I Hate it Here

Hate. It's not my job to talk about hate in wondrous latte-sipping cliches, serving forth witticisms and spoon-fed bits of aphorism that can be shared over Starbucks while nattering over the State Of The Fucking World. Hate is too important for that. It's also too damn trivial. See, all kinds of people better qualified than I (not to mention more jumped-up, better paid, on better drugs, with smaller cocks, of lesser importance, and not nearly as intelligent) have written reams and reams of books, articles, diatribes, rants, nodes, what-have-you on the subject. They've spoken about how it can be tamed, how it's good, how it's bad.

Fuck all that.

The tagline of my column is, in case any of you didn't skip past the closers of any of the priors, "I hate it here." I want to talk about hate the way I hate. Because it's my bit, and because we're missing out on something here in this country (which, for all you fuckers tuning in across the Big Ponds, is the United States of Dogfucking America, what's left of it).

Hate is used these days in ways that would make that syphilitic pauper Marx proud as punch were he here to see it. It is used to motivate the crowds; it's used as the intellectual equivalent of a radio dog fence. When you start to think, when you wander too far off that little reservation your favorite talking head droner has circumscribed in piss for you, a little switch goes off. You look around you, and the hate machine kicks in. Fucking liberals. Fucking red states. Fucking gays. Fucking rednecks. Fucking ragheads. Fucking fascists. Fucking white trash. Fucking whatever. Feel that? It's the radio collar kicking in.

In this country, hate is talked of like a disease. It bubbles up from our nethers in vescicles of greenish pus. It's magma. It's hot. It's a force of nature. It's something we can't control; it grips us. It's an externality. It's a mob characteristic. The pop psychologists want you to believe it's something you need to buy their book to learn to Conquer In Five Easy Steps To Conquer Stress. It's a thing. The American culture machine has taken hate and turned it into a zero-step pigment, quickdrying, something you can slap onto anything in order to label it, vilify it, justify it, explain it, or just plain organize it. It has been mistaken for something much simpler and easier to grasp. Its name is used in place of the original, a once-proud concept dragged down into the Reader's Digest version for the safe consumption of the masses.

This represents one thing we lost in our rush for the dream of equality and the classless society.

Me? I hate dogs. I hate the Smirker. I hate lots of people, and lots of things. But that's not the point. The point is this: hate used to be different. Hate is now something that is twisted and inflamed in an attempt (a clumsy attempt) to change the fucking world on a regular basis - but the thing is, hate is so chaotic a thing, it's like using nuclear weapons. Or lawyers. It just injects more into the system, to use it that way. "Goals," if there are any, are lost; unless the goal is chaos in the first place. If it is, then the user wins, and that's another story.

I know, I talked about missing something. Here it is. Hate used to be an expert's hobby. It used to be a fucking spectator sport, practiced by the few and the proud. Oh, not generalized unchanging hatred. I mean the kind of white-hot, incandescent targeted hatred at someone or something that you could actually change. Sure, hatred of the system was always there, a dull roar and ache; but the average serf couldn't really do anything about his or her lot in life, and was really too busy trying to scrape together enough crap-infested foodstuffs from the uncaring maw of the drunk-rolling whore of a mother Earth to give it a good go in any case. No, the serfs didn't hate, not the way the aristocracy could.

They had the surplusage and the time. Hate was the divine sport of kings, the prima ratio regum. Hate was practiced over elaborate cocktails and smiles and nods, with immaculate costumes and schedules in months, with entire lives playing out in the game. Hate was spending months befriending a target, becoming his best ally, only to lure his pre-pubescent daughter into the linen closet at a garden party with a handful of sweets and deflower her - and to do so with such skill that the girl would write arias about it in her diary and keep the secret to herself for months. Only when a (artfully arranged) family argument amongst his clan reached an absolute boil would she throw your social timebomb in her father's face - just as the fact that you'd bought up his gambling debts became known, as did the revelation that the 'sister' of yours his son had married was in fact a whore from Woking that the entire social circle had enjoyed. Only then would the poor lass scream at her broken father that yes, yes the Count St. Useless-Of-The-Marbury-Fields-In-The-Acre-Of-The-Relentless-Persecution had, in fact, taken her maidenhead in the scullery last March during his triumphant ball, and she intended in fact to run off to join her beloved that very night.

This is hatred. To be practiced while sipping the finest of fucking bourbons. It is the stuff of which Americans, now addicted to instant gratification and spoon-fed information and their notion that guns make power and that their government should fix their lives are completely incapable of understanding much less performing.

Oh Spider, I hear the whinge, those are horrible things! You're damn right they are. In return for the hideous fecal boils of venereal pus that have rained down from the Capitol on our fair land these few years from the self-proclaimed aristocracy, such few trifles would be mere sporting clays. Ask the nurse being investigated for sedition (and ask when the last time that word was dragged out) for espousing objections to government policy - her workplace visited by the FBI. Ask the government employee visited by the Department of Homeland Security and told he would be charged for having anti-Iraq War bumper stickers on his pickup truck - in Boise, Idaho - by men from an Office that was mysteriously difficult for the newspaper of his fair city to even locate later, and which would not return telephone calls from that newspaper admitting to its existence. Ask them if they feel this sort of properly carried out hatred, with malice aforethought and goals declared, is out of line.

But fuck me, what a better place this would be if a few more people here could stop bitching about their fucking SUVs and the price of gas and their goddamn Starbucks and take lessons from the useless people of ages past.

I mean, think about it. There's no fucking way the Smirker and his cronies have the long game to play that. The only reason they're getting away with the midrange crap they are right now is because nobody else in the country has the fucking play-through to even notice that they're being fucked doggy-style by a rancid set of snorting hogs with miniscule cocks and serious incontinence, regardless of whose side they're on.

That, and the fact that no-one has the tools left to hate them. All they can muster up is what they think is hate but which is too ephemeral, too undirected, too clumsy to do the job right. They don't have hate. They've forgotten what hate is. And they don't care. They've lost the notion that there are things one doesn't fucking accept, and situations that are beyond the goddamn pale. They can't even remember the proper response to the kind of abuse that's being shat down on their heads, regardless of their views. Even aside from an actual response, there should be those few artists practicing masterworks on the genetic damage currently responsible for this travesty of a fucking policy implosion that they call an administration - but no.

What do I hate? Apathy and ignorance.

I'm Spider Jerusalem, and I hate it here.