BUT WHY THO

~ we had a good run, didn't we? ~

Fuckboi or not, Ryan Reynolds will forever exist in my head for that one gif alone, where he squints and says, But why? with so much premeditated derision, so much disgust for the target of his query, his disdain reaches out through the screen and punches you in the jaw with a simmering haymaker.

It’s a solid question: But why? It’s been in the corners of my vision, just out of any direct line of sight. Just outside of the range of decibels you and I can hear. Unspoken, but there, there nonetheless. The question of why this pivot into skullfucking fascism is right in our faces, rather than the soft shell “just the tip” variety we’ve been used to for so long.

We had a good run, didn’t we? You let us protest, you let us bang our heads to Rage Against the Machine and pump our fists to Public Enemy. You let us rock Che Guevara on our t-shirts, and quote Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Noam Chomsky in our discourse. You let us point out the anniversary of the MOVE headquarters bombing in Philly back in 1985, and more recently actually allowed us to recast the ‘race riots’ of Tulsa in 1921 for what they really were: a fucking massacre. KRS-ONE emulated that famous photo of Malcolm X, M2 Carbine rifle held up, peering out the window at the existential threat of you. Shit, for a while you let us villainize you as the dark side of the state surveillance apparatus in movies like Enemy of the State (RIP Gene Hackman), and you let us lampoon your CIA in Air America. We dog-eared pages from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, touted Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States on TikTok, and we shook our heads at the shit going down in China, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, Congo, Myanmar, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tibet, Guatemala, Argentina, Cuba, Libya, Haiti, Ukraine, Palestine, ad naseum, and we felt better about our own lot here in the United States of America because of it.

We enjoyed the illusion of choice when we voted and took to the streets in protest when George Floyd was killed. We full throated overpriced popcorn with “real”^TM butter and devoured your war propaganda like Transformers: Robots for ‘Murica and Independence Day, Fuck Yeah!, and cheered when Rocky, Rambo, Barney, Chuck Norris, Optimus Prime, the Dirty Dozen, Ahrnold, Jack Ryan, Maverick, the Wolverines, Jack Bauer, and Captain America played the ol’ drum, fife, and bugle for your cause.

Your finely tuned get-outta-poverty programs were slick: sports and music as a means of bootstrapping out of the ghetto and the trailer park, Detroit and the Appalachians. It was all there, if we wanted it bad enough: bling, bitches, cars, jewelry, cribs, stacks of cash, blue sky days and casino nights, poolside parties and nightclubs, access to the corridors of power slowly revealed the more we bought into the American Dream, if we played ball.

Sure we were suspicious, cynical, aware, and woke, but we weren’t really a threat to you. Why, then? Why did you push it? Why did you force our heads into your laps, our mouths to your boot heels? We were already traumatized enough that we gobbled up your gaslighting and coercion, no problem. The fuck is up with this flat out grab ‘em by the pussy shit?

Were you bored? Fattened from the centuries of orgy and swollen with largess, somewhat disappointed by how easy it's all become? A little bit disgusted at how much abuse we were willing to take? Did you think: these little bitches, how disgusting, how weak, what sad little pathetic pieces of shit on a piece of shit—I know! Let’s reeeeally fuck with ‘em, see what they do?

We had a good thing going. You had to fuck it all up. I don’t think you understand just how obligated some of us feel to fight back. That’s a PART OF THE PIPE DREAM you dumbed us down with and numbed us up with for centuries. You sold us on equality, liberty and democracy, the pursuit of happiness, for centuries, and even though we knew you were gaslighting us, we were in enough of a gray zone we acquiesced. Now you wanna strip those small comforts away and don’t expect us to loc the fuck up?

And then you pick Donnie Darko and the Eyeliner Iyahtoldja to do the bidding. Throw in the Ketamine Klansman for a little razzle dazzle—like, you serious bro?! Everybody in their cabinet is some kinda cabbage patch doll of extreme exaggerations. RFK, slowly molting into a lizard, talking ‘bout re-parenting Black children. Hegseth getting shlammered at the crack of dawn before the press, Christofacist symbols etched onto his chest plate. Stephen Miller cosplaying as a whites only dildo, or vibrator, those ones made specifically just for the clitoris, not full entry. Bannon somewhere in the back tryna patch up his skin suit with navel lint and the scabs of his old shattered dreams. Karoline Leavitt, who eats her lips faster than they will regenerate. Tom Homan, a low rent Jesse Ventura look alike meatball, who will never be as dangerous or cool.

I have never seen a group of people do more to kill a boner and blow dry a coochie than this buncha whack jobs. As if—and this seems to be a tenet of most cults, so no surprise—being repellent is required, to add a gag reflex to the surrender. To ratchet up the pain of bending a knee and opening wide for these sock puppets.

It all makes it abundantly clear how untouched by humanity you are. It also reminds me of the greatest blessing narcissists give us. So possessed by your own hubris, you don’t know it, you can’t see it, it never occurs to you when you are showing us your ass.

Cool. Tell us you’re a piece of shit while telling us you’re a piece of shit. We’ll take it. We have a thousand knives. You will die by a thousand cuts.