writing

I’ve been sleeping a lot more lately, which is probably a good thing.  Also been having a lot of nightmares every night, though, which isn’t so hot.  Ever since Biden’s ‘unity’ speech and the accompanying propaganda variety show I’ve had this feeling like something was just ‘wrong.’  I couldn’t put my finger on it until I woke up today.  I think, in that moment between sleep and lucidity, I finally figured it out.

Every morning since the 2016 election, and particularly since the 2017 J20 protests in D.C., one of the first things I thought to myself on waking up was ‘how do we slow it down?  How do we stop this from happening?  How can we unify to stop this?’  ‘It’ and ‘this’ being fascism, of course.  And at least part of every day was dedicated to that cause (even if it was just thought).  A lot of bad things happened to people who had this reaction.  Sure, a lot of people spoke out, which was fantastic, but for people who were in any way identified as practical obstacles to the fascist program of corruption, treason, and supremacy, things went beyond just being criticized on the internet.  Activists were antagonized or jailed.  Public servants had their lives, careers, or reputations ruined without just cause.  There were some very dark days, and they changed a lot of us as people.  We aren’t the same hobbits who left The Shire.  Happy endings after a war, even a quiet war, only happen in stories.

Then came the pandemic, and the same smothering repression previously wielded against those fighting for human rights and public integrity was turned against science and against people speaking out against reckless coronavirus policy.  Things got weird again, early last year.  My social media presence was broader, and I trusted my phone more, before that time, and I’ll leave it at that.  Never let power identify you as an influencer, lol.  The point being, this narrative that all of this, fascism, coronavirus debate, even the behavior of private and public power, was all just some benign disagreement is absolutely false.  Some dirty shit happened because they saw this as an endgame fight, just as the good people did.  Whisper campaigns, character assassination setups, phone spoofing, off-books surveillance, web fuckery, creepshow threats.  You name it.  It happened to the folks fighting back against fascism and against that administration.  I would argue that it’s still happening as power champions fascist politicians and continues the quiet struggle for oligarchic supremacy against the public good, although they’re being more careful now that he’s not in the White House.

And then, after a violent, murderous attempted coup and the subsequent public opinion shift, the political class on both ‘sides’ tells us that it’s time to move on.  The business class tells us that it’s time to go back to our unsatisfying, low-wage jobs or our inadequate welfare and earn money so that we can spend it at strip malls pretending that we aren’t utterly empty and disappointed with our lives.  They tell us that the coronavirus wasn’t that big a deal and anyway it’s almost gone.  They tell us that the fascists were good boys (and girls) and anyway the attack was really waged by antifascists who wanted to destroy freedom.  And all the while anchors and pundits throw around labels that they don’t fully understand, for purposes that will expend themselves in the span of a news cycle.

The truth is that business interests and self-interested politicians committed a crime against humanity and institutionally murdered over 500,000 Americans, that the Trump administration sold out to authoritarian powers (great and small) in exchange for personal favors, that the Republican Party spent four (forty) years turning itself into the American Nazi Party, that there was a coordinated, private and public, attempt to overthrow the government and democracy itself on January 6^th 2021, and we’re not even getting into Puerto Rico, kids in cages, the possibility that the Trump administration had an antifascist demonstrator murdered by the state, the upside-down Bible crackdown, the criminalization of Black Lives Matter, the weird fascist fuck train that was summer 2020, organized and criminal vote suppression, the Postal Service, or any of the rest of it.  I remember all of it, because I spent four years calling attention to all of it, and paying the prices for that.  Now the beautiful people say it’s not mine to worry about, anymore.  It’s not yours.  It’s theirs, again.  Now I’m supposed to just forgive and forget.  We’re all supposed to just forget, and pretend we didn’t learn anything, and go back to being small.

The truth is that we were all collectively victimized, even if they never went after or got to you, individually.  Many people have made the comparison between current U.S. politics and an abusive domestic relationship, and I think that’s pretty accurate.  Before, we all had an abusive father figure in the character of Donald Trump (and his toxic family, regardless of gender).  Now it’s more of an abusive spouse situation in the demeanor of the Republican Party.  We need to stop using that word ‘conservative.’  It just means reactionary.  It’s code for oppression and exclusion.  But we’ve all been told that, now that the cops have shown up to the house, the family needs to put on a good show and move on with life.  None of that stuff that happened before is important now because the people who matter in this big, national family need us all to forget.

So, I figured out why things feel ‘off’ to me, and why I’m having nightmares every night.  This isn’t just the usual political bickering (hint: libs, it never was).  The government was turned into a weapon against us, and people will remember that until the day they die, no matter how many times you tell us it didn’t happen or that we should just forget it.  I sure as hell won’t forget.  And I won’t forgive.  And I don’t think the majority of the population will do so, either.  It’s not even a matter of choice, really.  When people are exposed, particularly intentionally exposed, to extended periods of trauma and then they are told afterward to delete that experience from their thoughts, feelings, and future behaviors, without any sort of honesty or reconciliation or amends, things follow a certain pattern.  That energy has to go somewhere.  It doesn’t just vanish.  Some go insane.  Some will internalize it and kill themselves, either quickly or slowly.  Some will never trust again.  Some will externalize it and turn it into anger, hopefully with some productive direction, but not always.  If the political and financial classes of this country cannot or will not fully admit what happened over the last four years, what is still happening now, and the danger we are still in, then they will face a circumstantial and systemic reckoning that emerges from the deletion of these displaced and forgotten years.  Nightmares unsoothed have a way of spreading.

That right there is what both witchy tumblr and sociologists / political scientists call ‘a curse.’  Which is another way of saying ‘the consequences of action.’  And that curse can only be broken with honesty and courageous, righteous sociopolitical action.  Not pretty words.  Action.  Accountability.  You aren’t the shining democratic city on the hill.  You’re just another failing democracy with a very recent autocratic episode in history and a lack of political will to change course.  You’re Russia, before Putin.  You’re the German Republic, before Hitler.  And unless the center can find their individual and collective character, the nightmare has only just started, for everyone.

Quiet is not the same as empty.  Calm, and a breadth of focus, are not synonymous with amnesia.  None of this has gone away, and we will remember.  What was taken by evil people must be restored.  You cannot cut a hole this large in the soul of humanity, of history, and expect to fill it with platitudes.  A great debt is owed, to millions of people, and the laws of social science and history will see that it is repaid.  What form that takes will depend on how we all conduct ourselves in the coming months and years.  But however inconvenient it may be to the present establishment or future ones, none of this, and none of the people participating in it, will be forgotten.  This story is still being written, and it’s no dream.

https://achrilock.com/2021/03/03/7949/

So, the project of western Enlightenment, the triumph of capitalism over traditional feudalism, so often viewed through the revisionist and exclusionary lens of progress, was ultimately the reorientation of individual and collective human focus from the project of what ‘should’ be done, by the strong to the weak, to the project of what ‘could’ be done.  It was the abandonment of the social contract for a more anarchic, yet paradoxically hierarchical economic and sociopolitical orientation.  Our job as reformers, as undeniable revolutionaries in the present historical context, is to return honor, accountability, and equality to human affairs without disregarding the gains we have made in rationality over superstition, in egalitarianism over autocratic whim.  Above all, though, we must abandon the notion that our intrinsic need for elevated social status (now achieved largely through more material wealth) and science itself somehow demand the structurally orchestrated suffering of others.  Math and science tell us how our choices will play out.  They should not tell us what choices to make.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/28/7896/

‘Honor’ as an applied concept needs to be resurrected.

Not the old collective virtue signaling or desperate fear of making mistakes, but maybe status as a measure of personal honesty and integrity rather than as a function of wealth, deference to arbitrary authority, artificial standing, or dedication to tranquility over justice.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/28/7888/

I’m not a Christian now (I was when I was younger, but as I grew intellectually I began to understand that, while God might or might not be real, if it is real it’s mostly silent and it’s so much larger than humanity as to be inexplicable and telling others what it says or wants is at best well-intentioned but misguided activism and at worst weaponization of something that should be sacred for the purpose of sustaining human injustice and hierarchy, which is not legally criminal but is most certainly ethically so).

Anyway, Jesus, the real Jesus, not the twisted, white supremacist capitalist Jesus of modernity, was a good teacher who had some really good things to say and some good lessons for everybody about how to treat other people.  Following that is perfectly fine.  I dunno if you can claim that it’s divine (I mean, sure, you can claim it but screenshots or it didn’t happen, right?).  But it’s whatever.  There are worse paths to follow, for sure.

