Baby wants bloodshed - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge

The next civil war has not already begun. America is a violent country, armed to the teeth and blistering with hatred, but it’s also old, lazy, stupid, fat, medicated, and cowardly. 2020 marked a recent high point in American political violence, but all that violence was politically meaningless and merely dumb. A clown show, a farce, but this time when the performer falls off the ladder with his head in a bucket of custard, you can really hear his neck snap as he hits the ground. The past decade of polarisation and turmoil has not yet produced a single exchange of fire. There are armed factions, clammy political losers of every stripe, walking around in the streets with their assault rifles, their incomprehensible slogans, and their bellies peeking over their waistbands, but all of them, from the cops to the anarchists to the Nazis, are abject pussies. The most prominent of them call themselves the Boogaloo Boys, because there’s a 1984 film called Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and it became an internet meme to append Electric Boogaloo to any sequel, and they’re trying to spark a sequel to the nineteenth-century American Civil War. Also, they wear Hawaiian shirts, because big luau sounds a bit like boogaloo, and wave flags of a blue igloo, because that sounds a bit like boogaloo as well. This is what’s meant to overturn the most powerful empire in human history: some sub-Rickroll meme dogshit. It’s all playing pretend, and they know it. The American way of doing deadly violence involves one man with a gun spraying a bunch of other people without guns, basically at random. If he isn’t a cop he’ll end by turning the gun on himself. One last spastic fit: the only way to really express the frenzy churning away inside you. If you tried to put it in words it wouldn’t make much sense. In other countries, ideological violence is the ultimate means of securing your political objectives; in America it all comes down to the voices in your head.

Baby wants bloodshed - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge