CRACKPOTS #64: A Spectacle, Lobomotomized: Simulation in the Age of Illiteracy  (Patreon)

Hello it's your great pal Brace. This Sunday evening we have a guest newsletter from Jake Rhodes of the excellent Pendejo Time podcast...I liked his show and the little thing he wrote about kratom extracts last year so asked him to write for us...check out his rock band DRUNK UNCLE as well...here's the CRACKPOTS!

“You people have no idea what’s coming.” 

FAFO.” 

“Goyslop.” 

“Looksmaxxing.” 

“The Day of the Rope.” 

“Chud.” 

We didn’t start the fire, but we in the “West” bear witness to it, roughly 7 hours a day of witnessing if you are between the ages of 18-30. We interact with the fire, sometimes stoking it by joining satanic, accelerationist death cults hell bent on deploying the power of gooning and hypnosis to desensitize ourselves to the culling of the mundane. 

Turn on. Tune in. Jack off. 

Some of us try to put out the fire, or at the very least turn the heat down. We engage in lively debate, we defy and destroy the jackbooted thugs of the various American alphabet organizations not by engaging in direct action, guerilla warfare, or a good ol’ fashioned dust-up. 

No, in typical American fashion there must be a show. A spectacle of defiance. “We won’t take this lying down. But we will take it dressed like Bowser, or Princess Peach, or perhaps even a toad.” 

In 1985, amidst global catastrophe and the cavalier calvary that did their darndest to stop the AIDS crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, and Apartheid, sociologist Neil Postman wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” 

The standard-issue “novel as point of reference” for the world’s slide into corporate fascism was (and still is) 1984. Postman, however, felt that the world was not hurtling towards the sleek, terrifying, and calculated evil of Big Brother. Instead, Postman saw the public’s response to the decline in material conditions, the quickening death rattle of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of neoliberalism as more in line with Huxley’s A Brave New World. 

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." 

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".

The inflatable frog being body slammed into the concrete by a subliterate fat fuck. The mud wizard and his tome KOing German riot police. With no clear, meaningful, well-organized left wing political opposition to a rise in global fascism, we op instead to entertain ourselves. Why? Is it cowardice? Boredom? A lack of political and social will? Neil Postman and others argue that it is something else entirely. 

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Guy Debord’s Spectacle, Baudrillard’s Simulation, and Neil Postman’s “Entertainment America.” can be distilled into an uncomfortable, garish reality: we understand what we have to do, but we’d rather laugh alone instead. 

The isolated American, bent up in the corner of their Wayfare couch, oscillates between witnessing the brutality of a child being murdered by bombs, boots, and bullets and a front-facing camera riff of their favorite comedian or podcaster. He mocks Kristi Noem’s expressionless, “cool-mom” cruelty. “What good would it do to torture her.” He asks, camera panning to reveal 8 empty tall boys directly in the middle of a millennial grey laminate floor apartment. “Her face can’t even produce an expression of pain. You could probably set her on fire and she could at best look mildly annoyed.” Likes, shares, comments. 

“Lol.” 

“Hahahahahah nice.” 

“Uhmmm, maybe we don’t joke about violence against women. Even if it is Kristi Noem.” 

“My name is Young Butt Buster Da Booty Snatcher” - from an account named Young Butt Buster Da Booty Snatcher. This comment has the most likes and replies of them all. 45,239 and counting. 

Another magazine dumped into a peaceful protestor. Men, women, and children enter concentration camps in the Everglades and cease to exist. A mother wails the primal, guttural, million-year scream of desperation as the father of her children is beaten and thrown into the back of a Chevy Tahoe. Young Butt Buster Da Booty Snatcher changes his profile picture to an AI-generated photo of the crying woman wearing a sombrero that has flown off, she’s been launched out of a trebuchet and into a river that could be the Rio Grande. The cries of “hypocrite” and “fascist!” don’t fall on deaf ears. They’re embraced, enjoyed, and reveled in. Postman notes

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------From Age to Rage: Enlightenment and Masculinity 

Prior to the Age of Enlightenment, many Christians saw the physical body as something that distracted the sinner from the divine. The spirit was corruptible, but the flesh was wholly corrupted from birth. 

Edward Peters notes in his work “Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe” that certain gnostic sects like the Cathars saw the human physical form as a trivial thing at best and an active deterrent from entrance to the kingdom of heaven at worst. And then everything changed. Some British and American intellectuals active during the Age of Enlightenment posed questions never before spoken by God or Man: Can you love Jesus and still be Jacked? Should being jacked be a prerequisite for entering the Kingdom of Heaven? In 1857 and 1861, Christian Socialist and labor organizer Thomas Hughes wrote two books: Tom Brown’s School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, respectively. These two books were semi-autobiographical works that sought to provide young school aged Christian boys with a framework for both moral compass and compunction. Hughes was not just concerned with the spiritual strength of men, but physical strength as well.

 In fact, he argued they were part and parcel. This combination of personal fitness and philosophy became known as “muscular christianity.” Hughes notes in his second work Tom Brown at Oxford that "The Muscular Christians have hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men." 

Many preachers in the 19th and 20th centuries saw industrialization, urbanization, and the passive virtues of love, compassion, and tenderness were softening their flock. It wasn’t enough to love the Lord with all your heart; you had to also love him with all of your muscles. And so, in 1869, the Young Men’s Christian Association was kickstarted in New York as the first place where young boys could go to workout and worship. Jesus Repped. 

At the turn of the 20th century, muscular christianity had become a powerful and influential cultural movement. James Minchin writes in his work “Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English History” that “the Englishman [goes] through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other…. if asked what our muscular Christianity has done, we point to the British Empire.” 

Within another century, muscular christianity and prosperity theology have come to be the defining bedrock of the American Christian Right—with one major difference. The Muscular Christian Movements of yesteryear considered both a strong body and mind to be prerequisites for a godly man. Many Christian titans of industry and faith in the early 20th century built both bridges and libraries. The Godly man gave his body to his country and his mind to scripture and literature. Today, not so much. 

Please peruse the MMA and lifting athleisure collection Jesus Didn’t Tap and make a purchase. The caricature of today’s Godly men are primarily concerned with getting pussy on big boats, running steroids, and gambling. They are indistinguishable from your standard issue Italian American longshoreman. American mythology, the new Manifest Destiny, and the New American Spectacle are all tightly interwoven. The threads of which can be traced to the masculine mythmaking of American media in the middle of the 20th century. 

American historian Kristin Kobez Du Mez notes in her work “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” that American Evangelicals (and Christian Evangelicals worldwide) had found a new taproot for their hatred of the world

“Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.”

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Discussions of whether or not we “live in a simulation” are often had between bong rips and butt chugs. When the Brainiacs get to chatting about it, they say they are trying to poke and prod at the glass containment of our enclosure to see where the cracks and creases are. But usually they’re trying to get funding from the government on some new rocket, missile, or evil computer. 

The truth is, we do live in a simulation. Just not in the way people think. American Reality is Global Reality. The world reacts to our provocations and our genocides, either with fervent support or disgust, or somewhere in between. At the edges of the empire, victims of American Reality can see the threads that bind it together. Americans struggle to see their own glass enclosure, despite half the world banging and tapping and pleading at them to stop playing with the big monster truck tire and fucking look. Look at what you’ve done! 

Michael Parenti summarizes this in his work “Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media.” Parenti writes 

“The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.”

The hopelessness of the situation for victims of American Reality seems to have no solution, at least not one that Americans are willing to embrace. Again, we know what we have to do, but we would rather be entertained than do it. Plus, doing it is hard, and I have a thing on Tuesday I really can’t miss. 

The war between Americans that try to shut the Reality Machine off and those who run the nodes and nodules of the machine has been mostly a cold clash. Op-eds, articles, essays, this essay. To some degree, I believe we are arrested by awareness. Too aware. Too awe-struck by the sheer magnitude of the gears of the machine, its spinning lathes, its oppressively loud levers and switches, its ability to produce burgers at an alarming rate. 

And in those moments of fear and amazement, just when we think that we have caught the wizard jacking off behind the curtain and we’re about to blow his shit to smithereens, the gears suddenly change in a different direction, the lathes become assembly lines, the projectors become screens. We fall to our knees on the Factory Floor of the World in exhaustion and exaltation. Another day done in the production of the Greatest Show on Earth: American Reality.

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The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'. 

-Karl Rove to Ron Siskund, supposedly.