The Iraq war continues though there is now no stated rationale behind it and no stated goal in fighting it. The Iran war looms. The economy teeters on the brink of collapse, on the brink of the burst of the bubble of unsustainable economic leveraging to maintain the illusion of wealth. The panel tasked to investigate domestic surveillance of citizens (read: dissidents) has been “denied” the security clearance to carry out the investigation into wrongdoing (!!) and unceremoniously disbanded. No-one reported on it. This month for the first time ever we have public acknowledgment from several quarters of the Echelon program, which records and analyzes every contact every citizen makes, by phone or online, regardless of carrier or technology, for the military intelligence (NSA) system rather than the civilian intelligence (CIA) community. No-one reported on it. Draconian measures that will surely soon result lag only as a function of the inertia that must be fought in constructing mega-mechanisms for such enforcement. Macromilitary tyranny on the superpower scale, after all, is a logistical issue as much as it is an ideological one. As if to confirm our suspicions, the civilian boss of the civilian intelligence agency has been forced out, to be replaced by military brass with close ties to military intelligence (NSA), essentially unifying the national intelligence/analysis/diplomacy apparatus as a single entity answering to the military command. Military brass or central neoconservative players now effectively run every wing of our government with statutory powers. An incredible wave of anti-immigration and pro-consumption sentiment has overtaken the public even as record dollars that they don’t have are spent on mass culture entertainment and rank indulgence. Congress is powerless to do anything; any passed bill that runs afoul of White House policy or strategy is simply, publicly, and literally written off by the president as not-to-be-enforced with a great flourish and reference to the all-powerful (and “new for 9/11”) so-called unitary executive.

For the most part, the public stridently desires only cheaper gas, fewer immigrants, and better television, and cares little about how the government goes about delivering such things, much less what else the government might be doing. A few here and there hope for change in two upcoming elections… but they will be shocked when they see what actually happens—and I don’t mean who wins.

Children, look around. Look around **closely** and remember.

You are living in the middle of Weimar Mark II. In short days you will reach the end of it. Far too soon for comfort and before you realize what is happening, something will have changed. People you know will simply disappear, and others you know will be persecuted, imprisoned, destroyed—and unless you are very careful, you won’t realize that they were innocent—and unless you are very brave, you won’t worry about it much even if you do.

And when everyone wakes up again, decades from now, untold atrocities and long, grey years of terror will have been written in stone and a new generation will be asking you, in the same way that the world once asked the Germans:

“How could you have let it come to all of this? How could you not have seen?”

By that time, it will seem obvious once more, as transparent as it should have been all along, and you will gasp at the evil that has been visited upon you, that all have had a hand in visiting upon each other, and you will wonder at the wasted years and lives. It will seem to you that you have been unfairly fooled and made to suffer.

But of course by the time you understand, the story will have been written already by the scribes long ago. We are living in the Weimar Republic. We, you and I, Americans, are the next Reich, the all-too-immutable foundations of which are already solidly and well in place.

Those who cannot be bothered to learn their history are indeed doomed to repeat it.

—

Panem et circenses, while it all comes tumbling down!

I really need to write. Not more nonfiction. Not more periodical pieces. I need to write fiction. I need to emerge from my cocoon, finally, after long years of writing. There are words in me, I know it. Only they are fragmentary and inexperienced, collected and maintained in some disorder. Still, I know how to write. I have been a professional writer for more than a decade. The trick is to start, and to continue until you finish. Nothing more, nothing less.

What is wrong with me is less a deficiency in talent or vision and more a deficiency in drive and optimism—in basic good attitude, of which I have none and have had none for years.

—

In the meantime, there is always truth to both overjoy us and weigh us down at the same time.

—

My life is progressing. It is happening, as is the life of everyone in my generation. We are the adults now. That we have not managed to accomplish in as short a time what our parent(s) materially accomplished is no excuse or preventative; we are and will continue to be—older.

Unless we claim the throne from those that preceded us and begin to attempt to hold ourselves up as exemplary to those that follow us, we will be forgotten, irrelevant, and unable to self-sustain. Nevertheless, that is precisely what we are in danger of doing, due in large part to our lazy complicity with an untenable economic system and worldview provided by our parents and the remnant intertia of the most magnificently bourgeois past in global history.

It is time for us to grow balls and make revolution in the streets as our misguided parents did to no account for lack of vision and education, or to take jobs as the baristas that will serve the capital class and the foreign markets and travellers that will soon occupy our places in a still-corrupt but kinetic (especially with regard to markets) world.

I think feminism has been the largest case of “Oh shit, I ate the cake and now I don’t have it!” in history.

Guess what, girls?

– Men don’t get to have babies
– They don’t get maternity leave
– They have to work long hours (someone always has!) to keep up the consumerist lifestyle
– They don’t get much chance to mantain real social networks

You wanted to have what men had, and you got it. As of now, the way society is structured, you can have one or the other. Now choose, because it’s getting tired to see you swing back and forth and try to have it both ways. You want to have it both ways and you think that’s fair because you’re a woman, hear you roar? You’re going to have trouble convincing the other 50% of the population that they should sublimate their own identities to an even greater degree and work twice as hard to subsidize your opportunity to be a mom and at the same time to draw a full-time salary equal to theirs while doing no work so long as you’re nursing that baby.

Or can we finally make the discussion about human rights rather than gender rights as should have been the case all along while everyone was busy hating men? Can we finally talk about how capitalism values work units rather than people and how the only reason either gender is on this treadmill is because of consumerism? Can we finally talk about whether or not it is necessary to replace cell phones once a year, to consume 4,000 calories per day, and to live in a house with six times the number of rooms as occupants? Can we finally talk about personal leave rather than maternity leave, say a guaranteed three months per year and two years per decade, without affecting job status, with the temporary vacancies filled by equally paid interns/apprentices from amongst the population of young people desperately needing experience and job training and currently mostly working for years for free as unpaid interns to get it?

