FUCK THE AMERICAN SICKNESS (PART 2)

“Dear John
I hope you get this letter in time
Before they wishy-wash away your mind -
Or is it already gone?”
                                   - Narcoleptic Youth,

                                     ‘Dear John’

So okay. Last January I published ‘Fuck The American Sickness’ (Part 1)’ on this blog. It's a real-life tale, full of hardcore sex and semi-satiric prose poetry. It was the first post I put up here, after my declaration of intent with this blog. The material was sexually graphic for a very specific reason: it goes directly against the grain of contemporary PC poetic and literary representation, and I wanted to make it very clear that I will never censor myself - or try to censor others, for that matter. 

Pity the current Scottish government couldn’t say the same thing.

Ask Count Dankula or Grouse Beater what that's about.

As has become apparent, I am exploring my years in America – from July 2005 to March 2016 – in what I am writing on this blog, along with just throwing in some random shite that occurs to me from the Scottish Central Belt in my daily life. But more and more it seems the two meld almost seamlessly, depressingly, disturbingly. Because the thing that has occurred to me, since I came back here and saw modern Scotland through a set of educated, different eyes – is just how much Scotland is increasingly copying America for its lead culturally, politically, and intellectually.

Which is a dangerous and stupid thing to do.

As is pretty clear to anybody with half a brain, America gives us nothing but nightmares these days. Ah ah ah, don't interrupt just because you have family or friends there, or fond holiday memories, or the weans love their yearly trip to Disneyland. You know what I am saying is true, face it. America's run by a madman who seemingly has a neurodegenerative disease; it wants to buy up the UK and run our standards down to their low levels; it willfully and gleefully refuses climate change assertions and is helping burn us off the planet; it sells arms to dictators; it fills the world’s head with utter shite in the form of its popular culture. I could go on and on. But, personally, one of the worst things it has done, to me, is foist the censorious, social media-transmitted disease of identity crisis politics onto the world through social media, and fuck up hearts and minds everywhere.

Sadly, some in Scotland have gratefully gulped down the Kool Aid of this mass hysteria and pathological mental illness, taking it upon themselves to ape its worst excesses in government. Coming back to this country to hear Scottish youngsters and grannies talking like dogma-spewing American college kids was really fucking weird, especially as they don't even need to, and could ignore all this shite if they so chose. This monkey-see-monkey-do nonsense is to the absolute detriment of our society, thinking, and democratic institutions. The horrendous influence of American societal and sociological madness can be seen in stuff like, for a random current example, the GRA, where men can now call themselves women and worm their way into areas previously only accessed by women. 

If you keep up-to-date with the news, you’ll know how much trouble that can of worms has opened up here, with the SNP seemingly ready to ride roughshod over the rights and wishes of women to implement its wee American-copying identity crisis coup d’etat. They have been pushed back from this, but this whole wee fracas is indicative of the contemporary SNP thinking in a (cut-off) nutshell: just push what you think is best onto the population, even without consultation, and they’ll do just what the Hell we tell them to do. And no disrespect to trans people whatsoever, this is a debate that is important and needs to be undertaken. I am just talking about the cack-handed way it has been handled so far.

The arrogant condescension coming from the middle class-centred SNP on this whole vacuous American political headshot is absolutely in keeping with the central fundamental tenets and psychotic sniffy ‘ideals’ of identity politics in general. This mass madness was minted amongst the upper-middle class Ivy League schools of America, used as a way to look down on others who do not hold the same views they do, or are not as 'advanced' and ‘sensitive’ and 'cultured' as they are. 

(Those inbredneck rich cunts remind me of the character of Des Esseintes from the late 19th century novel A Rebours by JK Huysmans. In it, a decadent aristocrat locks himself alone in his mansion and partakes of the finer crap in life, surrounding himself with gaudy, expensive furniture and decor, guzzling jujubes filled with female spunk. At one point he conducts 'smell symphonies' by smelling different perfumes in order, thus creating a snotterbeak work of art. But he has been so debilitated by his cloistered life he can't handle the overwhelming smell wall assailing him that he has to run to the window to throw it open to gasp heady lungfuls of clean fresh air before the smells kill him. Seems to me the parallels are pretty clear. Des Esseintes would have been whimpering and whining away in identity politics slanguage had it been around in his day.)

