The Erection Election

There will, if the truth be told, no "healing" from here on out.

Nihilism: It’s what’s for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. And forever.

“They had one last chance. And they blew it. Again and again.” — a fictional tag line for a movie about…us.

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This is that moment in The Godfather where Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando, slaps the fuck out of Johnny Fontaine. Slaps him and then mocks him for crying.

“What's the matter with you? … ‘Oh boo hoo, what can I do? What can I do?' What is that nonsense? Ridiculous!”

Of course he ends up being helpful, horse-killingly helpful, but having lived through both of his parents being shot to death, the Don had a perspective that might have served the young Sinatra corollary well: there’s a lot that can be done. Because if there’s a lot that can be done, and you can’t do it, then don’t cry about it. Accept it.

However, if there’s a lot that can be done and you can do it, well, do it.

In all fairness Fontaine didn’t do too much himself outside of asking his Godfather for a favor (yes, at least he had him to go to), the point though still remains: there are always solutions. And if they’re not solutions, to paraphrase Stalin, then there are no problems.

So days after Trump has returned to the national scene with something more substantive than insult comedy like, say, an election that re-delivered the presidency to him, along with the House and the Senate, there’s been a riot of handwringing, sobbing, fretting, finger pointing and blame gaming. It’s not so much that I am immune to such things but…well, let’s go back a little bit.

“No, see, for me,” I smiled, “I use the flag to both rub my nuts and wipe big globs of chunky shit from those hard to reach places!”

“I bet you one of them San Francisco freaks, eh?” The speaker was a paratrooper friend, a Kentucky fella, name of Tim R. A paratrooper, and a powerlifter. The scene unspooling? On the floor at Gold’s Gym.

“San Francisco freak? Me?” I smiled. Mostly because I know me a lot better than he knew me.

“Yeah,” all 5’5” and 220 pounds of him said. “Burning flags and shit! I’d kill anybody I saw doing that!”

“Oh man…that’s totally not how I’d treat the flag,” then I spread my legs like I was riding a horse and between my now spread legs I started to move the one hand in front and the one hand behind. Like I was riding a towel that was toweling my underside.

“No, see, for me,” I smiled, “I use the flag to both rub my nuts and wipe big globs of chunky shit from those hard to reach places!”

It was like he had been dipped upside down in a vat of crimson red. He had gotten so mad so fast that it was not entirely clear that he wouldn’t rise for the bait I had thrown. It was clear he was thinking about it and as he closed the distance between us I could see him doing his maths.

At the time I was 265 pounds and on the same sort of gear that he was on, facts that largely helped him think his way to nonviolent action: “wooooooo boy,” he finally sighed. “….You oughta be glad we ain’t in Kentucky.”

“Lots of reasons to be glad we’re not in Kentucky,” I laughed and we went back, nice as pie, to just being gym buddies again.

Times like now (this week) I wonder after his whereabouts but I don’t have to wonder far since my life is full of similarly troubled souls who are casting about what America means, from both sides of the American political spectrum.

But here is now where I have to try to force myself to be a better man than that one with the fictitious flag diaper. Have to? Well, let’s go back a little bit.

In the olden days of hardcore when moshpits became single sex affairs for young men who had yet to discover Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), fights would often break out. If you were actually in a band, your relationship to both moshpits and fights was…nuanced.

Suddenly I had become the most dangerous person in the room, again, because I was gleefully refusing to recognize that stopping bloodshed is good business.

An audience of people not moving was not nearly so cool, regardless of the number, as it might seem to a pop music listener. So, you wanted a pit. But too much of a pit meant you were just wallpaper for fistfights and it was not endorsement. It was more of a critique: we’d rather fight than watch.

And bands had a number of different ways of dealing with this. The Dead Kennedys. Minor Threat, and others would often stop their shows in order to stop the fights. That never sat that well with me. It seemed like babysitting and who wants to be babysat.

Black Flag, however, would steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it. Which seemed to be a weird violation to me. A systematic denial of the reality of experience. Like, what? You don’t see this? I loved Black Flag but this kind of myopia didn’t sit well with me either.