Let’s end the wishful thinking and the gender bickering and realize that the reason for the wage gap is capitalism—the value of productive labor over all other forms of routinized practice and of the work unit over the person. Let’s realize that if everyone gets adequate personal time measured in months per year and years per decade, and we can implement socialized medicine and socialized daycare on top of it, then working motherhood/fatherhood becomes much less of problem. And finally, let’s realize that there’s never going to be a solution along the lines of what today’s radical feminism asks for: women being guaranteed equal pay over an elapsed time without having to produce equal work over that same time, simply because they are women and are “biologically different.”

We men appreciate the (late) acknowledgment that women are biologically different, but you already burned the “men should be in the workplace so that we won’t have to” bridge. In the ’60s. That’s right, there was a difference between men’s work in the workplace and women’s work in the home back then: men’s labor was almost entirely alienated. Guess what? We didn’t have any choice either. Still don’t. Now some of you want us to work harder so that you can have all of the (actually fairly slim in the spiritual sense) benefits of being a man and all of the benefits of being a woman, too, with men picking up the slack to save you the real, measurable consequences of these choices. Ummmm, I have no intention of participating in a system like that.

Let’s all talk about trying to give everyone the time they need, whether male or female, and whether it’s to raise a family, to write a book, or just to go off into the hills, meditate, and be thankful that you don’t have to see your boss for a while.

—

Or, to put it another way, feel free to demand any rights you want, so long as you always demand the same rights for men and women alike. It is what you asked for. Why should we ask (or settle) for any less?

—

I don’t think women realize or care how unhappy men are. We have nothing. We are empty. We are spiritually devoid of meaning. We are wage-slaves, regarded as labor and nothing more by the economy, as idiot sperm donors and nothing more by women, and as criminals and nothing more by society. There is very little incentive not to commit suicide.

Most men I know are chronically depressed, myself included. Most men I know talk secretly, when amongst other men, of fantasies about suicide, mass murder, deep, permanent drug states, escape.

Escape.

We don’t have these fantasies because we are evil. We have them because we are facing lives devoid of meaning, hated and alone, and we can’t have children. Yes, life is empty for everyone. The existential question looms forever large. But we can never have children. Those ties will never be ours.

Ladies, look deep into your biology and your subcionscious and those drives and needs that you feel but are embarassed as feminists to feel… and realize that we can’t even aspire to that. That un-loneliness that comes through the extension of self—that secret something that you feel when you think about someday having your own child, even if you swear to yourself and everyone else that you never will—we know what it is. We need it, too, but we will never have it and can never have it. The closest we could ever hope to come is through fatherhood in a nuclear family, but we have now largely lost this, for better or for worse, to gender equality.

A man is funamentally individual and alone in the universe, arising from a mother but returning only to mud. With a man, the chain is always broken. For a man, life always end when he ends. There is nothing of him that lives on. There is never another generation. There is never a legacy. Men are the final note in an unheard song, and every man knows it. I suspect that this is the reason for the dominance of traditional patrilineality: it was an implicit social attempt (a poor one) to compensate for this loss.

I think modern women, and feminist women in particular, value motherhood much less than many men do.

1) My high school is #163 of Newsweek’s “Top 1000 High Schools” in the U.S for college-bound kids. That makes me feel really sorry for American high school students from “lower” schools, because I hated my high school. I was college bound and I felt like I had to throw a tantrum to be allowed to learn and study rather than just be babysat like a brain-dead inmate.

2) There are too many birthdays and holidays in my life to keep track of. Since January: New Year, father’s birthday, a sister’s birthday (#1), Chinese New Year, St. Valentine’s day, my birthday, a sister’s birthday (#4), St. Patrick’s day, a sister’s birthday (#3), Easter/Equinox, a sister’s birthday (#2, today), May Day, and next week, Mother’s day, with more to follow. It’s beginning of May (month #5) and by next week there will have been over a dozen “special” days that involve celebration, gift-giving, or some sort of observance. That is more than one every other week, i.e. **too many**, especially with how busy and stressful my life is right now. I have no time or money to gift-shop (again) but wouldn’t you know it, today I am gift-shopping (again). I’m all for “celebrating life,” but this is f’n ridiculous.

3) My credit card was stolen for the fifth time this week. Not the card, just the number. The Man called me to tell me that someone was trying to use my credit card to make a large purchase in China. He wanted to know if I was in China trying to make a large purchase. I told him “No.” He told me he’d cancel that card and send me a new card. I guess it’s just the price of doing business in modernity.

4) It’s **hard** to take pictures of anything these days. Everyone is freaked out, either because they think you’re invading their privacy if you take a photo of anything that is also in **their** line of sight, or because they think you’re a terrorist (if they’re one of **those** people). Everyone takes the existence of documentary photos for granted. Everyone also complains about how “plastic” marketing has become. They don’t seem to understand that the only way that documentary photos exist is if someone is allowed (if not paid) to take them, and that the reason marketing looks more and more fake is that nothing is allowed to be snapped and even if you manage to snap it no one will allow an image of themself or anything they own (and let’s face it, **everything** is onwed) to be used, for whatever reason. There will be no real pictures for the next generation to use to study us. They will all be fakes, Photoshop jobs, or plastic perfect. And we will be to blame.

5) I am tired of social existence. I prefer to be a sociopath and lunatic. It’s easier.

I can be a hothead.

—

I don’t necessarily apologize for anything.