This fragile, ever-changing-rules-and-vocabulary idiocy, which now basically amounts to religious fundamentalism, is just another form of hysterical conspicuous consumption from rich people. They think and know and feel things better than you (ignoring their inbred madness and America’s general low-level mental illness, that is), and if you don’t think and act as they do (in public) you are nothing but lower-class scum who deserve to be impoverished, despoilers of the nonexistent American dream that you are.

And this utter shite is what many people in this country (and round the world, but I am sticking to Scotland here) have chosen of their own free will to emulate, simply because they are still under the mistaken impression that America is an interesting and sane and decent place that is worth thinking about or copying.

The reason I have chosen to call this the second Fuck The American Sickness installment is not accidental. In the first part, the young student woman I had a brief fling with had a head full of this sort of undercooked BSE mince. If I would talk to her about, for random example, the greatest artists from the 20^th century and she would get all antsy, saying that they were the ‘greatest’ implied there was a hierarchy in the arts and this was wrong and everything is all the same and everybody is all the same and blah blah blah. At the time I had never really heard any of this stuff before, and assumed that it was all new, genuine thought coming out of America’s student-loan-debt-generating diploma mills.

It’s only over the last few years, as this disgusting, horrifying, terrifying, and occasionally hilarious mass mental illness has come to be ‘accepted’ in youthful quarters as some sort of useful theology, that I’ve come, like many other people, to realise how completely and utterly fucking insane it all is. It’s pretty much reached its tipping point now of peak arsehole manufacturing levels in the Western world. I fucking hope this is the giddy quavering high point before it all crashes down (and when it happens across the Atlantic, it’ll happen over here too – when American sneezes, the world gets gone-viral pneumonia) and some sort of post-derangement sanity can fall back into place. Cos it’s just yet more divide-and-conquer shite to be swept up and thrown away.

When I came back to Scotland, I instantly recognised that the place had changed forever under constant numbing American pop-cultural bombardment. People living here probably wouldn't have noticed the slow transatlantic drift, but it was very obvious to me. Everybody was using the useless, now-worthless “awesome” as an adjective, as if it meant anything. Youngsters wanted to “take out the trash.” Shops had become stores, gigs and programmes had become shows. Shit fast food vendors like Papa John's and Five Guys and Subway had gained inroads into Scotland’s stomachs. We often had fries instead of chips now, and pharmacies instead of chemists, vacations instead of holidays. Teenagers were attending proms, and were trick-or-treating versus guising. Cafes were serving burritos and fajitas. Our phones were impatiently changing Scottish spellings into American ones. We had become obsessed by American news and  were talking about it 24/7. I could go on. But the online replicating of identity politics in Holyrood was the thing that turned me off the most, especially because it’s caused women (forget men, we don’t count in modern Scotland) such a lot of fear and loathing and potential space-sharing trauma.

It’s bizarre. The younger SNP selfie-snapping careerist apparatchiks – and I am naming no names, they are just one brainwashed, wannabe-American mass to me, faceless and nameless and thoughtless – have all grown up with social media. They instantly pick up on any half-chewed soundbites and phrases and insults and dogshit popcult trends coming out of America and immediately copy them, and it’s virtually impossible to distinguish them online from somebody in America or Australia or Canada (these latter two being horrendous hyper-PC-sodomised Hellholes, apparently) or wherever.

It’s all just one big leprosy smear of censorious anti-intellectual dictating, and anybody stating an opposing opinion to these American-brained cultists (unaware they even are American-brained cultists, which is the ironically funny and tragic thing) is instantly branded a homophobe or a transphobe or a bigot or a (sigh) Nazi or a whatfuckingever. You’re only a bigot if you don’t think the way these very, very vocal bigots do. Still, good way to rebel against your middle-aged, horrifed parents, eh?

The glazed-eyes, screen-grazer religious fundamentalists are on a mission, and anybody saying anything outwith their own vacuous online echo chamber is a heretic, a scumbag, and needs to be permanently ostracised and sent into the forever-desert of no-followers Twitter Cyberia. Or better yet, get them banned from Twitter, and Shiny Happy People Power can prevail in the world again. Hooray for hyper-sensitivity, and taking constant offence over absolutely nothing whatsoever!