But I think the biggest, most heinous lie that was weaponized by the Christian churches was that the good should be meek, deferential, or polite in the face of injustice.  I don’t want to imply that people should be ‘mean’ (I’m mean, but we’re talking about actual good people, here, not me).  The Jesus I learned about was the one who flipped the tables because he was angry.  The Jesus I learned about told evil exactly what it could do with itself, and then organized to make sure that it happened.  The Jesus I learned about was a fucking socialist badass who hated to see the weak suffer and the mighty delight in that suffering or ignore it.

So say what you need to say.  Speak your truth, as they say.  Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, maybe you gotta pay a social price for it.  That’s life among humans.  But don’t you dare let anybody tell you that you have to be nice to be right, or to be worthy.  That’s how power takes.  That’s how power wins.  By shutting your mouth and getting you to deny your own righteous sadness or anger.  By making you give up the fight before it has even started.  The Jesus I learned about wouldn’t put up with that shit, and neither should you.  We would all be better off if more good people would allow themselves to be ferocious, not fearless but also not prisoners to fear.

I like and respect people, Christian or otherwise, who take the time to think about what’s right and what’s wrong, who don’t lean on some abstract system to make that determination for them or to excuse their inaction in the face of injustice, and who don’t need the fear of the police, the state, or a big dad in the sky to make them want to be good.  I like and respect people who care more about setting things right than looking virtuous.  I like people who understand that the only way the world gets better is when good people are willing to fight to make it so.  I hate a liar and a hypocrite, and so did the Jesus I learned about when I was little.  But even worse is a person who knows the difference between right and wrong but won’t risk anything to see things made right.  Politeness and meekness are not virtue.  Virtue is not a fashion statement.

Learn.  Speak.  Act.  Learn from triumphs and mistakes, but above all, be brave.  The good in this world deserves nothing less.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/22/7726/

While it is still Sunday, let us pray. The Bible tells us that to lay the head upon the bosom is very Jesus to do it. This is the word, and the word is HIS law. Thusly must he who would do it do so, and he who would not do so abstain from it. As it was in the time of kjkljgkfgj so on and so forth, until the kingdom becomes an democracy. Amen.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/21/7722/

Dear diary.  Today I did jack shit (excepting, of course, delving into my extensive back catalogue of 90′s PC games).  I was able to do this, rather absent mindedly, because the new president, capitalist-curious though he may be, isn’t completely batshit crazy.  I was able to have a traditional Saturday, content in the knowledge that he and his administration weren’t engaging in extensive corruption and crime, and cultivating fascist sentiment among the peasantry in order to cover for this behavior.  Evening plans include a leisurely dinner, followed by some quality beer and a movie.  We’ve been robbed of too many days like this, lately, and though many still suffer hardships on this day and I feel for their egregious plights, I, for a nice fucking change of pace, am not one of them.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/20/7687/

So, coups are on the table as long as one is of sufficient social status? Cool. Noted. ☺

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/13/7562/

Every bully I ever knew? Complete terrifying monster who reveled in the exercise… until they get caught. Until they fuck up. Then it’s all quoting rules and finding loopholes. At least until the people who outrank them turn their backs again. This is no different.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/12/7515/

If it was hatred I would just give up.  I’d just stop.  I tend to let people I hate burn in the fires that they, themselves, started.  The purest form of justice.  But from my perspective, you all are the ones still stuck in the nightmare.  I’m trying to wake you from it, best as I know how.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/03/7288/

I mean, I get it.  I like a happy ending as much as the next person.  But, you haven’t dealt with the real traitors.  And dealing with traitors is what makes an empire an empire.  And, now, every person or group with a lick of sense and a little bit of money knows that the United States can be torn down by setting its worst against its best.  They know that it is led by people who value personal status and comfort above all else.  And that, my illustrious, privileged friends, means that we’re all in deep fucking shit.

https://achrilock.com/2021/02/02/7258/

I can’t remember the song from one of the most formative moments of my life. It might not even exist in this timeline. All I have is an image in a memory. That’s the price that I paid, you pony-faced bitch-ass banshees.

https://achrilock.com/2021/01/31/7200/

Jane Austen is the undisputed queen of all trolls, either living or dead.  She is an example to which we may all, though pitiably inadequately but also justly and beneficially, forever compare ourselves.

https://achrilock.com/2021/01/23/6991/