FINIS

You’re staring down at a meal. Could be a turkey dinner, a pizza from Domino’s, mint chocolate-chip ice cream, whatever you like. Because this is your last meal. The last thing you taste before the elected Powers That Be take your life in the name of Lady Justice.

Because you fucked up. Maybe you caught your significant other getting some on the side and lost control. It happens. Or maybe you were a dirty crook to begin with and shot some rich prick who wouldn’t give up his Rolex. Hell, maybe you’re a methodical serial killer. Ted Bundy: The Next Generation.

It doesn’t matter.

Whoever you are and whatever you’re eating, you have a unique opportunity. Unlike many, you can contemplate your death as an immediate reality rather than a philosophical abstract. The greatest thinkers themselves were never in your position, the old being too incoherent and the young never seeing it coming. Well, there was Socrates, but we won’t get into that.

The myriad of possibilities rushes through your mind. Heaven, Hell, Reincarnation, or just plain Oblivion. The greatest question ever asked by humanity: “What comes after death?” and you are about to learn the answer and, possibly, the ultimate Truth of the universe.

You may be excited or intrigued at the thought of gaining such knowledge. You might be shitting your pants; terrified of losing the only existence you have ever known. You may have found Religion while on death row and go to your fate with a sense of peace. You may be an unrepentant monster who happily recounts every horrendous act, especially the ones the cops never found out about.

Doesn’t matter. There’s a schedule to follow and your feelings don’t factor into it.

You can be thinking of this while you eat, or while the nice guards lead you down the hall. It’s okay, no one will deny you the right to daydream.

And when you’re being strapped into the Chair, or the Gas Chamber, or whatever form of egress is currently in vogue, it hits you: the banality of the whole thing. The systematic tightening of restraints (can’t disturb anyone with you’re flailing limbs), the droning voice of whatever religious authority you have requested (if any), it’s all so mechanical. Executions, the State ordered ending of a life, are carried out with all the seriousness and emotion of a routine board meeting. You’re Executioner looks like he’d rather be at the bar with his buddies. This is when you realize there is no grand finale, no climax, no drum roll leading up to a clash of symbols. It just ends.

The Year in Hate

2014 sure was a banner year for hate. With so much racism and police state apologism exploding in just the fall, you likely forgot some of the highlights earlier in the year.

Like Cliven Bundy, the "tax protestor" who turned out to be a vile racist since those things are usually so separate. No less a national blowhard than Sean Hannity hitched his wagon to this cracker and his half-assed anti-government rhetoric until it all culminated in the murder of two police officers. The NYPD has yet to blame Bill de Blasio.

"Blah Blah racist bullshit."

In other shooting news, poisonous skitstovel Elliot Rodger tried to go on a shooting spree in retaliation for never getting his dick wet. That he didn't rack up much of a body count, including some dudes, convinced professional internet misogynists that he wasn't influenced by them at all. Nope, he just managed to regurgitate all of their talking points in his ridiculous manifesto by coincidence.

"Feminism is why I can't get any, not my repulsive personality!"

Besides, gun crimes only count when police think a black guy might have a gun. That's why they didn't even bother with the theatrics of asking a grand jury following the killing of John Crawford. They heard he might be carrying a rifle and you just can't do that in public.

Running around a toy store with assault rifles is a job for the police.

Or stolen cigars. That there's a capital offense. Especially if they were stolen by a colossal Terminator-Demon-Gorilla and you're a nebishy police officer with nothing but your sidearm, baton, pepper spray, a militarized police force, and the support of a frightening number of the population to protect you.

"That black kid is scaring us!"

And God help you if you're selling untaxed cigarettes, because freedom-loving Americans and their justice system sure won't. Sure, Jaime Dimon can obliterate the savings of millions and still walk around unmolested but he's rich and white. If you're engaging in shady economic activity just to put food on the table, you're worse than Hitler.

This is what a police state murder looks like.