You know, I know exactly what any younger person disagreeing with this will say, that I am a middle-aged foamygub fool, farting arse froth, clueless, hateful, a bigot, a nag, an awfuckdunno something negative and hateful anyway. Ageism is the only form of bigotry allowed by these zealot hypocrites (well, that and white male hating, especially working class males, but that just takes us right back to rich American cunts sneering down at their ‘inferiors’ in their penniless penury), who cannot grasp that it is perfectly possible to have opposing, or maybe even just somewhat different, views to theirs, without being the Troll Cunt Devil incarnate. And to them I would say...

This is what echo chamber dwelling will bring you – a pathological inability to deal with the thoughts and feelings of others, prizing your own over everybody else’s. Even, hilariously, including people who think like you! Some of these ladies and lassies and ladyboys are so wacked-out and net-fucked they can’t burst their own wee self-imposed bubble and get along with others like them without clawing for bottom dog position in the self-victimised hierarchy. 

And these are the people who want to have power over others, who expect to use it judiciously and sensibly. How the fuck is any kind of political solidarity for a higher cause possible when you hate yourself and everybody else, and don’t want to be yourself or be like others? Which came first, the closed-minded anti-social injustice worrier, or the anti-depressants and self-harm? “It is indeed a problem for us to probosculate upon,” as Dr. Teeth from The Muppets sagely put it as he scratched his green cloth chin. 

I am chuckling here, though it’s not really funny. At all. It would be funnier if it didn’t have real-life consequences. Nicola Sturgeon, our femdom First Minister, positively encourages all this madness and victim-status-claiming, the self-crippled mountain climb of importance, the limping walk of eternal Western whiteboy shame, the Prozac-numbed sentience death gasp. I don’t know what’s going on with the second Independence Referendum. Nobody except Nicola Sturgeon seems to know what’s going on with that, if she even knows herself. So what we are left with right now is a telling online chokehold snapshot of a party in old-versus-new, competent-versus-unbalanced disarray. 

I read the womanifesto a couple of days ago online of one young lassie wanting to stand for an MSP position. She listed her past mental and emotional problems and said that, because of them, she knew all about oppression (because to certain people nothing but oppression exists, though it’s often self-oppression) and would work hard to blah blah blah the usual whatever. I can’t think of a single other job where you would list the negative parts of your life and personality and worldview before interview and expect to be taken seriously, especially if it was to have important power over others. But being mentally and emotionally compromised seems to almost be a chic thing to be these days. Just look at the medical-jargon-spouting profile descriptions of many young people on Twitter. Anybody saying it isn't cool is sneered at as (made-up word alert) 'ableist' and consigned to heretic healthy Hell for all eternity.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour" - Hunter S Thompson.

It’s actually a form of cruelty, to me, to put some people into a position that may give them status and have people noticing them potentially for the first time in their lives, then expecting them to deal with it on any countrywide level. If they can handle it, good for them. But a lot of the empirical evidence says otherwise. There is a cynical part of me that wonders if this is being done deliberately to rot and ruin the party from within, but I am not going to run with that. Down that bunny boiler way lies rabbit holes full of stinking fucking buckshit. 

I am not without empathy for mentally ill people, but putting them in prominent positions of political power, when they cannot handle the pressure of the position, seems counter-intuitive. I have seen female SNP MSPs sitting online on Twitter during workdays complaining about online bullying and how they find it difficult to cope with it. Sometimes they even do this when asked a genuine question they don’t want to answer, hiding behind their much-paraded traumas. They are literally being paid to seek sympathy and complain on social media! It’s (no pun intended) mental! Maybe some would call it workplace advancement, in that you can place people like this into workplace positions, and everybody deserves to work, of course, but the amount of slightly…off MSPs and general gofers in the SNP is quite disconcerting.

I don’t feel particularly threatened, because I’m not an SNP member (though I have voted for them before since 2016). But what these personality-unqualified, mentally and emotionally troubled people do has very real ramifications for the country I live in, so I feel I can at least comment from the sidelines. You've heard the other side’s smarmy, pompous sub-American sneering a million times anyway; might as well hear from an opposing, heretical POV for a change. I’m just a lone voice in the neon-hued cyber-wilderness farting peas at the moon. I can see that the post-industrial Western world is becoming feminised, and that’s fine too, putting aside all the fucking disgusting middle class manhating the media pumps out on a daily basis. I’m just trying to understand a few things, ultimately, like these American (sorry, Scottish) youngsters are by remaking the world in their own fractured, entitled, selfie-reflecting image.

