Make Halloween Dangerous Again!
Halloween is quite easily my favorite holiday. A heathen celebration the Christians failed to conquer, it's a time of joyful chaos and youth rebellion decorated by skeletons, scattered leaves, flickering jack-o-lanterns, and bonfire smoke. A holiday where serial killers are lionized and everyone dresses in drag, betraying conformity to expose their darkest desires to be whores and outlaws. It's the one time of year when a genderfuck malcontent like me can feel halfway normal without having to sell out. It's also arguably this stupid countries only truly anarchist holiday, or at least it was and it still should be.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Halloween meant one night a year when kids owned the streets, wandering unsupervised from house to house dressed in disguise like demons and monsters, appropriating candy from random strangers under the threat of vandalism like tiny unions of egoists. Trick or Treat began as a threat. You could hand over the good stuff (and it better be good) or you could get your house fucked up in a toilet paper draped act of propaganda of the deed, letting the whole neighborhood and any other passing horde of hoodlums know who fucked up and why. In certain parts of the country there was a completely separate holiday called Hell Night, when children engaged in mass acts of gleeful sabotage against the parents, teachers, clergy, and cops who made them feel powerless during the rest of the year. Windows were broken, tires were slashed, and a sense of justice was returned to the universe.
Halloween and Hell Night weren't like Christmas or Easter. The only gifts you got where the gifts you took, the gifts you earned. It was an empowering event that celebrated lawlessness and the collective power of us against them. So it should come as little surprise that the thems of this world have conspired to neuter this heathen celebration of unfettered youth power, by badge, bible, or checkbook. Over the last couple decades Halloween has been transformed into something truly monstrous, the worst kind of monster, a fascistically vanilla monster called "normal". A pejorative so hideously fowl that it could have only been created by an adult, dead from the heart up.
Clever costumes constructed from Goodwill dumpster dives and pilfered drug store make-up have been Disneyfied and replaced by cheap mass produced commercials for corny Hollywood schlock. Feral gangs of sugar-high seeking adolescent illegalists have been rangled into domesticated doorbell chain gangs governed by cartels of uptight helicopter parents. The best junk food has been banished for being unwrapped or unhealthy and replaced by flavorless healthy alternatives to a good time. The moonlit blacktop playgrounds of nocturnal suburbia have become infested by curfew crunching cops and drowned in floodlights seeking to keep kids under adult thumbs even on the only night of the year that was once there's for the taking.
Well I say enough. This is a call to the kids of this country, both young and old, to revolt. Take back the streets. Take back Halloween from the beige forces of adulthood. It was never there's to take to begin with. So break the rules. Sneak out without your parents supervision. Dress to terrify and offend your marks. Get sick on lethal amounts chocolate. Punish the dicks who hand out raisins with shaving cream and rotten eggs. Egg a fucking cop car while your at it. Blow up your neighbors mailbox. Toilet paper your vice principles house and soak the mess with his hose so he cant clean it up. Smash a jack-o-lantern. Get ripped on forties lifted from the local mini-mart. Get finger fucked by your best friend in your grandmas stolen Gremlin. Be a fucking kid. Break the rules. Fuck up. Do something random and stupid. Suburbia's a goddamn prison so start a fucking riot.
And to all the adults in the room, especially the parents, give your kids a fucking break for a change. They may be your responsibility but they're not your property. Turn a blind eye. Hand out the good candy and take it on the fucking chin when your car gets shit-canned if you fail to deliver. You were kids once. Anarchist or not, you can remember what it was like to be the powerless prisoner of your parents or the state. I'm an agoraphobic basket-case. I've grown scared as I've grown old, but I take comfort in the idea that there are still little Stirnerites out there to stir the shit and make the man sweat. They'll here me shout "Right on!" from my living room window with a raised fist after taking a bat to my mailbox. Embrace the chaos, even if that means just not snitching. Keep the anarchist spirit of this season alive. Make Halloween dangerous again.
Happy Samhain, dearest motherfuckers. Keep it wicked and give em holy hell. Somebodies got to.
Peace, Love, & Anarchy- CH
Soundtrack; songs to raise hell to
* Double Dare by Bauhaus
* Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by the White Stripes
* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
* TV Set by the Cramps
* Suburbia by Arcade Fire
* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks
* The House that Heaven Built by Japandroids
* (Every Day Is) Halloween by Ministry
* Awful by Hole
* Rise Above by Black Flag
Posted by Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid) at 1:37 PM 2 comments:
In Defense of National Anarchism
When I first learned that I had been published on Attack the System, a site notorious for being something of a safe space for national anarchists, I was both confused and intrigued. Intrigued because the national anarchists have a rather unsavory rep among their fellow anti-statists as being a kooky breed of quasi white supremacists. And confused because I happen to be an aggressively queer Marxian syndicalist. But also being a hard-luck, technologically challenged, writer who's shit is often too radical even for the fringe, I decided I could hardly look a gift horse in the mouth. So I said fuck it, why not?
