CHARLES TARLTON
Har Mĕgiddōn (הר מגידו): The Coming American Fiasco
1. The Boiling Point
Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
— Aneurin Bevan
No one really noticed, until the first pickup abruptly drove on purpose into a crowd. We’d all been looking the other way, and suddenly, there they were, angry American faces, mechanics, carpenters, good buddies driving the big rigs, bikers, and roofers, now all defying the law, naming their own game. Here was a war straining to be born; one side clawing onto the stage, the other locking the door and calling the cops. All the while, and slyly out of sight atop their piles of bric-a-brac, magpies fanned the fires.
A banged-up rusted pickup truck, flying two American flags, flew past angrily on a parkway filled with Mercedes and BMWs, blue smoke blowing from its rusted hanging exhaust pipe, and oblivious in his rage to how alone he seemed, slowed suddenly into the fast lane, forcing everyone to come around him and, as they came by, stuck up his middle finger and yelled, “Pay Day’s comin’, motherfuckers!”
Up to this very moment, acts of public violence had seemed random and accidental, curious psychological aberrations — a lone man with a gun, a firebug with a can of gas. But now the evening news is filled with mobs, guns and sirens, whole buildings up in smoke. It’s as if one minute there’d been an argument, the regular kind, with unwritten rules, an etiquette and some civility and, then suddenly, somebody had said, “How’d you like to take it outside?” And the knives flashed.
A colored aerial photo in this morning’s Times made huge downtown protests look like flower arrangements to the careless eye, a mix of roses, red-and-white carnations, and blue hydrangeas conveying the people’s loathing. I saw wild protestors, whose eyes were blood-shot with anger, sweat pouring off their brows in hatred of the privileged, and their arms ached to lynch them all, the rich and the better born; Cain’s psyche on a bilious rampage.
A snarling incubus goads rampaging have-nots on as they prowl through unfamiliar streets, trampling manicured lawns, tearing down the Japanese Maples and blue Wisteria in an indiscriminate hunger for revenge. A monster oversees and urges on the anarchy. A demon with an insatiable appetite, he reaches with grotesque talons to gather everything in. “A provocateur,” bystanders said, “he just whipped everything up.”
In the Redneck Revolt, there’s a suave well-educated bourgeoise’s son from Yale or Stanford maybe, who’s spent too much time in chatrooms listening to wild Fascists spinning webs. Beside him, sporting the same olive surplus combat gear, a rougher trucker’s son, who’d left school to be a Marine, now marches under a banner’d swastika. Just as in the Bible, how news of a Messiah being born sent Herod’s murderers out to slay newborns in Judea, a messianic politician now can say —“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
Anger, resentment, and hurt had replaced argument, or anything that even looked like debate. Reasoning went out the window, and the insults were flying. We were at each other’s throats and loggerheads. You could smell smoke where America’d been set on fire, and hear howls of outrage and anger. People were clawing each other, threatening extermination. Some wanted to call the police. There were racists and bigots and the pseudo-religious, on one side; the smug, well-off and proper stood on the other.
“I’m White!” the tattooed guy was bragging, “and we ain’t stepping aside.” His hat said Massey Ferguson, as he turned casually to spit. “We gotta take our country back!”
I tried to imagine being in his shoes, and I realized it doesn’t make you evil to disagree with someone. No one likes to get knocked off their perch, so taking everyone’s outlook into account, I should be able to understand anyone, feel what it’s like to be them, Jesus, maybe even empathize.
After he’d torched a Black minister’s house in the dead of night, he came bragging into the all-White bar. “White lives matter,” he said, “read it!” Then everyone shouted, You will not replace Us! As per their credo that White made them special, they imagined a ranking of skin colors — pink over brown over black, despite the identical red whenever they bled. They nailed up Confederate “star-and-bars” on their walls and practiced their Rebel yells. Yee-ha! Waa-wo!
One foot poised on the pedal, ready to kick-start the big Harley, he threw the bird at the Pakistani family coming out of the 7-11, made a U-turn in the street, and roared away. By the time he got to the Proud Boys’ party in Boise, the way he was telling the story, he’d scared them Pakis off and painted swastikas all over their walls. But, even I saw those fat fuckers on TV climbing on the Capitol; you just know they were faking rebellion.
There in your comfortable chair you could hardly have imagined that night. The stars, as always, were distant and cold, but the silent darkness filled quickly up with wild car horns, sirens, the boom and crackle of war, and house fires spread across the city. Your heart told you everything was changing. Rancor spread like plague through the town and left a formless terror of each other in its wake. Civility was dying and its vocabulary’d been replaced by a rough and guttural truculence — “Fuck you!” “Eat Shit!” and “Motherfucker!”
That giant enterprise, society, hangs by a strand of spidery web. The ties that bind are fragile, silken things. We each of us bear the duty... Stop! Now that’s too preachy. We’ve all grown vain and complacent, reciting our virtues and principles without meaning. Oh, we’re so inclusive! And empathetic! Proud, though, and haughty, too. And do we moralize! But, the truth is, we cut people adrift and forget them, we let poverty and ignorance fester because we’d rather spend the money on fancy soaps and prime filets. To be poor, ignorant, and White used to be compensated for when you stood, in your turn, on the upturned faces of Black people; but liberal progress has knocked all that down. Now embittered White people are ready to knock over the chessboard.
Most of the people who live in poverty,
most of the illegitimate children,
most of the single mothers on welfare,
most of the unemployed men, and
most of those arrested for serious crimes in America
— are White.
A White-supremacist took a vacation to Africa and was astonished to see Black doctors and bankers, Black professors and priests, and he had to bite his tongue. When he got back home he started raging and spewing, his dread of being replaced was now stronger than ever. “We’re up against the devil,” he roared. Everywhere he saw perversion, and plots against White Anglo-Saxon America, and he prayed each night for the power to stop the wholesale suicide of despairing Caucasians.
