It Ain't A Conspiracy If It's Out In The Open

On mass discouragement, and who we are (or can be) as it all collapses.

I picked up my girlfriend from her job in an Uber because I don’t drive. She said, “If I start talking about it, I won’t be able to stop so I’m not even going to mention it.” She was talking about the files, and our year-long saga of trying to understand how perverse power has become (and has secretly always been). We tried to retrace our steps, understand how we got here.

“I guess I’m feeling fucked up because it’s children,” she said. “I can’t stand to think of what the world is doing to kids. And for what?!”

“Remember the pizza restaurant?”

“Yea, and how the people were calling the FBI to raid off of QAnon tips. We all laughed and the joke was on us.”

“But are they just bored? What would make them be so sick when they have everything?”

“Well, they have everything. That’s what I found so telling about the Puff documentary. It seemed like the more famous he got, the less satisfied he was. On some monkey’s paw, be careful what you wish for type shit.”

“Nah, but I don’t buy that. Why they wanted kids? Why did they want flesh? There’s something worse behind this.”

I argued that it has always been like this, out in the open. We were not trained to see it and instead chose distraction. On the heels of the latest blow to free press and any semblance of media, and tugging at the coattails of comedy hosts being extorted, news companies being bought out, it’s all too obvious that the last of empire is a craven free-for-all where he who steals last, steals best.

That’s no secret. Not to me. I remember a party I went to in 11th grade. There was a kid named Evan, seemingly no parents, and I always went to his house to get drunk. Evan was about 5’6, 100 pounds if he was any, and swam around in his Carhartt jeans and baggy polos. I ate Percocets and drank 40s with him and my other friends who were rich and gave them to me like candy. I didn’t know what I wanted from life except to stop feeling so goddamn much.

I couldn’t keep up with Evan, though. No one could keep up with Evan. Until one moment, around 1 a.m., as the girls had just started to pour in, Evan was unconscious on his rooftop patio and some close friends were trying to slap him awake. But his lips looked purplish and he was unresponsive. Someone called an ambulance, quietly, and the son of a soap opera star said he would escort Evan to the hospital. He recovered okay and we never really heard about it or talked about it again.

That’s when I learned about how power works and how secrets are kept. A student at a New York private school had passed out, kissed death, and been carted off to the emergency room to get his stomach emptied of the poison. We didn’t mention it because there was some quiet code that his parents shouldn’t be held accountable and they had paid a decent cost to live out their worst indecencies. Noted.

We are looking through reams of files to find the evidence of what we’ve known. Power corrupts and there’s no turning back once the rush of naked power and the adrenaline of wrongdoing at the expense of another has taken over the bloodstream. Our daily iniquities do not compare to global terror, statecraft, or trafficking. And. Our daily iniquities are the anesthesia we use to ignore the advantages being siphoned off around us.

I have more on this that I’ll post once I understand the questions we need to ask, and how to construct a media system that does anything to hold truth up as sacred.