Then there was the way I had chosen. One night with a pit that was on the edge, I tried the first way. Then I tried the second way. And still the fight continued. So there was born a third way. Like Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, or wherever it was that he set his guitar on fire while playing, his fingers moving over the dancing flames, I started to invoke the spirit of the fight all while feeling a certain kind of bloodlust rising in me.

I was singing, but then muttering: kill each other. Yes. KILL each other. It was two feet feet planted firmly and deep on the chest of eventual horror. Someone else ended up breaking the fight up, but my mania was not missed and I could feel the audience recoil. Suddenly I had become the most dangerous person in the room, again, because I was gleefully refusing to recognize that stopping bloodshed is good business.

The very essence of nihilism, this I’ve sold in one form or another, for just about…well, forever.

Until I got a text from my oldest daughter.

If you think this sounds like a call for civil war you’d be wrong as there’s going to be very little that’s civil about the coming war.

“It’s great that you have this house to go to in Spain,” she wrote. “But some of us have to stay in America and it makes me feel bad when you call it a toilet bowl.”

There was no prescriptive. She wasn’t really asking me to do anything other than, I guess, think about not being such an asshole. But it left an impression and the impression it left edged me toward an understanding that nihilism, or at least my rendering of it, had limitations. More than that even, for many it was not even a useful antidote. So why sell it?

Before writing this piece I had a long, hard think about this especially since my initial go-to reaction to recent political news hewed to something akin to “I’m going to enjoy watching you all drown in your own blood as you try to kill the gay men inside that is seemingly motivating all of your heroes.”

Then I realized/remembered that amidst the rivers of blood I might find, if I looked hard enough, people I really and truly loved. And while my house in Spain is big enough for all of my loved blood relations, it’s not actually big enough for the people who are not blood relations who I know and sometimes even love.

So this needed to make sense for them in the same spirit that it had to be true to me by way of some real sentiment/thought.

Then it hit. Like a bolt out of the blue. Like something I’ve been saying for years but just now have heard. Like a diamond shot through the forehead: we need to recapture comfort. Hard and fast.

Steps toward doing so? Well, I don’t say this is for everyone but it works for me: large caliber firearms usually do the trick. Beyond this, a willingness to use them. If you have an aversion to being armed I might understand. I also might ask you where do you think you are? Because this is the new America, same as the old America.

I’ve also recently been told that Jello Biafra won’t have me on his podcast because he believes I am a member of the National Rifle Association, an absolute falsehood. But more importantly if he believes a future life in America can be negotiated to some state of wellness without firearms, he’s totally wrong. So let’s just say having the means to defend yourselves from the morons that you have to share this country with is just good business.

On the ground floor this will work. Outside of that a studied refusal to play/pay along. If the new and dominant paradigm has something/anything/everything to do with lying, cheating and stealing, to quote Yossarian, you’d be a fool to do it any other way.

And lastly reject identity issues while embracing tribal ones which, if you’ve noticed, cut across class and caste divisions.

If you think this sounds like a call for civil war you’d be wrong as there’s going to be very little that’s civil about the coming war. During the Red Dawn era I opined that the Soviet Union would never be able to swing a full scale occupation of the United States. The U.S. was so unruly and out of control that we could barely keep it on the rails ourselves, so how’d they do any better?

Well, this is the moment to embrace that. All of that. So keep your “healing” kumbaya crap that I’ve been hearing since Ford pardoned Nixon. Keep it and understand this, America was born in blood, steeped in blood and remains awash in blood now and for the foreseeable future.

And you’d be a fool to expect reasonable behavior from your neighbor who, if Trumpism has taught us nothing, is a distant second to my interest in watching out for Number 1. That is: me. That’s about the extent of my message of hope: take care of yourselves, don’t let them grind you under and if there’s a choice between overreacting and underreacting, given American history, please be sure to do the former.

Sorry. It’s really the “best” we can hope for I think. Or as the great American Al Capone once said, “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” Make it so.

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