Shittttttt!
The long and tiresome campaign of President Posterior (elect) has revealed to home audiences (we can hardly call the unmobilized American masses anything else) the dyspeptic underbelly of the liberal-democratic fantasy. Locked within the confines of their curated Internet timelines and baseless feel-good truisms about voting, clueless pseudorationalists speak about waking up to a new epoch. We cannot call it an awakening. Perhaps it is more like a fit of hypnopompic sleep paralysis and its accompanying suite of horrible hallucinations. Despite a long line of successful and untouchable buffoons in the international political arena serving as test dummies (Silvio Berlusconi, Rob and Doug Ford, Vladimir “KGB” Putin) the vast majority of people have been taken utterly by surprise.
The new world order? A goofy blend of reality television pacing with saber rattling, misogyny, racism, and media distraction. A new self-deprecating authoritarianism along the lines of Ubu, Gilliam’s Brazil and the regime of Rufus T. Firefly. A coalition of protectionist nuclear thugs and improvised bigots with shiny buttons. A wall-building bastion for the noxious identity of “whiteness”. We note that in the West, the Diffused Spectacle spoken of by Debord seems to be concretizing itself anew to make-up for the Fall of the Soviet Union. The elites re-integrate genuine tensions by enacting a puppet show version in electoral politics to get us to play along.
We also dog-ear the congratulary note of so-called progressive Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the newly elected Duce. He speaks on behalf of “our shared values” in an entirely accurate allusion to his country’s fetish for ejaculating pipelines, apartheid, privatization and accumulation by dispossession.
Under the superstructure, our economics aren’t going anywhere. Financialization and managerial extremism are still the order of the day. Capitalism is frankly pleased to do away with its democratic veneer, an outmoded tool of an early bourgeoisie long since discarded in China, Russia, Singapore… Thuggery, private jails and weapons programs are good business. The markets have never rallied so strongly following an election of a U.S. President.
Are we angry enough yet? Is this the particular scandal we’re mad at, or the general system of exploitation? With Trump at the helm in America, it’s obvious to us on the continent where to throw our bricks. We enjoy the sight of America’s decay even as we fear the new authoritarian future that awaits us in its wake if we let it. A crisis of representation is at least a great opportunity to break things while the streets are hot.
But merdre! Just so there’s no beans about it. Peculiar Mormyrid denounces Presidents. Presidents general and particular. Presidents are steaming bags of greencandle-assed misogynist fruitfly fuckers; no, presidents are scarecrows stuffed with rotting smegma flesh and curdled earvomit written in bloodrenched legalese; no, wait, all presidents past present and future are goofy shitstained bloodpuppets for the cash-nexus of capitalism and its diarrhoea smeared bearers, the capitalist class; no, this president is a gesticulating earwig ontop of the previously enumerated effluvia; this president is a firecracker rapist and an acid aquarium of fentanyl eyeballs and sniffing nostrils; no, this is a racist and rapist and an exploiter and a heap of garbage doubling as a paranoiac image of an ice cream cone flavoured with halitosis under a green moon signifying a vulture beak in the royal phynancial rectum. A machine copier that is also a fat chicken. A mid-atlantic crisis. All presidents are added to the rostrum of guillotinable offenders along with gods, kings, teachers, and other masturbating masters. A president is hereby an outlaw; a homo sacer; it can be done away with and nobody must contest its extirpation.
Daffy says Rabbit Season. Bugs says Duck Season. As of today, we pull down the sign to reveal a cartoonish demagogue with a dystopian grin; it’s opening day on President Season!
We are for mass demoralization in capitalist society, and denounce once more, in addition to the whole machinery on which they sit, Presidents in all their suit-and-tie hypocrisy. The first President was a slaveowner. The last President, a murderous drone technician. This President. The next President and the next next Present. Presidents are pestilential. Not coral reefs and honey bees; we want Presidents to go extinct.
We stand with the majority who don’t vote. We stand in solidarity with those who are protesting Trump and the current world in all its rottenness, with Black Lives Matter, with no-DAPL. As surrealists we are joining them in the streets, keeping an eye out for utopia and a new myth wherever they may appear in the midst of the fighting. Bring a fleshbloody cheesegrater. Bring your cats and dogs and birds. Old Père Ubu’s got you covered. Go out into the streets and fight your president. Eat him alive.
-The Mormyrids, November 11 2016