Much like trying to shoot all the filthy whores, you'll find a surprisingly vocal segment of America who are all in favor of police brutality when it's against poor brown folks. This is what John Dolan calls the Sullen Majority, that bedrock rottenness of every civilization where there is no joy, just petty malice and resentment. This is how you can get the same people who have cried for years about Obama the Islamo-Commie stealing their freedoms turning a blind eye to actual abuses of the citizenry. This is how you get so many red-blooded American patriots defending anal rape by their government. The American concept of "freedom" is a narrowly narcissistic thing, championing one's every action as sanctioned by Providence while demanding the whole weight of the law smack down any of those uppity Others.

But no catalog of 2014 hate would be complete without a look at the internet! Continuing to demonstrate how SOPA might have been a good thing, lots of the same assholes who celebrated Elliot Rodger spent the past few months flipping their shit over video games. What began as a hate movement against any women who dare to get near their toys - including a threatened school shooting in October - soon devolved into pedophilia apologism and straight up white nationalism. Also, Eron Gjoni rapes goats.

Here, this is a nice distraction from all the awful.

In far more important internet news, beloved hacktivist doodad TOR was revealed to be funded by the US State Department. People who'd invested their time and trust in the TOR network engaged in serious debate about the ramifications for privacy and Nah, they flipped their shit too. Not because they're all secretly on the NSA payroll but because programmers are the modern manifestation of Jonathan Swift's Laputa. This is still ongoing and you can see all the histrionic scumbags on Twitter proving why hacktivism is a waste of time.

Each layer is more denial. And Neo-Nazis.

So there you have it: 2014 was the year of hating anyone and everyone who dared to not be a wealthy white dude. Honorable mention to Hobby Lobby, for setting a legal precedent that your employer can now control your sex life. Because freedom.

A Brief History of Race War

With folks expressing their displeasure at the police having a license to kill, it seems all the closet racists are in a race to out themselves:

If I were a white guy living near Ferguson, you had better bet I am buying ammo to protect my property and family. These "protesters" seem to be the most racist aspect of this story.

These people are burning the city down.

The same old, same old its not our fault. Poor us. Fuck the white man because he is the only reason I don't have an education.

YOU types down in Ferguson are what gives all blacks a bad name.

That's really the most common complaint: "Well, you darkies are violent thugs!" And while it's easy to dismiss such a statement for the pigheaded racism it obviously is, I thought it would be instructive to rub everyone's face in the heinous shit white people have done to non-whites all through the 20th Century, especially the post-war period when all the "civilized" powers agreed genocide was a no-no.

Rather than start with the obvious like the Torture Report, I thought we'd kick things off with that oft-cited modern genocide Rwanda. Because it's popularly accepted as a pretty terrible thing and not many people know about the role played by one white Belgian, Georges Ruggiu. A nebbishy loser who befriended a Hutu at university, he traveled to Rwanda in 1990 to take a job at Radio Mille Collines where he spewed racist, pro-genocide rhetoric on behalf of the soon to be genocidaires: "Clean out your houses! Get rid of the cockroaches!"  

Before you go and defend Ruggiu's tirades against "cockroaches" as free speech or coincidental to the ensuing killings, he not only confessed to conspiracy to commit genocide but rolled on the entire station as the propoganda wing of "Hutu extremists." Quite some time ago in fact: Boy Georges was thrown in a Tanzanian prison back in 1997, where he was rightly beaten silly, before sleazing his way into an Italian prison and finally back home to Belgium. Across the same period, he grew a beard and changed his name to "Omar" to get shelter from gullible African Islamists who go gaga over palefaces joining the Ummah for some reason.