Then something very strange happened. The national anarchists turned out to be human beings and they seemed to legitimately dig my shit. So I put them to the test. I sent them all of my posts, not just the ones I thought wouldn't offend their traditionalist sensibilities. I sent them candid posts about my own complex gender identity. I sent them posts referencing my past dalliances with communism and my continued admiration for the Black Panthers. I sent them posts in which I openly and gleefully derided the very notions of biological race and gender. I didn't write these posts with the national anarchists in mind, it just happened to be the kind of shit I write about and I made zero attempt to shield my new audience from it. To my surprise, not only did every single one of those posts get published, they were a hit. Attack the System even went so far as to make me an editor, which was particularly kind considering that I can barely edit my own work, let alone anyone else's.
What the fuck was going on? These were the big bad national anarchists that everyone is so goddamn afraid of? So I did some digging and I was shocked to find out how much common ground I had with these pariahs of the anarchist movement. First off, Attack the System is run by a guy named Keith Preston, an ex-Wobbly who looks more like an ex-Hell's Angel. The left anarchist blogosphere would have believe that Keith eats live babies and jerks off to Nazi propaganda films but, much like myself, he's actually a Lou Reed loving panarchist who had been an important player in the anarchist left before he decided to go rogue and welcome national anarchists into the fold as viable revolutionary allies against the state. This act of blasphemy made him a defacto member of the national anarchist movement in spite of the fact that he's really more of a fellow traveler, a cautionary tale that will probably feel like deja vu before I finish this post.
The national anarchists themselves preach advocacy for a post-capitalist society of stateless tribal communes. If it wasn't for their tacit support for racial separatist societies being allowed to coexist with mixed racial tribal communities, their vision would be virtually identical to my own Bookchinite democratic confederalist pipe dreams. I'm not going to pretend that I'm OK with the idea of enthno-pluralism, as I've said before, I find it to be quite ridiculous. But it can't be emphasized enough that nearly every national anarchist that I've encountered is also a card carrying Voluntaryist/anti-interventionist that would sooner cool out to Graceland than force their weird beliefs on anyone else. That doesn't make these beliefs any less gross to me personally but the whole point of panarchy is local self-determination. I will never be able to create a queer syndicalist world anymore than they would be able to create a racially purist one. It would be stupid to even try. Human beings are just too goddamn complex for a single Utopian vision. Panarchy doesn't just protect the tribes you like, it protects the tribes you hate. Provided that these people don't force their will upon anybody else, their lives are their goddamn business.
Compare this to the fine upstanding citizens of the antifa scene and you have to wonder who the real fascists are. Antifa, like the national anarchists, are a loose knit tribe of mostly white cis-men allegedly committed to combating tyranny. Unlike the big tent national anarchists however, they feel that they have the inalienable right to force their so-called values down your fucking throat with a goddamn ax handle. They claim to be standing up for maligned minorities like me but rather than taking on the police state, they seem to focus most of their energy reenacting scenes from The Warriors with their doppelgangers in the alt-right. It's little wonder that most of the founding fathers of the antifa movement are former neo-Nazi skinheads who've gone from bashing fags to bashing on our behalf as if we need their fucking help. Like Tyler Durden's lost boys in Fight Club or the PC Bros on South Park, these assholes aren't about any specific ideology, they're about the action. They just wanna fucking break shit and pound pussy. Ernst Rohm would be so proud.
And it's these patronizing pricks who lead the front to deny national anarchists and any other anti-statist who doesn't jibe with their adolescent interpretation of anarchy a voice in the movement. What made them so fucking high and holy? Tell me, when was the last time you heard a story about national anarchists fucking up kids at a Noam Chomsky conference? From what I can tell they're much more interested in Renaissance fairs and pagan festivals. Antifa throwing shade on these weird motherfuckers for being "fascists" feels a bit like neckless jocks calling D&D nerds bullies. And I think you all know where I stand in that scenario.
