The worst aspect of our society’s observance of Christmas is the way adults deceive children into believing there’s a magical bearded man who will grant their wishes if they’re good.

But enough about Jesus.

Santa Claus, on the other hand, is a truly heroic figure, running, as he does, a pagan mole operation inside the Christian mythos.

It’s widely presumed that the septentrional god of creation, poetry, wisdom, magic, and song, known to the Germanic peoples as Odin, Wotan, or Woden, and to the Finns and their relatives as Väinämöinen, made himself scarce after the introduction of Christianity, leaving the masses to their blissful idiocy. (In the Kalevala, Väinämöinen suggests that the baby Jesus be dumped in a swamp and hit over the head with a stick. If only.)

But it’s become apparent that the great shamanic culture-hero and master of disguise is alive and well in Korvatunturi, surrounded by those other survivors from ancient times, the elves, subverting the Christian ethos from within by adulterating it with the pagan virtues of pleasure, frivolity, and self-indulgence.

Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Santa Claus says, “Love ever your neighbor as yourselves — but first be such as love themselves.”

But surely Santa is just a symbol of the gross commercialization of the ancient festival? Contrariwise: it’s all too easy to underestimate Jólnir‘s boundless cunning. He’s really playing eleven-dimensional chess here, having recognized the revolutionary role of bourgeois materialism in eradicating feudalistic superstition and paving the way for proletarian class consciousness. Why do you think he wears red?

So anyway, I forget exactly where I was going with this, but I wanted to post the lyrics of a Yuletide song I wrote regarding, I don’t know, inverted totalitarianism or something. (JUST WHAT YOU WANTED THIS HOLIDAY SEASON: MORE INSUFFERABLE, JEJUNE POLITICAL RANTING FROM POETARIAT.) I recorded five or six shitty versions of it a year ago and was going to have another go at it, but I decided my time was better spent programming some shit instead. You don’t care. Read the rest of this entry »

I highly recommend this Ustream page to everyone who wants to watch what’s going on in NYC today.

Also, on the subject of SOPA: “I remember Goebbels. I grew up over there.”

I designed some signs/stickers/posters to help you protest the suffocating banality of life under modern capitalism: Read the rest of this entry »

A preoccupation with one’s own feelings of victimhood, triumph, and exceptionalism, to the detriment of serious contemplation of the ways in which one victimizes others, is a sign of narcissism and psychopathy in nations as well as in individuals.

Forget I mentioned it. Rise for the flag salute. NEVER FORGET! THESE COLORS DON’T RUN! LET’S ROLL!

The striking thing about Osama bin Laden’s death is how utterly depressing it is.

Is there really anything to celebrate here?

Have the victims of the September 11 attacks suddenly come back to life? How about the hundreds of thousands of people (possibly over a million) killed in wars we justified based on Sept. 11?

Are any of our wars ending any time soon? (I mean a real end, not this bullshit about “timetables” and “horizons” and “ending combat operations.”)

Are we going to end the Guantánamo prison camp and free the innocent men held there?

Is the NSA going to stop spying on us?

Is the TSA going to stop sexually assaulting us?

Are we going to redirect military and police-state funds toward schools, healthcare, and infrastructure?

Are our civil liberties coming back?

Have future terrorists been deterred from martyrdom?

Was it really worth it to give Osama bin Laden the fate he wanted all along? In the near future, I’m sure we’ll see a lot of demonization of the antiwar movement — after all, they would have let Osama get away. Because everyone who was killed or maimed by US troops and contractors (and by our allies), everyone who was tortured (some of them tortured to death), and everyone who was raped (or gang-raped and murdered) is insignificant compared to one fanatic in a compound in Pakistan. (I won’t even begin to detail the vast opportunity costs of our immense military budget.)

The American propaganda system requires that we see bin Laden as merely a cartoon villain, instead of a family man who loved poetry, volleyball, and horses. Yet it simultaneously requires us to humanize the men and women who plan and carry out American war crimes: we know all about Obama’s struggle to quit smoking, his practical jokes, his light saber skills, his Portuguese water dog, and so forth, and many of us have read at least some of that totally masturbatory memoir he wrote. Are some human lives more valuable than others? Are some of the bloodthirsty psychopaths who engage in the wanton destruction of innocent human lives more human than others?

