Deadened Souls
Had I not managed to leave my screaming stepmother, I would have grown up in San Jose, with some of those years, at least, in the Santa Clara County Jail for murder one. Like most people, I couldn’t wait to escape my upbringing. My brother and his family are still in the area. Each life is compromised, day by day, by decisions not taken or even imagined.
Though everyone is trapped by his society, children are particularly helpless. Brainwashed nonstop and forced to obey even the most asinine commands, they haven’t acquired enough experience, wisdom or strength to resist anything that’s injected into their mind or body. With their parents at least complicit, most grow up brain damaged. Some are killed outright.
After a dozen years of compulsory bullshit, your kid can stagger into adulthood by slaughtering or being slaughtered in some distant war for profiteers and Jews, as justified by false flags. You raised him to be butchered. As bits of flesh and bones in a leak proof casket, he’ll be paraded past a bored commander in chief. It’s almost time for ice cream.
Who isn’t bored, really? Always triggered and titillated yet never nourished, American youths are reduced to worshiping self, gawking at porn, fixating on video games, filming themselves being assholes or screaming at screeching cars going in tightest circles. In San Jose, seven were just arrested for attacking a police car at a “sideshow.” Though mugshots are only stark images of just captured fuckups, I can’t help but marvel at how deadened their faces are. Only one contains any light.
If born in 1990, say, you’re raised on outrageous lies about 9/11, Bin Laden, War on Terror, Obama, Trump, Putin, Covid, Jewjabs, nationalism, multiculturalism, gender, border and weather, etc. Like everybody else, you inherited nonsense about the Holocaust, Israel’s right to exist and the need to be vigilant of domestic terrorists, with Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma bombing a key scapegoat. Above all, you must learn to hate conspiracy theorists, for they dare to subvert your belief system, as fornicated into you by your parents, teachers, TV, FaceBook and every celebrity.
In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security launched a campaign, “If You See Something, Say Something,” but Americans are only conditioned to freak out about unattended backpacks and Muslim travelers, not inexplicably imploding skyscrapers, irrational diktats or absurd narratives.
American madness has been exported everywhere. Flying during Covid, I could remove my mask during meal times, when the virus magically disappeared. At Sydney’s airport last week, I had my body lotion and toothpaste confiscated. In Philly around 2007, a Homeland Security flunky took away my unopened can of clam sauce. If I didn’t want to loose it, I could drink it, he said. The spaghetti on its label was too much for this gent to decipher. In London, an agent stared at my jar of paté before deciding it wasn’t liquid. The irrational is constantly imposed on us to turn us into morons.
To be insane is to be unmoored and divorced from just about everything outside the self. We’re sinking into the cesspool of unchecked self love. There’s a great irony in this. The more you love yourself, the more insufferable and uglier you become.
Looking at those ugly San Jose kids made me think of the hideous Antifa mugshots, as collected by Andy Ngo. Since most of my readers are long in the tooth, if they have any molar left, they may not be aware of the Island Boys of Miami or Lil Uzi Vert of Philly. Google their names to admire their looks. While Island Boys are only TikTok stars, Lil Uzi Vert is discussed in even the Financial Times:
In many ways, the Philadelphia rapper represents newness in its most extreme form. Like a character in an implausibly zeitgeisty novel, Uzi (pronouns: they/them) has had a 10-carat pink diamond reportedly worth $24mn inserted into their forehead. “Might put some diamonds [on] my nose,” they rap on their new album, whose 26 tracks have all entered Spotify US’s top 100. It’s set to be the first rap album to top the Billboard album chart this year.
You can’t be more cutting edge or progressive than “newness in its most extreme form,” with they/them as pronouns to boot. This freak’s fans must look up “zeitgeist,” though, to augment their twenty-word vocabulary. Uzi’s, too, is rather modest:
I watched the moon tonight and it was red (it was red) I wanna live together 'til we dead I tell myself that I can change (I can change) Remind myself to not complain (to not complain)
The average Vietnamese’s mind and lexicon are also shrinking, but not as fast, and we still don’t know how to twerk.
Next door in Cambodia, you’ll see rapper VannDa’s face on billboards, selling products. He’s that big. His “Baby Mama” has just come out. Though the video flaunts a beachside villa, swimming pool, yacht, tattoos, champagne and people acting cool, its lyrics are mostly old school, “You’re the one and only, I’ll take care of you for the rest of my life.” “My love for you is true, never changing.” “A love that knows no bounds (no boundary).”
As poetry, it sucks as much as Lil Uzi Vert’s, but VannDa is not Satanic or a gangsta. His posturing remains innocent and even pathetic. Though trying hard, he’s only superficially contaminated by the American pandemic. Ease up, my man, and dig deeper into your Cambodia. Don’t sink with the sickos.
[mugshots of Antifa members of Portland, as collected by Andy Ngo]
[rappers Island Boys of Miami]
[Lil Uzi Vert of Philadelphia]
[rapper VannDa of Cambodia]
[The Modern Jazz Quartet, which I saw at the Kennedy Center in DC four decades ago]
I'm trying to restrain my big mouth but I just have to say what a superb essay this is. Seeing the world in general and America in particular as it really is. And which virtually no one wants to talk about.
There are physically brave people (often reckless idiots, usually men) and then occasionally, very occasionally, there are intellectually brave people. (Perhaps intellectually courageous would be a better term?) You sir are among those few.
Now if you and your perceptive and good readers will excuse me, I'll go back to heavy drinking. Happy fourth of July to all.
That lineup of Portland Antifa renegades is something else. I have read that many of them were not actually from the area, but came in from outside, unable to resist the opportunity to rumble.
I first came to Portland in 1992, and it was a wonderful place. We lived there for 5 years or so until my daughter finished HS and went off to college downstate. She returned to Portland after graduating, and we visit every year. The city itself is almost unrecognizable. The formerly beautiful downtown area is pretty much a "plywood city", with homeless everywhere--it almost makes you want to cry to see the ruin of it. And just about every spare inch of freeway right-of-way is now filled with tents and blankets.
You write: "Though everyone is trapped by his society, children are particularly helpless. Brainwashed nonstop and forced to obey even the most asinine commands, they haven’t acquired enough experience, wisdom or strength to resist anything that’s injected into their mind or body." Quite so.
When I reflect back on various experiences from my own childhood, passing through "the system," I constantly find myself circling back to the question: “Why on earth didn’t I push back on this obvious BS being laid on me?”