So has Comrade Hermit gone over to the dark side? Truth be told, dearest motherfuckers, I've always kinda been there. I may be an anti-racist, genderfuck, cultural Marxist but I'm also a lifelong fan of Yukio Mishima and Norwegian black metal. I'm a creature of the fringe, I've always felt most at home among the freaks, be they drag queens and leathermen or wickerman burning Odinists. A stated mission I've had since this blogs infancy several years back has been to unite the anti-statist fringe into one big revolutionary vanguard against the tyranny of the status quo. If this means breaking bread with some right-wing oddballs then I say pass the bread, we've got work to do.
And to all you "anti-hate" haters out there, I have only this to say while you unwad your collective panties. The National Anarchist Movement has published one of your own on their Facebook page, twice. Can you honestly say that you would return the favor? Check your mirror, dearest motherfuckers, check your mirror.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this piece
* All Tomorrows Parties by the Velvet Underground
* Transylvanian Hunger by Darkthrone
* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats
* Freaks Come Out At Night by Whodini
* Danse Macabre by Celtic Frost
* Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed
* Sober Motel by Dilly Dally
* Atmosphere by Joy Division
* Heaven by Charly Bliss
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop
My Shitlist 2018
This blog is a lot of things to me. It's art. It's therapy. It's a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it's a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I'm here to bitch. That's why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity's Rainbow, so I'll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.
John McCain- After a lifetime as America's most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set "Just give me a goddamn shovel! I'll bury the cunt myself!!" All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon's going great.
Pope Francis- This crafty motherfucker snowed all of us, even me. With all his radical posturing on capitalism, gay rights, and Vatican reform, I thought maybe, just maybe, my ancestral church had finally began to get it's fucking shit together. No such luck. It turns out the Red Pope is all bark and no bite. In spite of all his lovely little words, the international pedophile cartel known as the Catholic Church continues to pump out fresh victims like Air Jordan's at an Indonesian sweatshop and Franky has gone out of his fucking way to cover their collective ass, putting the company name before basic bare minimum common decency (the latest cover-ups occurred in nearly every arch-diocese bordering my own in Central Pennsylvania) and I'm beginning to think that was the point all along. Like Obama, Pope Francis was just a hip new mask to cover the madness of the same filthy old empire, a shiny new rape van full of fresh kittens. Well no more. When you're trans, part of you will always be that battered child in the closet. The church put me in that closet. It's other victims will always be my comrades, so this jihad is fucking personal to me. Sinead O'Connor was right, It's high time we fight the real enemy. In 2018, that enemy is you, Frank. Commie or not, I'm going to kick your fucking ass. I'm not just lapsed, I'm done with Catholicism. You can officially mark me down as a Trinitarian Wiccan and this witch is pissed.
DJ Khaled- Social media has done some wonderful things, even a bitter Luddite like me can admit it. Its sparked revolutions, exposed powerful creeps like the ones on this list, and emboldened maligned weirdos like myself. But its also awarded fame and fortune to brain-dead blowhards like DJ Khaled, a C-list hip hop nobody before he constructed an empire on his shallow, re-baked Chicken Noodle Soup for the millennial's soul, self-help, horseshit. Now the motherfucker is everywhere, not just Twitter and Instagram but commercials, billboards, bus benches, designer drugs, urinal cakes, subliminal messages, and most ironically of all, prime time "talent" shows, because who better to assess artistic ability than a second rate, B-boy, Dr. Phil knock-off, who wouldn't know talent if it creeped up and fucked him in the ass? Yep, social media has done some wonderful things, but I'm beginning to suspect that we retired Ted Kaczynski a bit too early.
Robert Mueller- The vaunted Matlock of the so-called Resistance, this newly minted liberal lion cut his teeth as a key player in George W. Bush's post-9/11 torture factory, heading the FBI while they were busy bugging mosques and sending framed Muslims to rot for life in Git-mo. And this is the guy who's gonna bring justice to Trumplandia? Please excuse me as my disgusted laughter cracks into hopeless sobbing. Robert Mueller isn't leading an investigation into election meddling. If that was true Mossad would have given his skull a skylight months ago. Bob is running a three ring witch hunt designed to sabotage even the faintest opportunity for detente with Putin's Russia. It's a war against peace and, surprise, surprise, months and millions of dollars in and Mueller has proven approximately jack-dick in the way of Russian collusion. He's exposed a few Wall Street mercenaries and entrapped a couple of geriatric old goons, all of which might be reason for amusement if this campaign wasn't riling the country into the worst Russophobic furor since J. Edna rocked a Missile bra. Go ahead and fire him, Trump. Maybe you'll get impeached for it and everyone will win.
