Blaming what is essentially an endless epidemic of mass murder on mental health issues, while simultaneously embracing narratives of pedophile rings run out of pizzerias, Jewish space lasers, microchips in vaccines, and whatever else might be the latest horseshit coming out of these performatively pious shitstain tools of oligarchy today should, by all reasonable circumstances, be identified as counterintuitive.
Mark Twain reportedly said “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that these killings are the act of self-identified good guys with guns, acting in the service of what they perceive as justice, in what must be finally acknowledged as the second American Civil War.
Just because it doesn’t look anything like the last time this country tore itself apart, doesn’t mean this isn’t precisely what is happening to us now.
But then again, a culture so shallow as ours, that all too often stops thinking at the “Good Guys/Bad Guys” stage, that embraces identitarianism of all social and political stripes in lieu of humanism, utterly lacks the imagination, let alone the insight, to perceive what’s happening to it in anyway other than through the filter of screened memory and received dramatization of fantasized non-experience, in an adolescent attempt to impose narrative order on chaos.
And furthermore…
As the heroes and villains algorithmic bullshit of comic book based movies have replaced nearly everything else in the culture of popular entertainment, cosplay, one of the oddest, and to my eyes creepiest, of that previously concealed from masscult world in which I’ve spent the last half century has become a pervasive aspect of group identity, separate and distinct from those people wandering around comic book conventions in sad and needy search for attention.
All these Nativist Christer men and women playing soldier of the soon to be upon us apocalypse, in camouflage and body armor, waving around weapons ownership of which they regard as their divine right, ultimately showing up for the attempted overthrow of the United States government with the same sort of passionate and incoherent enthusiasm they’d bring to Walmart on Black Friday, have mainstreamed that creepiness.
That’s sad and terrifying enough, in and of itself.
But I’ve been hipped to a number of newspaper puff pieces from 2018 about the Uvalde police department equipping itself in all this paramilitariphernalia with pride and glory, all butch posing, oozing smug self confidence.
So now, as their true selves have been revealed, we have police officers cosplaying as police officers, too.
1 Comment