AMERICAN GULAG 3: Nasty Boys

~ a profile of cruelty ~

Finish the joke:

Guantanamo Bay, Panama, and El Salvador walk into a bar. The bartender says,
“ . . .

Finish the joke:
America walks into a barrio. The people say,
“ . . .

These days it feels like it's hard to find the punchline—just lines drawn in the sand. Just a punch to the gut when families are rendered apart by giggling sycophants. This dystopia went from slow burn to jumped-the-shark in seconds flat, didn’t it? Does it still count as a dystopia? Don’t dystopias have pastel color palettes and complex character arcs? Feels like this timeline is in-your-face bright, color burning through the film, no sympathetic villains for miles, just the kind of absolutely syphilitic assholes that are so vile you hate to hate them. No room for delicious rivalries, or cherished enemies. No grudging respect for their devilments. This is Kendrickian levels of hate.

As for Gitmo, if ever there was a stark example of who they are coming for next, this is it. First they imprisoned the accused there, and we spoke up. It did not make a single fuck of a difference. Now they’re gonna imprison the undocumented immigrants there, and we will speak up again, and only time will reveal if there was a shift in the wind.

Who’s next? Might be the abortionists, or their ardent supporters. Or the runaway daughters seeking a procedure and the family members who helped them. Might be the people charged with aiding and abetting, or accessories to murder, as the state would have them seen. Of course, it will be the doctors and the practitioners who offer help, or perhaps a pamphlet on available treatments.

Might be the gender fluid, the transcendental identities who know every iteration of the word trans, who know how transactional this moment in time is—that trading their true nature for an assigned color swatch will get them some momentary peace, but only that. That the transfer of power in any given moment comes on a sliding scale, entirely on the mercy of who’s looking at them translaterally.

Might be the latest designees as enemies of The Management: Antifa, civic defense groups, Luigi and Mario, militias, book clubs, unions, knitting circles, fight clubs, motorcycle gangs, cosplay conferences, comicons, librarians, citizen journalists, theatre kids, hackers, 3-D printer owners, or whoever is Public Enemy #1 for the day.

If any three of those walk into a bar, it’s gonna be scorched earth from The Management. I mean, if they take out their celebrities in threes, let’s not offer up our agents of retribution so easily. The only consolation prize is that we are nearing the end of the orgy, where the table scraps are going to be wolfed down but with less enthusiasm, as the beast slowly REMs into a food coma. Then, it is my hope, we will cut our way out of its belly.

I recently watched Separated, by the team of Errol Morris (Oscar winning documentary filmmaker) and Jacob Soboroff (author of Separated: Inside an American Tragedy). It covers, in detail, the zero tolerance policy in 2018 (under the direction of unrepentant scumbags Stephen Miller and Tom Homan) of separating children from their parents when arriving at US borders, regardless of a crime committed or not. Suddenly torn from their parents for months, in some cases permanently. The children then placed in cages. Children, isolated, unable to speak the language of their captors, clinging to a single silver thermal blanket, elbow to elbow, knee to knee, on cold concrete floors. The numbers rest at over 5,000 taken from their families, and as of now there are 1,400 who have yet to be reunited with their loved ones.

Think about that. It’s inhumane to see the treatment of children in this light, and equally inhumane the unrelenting, almost gleeful position of its architects. Hard to fathom, even—until the documentary gets to the point, that is the key to understanding why the American Gulag operates as it does: it’s about cruelty.

Sure, the separation was positioned as a deterrent, was predicated on scaring people from coming here, but that IS the cruelty. The psychological damage, the rift in family life—to threaten separation requires a base nature rooted in being a nasty piece of work and loving every shot of dopamine that rockets into your reptilian soul at the pain of others.

And you need cruel people to carry out these policies. Well suited to it, capable, and of course, ones who revel in it. Cruelty isn’t cruelty without deriving some kind of pleasure from other people's suffering. Border Czar Tom Homan and advisor Stephen Miller are excellent examples of the species. They nurse half erections while they break shit, all the impotence of their small interior lives wrought out on the national stage in the form of their rapient urges. Coming together on occasion to dry-dock their half-engorged thrust into the terrordome they created, and give each other a quick hand job and a slap on the back: Good job, sport!

In order for cruelty to occur, however, it helps to dehumanize the suffering. Less than human makes more grist for the grindhouse. That’s why industrial scale American slavery was so successful. What’s three fifths of a human? What's a little blood quantum when Manifest Destiny has wholesale slaughter to hand out? When you are taught that insects don’t possess a soul, or a feeling life, or moral intelligence, it makes stepping on ‘em just a part of the day, not a moral quandary.

It will help to remember this: the people we are fighting are cruel. They possess an inner sickness, a penchant for that trill up their spine they get from harming others. From applying knuckle screws to the hands of the souls they have captured. From deeply scarring children in permanent ways that they will carry with them the rest of their lives.

Cruelty is deemed necessary in the execution of the American Gulag’s directives. That alone is reason to oppose it—all, every day.

Best punchline to the joke setups above wins the internet.

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