His unkempt beard, sweaty tee-shirts, and greasy hair got in the way of true love, so he settled for skags (as he called them) and a trailer instead, and the highs he got from chanting, Where We Go One, We Go All in parking lots and, on that fateful day, from climbing the Capitol’s walls. There’s no end of irony up and down the social ladder — all the while you’re reveling in the anger you vent downwards, there’s dirt being kicked in your face from above, until you get to the top of the ladder and see the few who set all the kicking in motion. It’s hard to keep a straight face.
There’s something disturbingly childish (if you’re neither soldier nor cop) about dressing up and wearing a holstered Magnum or Uzi slung over your shoulder. What’s scary, there’s more guns here than people, and the people all dying to be heroes in their own action movies. And while, technically it’d be against the law if he carried his concealed Sauer onto a school grounds, by then it just might be too late.
The fear was that Whites have been losing ground, elbowed off to the side of the road. That’s not so much a political thing as visceral, something coming up from the gut. Helps explain, though, how Christians (born in the blood of the Lord) can disdain the other cheek, and call out for violence (as one always does when the talk’s just not going your way). Backed into a corner, these “real Americans” jettison the Constitution, hoping for a coup.
Resentful and outside the circle, he dreamed; his head filled with Proudhon, Kropotkin, and bringing all property’s theft onto the scene in Illinois and New Jersey, leaving the plutocrats trembling in their beds. He heard the music of equality sung in his head, he heard it night and day. Rebellion’s the only way, he’d say, of righting the wrongs that he knew; you could see everything in the full light of day — chaos was the unavoidable first step.
When everyone’s finally compared their notes, they’ll have seen that they’d all been treated with the same contempt. “Pariahs,” the old truck-driver said, “they treat us like lepers.” He put his Kenworth in gear and parked it crossways in the road. “Let‘em try to get through that,” he said. A guy who’d rather die than be thought a Marxist was talking about spreading the wealth around; “Give everyone something,” he said. “Make room at the table. Isn’t that what Jesus said?”
An appreciation of the beauty of guns, of their precise machining, their luster, disguises the horrible menace they represent. Bullets actually tear through flesh and bone, destroy children as easily as robbers. As pleasurable as if you were a drummer and hit every beat exactly, and I mean every time. ‘Course they tell you that you are the best. So, why wouldn’t you think it? Everything wrong comes from the Devil who’s infected the U.S. with his poison. I’m not suspicious, but the evidence adds up. He knows how the game is played, he’ll lead us out of this mess.
He was looking for something to believe in; he’d lost faith in the American dream. “They all just want to get in here before we close the door,” the preacher said, “they all want to vote and all the rest of the stuff.” And then this from the holy-of-holies: “America’s White, Christian, and born here. So slam shut the gates, pull all the drawbridges up.” This was surely delusion. How is it each race imagines they’re the best? And, if you’ve ever heard anyone say that out loud, you know how crazy it sounds.
At first, there’s some hesitation, heavy as a brick, that keeps the wildest actions at bay. But it’s only an idea that, once punctured, disappears like smoke, and the unenlightened mob breaks through; freed at last from the suffocating flatness of their ordinary lives, they fly to the drama of conflict, conspiracy, and the golden leader, his square-set jaw, his steely eye, who will lead them when they take their country back. Everything’s turned upside-down; the best among us cower in retreat, while the worst push themselves forward, greedy, unashamed.
In the apoplexy of the country, some of the people will do the raging, but the larger, mixed, and growing people, a panoply of races, lingoes, and gods — red, black, yellow, and brown — will be the raged-against thing. Bigots and idiots will demand “foreigners” be put on boats and sent back where they came from. America for Americans! they’ll cry from their pale lips. See it in their pale eyes. Here’s the irony; these chauvinists all dance on the stringhe di marionette, in the hands of the puppet masters.
I dreamed the common man in a John Deere cap awakened and filled the streets with chants of Justice! The People! Freedom! And the lawyers and doctors and bankers drew back as if a grotesque had got out of its cage, and was now demanding a purer American people, a Whiter people, a simple, muscular common people rising up! But, then the dream burst and they were back in their mobile homes filled with kids and poverty, and the television blaring nonsense, numbing the very air. The red light over the intersection swung lightly in an ocean breeze, a warning
STOP
and making the White woman in her Mercedes tense up and notice the Black man in his pickup beside her. She stared right at him and her anger grew. Blacks and Mexicans, she thought, everywhere. We’ll have Buddhists next, or even Muslims. Where does it all end? she almost cried out loud. The Black man inched his old truck forward to get beyond her stare. She looked deranged, and he decided it best not to stir her up. She wanted to tell him to get out of town, to go back where he came from. He was watching the light, urging it to change. It took forever.
Talk in the room stops when the guns come out. The majority, punctured, collapses around empty air. The man with a gun (a good or a bad guy) dictated the conversation and picks the most direct route. What the “R” in NRA might stand for — righteous. When a social class has grown desperate, frightened of losing its place, it lashes out to freeze the momentum by any means at hand. You don’t overturn elections with a song.
They say only three things really matter: politics, God, and your gun. The more untutored you are, the more the gun matters, the more it defines you: “Go ahead, make my day.” If you grew up in the boonies where your friends toted guns, you stuck a holster on your hip and you were set for anything. “I don’t go after deer and stuff,” the pimply delinquent said, “I’ve only got the side arm, and it’s more just for protection. But, if the time ever comes, I’ll be ready. ”If you’re White and a man and live in the sticks, you’re most likely armed, right-wing, and nervous.
No one talks about how armed resistance groups dressed up in elaborate military gear, war surplus (but not really “uniforms”) as if they were going off to war, are mostly fat. They’re racists, though, and that’s no laughing matter. Two groups who see now a zero-sum game: the White-and-poor who boogaloo to arms, afraid their race is becoming outnumbered; and the very rich, who worry they might have to go back to the end of the line.
In the politics class they were trying to guess what would happen in the next presidential election if Trump got elected and Biden refused to allow it, and ordered the Marshalls to put Trump in jail. Mary Agnes, Republican, was totally outraged, “Stop the steal!” she shouted involuntarily, forgetting (till Percey, the so liberal democrat, reminded her) it was only a class. What part of it’s real, what part of it’s fake, everyone here would sure like to know.