Bibi Netanyahu- There's a reason this twat makes my list nearly every year. Every year he gets a little more powerful and a little more gross. In an era awash with vibrant autocrats like Erdogan, Trump, and Orban, it's a cruel irony that no one looks more like Hitler than the worlds leading Jewish supremacist. With his nimble fingers busy pulling our president's strings (Putin ain't got shit on Bibi), the Kosher Fuhrer has managed to use his fucking toes to machine gun hundreds of peaceful protesters in Gaza, plow entire villages in the West Bank, and even offer a helping toe to his kindred spirits in Al-Qaeda by launching illegal airstrikes in Syria, all while playing power bottom in Moscow and Washington's devils triangle. The motherfucker is like Jim Henson with a body count. Even the Jews are beginning to hate his fucking guts as Bibi's autocratic apartheid state increasingly turns the Uzi's on the chosen people. It's official folks, the golem has become the master. Moses help us.
Tom Arnold- Best known for porking Roseanne in her pre-MAGA heyday and riding bitch to Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies, quite possibly the most blatantly Islamophobic blockbuster of the Nineties, Tom Arnold is the kind of Z-list Hollywood loser who just wont go away. And now he's groping for another 15 minutes with a show on the usually excellent Viceland in which he plays the role of a yammering crusader for truth searching for the missing and likely fictional Trump tapes. It's kind of like Michael Moore on whippits hosting a Resistance friendly season of Finding Bigfoot. And Roseanne gets canceled? Where's justice? And when does the next season of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia start? I need to wash the taste of mediocrity out of my mouth with Ayahuasca and get high like I've never gotten high before.
Mohammed Bin Salman- The media just loves this sick son of a bitch, or at least they did until he threw a Scarface-style chainsaw party for one of their own. Up until lately however, if you had based your opinion on the Fourth Estate's drippy smoozefest coverage of the Crown Prince you'd think he was some kind of made-for-TV hybrid of Lawrence of Arabia and Nelson fucking Mandela. The reality is that the only thing the heir apparent to that hateful little dust-land terror-factory of a kingdom has reformed is Saudi Arabia's PR game. His much celebrated anti-corruption campaign is little more than a thinly veiled purge of the Crown Prince's royal competition and his minor concessions to women's rights are essentially a shiny set of jingle-keys to distract the infantile liberal class while he brutally ethnically cleanses Yemen and continues to stoke a dying garbage fire in the Syrian hinterlands. The swarthy young psychopath seems to be hellbent on outdoing his barbaric ancestors in the bloodbath department and the last folks on this list seem more than eager to give it to him on a pike like Khashoggi's head. This is one faggot who's not ashamed to admit that I'm rooting for the Shia Crescent. Someone's gotta stop this cunt.
Donald Trump & Co. Vs. The Fourth Estate- I despise nothing more on this slow-boiling planet than the endless cro magnon shit-slinging festival between the current gang of banksters occupying the White House and those putrid self-fellating sycophants in the establishment media who got the prior elected and then spent every square second of the last two years bitching and moaning about it. It's a never ending competition between two clans of conniving crybabies over who gets to be the top victim class of the One Percent. Both sides win by hijacking every dinner table conversation from coast to coast while we all lose by choosing sides in a cat-fight between soulless fucking hypocrites who we should all despise equally. If you hate Trump, that's great, you should. He's a petulant oligarch who believes in nothing but himself. But don't let that hate fool you into giving your trust back to the same tabloid hucksters who've sold us into every military quagmire from Vietnam to Libya. If you're sick to death of the press, that's a good thing. That's a completely healthy reaction to a toxic corporate cartel of bourgeois popcorn propagandists who play Woodward-and-Bernstein like cops-and-robbers while they service Nixonian trolls such as Henry Kissinger like a Saigon whore.
I guess what I'm trying to say here, dearest motherfuckers, is there's more than enough hate to go around. Why waste it all in one place? The press will try to tell you that your anger is a bad thing. That's fucking bullshit. The planet is dying, representative democracy has officially flopped, and children are murdered by our sinking empire on nearly every continent. Frankly, you would have to be fucking stupid not to be pissed. Don't reject your anger. Own it. Weaponize it. And use it to obliterate the human clutter that pollutes this god forsaken place we call Earth. Rage on, dearest motherfuckers, rage on. Make your own fucking shitlist and let the ass kicking begin. Pay it forward. Increase the hate.
Rage, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Theme songs for the shitheads above.
