Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

I had been wondering earlier in the week if Herman Cain, who had been hospitalized since shortly after attending Orange Foolius' COVID rally in Tulsa last month, was getting better or worse. After four or five weeks, you assume worse, especially when it's a seventy-four-year-old cancer survivor.

And of course, Cain passed away this morning, which is sad and unnecessary, but also entirely on-brand. Not only was Herman Cain a gaping asshole just as standard operating procedure, he made a point of being as much like Trump as possible -- which is to say, as defiantly ignorant and oppositional as he could. This is how it worked out for him.

So neither gloating nor mourning is really in order, since in the end Cain was just another dopey conservaturd whose main mission in life was to tweak stoopid libruls. Alrighty then, buddy. CONSIDER ME PWNED. Go ahead and push up some daisies.

No, if there is any useful salient point to be gleaned from the somewhat premature death of Herman Cain it is this:  he literally gave his life for someone who doesn't even pretend to give a shit. Okay? That's really all there is to it. As far as Trump is concerned, Cain is just another schmuck who bought the farm. Like the other 150,000 or so, it doesn't matter. You could stick another zero or two zeroes to that number, and Trump's reaction would be exactly the same. He doesn't care. He doesn't even pretend to care. Every single Tulsa attendee could die on camera tomorrow and it really wouldn't matter to him.

It's difficult to recognize, much less internalize, that extreme level of sociopathic indifference. But it's important to see it for what it is. Whatever you think of the COVID outbreak, whether you're in the bunker or you think it's a hoax, know this -- it could be a hundred times worse, more aggressive and virulent, like something out of 28 Days Later, and he still wouldn't care. Imagine that for a minute, and then understand it as an empirical fact.

Keep that in mind as we head into the school year. They clearly don't give a shit about the kids, the teachers, the school staff, the crazy logistics involved in just trying to keep everyone safe. That's not snark, it's not an exaggeration. They don't fucking care. At all. They clearly resent even being asked to go through the motions of pretending.

That's the choice, as we head into the homestretch of this dystopian nightmare election year -- you're either good with a death cult running things, or you're not. Everything else is secondary to that cold fact. So either show up, or live with it.

Do Not Resuscitate, Conclusion: Descent

American society has fallen under a series of collective madnesses, all of them perpetuated by the people who profit from them. This is all quite out in the open, but people have been conditioned not to look too closely. All of these mass beliefs fall under the rubric of Buy Now, Pay Later.

The republic has been financialized for a couple generations now, to the benefit of a handful of profiteers and robber barons, and the can has been kicked down the road throughout. But eventually the bill comes due, and we are in that time now. We hear a noise outside at four in the morning, look out the window, and see the repo man making off with our pre-owned leased Beemer.

The long project of the money class has been to suck up all the profits while making the peons eat the shit sandwich. They have been enormously successful in this project so far, and the COVID crisis has served to be (again to use the industry jargon) a force multiplier. Four trillion has been dumped into their coffers, like a dead hooker into the Hudson River after a Don Junior coke rampage.

To offer up a comparison, four trillion would cover student loan debt and infrastructure repair, and still have plenty left over to bribe the fossil fuel companies to shift to renewables without sucking and squeezing every goddamned drop of oil out of the ground.

The myth that wealthy people have pushed on everyone else is that they're smart and you're dumb, they work hard and you don't work hard enough. What we're finding out -- some of us a bit slower on the uptake than others, but all of us finding out the hard way eventually -- is that they're mostly luckier than everyone else. And a lot of that luck comes from the self-reinforcing dynamic that wealth imparts to those lucky few.

There's an economy-of-scale mathematically baked into net-worth levels of money, which are impossible to achieve from the bottom rungs of the ladder, and almost impossible to lose from the top rungs, unless you're just a complete dipshit wastrel cokehead. For every Michael Jackson that you read about, spiraling hilariously into debt thanks to the expenses of keeping a private zoo and paying off victims, there's a Paris Hilton or a Wyatt Koch, a completely useless person who never worked a second for their inherited fortune, who does nothing but indulge their base instincts every moment of every day, and still manages to remain solvent.

Now, instead of doing the human thing and simply securing their wealth while leaving the peons alone, they decided that most of everything is just not enough. They want it all. And Trump is just the guy to get it for them, because he uniquely understands what rich people want and what poor dipshits want. And he's more than willing to gull the latter group into helping him dump it all into the pockets of the former group.

This is the logical outcome of fifty years of Republican and conservative poison permeating the culture, the airwaves, public discourse. Trump is the culmination of this, not the cause, the symptom and not the disease, etc., etc.

But one of the other symptoms of the disease is the liberal teleology that the Republican/conservative base has been tricked and bamboozled into their voting patterns. If only they knew, blah blah blah. Well, don't worry, they know. They know what's best for them, and they fucking hate you more.

It's like the recent "lockdown protesters," the neckbearded goobers roaming the state halls with their dick replacements, the big revelation that it's a big astroturf operation, like the tea party crap from a decade ago. These assholes aren't taking a fucking check from Betsy DeVos. They're doing it for free, and they're more than happy to. Don't kid yourself. This is not about money or policy, or any concern about contracting the plague and taking it home to Grandma. This is about fuck you. This is about horrible people doing what horrible people do.

I encourage them to do it all -- take the hydroxychloroquine, drink bleach, congregate without masks on random sidewalks to harass passersby and hapless mediots. Crowd themselves into bars and churches and restaurants. Take Captain Clorox's medical advice along with his financial advice, see how that works out for you on both fronts. If I encountered someone who thought that drinking bleach had curative properties, I would seriously try to convince them that drinking twice as much would be twice as effective.

You know the real problem with this fucking country? There are no longer appropriate consequences for being stupid. People used to have to keep their wits about them and pay attention. Not anymore. Again, if you're the sort of dope that seriously turns to Donald Fucking Trump for any sort of advice about anything, you deserve every bit of what you get, good and hard. No sympathy, no mercy. If you needed yet another reason to stay the hell away from your Facebook uncle, there ya go. Just step back and watch the fun. Yes, it sucks that they will take some innocents with them, but it's not like there's anything you can do to dissuade them anyway. They are determined to act out their performative psychoses.

We like to tell ourselves that these fools are merely statistical outliers, a small but extremely vocal minority. Okay. What does it say about this huge country, with its enormous population and $15 trillion economy and its sophisticated systems of communication, that a supposedly tiny sliver of angry morons can so consistently drive the modes of discussion? What does it say when people who were previously out on the margins of extremism have been mainstreamed so thoroughly?

When I call those people losers, it's not really to be a mean asshole, although I  definitely am a mean asshole, and I make no apologies for it. But it's really to emphasize that they have no real agenda, no goals, no ambitions, not for themselves or their communities or their state. They just want to wave their dicks and whine that they can't get a haircut or go to Red Lobster.

So? Fucking go already, please. Get your riblets and your shitty beer and your got-damned haircut. The rest of us will be watching patiently, eating the proverbial popcorn, biding our time until nature finally has its due, without the constant interference of civilization. We don't create or innovate anymore, we just hustle each other and feebly attempt to mitigate self-inflicted damage.

And the bottom line is that only a failed state, a hollowed-out husk, would allow such people to dominate the debate and draw the lines of discussion. Only a polluted media ecosystem that is wholly in the tank would continue to give a handful of slapdicks a daily soapbox for their imaginary grievances. They could have been talking to doctors and nurses, photographing mass graves and refrigerator trucks stacked with bodies. A few have done those things; most have been content to sit there and faithfully transcribe the lies, as always.

I don't know about you, but the battle going on my brain right now, as we all watch multiple cities descend into violence and subversion and fear, the collective rage of the oppressed being sabotaged by undercover cops and white-power operatives salted into the crowds to start the window-breaking and the looting, the battle for me is no longer trying to figure out how we can "save" the nation, but whether it's even worth saving at this point.

Save what, exactly? A corrupt system where psychopathic billionaires bleed the masses dry and rent thugs to keep them from reacting to it? A series of financialized rackets designed to preserve and heighten wealth inequality and reject economic justice, and a political system designed to buttress all that?

Look at all the ugliness that has taken place just in the last few days, the chief executive stoking fear by talking shit like a dime-store Ceausescu, openly licking his chops at the prospects of siccing his mutts -- human and canine -- on peaceful protesters. He's a fucking piece of shit, a deformed soul in a deformed body with a smooth brain of oatmeal and dementia and unearned resentment, and forty percent of the people in this country still support all of it.

This country needs a reckoning and an enema, both on massive scales, and it beggars the imagination to see how either of those things happen. If things get too weird, the oligarchs will probably be happy to let Trump dangle and Biden win, if only because they can get nearly the same cut of the action under Biden, without all the grief and drama and toxic stupidity. And they can spend the next four years grooming Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton, while triumphant Dems pat themselves on the back and get complacent all over again.

At best, the angry sidewalk chumps want things to "go back" to what they used to be. That is no longer possible nor desirable. Anything written about them that doesn't frame it as such is doing a disservice to them and to the rest of us. Playing into their delusions and self-pitying anger does no one any good. There is nothing to discuss with them or convince them of, because they are not there for that. It's just a prolonged temper tantrum with guns. Maybe law enforcement oughta, you know, start enforcing the fucking law, before this gets out of hand. I gotta dump my keys and phone and shit into a tray to go into a courthouse, but these assholes can take long guns in there? Bullshit.

You have to recognize such people for what they really are, and decide and act accordingly. Not just at the ballot box, but every day. Your ballot is important, but not nearly as important as your wallet.

Because I'm a Rush fan, I am fond of paraphrasing Freewill and saying something along the lines of choosing not to decide still counts as a choice. That's true enough, but the stakes are high and getting higher, and it seems that one close corollary to that argument is this:  if you choose not to decide, someone else will step in and make a decision for you. How's that sound?

---

As they walked through the doorway of the room at the top of the great pyramid, a thousand or five thousand steps high or more, Aapo felt a thought unbidden lurking in the back of his mind.

This is the weirdest dream I have ever had.

This is not a dream. The jaguar looked at him, head cocked slightly, eyes blazing from gold to orange.

Aapo looked around the room, which seemed somewhat larger on the inside than it had appeared from the outside. The room was suffused with a green light that had no apparent source, illuminating the walls, which were bare, and the floor, which had an array of various mundane objects strewn about -- work gloves, a ring of keys, a rechargeable driver, a wallet, a photo of a family, dishes, a remote control. Aapo bent to retrieve the photo and it shimmered as his hand went through it. He stooped lower to get a closer look at the people in the photo -- a man, a woman, two young children -- but did not recognize any of them.

If it's not a dream, then where am I?

You are in the bardo, the plane between planes. Your previous visit to the world has ended. You are waiting for your next visit. We will see if you learned anything from before that you can take with you into the next one.

Aapo struggled to take this all in. I'm dead?

You have lived and died many times. This is just the most recent time. Do you recall anything about any of your past visits?

Long pause. No. Nothing at all.

That is not surprising. At most, we may see something that you can learn from. Put your hand on my shoulder.

I thought I wasn't supposed to touch you.

Well, you're not supposed to pet me. But I may be able to help you see your pasts with more clarity.

He reached tentatively to put his right hand on the mighty cat's left shoulder, which was at Aapo's chest level anyway.

Immediately a series of images and scenes swirled and converged in his brain. A bartender in what appeared to be a Wild West saloon. A military pilot miles in the air in the cockpit of a plane of some vintage, pressing a button and looking at a landscape below, colored tiles suddenly in full bloom. A farmer in a field, behind a plow being pulled by two yoked oxen. A medium-sized dog in a filthy alley. A woman in what appeared to be a laboratory, wearing goggles and a lab smock. A young girl on a boat in the middle of a large body of water, no land in sight, crying for her mother as the storm and the sea overtake the craft. A chicken in a large, crowded hutch on a farm.

More vividly:  a man, looking much like the reflection Aapo saw in the stream, operating a large earthmover, pushing dirt, dumping concrete into enormous pads and foundations, erecting high fences and walls topped with giant coils of razor wire. He wore a blue work shirt with a small oval crest on the left chest that read "Mike."

Aapo could see Mike continuing with these various building projects, all of which seemed to be for structures that were meant to confine or repel. Then he saw Mike in a nice suburban backyard, sun out, ice chest and barbecue grill on a large wooden deck, neatly manicured lawn below. An attractive woman brought Mike a bottle of Michelob. Mike took the bottle with an appreciative swig, kissed the woman and playfully patted her ass, and flipped the burgers on the grill.

This looks familiar, he murmured. The cat rumbled in response.

Another scene of Mike sitting in his truck in an empty parking lot, dusk falling off to the right, an abandoned KMart in the background. Mike held a mostly empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and fiddled with the radio knobs with his free hand. He looked despondent, exhausted. A gun lay in the passenger seat of the truck.

Mike and his wife fighting, Mike scolding his kids, Mike pouring more concrete, Mike playing with his kids, directing work crews on the construction site, laying in bed with the wife, drinking in his truck, uncoiling razor wire, mowing his lawn, yelling at the wife and kids, standing in front of what appeared to be a freshly constructed penitentiary, on and on and on.

I used to build things. Buildings.

The jaguar looked at him with its flat gold eyes. Prisons. Walls. Detention facilities. You were a construction foreman for a company that solicited contract work for certain types of structures.

Nothing else? Houses, schools, playgrounds? Office buildings? Skyscrapers, museums?

No.

Well, I had a family to support.

Everyone does.

What was I supposed to do?

The cat made a gesture that almost looked like a shrug. What do you think you were supposed to do?

So you're going to punish me for what I did in my previous life, is that it?

If it was up to me, I would have punished you already.

Aapo/Mike was taken aback by that blunt assertion. What -- why?

It's nothing personal. In fact, as far as individuals of your kind go, you seem to be not so bad. But collectively, your kind destroys much more than you create or nurture, either for material gain or just for the joy of destroying. Your kind have all but exterminated my children, and the children of the other spirits. You kill and take, and enslave others to help you take more, and are offended when anyone proposes that you might at least clean up your mess, return the place to what it was before you came and took.

But I didn't do those things.

No, not you. Someone like you. Many someones like you. It doesn't matter. It is not my role to judge and punish you. That is the role of the judges.

What judges?

You will meet them at some point. Soon.

How will they punish me?

It depends on what you can show you learned in the bardo. You can go back as a human with a bit more enlightenment of your role in the great game, or as a dung beetle, or something in between.

Aapo/Mike looked again over the "items" along the floor, lingering on the photo and the wallet, the keys, eyes flickering past the gun a bit more quickly. He noticed a small hole in the far right corner of the room, where there appeared to be a set of steps descending.

Where does that go?

Depends.

Are you going to keep doing that?

Look, my role here is not to judge your previous actions, nor to give you all the answers for the next round on the Great Wheel. I am here to show you possible paths. You can draw your own conclusions about your prior actions and motivations, and decide for yourself what you wish to take forward with you.

But I don't know.

Most don't. Life is complicated, and most would rather not make the effort to sort out those complexities. But that affects the outcome, in the judges' view. Either you are willing to learn and apply, or not.

Aapo/Mike furrowed his brow. I don't know what I did wrong. But I don't want to be a dung beetle.

That's unlikely. Those who made a life out of preying on the vulnerable, victimizing the helpless, those are usually the ones who get that level of punishment. Mostly it's because they are never repentant.

Really?

Really. They don't think they did anything wrong. They always claim that they were conforming to some set of "natural laws" that always just happens to favor them and oppress everyone else. They don't think there's anything to learn. So they get to start back from the bottom.

How many lives does it take to get to the top?

There's no set sequence, and there isn't really a "top" for that matter. For most it's a few steps up, a couple steps back, over and over again. Some reach enlightenment in a dozen or two dozen lives, some take hundreds, some never get there.

How many have I had?

Hard to tell. It doesn't matter anyway. Don't worry about the "top," just concern yourself with learning a little more each time, and sharing it with whoever you can.

That sounds like a religious cult.

No. It doesn't mean you go door-to-door proselytizing. It means you identify what is true and correct for yourself, and live that truth consistently. In fact, it's not really about right or wrong, or good or evil. It's mostly about recognizing cause and effect.

The jaguar continued:  Humans think that the Universe moves toward some ideal of "justice" that they invent for themselves. It does no such thing. The Universe moves toward its own balance, through entropy and decay and attrition. Every organism, every inert object, every elemental molecule and every grain of sand, is deployed toward that end. It is up to the judges to determine in the bardo whether an individual has come closer to that understanding, or not.

Aapo/Mike furrowed and squinted again, clearly uncertain of what this meant.

Think about the ones who become dung beetles, all the things they have to do in order to earn that punishment. They can't do everything themselves. They need others willing to help them.

Help them?

Consider the worst of the worst. Emperors, kings, tyrants throughout your history. The demented and sadistic. Countless innocents died because of them, but they themselves killed very few people at most. Others did almost all the dirty work for them. They could have said no, but didn't. Maybe out of fear, maybe out of greed or power or lust or ideology. But they did it all the same.

Now Aapo/Mike was confused, frustrated, defensive. Are you saying that I'm responsible for what they did, because of the projects I worked on?

Maybe not as much as the people who profited from the suffering of others and directed you to do the work, but yes, they couldn't have done it without you.

Someone else would have taken that job.

Ek Balam chuffed. Yes, and I would be having this conversation with them, and a different conversation with you. Are you saying that the only things you were good at in your previous life were dumping mud and stretching wire? That's what you wanted to do with the time you were given?

No. I loved my wife. I loved my children. I'm sure I had things I enjoyed outside of work.

Yes, but you also saw the anger and frustration you carried with you. Where do you think that came from?

I don't know.

Yes you do.

Aapo/Mike looked over again at the dark descending staircase, unlit and forbidding, yet strangely beckoning at the same time. He walked over to the head of the stairs and peered down. There was a little bit of light after all, a dull glow that did not reveal much, but at least made the steps visible enough to navigate.

Where does this lead?

Down into you, your previous life, your lives before that, all the thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, schemes, desires you have ever had throughout all of your incarnations. Each layer down another previous life, each a maze unto itself.

Can I go down there?

Can you?

Aapo/Mike rolled his eyes and looked at Ek Balam sternly. You're being cryptic again.

No, I mean it. Do you really want to do that? Do you really think it's necessary?

Will it help?

It can. For some it can grant enlightenment. Others are driven into madness. Consider the ramifications seriously before making the decision to go. You might not be able to find your way back out. It comes down to your ability and will to see things as they are, instead of how you want them to be. All of those things that comprise your existences, they are each like separate entities, hungry ghosts seeking to justify themselves to you. They will trick you if they can, and they will try.

There was a protracted pause between them, dead silence. No animal sounds outside; indeed, aside from the doorway behind the jaguar leading back out to the top platform of the pyramid, there was no indication that there even was anything outside this strange little room, with its sourceless glow and hollow images of personal items laid randomly around the floor.

Where is my family? Are they still alive?

That is not your concern. They are not here with you, so chances are they are still in the upper realm. Or they are simply not in your jati, their souls do not travel in the same small group as yours. You may have different things that you must reckon with than they do.

How did I die?

You have to see that for yourself. It is not for me to tell you such things. You may not want the answer.

He lowered his right foot down from the top, toward the first step, slowly and then with more certainty. I have to see. I have to find out.

It is better if you know what you are looking for before you set foot in there.

He set the next foot down to the next step, looked back over his shoulder at the great rumbling beast. I think I know. I hope I'm right. I wish you could come with me. Another step down.

I think you know that I cannot do that. Another step. He could no longer see the jaguar.

Yes, I know. Only the top of his head was still visible.

Be safe. Stay alert. I will be here when you return.

Ek Balam lowered his body to the floor, laid his head on his paws, and listened to the echoes of the slow footfalls down the steps.

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 5: Parasite

I've seen the entire Sopranos series cycle several times, but it's been at least five years or so since the last time. One minor story arc that keeps popping up in my mind lately, as I observe the tactics and operational ethos of the hideous people who run this crack den of an administration, involves the unfortunate landscaper Sal Vitro. The poor guy gets the shit beaten out of him for mowing a lawn that was in someone else's "territory," so he then turns to Tony's capo Paulie for protection, and by the end of the series, poor Sal and his son are mowing (for free, it appears) the enormous lawn of Tony's useless blob of a sister, who has wheedled her way into Johnny Sack's old estate. Remember all that?

I think what really stuck with me about that extended (though again, very minor) storyline was how subtly it underscored the point that these well-off men of power and influence had their tentacles in everything -- construction, garbage collecting, and yes, landscaping. No opportunity was too small for them to pass up, including enslaving small business owners in order to line their pockets with just a few more illicit bills.

That's what rings true about Fat Donnie's crew, too -- as dumb and useless as they are just in terms of being able to do any sort of legitimate work, as vile as they are in terms of basic human decency, no opportunity is too small. We are, after all, talking about someone who infamously cashed a thirteen-cent check back in the day. Someone once joked that Trump was the kind of person who would line his own coat pockets with latex rubber, so he could steal soup. Interesting visual, and entirely accurate.

We have a society where for-profit incarceration -- and therefore a clear vested interest in keeping people incarcerated, and finding more people to throw in the clink -- is commonplace. We have a society where using incarcerated labor at substantial discounts -- or even for free, since they get paid pennies per hour and then have to use that to pay for their basic commissary items -- is routine.

And now, the plague has given the monsters a new and grand opportunity. The official unemployment rate has tripled overnight to almost fifteen percent, which means the real rate is probably at least twenty percent. The Senate is in the process of leveraging aid to states and counties on the condition that businesses be indemnified from liabilities incurred from (to put it politely) economically coercing people to go back to work, since unemployment insurance systems are deliberately inoperable in many states. You know, because you lazy motherfuckers will just take advantage of it.

The goal has never been to prevent pandemic or mitigate damage. It has always been to make sure someone else gets blamed for everything, while continuing the racketeering, and the hijacking of PPE supplies to be fenced, the profits laundered and offshored. It's the ultimate no-show job for Sil's crew, combined with Paulie's crew robbing the cigarette trucks, and pushing all the proceeds through the Bing. There's really nothing more to it. Anyone still talking about misgovernance is completely missing the true picture. Things are running exactly the way they want them to run.

There is a perfect -- and by "perfect" I mean perfectly horrible -- economic storm brewing. For years, private equity has been quietly chewing through the backbone of many vital American employment sectors. You know how people blame the internet for killing off newspapers? That's only partly true. Private equity firms have been doing most of the heavy lifting.

Another sector where private equity has been working overtime is the retail and service sector. Have you been to a department store lately? You know how many people work in those employment sectors? Again, Amazon bears part of the blame for this, but not as much as one might first assume.

Regardless, ten percent of the total population has been dumped just in the last two months. The reason the stock market seems bullish boils down to two important factors:

1. These people are fucking scum. Seriously, they're nothing but vampires, profiting from mass immiseration.
2. They are herd animals, all trying to to get in that final second of profit-taking before the whole thing blows up.

The economy (again, what is the economy, precisely, and for whom?) is famously a lagging indicator, as they say in the 'hood. The repercussions of the past eight weeks will not be felt till, oh, around the Fourth of July, by which point the second COVID wave will have hit, because everybody needed to get back to their jobs that don't exist anymore, because there aren't any more consumers, because our leaders decided that the most important thing was to bail out the fucking cruise lines. And everyone was in a mad rush to get out for the Memorial holiday weekend.

We're way too complacent about all of this. We watched these monsters herd refugees into for-profit detention centers, where children get raped and people pass communicable diseases around, under the rubric of keepin' out them illegals. Everybody agreed that "someone" should "do" "something," but could not apparently reach any sort of consensus -- or even a quorum -- on who and what and how.

And we're fine with lubricating the machinery of the scut-work service center in this country with the blood of illegal immigrants. Who the hell do we think is processing our meat, picking our produce, cleaning and cooking and serving food in our restaurants? Who else, besides people whose entire lives are spent under the thankless lash of economic coercion, would do this crap for peanuts, have to listen to useless losers talk shit about them 24/7, and then be told to risk their health by going back to those jobs after all that?

Think about where all your food is coming from. Buy local as much as you possibly can. The best way to dismantle the system is to starve it as much as possible.

---

At first they mounted the endless line of stairs with a sense of resolve and purpose, regular man and giant cat. After about ten layers of the pyramid had passed, they began pacing themselves.

Who built this?

An ancient civilization. They have been gone for many eons.

How did they build it?

They did not leave any records that anyone has been able to decipher. There are hieroglyphics, but they appear to mostly be descriptions of their customs and daily lives. No one knows for sure. All we know is that the building is here, in this place.

As they passed layer after layer, Aapo noticed that he did not see any seams anywhere -- not between layers, nor between steps. Rather than being assembled brick by brick with dressed stones, it appeared as if an immense block had been placed here, and then chipped and carved into this form, or vice versa. It was an unnerving idea to think about. And there was no vegetation at all on the structure, no climbing vines or flowers or leaves of any kind.

He paused on a step, looked down at the top of the jungle canopy, emerald and chocolate and ebony, then looked up and around the sky, noticing that there were no birds, no clouds, no sun, just as endless expanse of subtly variated yellow, a screen of firmament that reflected light without revealing the source.

The steps were high and steep, and while Ek Balam traversed them with the sure foot of a mountain goat, Aapo kept his line of sight intently on the next step, and the next one, and the next, in order to retain his footing. The embarrassment of a trip or stumble on these hard marble steps would be nothing compared to the pain of smacking face-first into one.

Yet for a second, Aapo decided to look up the stepped path, in order to see what was left, and was dismayed to find that he could still not see the summit.

How much farther is it to the top?

Don't worry. We're nearly there.

Aapo pondered how that could possibly be, when he had just looked up to see an endless flight of these seamless steps. Suddenly -- or finally -- they stepped on to a plateau, a square of about twenty-five feet to a side, with a fifteen-by-fifteen foot cube with a doorway set atop the square. Like the rest of the pyramid, the cube was chalk white, smooth as marble, hard as granite.

Aapo stopped and took a deep breath, expecting to be thoroughly winded and sore by now, as they had been climbing for nearly an hour -- or was it a day? Yet he felt fine, strangely exhilarated in fact. He took a few deep breaths and looked down to his right, to see the jaguar looking up at him rather impatiently, then to the doorway.

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 4: Destroyer

Let's say you wanted to undermine an entire country. You would start by building your own base of power, and consolidate that base by creating a world for them that separated them from empirical reality. You would tell them what was true or false, what was real or fake, who were enemies or friends, and you would dictate the tempo of those shifting narratives -- when, for example, a trusted ally had suddenly turned into a bitter foe, when Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

You would gather unto yourself the few people you trusted the most -- relatives, lackeys, and their closest contacts, and gradually create a network of like-minded individuals who either allied themselves to you, or were at least willing to rent themselves to you.

Loyalty only really matters to the point of complicity, then the other person is balls-deep in the game as well. Now you have them, and they know it. There is no getting out clean for these people. Considering the sort of people who would work for you in the first place, they may not even worry about that sort of thing, except insofar as it affects their bank accounts and future prospects.

Now, with your network of rented minions and dogsbodies, you would set about immobilizing or subverting the institutions holding the national framework together. In a nation that at least still pays lip service to the principle of rule of law, you would co-opt the bodies of law -- the legislature, the judiciary, the administrative infrastructure entrusted with enforcing laws. You would make them all beholden to you personally, again by gradually bringing them in, until one day they realize that they are now accomplices.

You would actively undermine the country's foreign policy, using the "middle kingdom" trope that every civilization that has ever existed has used to justify their actions, to deny the framework of mutually-beneficial interdependence that has mostly kept (relative) peace for the last fifty years, or at least kept things from getting even worse. You would sell it out to the countries you have been currying favor with for years, whose governments rent entire floors of your real estate.

You would encourage the brutes and thugs and killers of the world, while telling your friends to go fuck themselves. You would make sure your knuckle-dragging supporters know it's all just a big joke, except when it isn't.

You would identify the more violent, reactionary strains in the society, and bind them to you by signaling your alignment with their marginal concerns. Find common ground between those elements and their companions in more conventional institutions -- the military, the police, people with money who will do anything and everything to avoid losing even one cent of that precious, precious money.

We all like money, even if it's just for the obvious reason that having money enables you to not have to constantly worry about not having money. But consider the type of person who already has more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetime, more than their great-great-great-great-grandchildren could possibly ever squander, yet still cannot bear to part with, say, a marginal three-percent tax after the first billion dollars.

The type of person who would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars renting senators and funding think tanks and doing everything they can to rend the fabric of their country, in order to avoid even a one-percent increase in their taxes, which they frequently don't even pay in the first place.

The type of person that wants to make government as ineffective and inefficient as possible, in order to bolster their claim that government is useless and even harmful, that it serves no purpose beyond bleeding the noble taxpayer to a dried husk.

The type of person who sincerely believes that poor people are dumb and/or lazy, even as they themselves piss their inherited pelf on five-figure handbags and nine-figure mega-yachts and such. People who have no identifiable skill, but as charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club, use their privilege to rent those who do have skills, in order to legitimize their own existence.

The type of person who believes that accountability is for other people.

If you wanted to undermine and destroy a country, these are the people you would use to do it, and these are the things you would have them do.

With that in mind, consider the people running this nation right now, and all their statements and actions over the past four years. The point is not to speculate whether Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and the rest of these fuckers are agents of foreign powers, installed to rob the country blind and destroy it from the inside out -- they clearly are, there's really not much to speculate about.

The point is that even if they aren't acting in such a capacity, they really might as well be, because that is the practical, predictable outcome of everything they've done and said. Perhaps the strangest part of all that is that they've barely tried to conceal it. Most of this has taken place right out in the open. Enough of us, citizens and their representatives who actually wield power, stopped caring enough to do anything about any of it.

How about that? Like a broad-daylight bank robbery without any weapons or masks, just vague threats and menacing looks.

---

The beast was at least nine feet long, four feet at the shoulder, impossibly muscular, black in color, yet he could still see spots and rings and knurls along the coat. The jaguar looked at him impassively, as if waiting for him to make the first move.

He reached for his knife, not just automatically this time, but with purpose and fear.

Your knife won't help you.

Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder quickly, seeing the trail whence he came, spotting all the high roots and low branches and all the little obstacles that marked the escape route.

You can't run fast enough.

He looked back at the cat, its left lip curled in a snarl -- or was it a bit of grin? Suddenly it was difficult to tell.

Tell what? Whether a telepathic jaguar is smiling at you?

He took a deep breath through his nose, hoping to clear his head. This is just a dream, after all.

Who are you? he asked the jaguar.

Who are you?

He felt his brain grasp at straws, searching for purchase. I -- I don't know, he responded with a puzzled look. He glanced into the stream and briefly saw his own reflection, reassured that he looked the way he remembered looking -- when? -- yet still unable to put a name to the face.

I'm not sure what my name is. But I asked you first.

True, the jaguar responded, but you are a guest here. The jaguar lifted and turned slightly, and the black coat shimmered to a dark yellow, and back to black. Some of your kind call me Ek Balam.

What do you want?

What do you want? the jaguar replied, again with that hint of a sneer-smile.

I -- I'm not sure. I don't know how I got here.

You don't seem to be sure of very much.

No. I don't even know where here is. I woke up in the desert and walked, and now I am here.

Here is better than there. At least there is water here. And you can get out of the sun.

Yes. But I want to go home.

Where is home?

His eyelids drooped slowly in frustration, and he exhaled audibly. I don't know. He shook his head slightly.

The jaguar peered intently at him. If you don't mind, I will call you Aapo.

Why Aapo?

The jaguar curled his paw into the stream and splashed himself with the water, then lowered his huge head and took a drink. Why not?

Okay.

Look past me, Aapo, and tell me what you see.

He looked back into the jungle past the great cat, a hundred feet or a hundred miles, and saw the white cube he had glimpsed through the high tree canopy earlier -- much nearer, and impossibly larger than before. The two cubes he had seen before were maybe the size of a room and the size of a house. This one on the jungle floor was so large he couldn't see either end of it.

Then he saw, about fifteen to twenty feet above, the next level in the stack. And another, and another, but still not able to see where the left and right ends of any of the layers were.

A giant pyramid, he replied to the cat, almost as a question.

The jaguar growled, and Aapo felt it in his bones, reverberating in his core, yet it seemed that the growl was not a threat, but an assent. Ek Balam turned and began walking toward the structure.

Follow me.

Aapo forded a narrow waist of the stream with a running jump, and cautiously trailed the jaguar.

Quickly the full breadth of the enormous white wall revealed itself, and the path veered off toward the left side. As they approached the corner of the massive structure, a beam of sunlight hit the jaguar, making the coat shimmer prismatic, from black to gold to white to green to chocolate and again to black, all before the cat had taken another full step. For a second, Aapo forgot himself and nearly reached out to touch the fantastic beast.

Do I look like a fucking housecat to you?

Startled, Aapo retracted his arm so quickly and with such force, he felt a mild pain in his shoulder and his side. He chided himself:  Of course this is not something you pet, you idiot.

The jaguar chuffed and rumbled as they rounded the corner and came to the foot of a set of stairs that climbed up the middle of this side, seemingly all the way into the very sky. Aapo looked straight up and could not tell where the stairway ended from where they stood.

Side by side right in front of the bottom stair, Ek Balam and Aapo looked at each other. The jaguar turned his head back, laid his mighty paw on the stair, and the two began their ascent.

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 3: Comorbidities

The rest of this benighted year will feature countless where do we go from here? thinkpieces, again none of which will explore the possibility that many people might not want to "return" to what was, that it didn't work for perhaps a majority of people, and that maybe concentrating massive volumes of wealth in the hands of a few indifferent sociopaths might not be the best way to run a railroad.

On the one hand, it is not unreasonable for people living in less densely populated areas to want to get back to work, especially since the government has told them to go fuck themselves, that they are on their own, that we only bail out billionaires and cruise lines and hoteliers now. Life is a series of calculated risks, some more than others. The people who govern this hollowed-out oligarchy have made it abundantly and repeatedly clear who can count on assistance and protection in times of crisis.

On the other hand, when some of those folks show up at their state capitol buildings in militia cosplay gear, weapons at the ready, screaming at law enforcement and threatening elected representatives, many messages become clearer:

• Only white people can get away with this shit.
• There are no consequences for behaving like domestic terrorists.
• There are a surprising number of people who not only don't care about anyone else, they don't even care about themselves.

Still wondering why people who are not white men have a problem with how laws are enforced?

Hillary Clinton famously used the pejorative "basket of deplorables" to refer to these chuckle-headed mutants. She was far too kind, it turns out -- these people are losers, straight up, as in people who have lost at the business of life, people who have no serious prospects for the future, who regard the entire world merely as a vague extension of what they can see right in front of them at any given moment. The failures they do acknowledge are always someone else's fault, never their own.

Seen from that perspective, a narcissistic sociopath is the perfect avatar for their deepest resentments, as well as the logical culmination of fifty years of Republican sociopathy and stupid games, the grand project of undermining the republic coming to fruition. Not only do they openly despise the notion of compassion or caring or helping anyone else, they would even sacrifice themselves and their loved ones, as long as it granted them the opportunity to fuck over some caricature plastered on whatever Fox News shithead they prefer to watch.

They hate their countrymen more than they love their country. This is crucial to keep in mind, every bit as crucial as the fact that Kim Don Un literally does not care how many people die from coronavirus, he only cares that he and his inner circle get to wet their beaks.

People keep searching for reasons and details, trying to ascribe this or that utterance or lie or contradiction as evidence either of sheer incompetence or baroque conspiracy. The answer is both and neither -- there is a coordinated effort and he is a fucking moron, and yet the simple truth of it is that the entire sum of his adult life is his unshakable fixation on self-enrichment. Other peoples' money, other peoples' praise and adoration -- these are the currencies that he trades in. He will do anything to generate more of both. There is nothing more to it than that.

There is no point in debating the details or what is to be "fixed" in preparing for the inevitable summer wave, or the third wave during the regular flu season this fall and winter. From the standpoints of Trump and Kushner, and the people still willing to stand on stage with them and grant them legitimacy, it's already fixed. It is doing what it's supposed to do.

This is not an accident, or happenstance. This is by design. Never forget that. This was all preventable, all of it, the death, the economic devastation and fallout, the continued destruction of whatever value this scab of a nation, with all its self-serving hustles and lies, still manages to hang on to. They chose not to prevent it. They are deliberately continuing with the logical outcomes of that choice.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

As we hit the 100k body count, two Vietnam wars or one World War One or whatever metric one chooses to use to illustrate the quick carnage, it is important to keep in mind at all times -- they don't give a fuck. Not even a little bit. No matter what the number ends up being, it doesn't matter to them at all.

In the most literal sense of the phrase, this country is being run by a death cult. Everyone who still works for them, pushes and amplifies their lies, supports them, is part of the cult, and need to be observed and treated as such. No, that doesn't mean you need to call your goofball Facebook uncle a serial killer the next time you see him, but if you haven't shunned and ignored him already, what the hell are you waiting for? There is simply no debate or engagement worth having with any of these people. They have always operated in bad faith, but now the stakes are higher. We're not bickering over what nuances of tax policy are more or less "capitalist" or "democratic socialist" or whatever.

People are dying (and sometimes being incapacitated even when they survive the virus), losing their jobs and businesses, and the monsters running the country see only opportunities for disaster oligarchism (as this is no longer a true capitalist society, in any realistic Adam Smith definition of the word), and the mediots can only veer between whatever meaningless gaffe Joe Biden had, or venturing into a crowd of these DURR MUH HAIRCUT rubes, and whining about being heckled and verbally abused.

When the historical coroners perform the autopsy on the USA, they might identify a single factor that finished it off, but mostly they will find a convergence of things, each of which were harmful, but collectively left the patient massively -- and unnecessarily -- vulnerable to that final bit. No matter how bad it gets -- and it's going to get worse, count on it -- keep in mind at all times: none of it had to happen. It could have all been prevented. But the people who own and operate this popsicle stand would rather poison the worm-ridden brains of neo-confederates and motivate them to violence, than see so much as a dime of their precious fucking money get spent on someone they deem undeserving.

It's a death cult. Treat its members and acolytes accordingly.

---

The sound of the water stayed faint, even as he slipped along the forest trail, stepping over outgrown roots here, ducking under low branches there. Pine and birch trees were more prevalent, the duff covering the forest floor thicker and more pungent. Sunlight still brightly penetrated the high canopy in spots, but fewer and farther between as he progressed.

And yet the sound of the water remained the same, neither closer not farther away.

Now the trees became larger, denser, covered with moss and vines. The tops were higher, blocking out more and more sunlight. It was darker, but he could still see. More animal chittering, perhaps a small troop of monkeys, off in the distance, but once again it was difficult to tell how distant.

A group of trees off to the right side all appeared to be bleeding a milky fluid, dripping slowly down the trunks. One huge tree to the left, massive in breadth and height, loomed over the trail. He looked up and could not see the top of the tree, and it had to be at least a hundred feet around its trunk, which was not round, but more like a giant star, with huge "arms" buttressed out from the central structure of the trunk.

The dense undergrowth of vines and shrubs surrounding this tree seemed almost to be moving of their own volition, as there was faint motion but barely a breeze. He could see large thorns on some of the vines, and was glad the trail managed to stay clear of this collection of plant life, which suddenly seemed terrifyingly sentient.

He passed by the tree cautiously, catching himself making an effort to be quiet, as if the thorny vines or the tree itself might hear him. He kept looking over his shoulder at it, subconsciously thinking this thing might follow him somehow, might curl its thorny tendrils around his ankles and pull him, screaming, inexorably into some hidden, gaping maw.

Turning forward again to concentrate better on the path ahead, he could see through the impossibly high weave of deep green leaves, out into the bright light from an invisible sun. Peeking up over that aperture was what appeared to be a white cube, set atop a larger cube. Then the perspective changed and all he could see was the leaves again.

The sound of the water was suddenly closer, more urgent, the jungle foliage denser, more pungent, more alive. His left hand slipped back, again mostly on instinct, then not seeing a threat, slid forward a few inches to the hip flask of reposado. He popped the cap and took a swig, more deeply than the initial taste when he first found the flask on this belt he had never seen before, with clothes he had never worn before. He swirled the tequila around for a second, felt it on his tongue, and swallowed, all while monitoring this microcosm in front of him, this miniature universe of alien life forms.

He stepped around a small group of miniature palms that surrounded a mangrove tree, again stepping over roots while watching for low branches. A green snake, easily six feet in length, slithered up the trunk of the mangrove. Several sets of small, glowing eyes peered out from burrows dug into the soil in front of the tree.

Coming around the tree he finally saw the small creek bisecting the trail. It wasn't especially deep nor wide, nor flowing fast, so he could ford it without too much trouble. The water looked clear and cool, the rocks at the bottom burnished smooth and clean, no moss or fish or motes that he could see.

He knelt and reached into the water with his right hand, again sliding his left hand back toward the knife without being conscious of the motion. The water felt as cool and refreshing as it looked. He splashed his forehead with his hand and felt rejuvenated almost instantly, even though despite all this time (what time?) and distance (how far?) he wasn't tired or hungry or thirsty.

Still, the water felt good and right. He scooped his hand into the stream and took a tentative sip. It tasted clean and refreshing, as if it had come from a high mountain stream, rather than the floor of a fertile jungle.

You're not thirsty now, but you might be later. You should fill up the empty hip flask.

The thought came into his head, but it was as if he had heard someone else saying it to him in his head, instead of out in the open, instead of the thought being his own. The voice was deeper than his own, with perhaps a menacing tone beneath it.

He looked up and saw the giant cat, directly across the stream from him.