Ride Trigger over the Sunset

     Let us consider the practice of language policing.  Getting bent out of shape about the use of a word that's offensive to some, but not to others.  "Triggered," a word that triggers me, making me think of times when I've seen terrible things in movies like Jaws and The Shining, images of war, bodies in documentary films about Vietnam and World War Two, dead of Hiroshima, the British soldier bulldozing a tangle of dead emaciated bodies into a pit, all these images never leaving my head, I welcome all of them, they are part of my piece of the collective memory of humankind.  To live a life, just try it, of guarding against being triggered seems a good way to never learn how to empathize with real suffering.

     A word sends back a memory, it's happened to me.  I have watched several films dealing with mental illness.  They triggered me; memories of psychiatric wards and their sometimes obtuse personnel, of Jurassic Park played at high volume, watched by dark blue-clothed (suicide watch color) men.  I wore their color, but after a week they gave me my jeans back, my shoelaces and belt once I learned graciousness towards the captors.

     Girl, Interrupted, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lilith, Red Desert, all of them dealing with mental illnesses, mental hospitals, changing perceptions.  These films triggered me.  I took that in and breathed out the uncomfortable aspects of the memory triggers to accept the pain of what happened to me in 1993, 1994, and 2002.  Manic Depressive Illness.  "No joke," to borrow Joe "I'm Just a Regular Guy" Biden's phrase.

     I'm not presuming that everyone can react to triggers the way I do.  Some have deep, serious trauma complicated with many current life factors, like we're in a fucking pandemic and the government won't give the people Medicare for All, but Biden expanded the war budget even further to its greatest balloon- about-to-burst extent.  There's money to give to Mitch McConnell's wife and Nancy Pelosi's husband and Tom Brady so he can put an $89,000 down payment on his first yacht, but there's no way we can get a UBI and Medicare for All. 

     Does that kind of thing trigger you?  Life is a trigger.  Trigger is a horse, galloping proudly, guided by a sure hand.  Also, a word is not a bullet, so the word trigger doesn't fit what actually happens when someone gets offended by the use of a word.

     What does happen?  

     A cocktail party in Bel Air, 1950, white-gloved women wearing hats, they all know each other from the beauty parlor, from the studios, the parties, the charity events.  Their husbands are producers, actors, art directors, directors, and one of their donkeys is a movie star in his own right.

     This modernistic Bel Air house has a triangular swimming pool with a dark eye painted on the bottom, a wavering eye symbolizing its Mason owner, a prominent actor who once kissed Greta Garbo.  Well-connected, he attends J. Edgar Hoover's dress-up parties at which President Lyndon Johnson can sometimes be seen, accompanied only by his favorite henchman, Rodney "Head Shot" Champlain.

     Back at the Bel Air party, a white-gloved woman named Rhonda says, "After all, my father's in the KKK.  It's really a charity.  The letters stand for Kind, Kinder, Kindest."

     Does that absurd story trip triggers?

     I'm not telling anybody how to use language, but trying to limit people's words is a shitty thing to do to someone--imposition of your hang-up about a word on someone else.  Try saying the word you don't like a thousand times.  It will lose all meaning, sounding eventually like a percussion instrument.  Start a band, new album coming out Tuesday, I've Untriggered Myself!

     I know it's not simple, I'm making light of it.  Humor, though, is a tonic for those who feel triggered and need warnings.  Part of me says it's people not letting their minds grow up.  The world is a horrifying place.  India's going through the biggest Covid-19 infection and death rate in the world these days.  Our government continues the War on Terror, now on its fourth president, someone determined to make it go on.  

     "I like Dick Cheney," said Joe Biden, for real.  Warmongers praising each other without journalistic pushback triggers me.

     I get triggered, too, when people come into my place of work, sloppy about how they wear or don't wear masks.  I have to tell grownups to wear their masks properly.  

     It doesn't affect my life negatively that people get freaked out by certain words holding personal associations for them, though not for me.  Everyone I've spoken with about this has different views, different words they don't like although there's large agreement on specific words.  

     I don't like the sound of the word fecal.  Fecal matter.  Yeah, that sounds better than "shit," not really.  

     I don't want to ban the word fecal, nor do I wish to ban any word; I'm not afraid of them.

     

Vic Neptune

   

     

     

       

     

Our Leaders' Cold Dead Minds

     Does this era cause despair in our lives?  Is the governmental/societal/capitalistic structure running the U.S. laid bare like a building's skeleton against a sunset?

     Who brought ruin to America?  Donald Trump and white supremacists, or hyper-capitalist leeches draining workers of middle and poor classes, stealing fifty trillion dollars over forty years, through tax code fuckery (Biden), war obsession and profiteering, and, oops, the Pentagon can't account for twenty-one trillion dollars, among other practices enriching and empowering the worst scum in the nation.