“I think it’s fair to say,” the famed ethicist remarked, “that no one’s ever that wicked on purpose. The way people see themselves, they’re always in the right.” Okay, let’s say a true artist never takes sides, but aims always to portray the whole range of human nature. Some dope in a psycho-political gesture drives his car into a crowd and kills people, mistaking imbecility for zeal, and imagines himself now a Nazi hero. He’s got life in prison to meditate on that. Insisting you’re radically free is a threat, specially measured out from the tip of my nose. Take this guy all dressed up to look tough, carrying weapons and strutting down the street, all but pushing people aside. He goes where he pleases and does what he feels like. In the long run, he thinks, he’ll get to decide who stays and who goes, who lives and who dies, in the new.
AMERIKA.
A soldier returns from Afghanistan, totally inured to guns and violence and, having had all his race predilections whet, concludes America will soon be overrun by foreigners and Blacks, and pledges to resist. My brother and I shot rabbits in the groves, and sent them tumbling, shuddering, and quivering to death. Then there’s this woman’s grown tired of her boyfriend, so he brings ‘round his Beretta and dispatches them both.
Do you remember the first time you heard some racial epithet uttered and no one objected or even looked up startled? Do you remember when there were laws about guns? Had you ever heard anyone advocate shooting the President before? There’s a screen of insanity behind which the Kochs, the Waltons, and Musk get on with counting their dough, leaving the rest of us tip-toeing through mine fields. No one wants to be a cop anymore; they’re overworked, broke, and resented. And it’s dangerous being a cop; someone’s always got you in his sights. In the middle, you’re always in the wrong. Would the blue line stand against the anarchists and bomb throwers? is the question everyone’s asking. Two groups trained to use weapons, veterans and the police, stand across from each other, bringing the hot moment in close.
Think of the very rich who, believing in nothing and lusting for everything, clutch their stuff jealously against oblivion. Does money stand outside the immediate fray, comprising the overall scene — city, the planet, the heavens? The old man collected newspapers; he had them in stacks (everyone’s seen them) all over the house. I knew a guy had a room full of pistols, rifles, and boxes of ammo; he bought new ones every so often in the belief you can never have too many guns.
It is the angry racist rant that best captures what the Alt Right’s so anxious to protect — pale epidermis — not at all God-given (no one revels in pallid) skin color results from ultra-violet in latitudes (we were all negroes, then, to begin with). All the rest, the childish mutterings, cartoon depictions of whomever they hate, all the manly, leathered, and sweaty posturing, and frequently misused big words; these things only disguise their meanness and a tendency to braggadocio. “You saw what happened in South Africa, ”they chant, “send all the coloreds back.”
There are White people here in America suffering from severe dysphoria, and they find life hard, so they’re looking around for scapegoats. They rake the muck and listen to each story with a jaundiced ear — look, and lo! they find they’re not themselves to blame! “It’s the Blacks,” they explain (or the Arabs or Mexicans). This way their distemper’s directed away from the big boys pulling the strings. There’s someone behind every curtain, and someone right behind him.
To have concluded (in the face of a melting Earth, under the disappearance of the sky at night, along with the rivers drying up and watching the oceans rise over seawalls) that keeping the White race in ascendance was all that mattered, is a sign, even more than the layabouts with their slack jaws and blank-eyed gawkers, of the utter insignificance of the far Right’s direst threats and prophecies.
How can you compare your racist tauntings to Minutemen picking off Redcoats from behind their stone walls? You must mean there’s a thing you call “patriotic hatred.” It’s a shabby, pitiful Weltanschauung; you must have been hurt as a child. Otherwise how to explain it? Your symbols and meanings twist like strands in the double helix, and you feel righteous, your mouth full of bile, and courageous, like wild dogs in a pack.
The stigma of Nazism is wearing off in America, you see Stahlhelme on maniacs and Hakenkreuz hanging on Capitol walls, and vestiges of Munich and Weimar fall around us like blossoms in the coming spring. Ordinary citizens parade in childish ersatz uniforms, armed to the hilt, demanding an end to equality. In rural America now, our very own sans-culottes call for Black heads on a spike.
There’s a photo I saw on the internet of this half-naked White guy holding a Nazi flag and sucking in his belly, trying to look tough. It made me realize that it’s all mostly posturing, from Bannon to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying guns in public’s just not heroic, but dangerously childish, brandishing and strutting for nothing in particular. All their so-called ideas are vacuous and childish, meant only to hide that they’re frightened to death of extinction.
The doors are locked to all but the chosen, so the big thief figures how to get in, slips on an unthreatening fatherly masque and ducks under the wire. The devoted and rag-tag entourage bask in his emptiness, bereft of ideas. They’d just as soon burn down everything down. The ventriloquist throws his inflections from way across the room, his intentions come out of the mouths of barbarians, makes it seem like their own. They’re up and ready to go.
A high-school dropout, he listens to the braying ass, and sways to his thick rhythms. Most things bewilder him, but he’s awake to simple ideas. He hears the call to arms against the alien tide. Down long narrow chutes into the pen, they’re herded, rounded up, and branded. Incoherence can be compensated for by the music and the color of the words. Their eyes glaze over in the thrill of being spoken to. Whose hand’s that in my pocket?
The money that flowed from secret coffers was used to hire buses, at first, then they bought semi-automatic tommy guns and gas masks, so in a mob they would all look the same. Some wore military surplus, others dressed up in frivolous costumes — steel-toed boots and shirts made from Old Glory. They cast everything aside and took the leap, risking life or death, or a charge of treason. “There’s no turning back,” the zealous ones postured — then they all stepped over the line.
The party of Lincoln has moved through various stages, and finally arrived at its own Armageddon; They’ve decided to pull the whole thing down. QAnon, Proud Boys, and the Aryan Nation brought their fetid smell within the tent, a Fascist stench, that surely never would have freed any slaves. Hate is just like acid that eats you out from the inside. The moment comes down now (as it so often has) to the Many or the One.
He was all alone much of the time, and he had a weird sense of humor, quirky, often pretending he was Gavrilo Princip running after the Archduke, and pointing his Browning. They groomed him to commit acts of terror; the single assassin’s the less risky option. So, with all of his guns clutched in his arms he rushed madly into the synagogue never expecting to come out again. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!
At the end of a row of white pseudo-colonial mansions, shrouded now in dark anonymity, the unthinkably rich live out of the limelight and rarely leak into view. From their summits they’re watching the little people bicker and brawl, kicking money to this one and that, tossing fuel on the fire. Our elaborate politics mean nothing to them, they just as easily consort with kings as with vassals and serfs, presidents as easily as with tyrants, deferring to constitutions but not snubbing mob rule. They watch with amusement the rise and fall of serial regimes, afterwards sending out servants to sweep the debris from the walks.
There’s a straight line can be drawn from today’s Atomwaffen and Hammerskin Nation through Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Daimler/Benz, AFGA, and Hugo Boss to Schutzstaffel, Totenkopf, and Hitler. They called it “Extermination through labor” (hardly mentioned these days as if humanity’d taken a hike), working prisoners to death, and later tossed all their medals and slipped through the Nuremburg net. Today’s “Nazi” guys work mostly alone, psychos blaming everyone else for how little they matter, how they’ll never be missed.
They sent the first wave in, armed with bats, to drive Black voters into the street, then the next bunch jumped from their cars, waving their banners and flags, and then marched, arm-in-swastika’d-arm, chanting — You Will Not Replace Us! Someone piled ballots up in the street and set them on fire. Everyone chanted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and it felt like revolution, but there were only eight guys when the police dispersed them. They all went meekly away.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Guns might be metaphors — for playing or killing — that take the edge off murder; the toy in the child’s fantasy turned real. Now add a stolen token like “militia” (and all the patriotic glosage thus entailed) that insulates the ravings of children playing at war, and you’ve got the recipe for tragedy. It doesn’t really make them any more mature that the leaders are legally adults and often inflict undisputed harm, they’re still children in a field playing at war.
A banged-up rusted pickup truck, flying two American flags, flew past angrily on a parkway filled with Mercedes and BMWs, blue smoke blowing from its rusted hanging exhaust pipe, and oblivious in his rage to how alone he seemed, slowed suddenly into the fast lane, forcing everyone to come around him and, as they came by, stuck up his middle finger and yelled, “Pay Day’s comin’, motherfuckers!”
Up to this very moment, acts of public violence had seemed random and accidental, curious psychological aberrations — a lone man with a gun, a firebug with a can of gas. But now the evening news is filled with mobs, guns and sirens, whole buildings up in smoke. It’s as if one minute there’d been an argument, the regular kind, with unwritten rules, an etiquette and some civility and, then suddenly, somebody had said, “How’d you like to take it outside?” And the knives flashed.
A colored aerial photo in this morning’s Times made huge downtown protests look like flower arrangements to the careless eye, a mix of roses, red-and-white carnations, and blue hydrangeas conveying the people’s loathing. I saw wild protestors, whose eyes were blood-shot with anger, sweat pouring off their brows in hatred of the privileged, and their arms ached to lynch them all, the rich and the better born; Cain’s psyche on a bilious rampage.
A snarling incubus goads rampaging have-nots on as they prowl through unfamiliar streets, trampling manicured lawns, tearing down the Japanese Maples and blue Wisteria in an indiscriminate hunger for revenge. A monster oversees and urges on the anarchy. A demon with an insatiable appetite, he reaches with grotesque talons to gather everything in. “A provocateur,” bystanders said, “he just whipped everything up.”
In the Redneck Revolt, there’s a suave well-educated bourgeoise’s son from Yale or Stanford maybe, who’s spent too much time in chatrooms listening to wild Fascists spinning webs. Beside him, sporting the same olive surplus combat gear, a rougher trucker’s son, who’d left school to be a Marine, now marches under a banner’d swastika. Just as in the Bible, how news of a Messiah being born sent Herod’s murderers out to slay newborns in Judea, a messianic politician now can say —“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
Anger, resentment, and hurt had replaced argument, or anything that even looked like debate. Reasoning went out the window, and the insults were flying. We were at each other’s throats and loggerheads. You could smell smoke where America’d been set on fire, and hear howls of outrage and anger. People were clawing each other, threatening extermination. Some wanted to call the police. There were racists and bigots and the pseudo-religious, on one side; the smug, well-off and proper stood on the other.
“I’m White!” the tattooed guy was bragging, “and we ain’t stepping aside.” His hat said Massey Ferguson, as he turned casually to spit. “We gotta take our country back!”
I tried to imagine being in his shoes, and I realized it doesn’t make you evil to disagree with someone. No one likes to get knocked off their perch, so taking everyone’s outlook into account, I should be able to understand anyone, feel what it’s like to be them, Jesus, maybe even empathize.
After he’d torched a Black minister’s house in the dead of night, he came bragging into the all-White bar. “White lives matter,” he said, “read it!” Then everyone shouted, You will not replace Us! As per their credo that White made them special, they imagined a ranking of skin colors — pink over brown over black, despite the identical red whenever they bled. They nailed up Confederate “star-and-bars” on their walls and practiced their Rebel yells. Yee-ha! Waa-wo!
One foot poised on the pedal, ready to kick-start the big Harley, he threw the bird at the Pakistani family coming out of the 7-11, made a U-turn in the street, and roared away. By the time he got to the Proud Boys’ party in Boise, the way he was telling the story, he’d scared them Pakis off and painted swastikas all over their walls. But, even I saw those fat fuckers on TV climbing on the Capitol; you just know they were faking rebellion.