But the grossest thing about Ruggiu is how he had to go looking for the sort violence that used to be SOP for white folks in the tropics as recently as his childhood years in the 1960s and 1970s. Like Algeria, a place so screwed up, one of the jihadi militias actually went "Fuck it, let's be satanists." Though you can't blame this screwed up state on general Africanness, as Tories and other subomegaloid swine are wont to do, as there's a pretty recent history of both French military and settlers getting up to their elbows in Algerian blood. This stretched from just after World War II - including Camus's passive-aggressive celebration of killing an Arab - all the way up through the final French withdrawal in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the Brits were doing their best to send the Kikuyu of Kenya down the same path as German Jews. The lackluster Mau Mau uprising, which managed to kill 32 British occupiers in about as many years, provided the excuse to murder of 90,000 Kenyans while being low impact enough that Her Majesty's ministers could divert other resources to the insurrection in Malaysia. Called the Malayan Emergency, because Lloyd's wouldn't cover the losses of the rubber and tin companies if war were declared, it continued the great British tradition of brutalizing the Burmese. In a prelude to American military operations like Mai Lai and Haditha, British troops massacred unarmed villagers not three years after lecturing and wagging their fingers at Germans who dared to massacre other Europeans.

Not a decade after the Brits got down and dirty in Southeast Asia, the US took its turn. But we're not going to dwell on that despite a million dead Vietnamese in what US Army veteran Stan Goff explicitly and frequently calls a race war. Everyone but the odd old crank accepts Vietnam was a bad thing, even if only because lots of brave American boys died for poorly defined reasons and it wasn't even a win.

Instead, let's look at the Doolittle Raid in World War II. That's always trotted out as the Good War, the battle for freedom against tyranny and all that. The glorious patriotic conflict in which hundreds of thousands of women and children were burned alive in Tokyo. Doolittle's inital run only scorched some 400 civvies, a low as massacre figures go, so the US Army Air Corps kept at it all the way up to 1945, including a carpet bombing of downtown Tokyo by three hundred B-29s. The Doolittle raid is often excused as revenge for Pearl Harbor but not even the amateur fascists doing military history in the US bother to explain the strategic point behind the March raid and its 125,000 dead Japanese civilians. Like the Brits with the Kikuyu, they just don't say anything.

Skipping over the rest of World War II, with all of its gas chambers and fire bombings directed at other white folks, we see a German crime that doesn't get nearly as much attention: the systematic extermination of the Herero people. Having had it up to here with the revolts against their rule by the native inhabitants of the land, German troops forced "rebel" Herero and their families out into the desert and kept them there until the vast majority died of dehydration. Those that tried to slip away from the main force and sneak back to their homes were stymied by Lothar von Trotha's extermination order: "Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot."

The Germans eventually got bored shooting women and children and switched to concentration camps. Which they learned from the British. In a rare instance of lax German accounting, the only casualty figure for Herero forced into camps is "Most of 'em."

This systematic extermination looks positively serene, however, in comparison to the British invasion of Tibet occurring at roughly the same time. Literally on a whim at the start of the 20th century, the British Raj decided to add Tibet to its empire of misery and dispatched a young Jesus-freak lieutenant to make it happen. Because no religion has spilled more blood on more continents than Anglicanism.
The War Nerd sums up what happened next better than I ever could:

Younghusband marched into Tibet in December 1903 with a force of Sikhs and Gurkhas—pretty scary mix, like rottweiler plus pit bull. And the Gurkhas were definitely the pit bulls in that pair. Sikhs are very tough but not blood-crazy. The Gurkhas were not only devoted lovers of knife-work, especially on POWs, but ancient enemies of the Tibetans. It didn’t take much to push them to a massacre. The Tibetans knew the British were dangerous and tried not to resist at all. But as the British force pushed farther and farther into Tibet, the local commanders decided to resist. That was a mistake. This wasn’t Tony Blair’s cool Britannia they were dealing with. On March 31, 1904, Younghusband encountered a Tibetan militia force of about 2000 guarding a pass near Gyantse. He must have had a hard time keeping a straight face or wiping the drool from his lips, thinking about the medals he’d get for this one, because the Tibetans were armed either with spears and swords or at best with matchlock muskets. That’s right: the kind of 17th-century firearm that won’t fire unless you apply the smouldering wick to the firing pan. Younghusband decided to play with the poor fuckers he was facing. He said, “My friends, my friends, what’s all this hostility? Why dees paranoia? Here, I’ll tell MY soldiers to take the bullets out of their rifles, and you tell YOUR soldiers to put out the flame of their matchlocks.” The Tibetans, who had no idea that Younghusband’s troops had modern repeating rifles, put out their matchlocks. Younghusband then ordered his troops to open fire. 1300 Tibetans were killed, with almost no British casualties.

And before that? Imagine a hundred Tibets in a hundred countries for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Always the white "civilized" tribe going to great and gruesome lengths in its attempts to exterminate all the darker "savage" tribes, when not enslaving and raping everyone who had the misfortune to be born outside Europe.

So tell us again, aggrieved white folks - who are the violent thugs in this world?

Look At These Thugs

Walking around with them gats, thinking they all hard and shit...

"Straight up dude this bitch is all sad and crying like awwww they killed my baby but she obviously didn't care enough to raise him right..." ~ a concerned citizen.

A Woman Without a Country

Olivia Manning, in recounting her childhood split between England and Ireland, described it as having left her with "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere." This sentiment animates the short fiction of another Anglo-Irish author, Elizabeth Bowen, who frequently presents characters unmoored from any sense of social identity at a tumultuous period of European history. In contrast to Modernism's liberating rejection of national identity, this state inspires angst and loathing in Bowen's characters.

Several of Bowen's characters exemplify this dislocation, in particular Justin of her short story "Summer Night." Though a man in his early forties, he has no close connections save for his deaf sister and the equally unmoored Robinson, whom he inflates in his own imagination. Justin moves listlessly between different cities in England and Ireland, and even different nations on the Continent, without ever setting down roots or moving outside his own closed, celibate, solitary way of life.

However Justin yearns for human connection, as demonstrated in his relationship with Robinson. He inflates the other man, declaring him a genius, thus concentrating the whole of social life from which he finds himself bereft in this single figure. Robinson, eager to be done with Justin so as to entertain his soon to arrive mistress, rebuffs such exultation and drives Justin deeper into himself. Both characters, in attempting to connect, merely find themselves turning further inward.

Even Emma, Robinson’s mistress, cannot shake escape this atomization. Indeed, she experiences it more as Robinson at least has genuine, if fickle, friends to occupy his time while she has a hollow family life and no joy except the limited freedom of her automobile. A rarity and sign of upper class wealth at the time, Bowen further uses Emma’s automobile to show her utter disconnect from surrounding society, stopping at a public house to use the telephone and have a drink but interacting with others no more than is necessary for this rudimentary market exchange. Other people are as phantoms in Emma’s life, as are the places they inhabit which she speeds through seeking some form of human connection in the shallow Robinson.

In “A Love Story,” Bowen presents similar characters but rather than yearning for connection, they actively drive each other away. Frank and Linda’s interactions ring hollow and sterile, Teresa and her mother all but despise each other, and their interactions together display a reluctance to engage with other human beings. Even Clifford and Frank all but say to each other that they do not care for one another and are both quite happy when they are done talking. This resistance to socialization reveals the deep psychic scaring of being a national orphan, of having never developed the skills for interacting with others and establishing a sense of belonging.

Bowen further generates a sense of dislocation through the structure of her narratives. Both "A Love Story" and "Summer Night" follow several separate characters whose individual plots do not come together until the very end, emphasizing their separation between each other. The reader is instead presented with these unmoored individuals, worrying over their own private dramas such as Justin with his awkward infatuation with Robinson. By switching between a third-person singular style for each of her characters, Bowen permits the reader only brief and limited glimpses on her broader narrative.

This dislocation of both characters and narrative reflects the Anglo-Irish experience following the Irish Revolution and into the outbreak of World War II. With British rule thrown off and a new society defined by both Irish tradition and the Catholic Church, the Protestant Anglo-Irish found themselves suddenly citizens of no nation, being too Irish for England and too associated with the old regime for Ireland. Though Modernism with its critiques of the nation-state pursued such a disconnect, Bowen and other Anglo-Irish had such an existence forced upon them and, despite the intellectual orthodoxies of the time, World War II demonstrated national identity remained very much relevant. Without such an identity, the Anglo-Irish found themselves not just disconnected from their nominal homelands but undefended against the territorial and martial ambitions of other nations.

In the Land of Ice and Snow

Since Marvel will be crowding the multiplex with spandex-clad fascists for the foreseeable future, there's no better time to go exploring the fringes of NetFlix. Which I did, and I discovered a great little Norwegian gem.

Escape, or Flukt in its native tongue, is a brilliantly harsh film. Its premise is as simple as its title - girl sees her family murdered, tries to get away from bandits - but like a good found footage horror film, execution is everything. This is a naturalistic tale of survival, without sentiment or neat moral lessons. While the heroine, young Signe, is our entrance into this world she is more part of it than the soft and comfortable place we the audience inhabit. Signe is sympathetic but she never conforms to modern norms of right or wrong because to do so would be suicide.

We're introduced to Signe, her parents, and her little brother as they're traveling between villages. This is a textbook case of efficient exposition as just a few words and glances establishes the emotional bond of this little family before all hell breaks loose. Seems these tiny migrations were common at the time - early 14th century, which in Norway looks to have still been the Dark Ages - and massacres by bandits were just as normal. And so it goes with first Signe's mother, unceremoniously dispatched by an arrow. Her father soon follows, after a courageous if sloppy last stand against superior numbers and weapons. Bandit leader Dagmar - the brilliantly cold Ingrid Bolsø Berdal - dispatches Signe's little brother with an efficient crossbow bolt. That's the theme of the entire openeing, the cold efficiency of the bandits after the warm and homey establishing shots of Signe's family. And it quickly pulls the audience into the Norwegian McTeague that is the rest of the film.

There's the immediate tension surrounding Signe of course. Will they kill her? Sell her into slavery? Rape her? One particularly nasty bandit keeps trying that third option, only to be shouted down by Dagmar and even the men. At a time when feminist critique of the arts is seeing a resurgence this is a particularly poignant film - Dagmar, a woman in the Middle Ages, leads this motley band of cutthroats and is clearly feared by them. Signe, though at first a helpless damsel, frees herself and strikes back at her captors with only the help of another little girl, whom Dagmar has adopted.

That little girl, Frigg, provides some much needed humanization for the bandits. Coming across a bearded hermit who delivers backstories, as bearded hermits are wont to do, Signe learns Dagmar was once a perfectly respectable wife and mother until the day witch-hunters drowned her daughter and smashed the fetus out of her. While it could be maudlin, this flashback serves to explain Dagmar's motives, at least concerning her manic desire to reclaim Frigg, but also shows how even in this brutal world people are not brutal out of some innate evil but simple, mindless circumstance. More importantly, he teaches Signe how to wield a spear.

And that's the extent of the hermit's contribution to Signe's survival. I want to take this character and rub her Suzanne Collins's stupid face and go "Looook! This is how you do a sympathetic female protagonist ion a survivalist story!" But as I'll likely never get the chance, I'm doing it to you right now. Signe's character arch is both well-handled and immensely cathartic, as she evolves from a terrified girl into a hardened survivor just as capable and ruthless as Dagmar.

The setting deserves special mention. While the film tells us this is all going on in the early 14th century, the landscape is still modern Norway and yet still just as feral and alien as the unfolding story. Tall mountains, deep rivers, and cold forests all emphasize the finite mortality of the characters, even the brutal Dagmar. It's a world of cold beauty where death is an immediate reality and survival hinges solely on determination.

And it bears repeating - the principle protagonist and antagonist are women. Neither is a caricature or treads in stereotypes. You could easily make them both men and it wouldn't change the plot one bit - even the almost rapist, as it's not like that doesn't happen to boys. And this is from 2012! The Scandinavians are busy making progressive historical thrillers while Hollywood is pulling its hair out over making a fucking Wonder Woman movie!

Rot the multiplex. Stick to streaming.

Land of the Dead and Dying

Throughout Dubliners, and particularly in the concluding story "The Dead," James Joyce explores an ideology of paralysis unique to Irish life at the time of writing. Joyce saw an inertia in the culture and politics of Ireland, owing to both failed attempts in the past to throw off English rule and to rigid social and religious norms, leading to stagnation. Through this story, Joyce presents the debilitating effect of such an ideology on the whole of the Irish people.

Centered on a holiday party on a cold January night, Joyce presents to the reader a number of characters who reflect this stagnation. The hostesses, the Morkan sisters, have held the same party every year, singing the same songs for the same people. Those people being Freddy Malins, chained to his ancient and decaying mother, the irreverent Mr. Browne whose jokes, though witty within their closed world, never rise beyond the boundaries of middle class niceties, the rare new addition Mr. D'Arcy the famous tenor who refuses to sing until the very end of the evening, the nationalistic but largely harmless Molly Ivors, and the muddling academic Gabriel Conroy with his wife Gretta.

Of all the characters, Gabriel best demonstrates the debilitating effects of this ideology of paralysis. A college lecturer, his biography similar to that f Joyce in that he also took a degree in modern languages, at the time thought a woman's discipline, he perpetually finds himself stymied by others despite the desire to assert himself and his control. It starts with a fumbled joke directed at the Morkan housekeeper Lily at the beginning of the evening, which Gabriel attempts to brush off with the conspicuous magnanimity of a hefty tip. However, it fails to endear Lily to him or convince her of his mastery, as she later displays an impertinence towards him in front of his wife, who laughs it all off.

Worse still is Gabriel's encounter with Molly Ivors. She chastises him for his ignorance of the Irish language, his penning of articles for an English periodical, and for never seeing the rest of the country. She sneeringly dubs him a "West Briton," a moniker she relishes rubbing his nose in even during a dance. Shaken, Gabriel cannot even respond but rather broods over the injustice of Molly breaking the social niceties of the party. He only feels his manhood redeemed later when he takes up his traditional role of carving the meat for dinner. In performing an old and familiar role, he finds both his confidence and sense of place in the world.

However, no one else has a more debilitating effect on Gabriel than his own wife Gretta. Feeling invigorated by performing his masculine duty with dinner, Gabriel wishes to make love to her though he lacks the strength of will to forcefully take her as he truly wishes. Instead, he affects a nonchalance and superiority, all while yearning for Gretta to open herself to him. In the process, he elicits a confession from Gretta of a youthful fling with another. This boy, Michael Furey, once sand the same song as Mr. D'Arcy, "The Lass of Aughrim," to Gretta and hearing it again reminded her of the affair.

The confession is a trifle to Gretta but absolutely debilitating to Gabriel. The thought of his wife having a life and emotions independent of him only heightens his own sense of littleness, already foremost in his mind following his bumbling with both Lily and Molly Ivors. Gabriel wanted to seize his wife in the street, to boldly show his love and possession of her, but could not move beyond the strict proprieties of Irish social life even when in private.

In this, Gabriel proves to be the apotheosis of Joyce's critique of Irish life and culture at the time of Dubliners. An educated, intelligent man but held in place by his own inability to act and his fixation on things past. Instead, he finds his only sense of self in old and worn out roles – carving the meat for dinner or patronizing the help with a generous gratuity. Though educated and styling himself a clever man of letters, Gabriel can conceive of no place for himself but the traditional roles for which he proves ill-suited, causing himself only grief. And though dead and gone, like Parnell, Michael Furey exerts an influence over Gabriel Conroy, sapping his will with his own wife and leaving him to agonize over his own mortality, rushing ever onwards to the grave while standing still