     America, philosophically and historically, is a white supremacist nation.  Raiding and assisting raiders in capturing Africans to ship to America is not really a stain on our history.  If the sheet of the nation's history is red (and read) throughout when it comes to its own behavior towards its own people (comprised of former foreigners) and foreigners to this day, it's an easy determination: the nation in question is a bloodthirsty empire vomiting its psychopathic ideology on the world: capitalism is our religion, it must be yours, but we, the rich, use socialism for ourselves, the government gives us money, lots of money, while it debates for months on how many hundreds of dollars to give poor mothers with sick families who don't have Medicare for All, which, according to a recent study, would've saved one third of American lives from Covid-19, which makes Trump and Biden, both opposed to Medicare for All, killers of hundreds of thousands of their own people.  

     Behaviors caused by my own despair manifest as overeating, laziness, indiscipline, carelessness, brooding, TV on too much of the time, seeing a video about how Trump looks more out of shape than ever, the poor little billionaire, who really gives a fuck about that asshole?

     Biden, though, God help us, is the president, the one to blame for current fixable conditions.

     Children, packed into see-through cells panopticon-style, their blankets shining like aluminum foil,

resemble wrapped fast food.  This can be blamed on three administrations: Obama's, Trump's, and Biden's.  None of these three men give a shit about these kids.

     Republican senators, including Grassley and Cruz, pretending they just discovered the inhumanity practiced as policy at the Mexico-U.S. border, went on a fact-finding mission the journalistic value of which revealed current, under Biden, overcrowded facilities like the one in Donna, Texas, maximum capacity of 250, but with 4,100 migrant children (including a four month old) "living" in Kafkaesque prison conditions.  Entirely the fault of U.S. foreign policymakers over decades of exploitation and subversion of Latin American nations, these crimes against humanity are apologized for by liberal fucktards, because, you know, Biden's doing it, not Trump, so let's look the other way.

     The same dumb politicized logic could be applied to the U.S.-enabled genocide in Yemen.  Biden isn't doing anything about that, either, nor did Trump.  400,000 Yemeni children are in danger of starving to death while Saudi Arabia, aided by the United States under Obama, Trump, and Biden, prevents food deliveries in the midst of a now six year war.  This kind of behavior by authorities, practiced by some Nazi leaders, got the latter hanged at Nuremberg.  Our leaders have no moral standards.

     Ted Cruz, with camera phone, videographed children crammed into transparent cells, enclosures like those seen in Planet of the Apes, but without the straw flooring paced upon by Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison, both of whom in that film have more room to move freely in than the unfortunates in Donna, Texas.

     A female ICE worker blocked Cruz's camera, shifting about as if playing defense in basketball.  She begged repeatedly for respect for the children, to not disturb them (as if locking up refugees from drug cartel murder zones created by the U.S. didn't disturb them so much they walked hundreds of miles to get away, wouldn't you?)

     Twitter Star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), so alarmed from her visit to the border facilities during the Trump administration that she correctly called them "concentration camps," has not used that term to describe the even more crowded and disgraceful situation under Biden.  Same facilities, same policies, same types of motherfuckers in Washington, but AOC is now one of them.

     AOC declined to fight for Medicare for All, has twice voted for Establishment Monster Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House.  She didn't fight for the fifteen dollar minimum wage killed recently by destroyer of dreams Joe Biden.  She also embarrassed herself by donating 160,000 dollars to centrist Democrats--some of whom returned the money, not wanting to be associated with her for supposedly being an arch-leftist (nonsense believed in nonetheless by those Fox News viewers who believe all the utterances of Fox News pundits).  The 160,000 dollars donated to centrist and corporate Democrats makes AOC look like the Democrat she is: one seeking approval from her party after two years of their growing hatred for her.

     That she got the 160,000 from small dollar donors who believed she would fight for Medicare for All, among other Progressive policies, should make no one ever want to donate to her again since those centrists and corporate Democrats receiving, or returning, the money are opposed to Medicare for All. 

     Imagine sending a politician money.  She claims she's fighting for what you and your loved ones need.  She then gives your money to politicians diametrically opposed to what you need.  What a fucking two-face, or, a typical shitty politician.

     I'm disappointed in AOC, to say the least, but I never donated to her, nor have I ever donated money to politicians.  I recommend it.

     AOC now calls the border situation "barbaric," but she claims it was more barbaric under Trump, with "babies ripped from their mothers' arms."  That Trump's border policies were horrible can only be denied with conviction by those who never perceived anything wrong with their billionaire president.  Joe Biden now takes on that role for liberal and Democratic apologists.  Both viewpoints are fucking stupid, and besides that, from the look of things in the border facilities, conditions are now worse under Biden--he's the president, he's the one who can do something proactive and humane about it, but he isn't.

     I didn't vote last November.  My revulsion at the idea of supporting, even with my minuscule vote, any of the lawmaker cretins running Washington, prevented me from helping any of them achieve more power.   Their actions and their lack of action in doing good, condemn children, whether in Yemen or Texas, to malnourishment and starvation, imprisonment, indignity, and uncertain futures, even as AOC and her ilk fundraise off of the criminality of their opponents, while not admitting their own criminality.

     Wake up to the true natures of these people.

Vic Neptune