The propaganda system also requires that we glorify the obedient Navy SEALs and CIA agents who killed bin Laden. But there is nothing heroic in America’s murderous foreign policy. The real heroes are still people like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning who have revealed some of the truth about our actions and motivations (and why it took us so long to find bin Laden).

pleonastic neoplasm

sliced spasm, a tumor fluoresces
silver gleaming white in hypernova gamma ray bursts and vulvar ectoplasm
platinum coruscates; an epileptic caesura scintillating, throbbing, flashing hemicrania aura
planarians, electrodes, the bicameral mind
I forgot what I was going to write here
horse clitoris!

buck naked,
a cunt-baked bundt cake
sat in the slot of a slatternly sort
scabrous frabjous flab—scavenging ravenous love—
a bun in the oven? none of the above

a hovering hodmandod, governing Novgorod
we thanked for the thimble he wanked on at Wimbledon
brevity is the soul of wit
but levity
is a bowl
of shit.

morricone macaroni

loving ape ass in Sargasso
and cerveza:
I’m May.
loving ape ass in surpassing
poor two Jews:
Hello, May!
ill foe due to poor fair anchor,
apian pearl! poor lay? differ!
may porn tondo vote schwa shepherd
jubilee lay lace on the air!

byzantine celadon, the dimmest glimpse of thrips
an alabaster blob, clabbered and black, gurgles hymns to slimness
enthralled and slavering for a smirking green crablike flautist, he picks a farty bass
by the Barcelona semicolonnade
the sunlight through cedars illuminates golden grass
on the horizon Hueys strafing and napalm fires burning
sclerotic fuzz grifting

As the bankrupt liberal elite and their blog-O-spheric toadies beseech you to vote for Democrats lest we fall victim to an even more warmongering and corporate-feudal neofascist regime, remember this mantra: This is a pile of shit, while Bradley Manning rots in prison.

My friend Keanu von Fagerström wrote this short story, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Icelandic sagas about outlaws:

(EDIT [July 10]: It just occurred to me that this story is also uncannily similar to the ancient Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers, from the 13th century BC. Seriously, read the synopsis [or read the entire story, or, for all you "traduttore, traditore" types, here's the original Late Egyptian]. According to Robert Coover, the Tale of Two Brothers is basically about male castration anxiety. So there you have it: Keanu von Fagerström unwittingly proves Freud’s theories.)

Chow-Snork Cunthrob

Once upon a time, Chow-Snork was wandering the woods which surrounded his home. His home was among a small tribe of 60 or so Pixies. It was a quiet and slow-paced life. The tribe was governed by a hierarchy of elders, central among which was the patriarch, Henry-Humphrey. While on this walk he came upon an orangutan with a snake head. Chow-Snork was taken aback, as he had never encountered such a strange creature before. “Fear not!” the snake-head hissed. “I have come to give you a gift, which will show Pixies what they are meant to be.” The Orangutan Snake creature disappeared, and Chow-Snork looked all around, but he was gone. Chow then looked down and noticed a red, spotted mushroom was in his hand. Chow didn’t recall picking it up. “Was this the gift the Orangutan Snake was talking about?” he wondered.

Chow decided to take a bite of this plush and vibrant-colored truffle. It tasted much like other mushrooms, but had a unique sourness to it. “What do you have there?” a voice from behind him said. Chow-Snork Cunthrob turned to see the wife of the chief elder. “A mushroom. Would you like a bite?” he offered. “Sure,” she said, taking it from his hand and eating it. “In all my years I’ve never seen this variety before; where did you find it?” Chow-Snork didn’t expect her to believe him, and answered that he found it growing on the side of a fallen tree. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember how I said that the gods would return to show their might? As always, my predictions were accurate (and I don’t even have a völva), as Thor is alive and well and dishing out divine justice in Ohio:

Also gathered along Union Road were Franklin twins and storm chasers Levi and Seth Walsh, who said they were out in the thunderstorm when they heard about the fire through a Facebook update.

“It sent goosebumps through my whole body because I am a believer,” said Levi Walsh, 29. “Of all the things that could have been struck, I just think that that would be protected. … It’s something that’s not supposed to happen, Jesus burning,” he said. “I had to see it with my own eyes.”

“I can’t believe Jesus was struck,” said his brother, who noted the giant Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was untouched. “It’s the last thing I expected to happen.”

The now-razed effigy of the White Christ was, appropriately enough, made of Styrofoam.

This is not the first time this has happened. Note that Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning not once, but twice. Presumably the first strike was out of wrath at Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie, and the second was Thor’s attempt to prevent that nauseating teratoma of a Prisoner remake. I can only attribute Caviezel’s survival and subsequent desecration of McGoohan’s legacy to the hand of Loki.

Also, what does it say about the USA that Wikipedia needs a disambiguation page for “Touchdown Jesus”?

In conclusion, St. Boniface can suck my fuckin’ dick.