* John McCain- Angel of Death by Slayer
* Pope Francis- Suffer Little Children by the Smiths
* DJ Khaled- Hip Hop by Dead Prez
* Robert Mueller- I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground
* Bibi Netanyahu- Sabotage by the Beastie Boys
* Tom Arnold- Loser by Beck
* Mohammad Bin Salman- Psycho Killer by Talking Heads
* Trump & the Press- Colors by Ice-T
P.S. My friend Lily, one of my favorite people, wrote this in an email and I just had to fucking publish it.
Empress Nicky of the Dark Luddite Realm, Anarchist Champion of the People, SHALL NOT BE IGNORED.
Kink is her body, and FIRE is her blood,
She has created over a thousand blog posts,
Unknown to light, nor known to gender,
Has withstood pain to write many arguments
Yet his hands will never hold anything
So as she prays... UNLIMITED NICKY WORKS
Fucking A.
Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not?
I've always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they're the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn't even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It's a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I'm pretty sure that the first "white" guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn't lay claim to. In today's divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.
This doesn't mean that race and other identities can't have a positive place in society. I take great pride in being a gender-bending Irish (lapsed)Catholic dyke. But if ancestry.com has proven anything it's that their is no such thing as purity. Through centuries of war, rape, and pillaging, we've all become a little bit of everything. There is no biological basis to racial identity. It's all a cultural crap shoot. So go ahead and take pride in being German, just know that you're making a choice to identify with 20% of your DNA and try not to be such a dick about it.
I know a lot of people hate to hear this, but gender identity is the same damn thing. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not defined by their genitalia anymore than they are by their skin color. We all start out female in utero and are largely shaped by the amount of testosterone we're exposed to during pregnancy. They're are many cultures from Santa Fe to Sulawesi who have acknowledged the existence of three, four, five gender identities for longer than our loafer dragging puritanical medical establishment has recognized the existence of two. (Before the Victorian era, the Johns-Hopkins-class naively believed that male was the only gender and women were simply defective males.)
"So what does this mean!?" I can hear the hysterical cry-babies of the troll army weep through a veil of tears, soiling their pressed Fred Perry polo shirts, "If gender and race aren't determined by biology than people can be anything! Oh the madness!!" Many of my fellow left-wing queermos would now take the time to launch into some kind of complex post-modern argument about the nature of western civilization and dialectical materialism and blah, blah, blah. At the ripe old age of thirty, I've simply grown to old for this shit. I'll leave the intellectual hair-splitting to younger minds and longer attention spans. My only response to what can only be accurately described as the rise of voluntary tribalism is, so the fuck what? If race, gender, and sexuality are fluid concepts then why shouldn't they be at least semi-optional?
Many indigenous American tribal nations took a similar approach, accepting escaped slaves and impoverished paupers into the fold as long as they committed themselves to the tribal order. Even that pillar of Prussian nationalism, Oswald Spengler preached that race was not defined by blood but rather by shared ideals. So what if Rachel Dolezal is whiter than a bleached gym sock? Or Ward Churchill has less Indian blood than George Custer? Or that I identify as a lesbian with a stubby cock and a six o'clock shadow? We've all chosen our tribes and devoted ourselves completely to serving the only communities that feel like home to us. I may not have chosen to be non-binary but I did choose to leave the closet and embrace my spirit above my biology and it saved my life. Why shouldn't everybody be afforded that same opportunity? Isn't this the logical outcome of embracing voluntaryism and individuality?
This may also be the best way to hobble racism and rise above the incessant bitching of identity politics. If we're all whatever the fuck we want then what really matters? As I noted above, class is the real game changer here. When it all comes down to it, the real deciding factor in a capitalist society is cold hard cash and the power it affords. Things like race, gender, religion, and sexuality serve the state as distractions from the common thread that ties us all together. Black kids in Ferguson have far more common ground with rednecks in the Ozarks than the millionaire uncle toms in the Congressional Black Caucus. Honky Rust-Belt casualties in Youngstown have far more reasons to vote for a black radical like Ajamu Baraka than a Wall Street corporate welfare queen like Trump. As I said here before in the wake of the Charlottesville brouhaha, we're all niggers and faggots in the eyes of the one percent.
So pick a tribe, any tribe, dearest motherfuckers. Loose yourself from the shackles of identity tyranny and come together to smash the state that divides us against ourselves and our radical individuality.
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones
* She Walks On Me by Hole
* Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan
* See America Right by the Mountain Goats
* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience
* Say It Loud- I'm Black and I'm Proud by James Brown
* Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones