RIOT: The Ultimate High
January 6th's defining feature -- congressional chamber poop -- supports a new shitty theory: maybe it really wasn't about just overthrowing the government.
Drunk driving always confused me. Not the drinking part. Or even the driving part. But much more so the fact that people seemed shocked that they went together so well.
I was in Beacon, New York. At a redneck bar called Howie’s. This is only important insofar as it was the first scene of me being threatened with physical violence and removed from an establishment on account of “nigger”. I would have expected it was for playing the Village People’s song “Macho Man” 15 times in a row on a juke box that surprised me by having it there in the first place, but who knows?
I do know that I spent a portion of one summer there drinking. Not just me but me and a bunch of friends. We were staff at a camp for kids and this is how our evenings unfolded. I was working as a lifeguard since I was much better with water than I was with kids.
We would walk to Howie’s along a relatively empty country road, drink to excess, and walk back. One night, though, excess was a little too excessive and walking had loomed as an impossibility. The later crew of staff had showed, one of whom had a car. A sunburst yellow Ford LTD with a black vinyl roof if memory serves.
“I can’t fit you all in.” The driver, a Puerto Rican cat about 27 told us, but we were all thinking the same thing regarding country roads, rednecks and too much drink. “Unless you want to sit on the outside of the car.”
This was high-level drunk guy thinking. Which we immediately signed on for on account of? We were high level drunk.
I knew in my heart of hearts that somewhere, somehow, someone was going to take a shit in the hallowed halls of our government.
So some people sat on the trunk, some people sat on the hood. As the driver calmed those nattering nabobs of negativity who were concerned about the overall safety of our solution, I climbed on to the roof of the car.
“Don’t worry,” I weaved. “I’ll keep an eye out for hazards.”
“I’m not,” the driver responded. “I’ll drive slow.”
And standing on the roof like the Colossus of Maroussi, arms akimbo, I made a mental note of the difference between how 25 miles per hour feels from a seat and how it feels from the roof of a Ford LTD.
It felt…fast. And the ground moving by at what felt like some distance now, felt even faster. But even while it was feeling fast I had enough critical distance to note: this is really fucking stupid. The thing is, the distance between knowing and caring? Miles, years, lifetimes apart.
Like the band The Adolescents once sang, “trashed beyond belief to show the kids don’t want to learn.”
The world is swirling, the wind is in your face and if it ended here, well what a fine place to end. Fuck it. You’re just giving yourself over to fate. Fuck it. Seems like a natural fit to anyone what ever raised a glass over a set of car keys.
Now I have no idea if my former known associate Gavin McInnes felt this way when his Proud Boys stood back while standing by last January 6, 2020 at DC’s Stop the Steal rally. Him or Pat Miletich who I knew from MMA. Or a guy I used to do jiu jitsu with but who dumped the whole program, up to and including his lucrative job at Microsoft, to be photographed punching it out at some other Trump rally.
But my suspicion? Politics was the Trojan horse this thing rode in inside, but the real reasons had little to do with whatever bloviators were bloviating about. And based on the angry mail after the McInnes piece it seems to be the same sort of narcotizing elements that make any kind of alcohol-fueled rioting…fun.
Reading from afar though about the damage, the incursion, the bear spray and so on, I waited. Waited for what I knew was there and just wondered if the media would be brave enough to make mention of.
[W]hen the lies you’re told about how great it is to be white don’t pan out, and you’re white, what do you do?
I waited because I knew a little something about abandon having lived through two blackouts, two riots, street attacks and, of course, the aforementioned Ford LTD hood topper. I knew in my heart of hearts that somewhere, somehow, someone was going to take a shit in the hallowed halls of our government.
And someone did. Maybe several someones.
The Fourth Estate scratched their heads and there were innumerable articles wondering where the anger came from. In all likelihood written by people who hadn’t lived through an April 29th, or a Ferguson, or had written the same things about those events as well. Written them and completely ignored The Clash singing about white riots and “riots of my own”.
But I look at it like this: when the lies you’re told about how great it is to be white don’t pan out, and you’re white, what do you do? When this is not your beautiful house, and this is not your beautiful wife (apologies to the Talking Heads), where do you go? And when every gain for everyone else is factored in as a personal loss, who do you do it to?
I’m not suggesting this excuses any of it and outside of the white kids at Kent State I suspect it’s going to be awhile before any white acting out is met with any significant show of deadly force (10000 people showed at the January 6th riot. One rioter was shot to death). I’m just suggesting that none of this should have surprised any of us.
In this way we’re wonderfully melting potted, and maybe social media has made it just a little bit more so. But we’re all mired in a leadership crisis that sees us hating those who claim to want to help us, despising each other for being so helpless and while not knowing what we want, being damned sure about what we don’t want.
Is there any other way to register a complaint than by calling the manager and shitting on the front desk?
And while I don’t want to totally diminish the effectiveness of trying to reverse engineer what happened, it’s also pretty clear to me that a perfect storm of class war, race panic, crisis masculinity issues (up to and including penis problems: check Testosterone Replacement Therapy Clinics, cross reference Republican cucks) covered this particular brand of fin de siècle loss of sanity.
So while it should be considered as having failed, that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. It was never designed to succeed. Like the John Birch Society, George Lincoln Rockwell, Richard Butler’s crew et al, a longstanding tradition of the embrace of failure as political theater is what we’ve been treated to. And if at the end of the evening we all make it home to our beds we can promise to never do something that stupid again. Of course, right up until the next time we do it again.
Until the next “again” however…the full weight and measure of the law that they claim to so fervently believe in when it comes to people who don’t look like them, should and will be brought down on them. Like the hammer of the gods.
Which will change nothing.
Bringing us to the closing question: you ever wonder why drunk driving is still a thing?
I don’t. But I guess I’m just too busy watching for hazards.