There in your comfortable chair you could hardly have imagined that night. The stars, as always, were distant and cold, but the silent darkness filled quickly up with wild car horns, sirens, the boom and crackle of war, and house fires spread across the city. Your heart told you everything was changing. Rancor spread like plague through the town and left a formless terror of each other in its wake. Civility was dying and its vocabulary’d been replaced by a rough and guttural truculence — “Fuck you!” “Eat Shit!” and “Motherfucker!”
That giant enterprise, society, hangs by a strand of spidery web. The ties that bind are fragile, silken things. We each of us bear the duty... Stop! Now that’s too preachy. We’ve all grown vain and complacent, reciting our virtues and principles without meaning. Oh, we’re so inclusive! And empathetic! Proud, though, and haughty, too. And do we moralize! But, the truth is, we cut people adrift and forget them, we let poverty and ignorance fester because we’d rather spend the money on fancy soaps and prime filets. To be poor, ignorant, and White used to be compensated for when you stood, in your turn, on the upturned faces of Black people; but liberal progress has knocked all that down. Now embittered White people are ready to knock over the chessboard.
Most of the people who live in poverty,
most of the illegitimate children,
most of the single mothers on welfare,
most of the unemployed men, and
most of those arrested for serious crimes in America
— are White.
A White-supremacist took a vacation to Africa and was astonished to see Black doctors and bankers, Black professors and priests, and he had to bite his tongue. When he got back home he started raging and spewing, his dread of being replaced was now stronger than ever. “We’re up against the devil,” he roared. Everywhere he saw perversion, and plots against White Anglo-Saxon America, and he prayed each night for the power to stop the wholesale suicide of despairing Caucasians.
His unkempt beard, sweaty tee-shirts, and greasy hair got in the way of true love, so he settled for skags (as he called them) and a trailer instead, and the highs he got from chanting, Where We Go One, We Go All in parking lots and, on that fateful day, from climbing the Capitol’s walls. There’s no end of irony up and down the social ladder — all the while you’re reveling in the anger you vent downwards, there’s dirt being kicked in your face from above, until you get to the top of the ladder and see the few who set all the kicking in motion. It’s hard to keep a straight face.
There’s something disturbingly childish (if you’re neither soldier nor cop) about dressing up and wearing a holstered Magnum or Uzi slung over your shoulder. What’s scary, there’s more guns here than people, and the people all dying to be heroes in their own action movies. And while, technically it’d be against the law if he carried his concealed Sauer onto a school grounds, by then it just might be too late.
The fear was that Whites have been losing ground, elbowed off to the side of the road. That’s not so much a political thing as visceral, something coming up from the gut. Helps explain, though, how Christians (born in the blood of the Lord) can disdain the other cheek, and call out for violence (as one always does when the talk’s just not going your way). Backed into a corner, these “real Americans” jettison the Constitution, hoping for a coup.
Resentful and outside the circle, he dreamed; his head filled with Proudhon, Kropotkin, and bringing all property’s theft onto the scene in Illinois and New Jersey, leaving the plutocrats trembling in their beds. He heard the music of equality sung in his head, he heard it night and day. Rebellion’s the only way, he’d say, of righting the wrongs that he knew; you could see everything in the full light of day — chaos was the unavoidable first step.
When everyone’s finally compared their notes, they’ll have seen that they’d all been treated with the same contempt. “Pariahs,” the old truck-driver said, “they treat us like lepers.” He put his Kenworth in gear and parked it crossways in the road. “Let‘em try to get through that,” he said. A guy who’d rather die than be thought a Marxist was talking about spreading the wealth around; “Give everyone something,” he said. “Make room at the table. Isn’t that what Jesus said?”
An appreciation of the beauty of guns, of their precise machining, their luster, disguises the horrible menace they represent. Bullets actually tear through flesh and bone, destroy children as easily as robbers. As pleasurable as if you were a drummer and hit every beat exactly, and I mean every time. ‘Course they tell you that you are the best. So, why wouldn’t you think it? Everything wrong comes from the Devil who’s infected the U.S. with his poison. I’m not suspicious, but the evidence adds up. He knows how the game is played, he’ll lead us out of this mess.
He was looking for something to believe in; he’d lost faith in the American dream. “They all just want to get in here before we close the door,” the preacher said, “they all want to vote and all the rest of the stuff.” And then this from the holy-of-holies: “America’s White, Christian, and born here. So slam shut the gates, pull all the drawbridges up.” This was surely delusion. How is it each race imagines they’re the best? And, if you’ve ever heard anyone say that out loud, you know how crazy it sounds.
At first, there’s some hesitation, heavy as a brick, that keeps the wildest actions at bay. But it’s only an idea that, once punctured, disappears like smoke, and the unenlightened mob breaks through; freed at last from the suffocating flatness of their ordinary lives, they fly to the drama of conflict, conspiracy, and the golden leader, his square-set jaw, his steely eye, who will lead them when they take their country back. Everything’s turned upside-down; the best among us cower in retreat, while the worst push themselves forward, greedy, unashamed.
In the apoplexy of the country, some of the people will do the raging, but the larger, mixed, and growing people, a panoply of races, lingoes, and gods — red, black, yellow, and brown — will be the raged-against thing. Bigots and idiots will demand “foreigners” be put on boats and sent back where they came from. America for Americans! they’ll cry from their pale lips. See it in their pale eyes. Here’s the irony; these chauvinists all dance on the stringhe di marionette, in the hands of the puppet masters.
I dreamed the common man in a John Deere cap awakened and filled the streets with chants of Justice! The People! Freedom! And the lawyers and doctors and bankers drew back as if a grotesque had got out of its cage, and was now demanding a purer American people, a Whiter people, a simple, muscular common people rising up! But, then the dream burst and they were back in their mobile homes filled with kids and poverty, and the television blaring nonsense, numbing the very air. The red light over the intersection swung lightly in an ocean breeze, a warning
STOP
and making the White woman in her Mercedes tense up and notice the Black man in his pickup beside her. She stared right at him and her anger grew. Blacks and Mexicans, she thought, everywhere. We’ll have Buddhists next, or even Muslims. Where does it all end? she almost cried out loud. The Black man inched his old truck forward to get beyond her stare. She looked deranged, and he decided it best not to stir her up. She wanted to tell him to get out of town, to go back where he came from. He was watching the light, urging it to change. It took forever.
Talk in the room stops when the guns come out. The majority, punctured, collapses around empty air. The man with a gun (a good or a bad guy) dictated the conversation and picks the most direct route. What the “R” in NRA might stand for — righteous. When a social class has grown desperate, frightened of losing its place, it lashes out to freeze the momentum by any means at hand. You don’t overturn elections with a song.
They say only three things really matter: politics, God, and your gun. The more untutored you are, the more the gun matters, the more it defines you: “Go ahead, make my day.” If you grew up in the boonies where your friends toted guns, you stuck a holster on your hip and you were set for anything. “I don’t go after deer and stuff,” the pimply delinquent said, “I’ve only got the side arm, and it’s more just for protection. But, if the time ever comes, I’ll be ready. ”If you’re White and a man and live in the sticks, you’re most likely armed, right-wing, and nervous.
No one talks about how armed resistance groups dressed up in elaborate military gear, war surplus (but not really “uniforms”) as if they were going off to war, are mostly fat. They’re racists, though, and that’s no laughing matter. Two groups who see now a zero-sum game: the White-and-poor who boogaloo to arms, afraid their race is becoming outnumbered; and the very rich, who worry they might have to go back to the end of the line.
In the politics class they were trying to guess what would happen in the next presidential election if Trump got elected and Biden refused to allow it, and ordered the Marshalls to put Trump in jail. Mary Agnes, Republican, was totally outraged, “Stop the steal!” she shouted involuntarily, forgetting (till Percey, the so liberal democrat, reminded her) it was only a class. What part of it’s real, what part of it’s fake, everyone here would sure like to know.
“I think it’s fair to say,” the famed ethicist remarked, “that no one’s ever that wicked on purpose. The way people see themselves, they’re always in the right.” Okay, let’s say a true artist never takes sides, but aims always to portray the whole range of human nature. Some dope in a psycho-political gesture drives his car into a crowd and kills people, mistaking imbecility for zeal, and imagines himself now a Nazi hero. He’s got life in prison to meditate on that. Insisting you’re radically free is a threat, specially measured out from the tip of my nose. Take this guy all dressed up to look tough, carrying weapons and strutting down the street, all but pushing people aside. He goes where he pleases and does what he feels like. In the long run, he thinks, he’ll get to decide who stays and who goes, who lives and who dies, in the new.
AMERIKA.
A soldier returns from Afghanistan, totally inured to guns and violence and, having had all his race predilections whet, concludes America will soon be overrun by foreigners and Blacks, and pledges to resist. My brother and I shot rabbits in the groves, and sent them tumbling, shuddering, and quivering to death. Then there’s this woman’s grown tired of her boyfriend, so he brings ‘round his Beretta and dispatches them both.
Do you remember the first time you heard some racial epithet uttered and no one objected or even looked up startled? Do you remember when there were laws about guns? Had you ever heard anyone advocate shooting the President before? There’s a screen of insanity behind which the Kochs, the Waltons, and Musk get on with counting their dough, leaving the rest of us tip-toeing through mine fields. No one wants to be a cop anymore; they’re overworked, broke, and resented. And it’s dangerous being a cop; someone’s always got you in his sights. In the middle, you’re always in the wrong. Would the blue line stand against the anarchists and bomb throwers? is the question everyone’s asking. Two groups trained to use weapons, veterans and the police, stand across from each other, bringing the hot moment in close.
Think of the very rich who, believing in nothing and lusting for everything, clutch their stuff jealously against oblivion. Does money stand outside the immediate fray, comprising the overall scene — city, the planet, the heavens? The old man collected newspapers; he had them in stacks (everyone’s seen them) all over the house. I knew a guy had a room full of pistols, rifles, and boxes of ammo; he bought new ones every so often in the belief you can never have too many guns.
It is the angry racist rant that best captures what the Alt Right’s so anxious to protect — pale epidermis — not at all God-given (no one revels in pallid) skin color results from ultra-violet in latitudes (we were all negroes, then, to begin with). All the rest, the childish mutterings, cartoon depictions of whomever they hate, all the manly, leathered, and sweaty posturing, and frequently misused big words; these things only disguise their meanness and a tendency to braggadocio. “You saw what happened in South Africa, ”they chant, “send all the coloreds back.”
There are White people here in America suffering from severe dysphoria, and they find life hard, so they’re looking around for scapegoats. They rake the muck and listen to each story with a jaundiced ear — look, and lo! they find they’re not themselves to blame! “It’s the Blacks,” they explain (or the Arabs or Mexicans). This way their distemper’s directed away from the big boys pulling the strings. There’s someone behind every curtain, and someone right behind him.
To have concluded (in the face of a melting Earth, under the disappearance of the sky at night, along with the rivers drying up and watching the oceans rise over seawalls) that keeping the White race in ascendance was all that mattered, is a sign, even more than the layabouts with their slack jaws and blank-eyed gawkers, of the utter insignificance of the far Right’s direst threats and prophecies.
How can you compare your racist tauntings to Minutemen picking off Redcoats from behind their stone walls? You must mean there’s a thing you call “patriotic hatred.” It’s a shabby, pitiful Weltanschauung; you must have been hurt as a child. Otherwise how to explain it? Your symbols and meanings twist like strands in the double helix, and you feel righteous, your mouth full of bile, and courageous, like wild dogs in a pack.
The stigma of Nazism is wearing off in America, you see Stahlhelme on maniacs and Hakenkreuz hanging on Capitol walls, and vestiges of Munich and Weimar fall around us like blossoms in the coming spring. Ordinary citizens parade in childish ersatz uniforms, armed to the hilt, demanding an end to equality. In rural America now, our very own sans-culottes call for Black heads on a spike.