The world is pretty much fucked right now, maybe forever, and it’s difficult to keep hope alive in an environment that seems to be burning down round our very ears. But dictating to everybody outside your wee middle class media cabal (plenty of jobs for the prosecco-and-gin-guzzling girls in newspapers and telly and radio, after all) what they should think and be, how they should act…is just not on, for older people. And, Hell, even for a great many younger people too. 

This whole identity politics shitstorm is really mostly a middle class phenomenon. However, as we have a decently educated population in this country, this dross is being taught in universities, spindoctrination camps (all over the world) full of bitter intersectionality lecturers who couldn’t function in the real world, so took it upon themselves to try and radicalise generations of young people to want to tear down the very society they are living in, at the expense of common sense and sanity. Oh, the humanities!

The idea of tearing it all down is mighty appealing in a cartoon, punky, sorta-apocalyptic way, but if what you are replacing it with is just as utterly full of totalitarian shit intellectually as the crap you’re tearing down, you can leave me out of it, for one. Donald Trump got the presidency partly because of American middle class people sneering down their nose at the working class, and spewing ‘woke’ (a word Scottish people use without even knowing its etymology or black American societal origins) condescending swill. No wonder large numbers of them voted in fuck-you protest for vermin. Living in a minorities-revenge culture, where they will constantly sneer at and spit on the vast majority of people for any past or present injustice, is just setting us all up for failure.

That’s the way it’s getting here, too. More and more people are being turned off by the (now hard) left in the UK (reading the fake-caring Guardian would make a sane person vomit up their intestinal tract) and pendulum-swinging the other way. The extremist societal pronouncements and positions of the SNP, and their arrogant, pompous condescension turns away people who might otherwise agree with them and their policies. What politics lacks in a selfie-serving era is humility, and empathy from the middle class with those less fortunate than them. After all, today’s middle class is tomorrow’s janitor or carer. But as long as the parties can just try and force their policies onto other people as being best for them…the damwalls will burst and the blood and heresy will run free and uneasy and laughing in the highly entertained streets.

You know, I can actually understand the whole extremist identity politics thing much more in America. Their predisposition to religious-alike concepts since the current incarnation of that country started has left them more open and vulnerable to this sort of mass hysteria. Their president is a conman madman, and the more he sneers the more the left and young scream and impotently rage, taking their feelings being disregarded out on others of a lower class than them. Everybody punches down, and the last man in line closes his door and kicks the dog. But Scotland would not classify itself as a religious country, and religion has not played too much of a part in our society (and across Europe in general) for decades now. Maybe this shit is filling a gut-void vacuum. Of course, we used to be much more religious, and certain Calvinistic self-scouring tenets still stubbornly cling to our psychological underbellies, so maybe that’s what makes some here susceptible to this New Religion. 

We have always been an ostensibly left-leaning country, and the fundamental(ist) tenets of apocalyptic American mass hysteria are actually difficult to argue with. I mean, who in their right mind would argue against love, peace, freedom, compassion, equality, human dignity? But this is being enacted in Scotland in the same disrespectful, deranged way it’s being hamfist-rammed into other countries too: it’s the PC ‘knowing’ way or no way. And, to be honest, the people trying to chip and chop and change us are too young and life-experienced to be fully listened to, though they do make some interesting points. It’s their absolute bedrock dismissal of older people’s views that often makes them almost impossible to get behind and support, or even begin to take seriously. If you think your own decades of life experience mean nothing, and cannot be used constructively in society, or even be just listened to...why bother even getting involved?

This comes right back to growing up with the internet. There is a generation chasm between some of those who came of age in the internet era and their elders, totally black and white, day and night, dim and bright. Which of those shading choices depends basically on who you are, or how old you are. After all, some older people are spewing the same pompous gibberish the younger ones are too, but I think that’s more to do with not wanting to seem out of touch, and to have to toe the party line.

You’re not going to get anywhere in a party with strict strictures on its basic scriptures, and there’s always the embarrassment of being called to Matriarchal Twitter Matron for a public dressing-down if you say something off-colour and (Heaven forbid!) funny. Because a lot of this shit has come out of radical American feminism and intersectionality taken to its (il)logical endpoint, it’s all done without humour. Radical feminists (I am chuckling here, male pig that I am) do not laugh much. The American sense of humour in general is no laughing matter, because they take everything literally. I personally cannot think of anything more nightmarish than grim intellectual slavish subservience to a party line, but that’s just me a – funny cunt. Shrug.

I think what’s clear here is that, with her female-centred obsession, Nicola Sturgeon is setting Scotland up to be run in the future by women, for women. If Holyrood survives the next few years without an Independence Referendum, that is. And please, don't give me any of that 'historical parity' crap as a deflection.  The whole world seems to be pretty much done with men, and we get attacked morning, noon and nightmare in the media. I can’t recall, in the years since coming back from America, having heard Ms. Sturgeon ever even once talk about some initiative for young men she has undertaken to bring to fruition. Everything is just done for young women, and she seems to love to play the wacky indulgent auntie to teenage girls and those in their 20s coming into the party, with a twinkle in her eye, and a tolerance of their quirks and foibles and lonelymaker manhating. 

It’s something I can only sit back and wonder at, because what sort of deluded sexist fantasist would callously disregard half their population like that? That is an absolute recipe for societal disaster, on a magnitude far worse than whining about ‘the patriarchy’ and such nonexistent tripe. Ms. Sturgeon’s sociological extremism is in direct pendulum-swing opposition to the Tories; if they go low, she and her girl group go high, or so they think. It’s exactly the same in America, with the rise of politicians like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her so-called Squad, diametrically opposed to Trump’s dumb fuck cabal. So you have two extremes of right and left battling it out for marketplace and existential supremacy, and it’s us in between who worry and suffer and wonder. Round and round and round she goes, and where she stops no-one knows!

One thing’s for sure. The shine is starting to come off Ms. Sturgeon’s star for a lot of people. It’s alright being self-aggrandising, calling all your policies “The world’s best” or “The world’s first,” basically showing you that you have a massive ego and the parochial sociological equivalent of Short Man Syndrome (with a sneaky wee soupcon of messiah complex thrown in for good measure). But eventually you have to sell some steak with the sizzle. You can’t just lock large swathes of the population out because they have cocks, or no money (working class women are also feeling left out more and more), you have to address the needs and fears and desires and talents of all groups in a country…or it’ll come back to bite your Armani-clad bahookie in some form of other. And no amount of online crying or playing on your mental and emotional illnesses on Twitter and crying to your girl group is going to solve that.

I am truly disappointed. I genuinely don’t want to be writing like this, angrily, critically, painfully. I love this country, bottom line, care about people in general, and what Scotland has become in some areas saddens and confuses and disgusts me. I also feel a dim half-dead ray of hope or two for the future, just to keep me confused and on my toes. Ms. Sturgeon invoked the Enlightenment in her recent TED Talk, preening over Scotland’s role in it as she crowed about a couple of other female-run countries. What are we now? A third-rate, ever-more-American colony mentally and emotionally, walking round staring at phones, bumping off walls and windows, watching cute cat videos as we walk onto the disinformation superhighway and get hit by reality and get our veins and brains spread over half a mile of breakneck-speed online traffic. All Johnson and Trump have to do now is finally finish the American self-colonisation started by social media and cunty superhero films and 

misandry and then, fuck it,
we can just take that
full fool last big step
off the individual-country
cliff into final
brainwash oblivion,
dark and silent and complete.
And sometimes I wonder,
in deeper introspective
moments, shit, if it
wouldn’t just
be a mercy
killing.

We live in very, very interesting times.

Terrifying.

And boring…as..fuck.

Talk amongst your cells.

“You can call me crazy
 But it’s more than a hunch
 Gobble down your vegan soup
 Tomorrow at lunch
 But whatever you do man -
 DON’T DRINK THE PUNCH!”
                           - Narcoleptic Youth
                            ‘Dear John’

END

(PS: there are, of course, a lot of good people in the SNP, grassroots people doing decent things, people who truly care about Scotland's future as a country. I don't even think a lot of the power-seeking, starblinded youngsters mean any harm, ultimately. They just don't know any better, and have just grown up during weird net-spellbinding times that tell them they're great and every action of theirs is worth recording, but also that they're living on a dying planet, so fuck it all, cos none of it matters. The above ramblerant is merely critical of the preening identity politics bullshit that has distracted attention away from useful and valuable things for way too long in Scotland. Stop waving young self-righteous condescending rainbow flags in our faces, people. We have important work to do.)