woman who boasts the manjaws of Richard the Lionheart or Genghis Khan. They sent out casting calls saying, “We at the TV News Monopoly are looking for a female news reader with a masculine jawline to infuriate our male viewers, to signal to them that yes, the old rules still apply, everyone still associates strength and gravitas with that archetypal symbol of masculinity—only, women can be man-like. If you have such anomalous manjaws, call us right away and we’ll hire you on the spot.” It’s all a sham, though, because women aren’t really taking over and most women can’t be man-like, no matter how hard they try. Almost all the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires are men, and it’s the same with the corporate titans and political leaders. Men still rule the world and do you want to know why? It’s because someone’s got to run the place right into the ground, and it’s certainly not going to be women. You think women are sociopathic enough to make the hard choice of picking our bloodthirsty, barbaric species above all others? Are women going to disgrace themselves like the wealthy douchebags who spend their money on golden toilets and sprawling palaces—which no one has ever worked hard enough in all of human history to have actually earned—and then to look at themselves in the mirror and smile, knowing that a billion people are starving? No, only men can rule, because leaders have to be assholes. Running your corporation, your country, your species into the ground, never taking responsibility, and bringing everyone else down with you—that’s a man’s job! But now it’s fashionable to flatter women that they can be as monstrous as men, because everything has to be equal, right? Well, where are all the female movie villains? Which evil vixen was ever as bad-ass as Darth flipping Vader? Last time I checked, Dracula, the mummy, the werewolf, and Frankenstein and his monster were all men. Which little lady was ever as straight-up demonic as Hitler or Stalin? Get the hell out of here with your right to equality! No one’s as cruel or as clueless as human males. We’ve earned that title and the right to rule after our thousands of years of slaughtering in the names of fictitious gods. We males have done the legwork of enslaving or exterminating almost all the animal species on land—thank you very much! So we don’t need women’s backseat driving on how to let power go to our heads. Least of all do we need them pretending they can do all this dirty work with no disastrous input from men. Let’s just see what happens, shall we? After only a few decades of feminist rulers, I’d wager the ecosystem might even be saved from ruin—and they’d call that “leadership”! So watch Ms. Manjaws sitting there with her porn starlet’s hairdo and her caked-on makeup and those huge honking manly jaws! Just watch her attempt to be as vapid and perfunctory at her job as the male news readers of old. Watch her take down that seven-figure salary for a monkey’s labour, and just see if she can squander it as rapidly as a man would. We should all be curious to learn if she can shamelessly carry around a trophy boy toy in her middle age, like an alpha male would. That’s the problem with late modernity: our symbols no longer mean anything and no one can trust in our myths anymore. She may have the jawline of a killer, but her heart’s not in it. No one’s fooling me! I’d follow her into battle only if I knew for certain she’d lead us right smack into the maw of crushing defeat, albeit with great, sanctimonious speeches, tall tales of derring-do, and bullshit mythic symbols of our noble enterprise. Until women can prove they can destroy the planet with the best of them, the only women I want to see on TV should be content with baby-weak jawlines. Manjaws are for the brutes whose thankless task is to destroy the planet, the brutes women love best.