There’s a photo I saw on the internet of this half-naked White guy holding a Nazi flag and sucking in his belly, trying to look tough. It made me realize that it’s all mostly posturing, from Bannon to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying guns in public’s just not heroic, but dangerously childish, brandishing and strutting for nothing in particular. All their so-called ideas are vacuous and childish, meant only to hide that they’re frightened to death of extinction.
The doors are locked to all but the chosen, so the big thief figures how to get in, slips on an unthreatening fatherly masque and ducks under the wire. The devoted and rag-tag entourage bask in his emptiness, bereft of ideas. They’d just as soon burn down everything down. The ventriloquist throws his inflections from way across the room, his intentions come out of the mouths of barbarians, makes it seem like their own. They’re up and ready to go.
A high-school dropout, he listens to the braying ass, and sways to his thick rhythms. Most things bewilder him, but he’s awake to simple ideas. He hears the call to arms against the alien tide. Down long narrow chutes into the pen, they’re herded, rounded up, and branded. Incoherence can be compensated for by the music and the color of the words. Their eyes glaze over in the thrill of being spoken to. Whose hand’s that in my pocket?
The money that flowed from secret coffers was used to hire buses, at first, then they bought semi-automatic tommy guns and gas masks, so in a mob they would all look the same. Some wore military surplus, others dressed up in frivolous costumes — steel-toed boots and shirts made from Old Glory. They cast everything aside and took the leap, risking life or death, or a charge of treason. “There’s no turning back,” the zealous ones postured — then they all stepped over the line.
The party of Lincoln has moved through various stages, and finally arrived at its own Armageddon; They’ve decided to pull the whole thing down. QAnon, Proud Boys, and the Aryan Nation brought their fetid smell within the tent, a Fascist stench, that surely never would have freed any slaves. Hate is just like acid that eats you out from the inside. The moment comes down now (as it so often has) to the Many or the One.
He was all alone much of the time, and he had a weird sense of humor, quirky, often pretending he was Gavrilo Princip running after the Archduke, and pointing his Browning. They groomed him to commit acts of terror; the single assassin’s the less risky option. So, with all of his guns clutched in his arms he rushed madly into the synagogue never expecting to come out again. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!
At the end of a row of white pseudo-colonial mansions, shrouded now in dark anonymity, the unthinkably rich live out of the limelight and rarely leak into view. From their summits they’re watching the little people bicker and brawl, kicking money to this one and that, tossing fuel on the fire. Our elaborate politics mean nothing to them, they just as easily consort with kings as with vassals and serfs, presidents as easily as with tyrants, deferring to constitutions but not snubbing mob rule. They watch with amusement the rise and fall of serial regimes, afterwards sending out servants to sweep the debris from the walks.
There’s a straight line can be drawn from today’s Atomwaffen and Hammerskin Nation through Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Daimler/Benz, AFGA, and Hugo Boss to Schutzstaffel, Totenkopf, and Hitler. They called it “Extermination through labor” (hardly mentioned these days as if humanity’d taken a hike), working prisoners to death, and later tossed all their medals and slipped through the Nuremburg net. Today’s “Nazi” guys work mostly alone, psychos blaming everyone else for how little they matter, how they’ll never be missed.
They sent the first wave in, armed with bats, to drive Black voters into the street, then the next bunch jumped from their cars, waving their banners and flags, and then marched, arm-in-swastika’d-arm, chanting — You Will Not Replace Us! Someone piled ballots up in the street and set them on fire. Everyone chanted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and it felt like revolution, but there were only eight guys when the police dispersed them. They all went meekly away.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Guns might be metaphors — for playing or killing — that take the edge off murder; the toy in the child’s fantasy turned real. Now add a stolen token like “militia” (and all the patriotic glosage thus entailed) that insulates the ravings of children playing at war, and you’ve got the recipe for tragedy. It doesn’t really make them any more mature that the leaders are legally adults and often inflict undisputed harm, they’re still children in a field playing at war.
3. Epilogue
Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.
― Wilhelm Reich
“Now, here’s our plan,” the retired Senator spoke into the mic, “for making a completely new start. Ban the Constitution, and then burn it. Burn all the books! Empty the libraries, make some huge bonfires! Boycott the gay commie news! Fuck all the Liberals! Let’s start all over again, with a new White America!” At first no one was taking them seriously but, by the time we all noticed, it was simply too late. Abruptly, unfamiliar newscasters appeared on all of the TV channels, saying the same boring old things. They were still peddling cars and detergent just as if nothing had happened.
We’re living in a war, right now,
— WTNH News, New Haven
Things seemed to be out of control. They’d already trashed all the voting machines, broke every window in Biden’s headquarters, and were hanging from lampposts like monkeys. The rednecks believed they and their Nazi friends would just file into Congress and take any seat, but they were mad disappointed because when they got there it was locked up tight and the lights were turned off. The country slid onto the alternative track, saying bye-bye to participation.
Yes, they have more money.
— Ernest Hemingway
Somebody climbed to the highest peak to get a glimpse of the future; and he was stunned. The rich got to be richer than ever, but the poor got even poorer; there were so many more of them. They came in all colors — White, Black, and Brown — and they all now huddled together. Too late, though, the racist militias learned race counted for shit; all that mattered was cash (have you got any?). They’ve doubled the guards on all the big mansions, confiscated everyone’s guns. “Here’s the thing,” the billionaire’d said, “everything’s going to get better. Just wait until government’s out of the way.” We began to think he’d been lying. All the roads needed paving; the schools were closed, all the colleges too. (Of course, they kept Harvard, Yale, and Princeton open to students who are almost all legacy). The police and the firemen now only protected mansions and posh neighborhoods. But, in the stores, there was still plenty of Gucci, Versace, and Dior.
So, who are they, all these barons and sultans, pretending they’re all in it for justice? Keep your eye on the long run. Watch for the Posse Comitatus and Aryan Nation to get kicked to the side of the road. Does anyone honestly think Trump or the others will sit down to eat with those unkempt, unsavory thugs,(off their gold plate and crystal)? You couldn’t have Bannon to supper, you’d be afraid he’d eat with his fingers.
I saw an old woman carrying a sign that read crudely, “THE END IS NEAR,” when out of nowhere the police swooped down and scooped her up. “We can’t have any more of this negative talk,” the TV News guy explained, but there are still signs of a storm in the air and I’m hoping it’ll blow all of their big houses down. Imagine acts of resistance, small ones at first, might be in the planning in Newark or Tucson, clandestine groups made up of veterans and bamboozled racists putting disagreements aside, and attacking the millionaires, driving them back to their embarrassing houses.
That’s too much to dream! More likely, of course, things would skid off the rails (think Kerensky or Salvador Allende) and for a time sadistic grandees would reign. Power would pass from hand to hand while the bodies piled up in the streets. The winners would not be known for a while, but lots of our houses would be burned down. Loyalties inevitably would shift around and too many good people would die, and you wouldn’t be able to buy gas anywhere.
Like cherry bombs with their short fuses lit, we were sputtering toward some unknown, toward a still vacant future, possible extinction. Someone will have remembered how we got to the American Reich. Here’s a photo of raggedy men holding guns over their heads, shouting something. We can’t hear what they said. Look at that breadline, and the guy holding the sign that says he will work for food. And the police rounding up Blacks and Hispanics, loading them onto a big stake-bed truck. Could this be our future, the way things will be?
The reason Fascism worked — it was just meant to keep the masses beguiled with ornate scapegoats and symbols, while der die Reichen scooped up all the spilled coins. In its most recent version the wealthiest gents fund the crumbums, they send money and weapons out into the country to tear down whoever might stand in their way. They hate all taxation, and have no idea there’s a public anything. They don’t even mow their own lawns.
[M]en of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs...
— Plato, The Republic
Imagine America’s gone, and kaput, and some other thing’s put in her place, our own native anal bored Oligarkhia, rule by our greediest few. The kid on the playground who wants all the marbles, like it’s natural to want everything. But, who would kill just for one more, who’d let everyone starve just to put Bianco Dolomiti tiles on the walls of his shower? What’s a euphemistic name for the kind of regime issuing from all this short-sighted greed?
We’re living in a war, right now,
— WTNH News, New Haven
Things seemed to be out of control. They’d already trashed all the voting machines, broke every window in Biden’s headquarters, and were hanging from lampposts like monkeys. The rednecks believed they and their Nazi friends would just file into Congress and take any seat, but they were mad disappointed because when they got there it was locked up tight and the lights were turned off. The country slid onto the alternative track, saying bye-bye to participation.
Yes, they have more money.
— Ernest Hemingway
Somebody climbed to the highest peak to get a glimpse of the future; and he was stunned. The rich got to be richer than ever, but the poor got even poorer; there were so many more of them. They came in all colors — White, Black, and Brown — and they all now huddled together. Too late, though, the racist militias learned race counted for shit; all that mattered was cash (have you got any?). They’ve doubled the guards on all the big mansions, confiscated everyone’s guns. “Here’s the thing,” the billionaire’d said, “everything’s going to get better. Just wait until government’s out of the way.” We began to think he’d been lying. All the roads needed paving; the schools were closed, all the colleges too. (Of course, they kept Harvard, Yale, and Princeton open to students who are almost all legacy). The police and the firemen now only protected mansions and posh neighborhoods. But, in the stores, there was still plenty of Gucci, Versace, and Dior.
So, who are they, all these barons and sultans, pretending they’re all in it for justice? Keep your eye on the long run. Watch for the Posse Comitatus and Aryan Nation to get kicked to the side of the road. Does anyone honestly think Trump or the others will sit down to eat with those unkempt, unsavory thugs,(off their gold plate and crystal)? You couldn’t have Bannon to supper, you’d be afraid he’d eat with his fingers.
I saw an old woman carrying a sign that read crudely, “THE END IS NEAR,” when out of nowhere the police swooped down and scooped her up. “We can’t have any more of this negative talk,” the TV News guy explained, but there are still signs of a storm in the air and I’m hoping it’ll blow all of their big houses down. Imagine acts of resistance, small ones at first, might be in the planning in Newark or Tucson, clandestine groups made up of veterans and bamboozled racists putting disagreements aside, and attacking the millionaires, driving them back to their embarrassing houses.
That’s too much to dream! More likely, of course, things would skid off the rails (think Kerensky or Salvador Allende) and for a time sadistic grandees would reign. Power would pass from hand to hand while the bodies piled up in the streets. The winners would not be known for a while, but lots of our houses would be burned down. Loyalties inevitably would shift around and too many good people would die, and you wouldn’t be able to buy gas anywhere.
Like cherry bombs with their short fuses lit, we were sputtering toward some unknown, toward a still vacant future, possible extinction. Someone will have remembered how we got to the American Reich. Here’s a photo of raggedy men holding guns over their heads, shouting something. We can’t hear what they said. Look at that breadline, and the guy holding the sign that says he will work for food. And the police rounding up Blacks and Hispanics, loading them onto a big stake-bed truck. Could this be our future, the way things will be?
The reason Fascism worked — it was just meant to keep the masses beguiled with ornate scapegoats and symbols, while der die Reichen scooped up all the spilled coins. In its most recent version the wealthiest gents fund the crumbums, they send money and weapons out into the country to tear down whoever might stand in their way. They hate all taxation, and have no idea there’s a public anything. They don’t even mow their own lawns.
[M]en of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs...
— Plato, The Republic
Imagine America’s gone, and kaput, and some other thing’s put in her place, our own native anal bored Oligarkhia, rule by our greediest few. The kid on the playground who wants all the marbles, like it’s natural to want everything. But, who would kill just for one more, who’d let everyone starve just to put Bianco Dolomiti tiles on the walls of his shower? What’s a euphemistic name for the kind of regime issuing from all this short-sighted greed?
Copyright © November 2023 Charles Tarlton
Charles Tarlton is a poet living in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and their two standard poodles, Nikki and Jesse. His poems and flash fictions have appeared in 84 journals and in six print collections of his poetry and ekphrasis.
