All Empires Collapse.

Every empire thinks that it will be the one that does not. And then it does.

Jeff Bezos and his very human-looking wife. Photo credit: Cindy Ord/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

Aside from specific contexts in history, for instance a Bronze Age army being slow to adopt Iron Age technology, collapse is always the result of two central factors:

One is that the wealth class becomes so generationally separated from the realities of living at subsistence levels that they cease to acknowledge the injustice of such disparity, or even recall what it means not to be able to pay their way out of any difficulty. See, for instance, the dead-eyed ghouls attending yesterday’s Met Gala. Or the moral vacuum that is TrumpSons Inc. Or the familiars who protect the Epstein Class for the reward of being excluded from it.

The second reason is that lower classes/wage slaves intuitively know that they’re being screwed, but like addicts at the blackjack table have come to crave the bitter taste of losing, or at least of thinking their loss is ordained. If the game is rigged, shame transforms from personal responsibility into cathartic anger. They are then drawn to leaders who claim strength (“Stalin” wasn’t actually Stalin’s name, it means “Steel” in Russian) who offer simplistic answers to complex problems devoid of solutions. These leaders tend to be imbeciles with a genius for manipulation, and their tragic civilization-crippling decisions (see: Iran) are as misguided as their self-regard.

The wage slave secretly wants to be fucked, because pain is preferable to fault. And masking pain is easier than massing in the streets, just as Fentanyl is easier than reading 17th century philosophy.

Successful businessman Mr. Jeff Bezos, your Met Gala host and Gilded Age novelistic rake, is the richest man in the world. Or at least close enough that the precision of that sentence is irrelevant. So why has the richest man in the world, among the untold millions of women who would cram their soul with chewed gum and rusty scissors to have access to his wealth, have chosen one who is so exaggeratedly altered that she barely looks human? Is it possible, say through Billionaire Tinder or Jeffrey Epstein, for Mr. Jeff Bezos to have acquired, at a very attractive rate, a mate who is simultaneously a fun hang and does not resemble an Aggrieved Ozempic Praying Mantis?

Is it because deep-down her sensational artifice is his true internal reflection? Is that why he’s also overnighted himself so much surgery that I initially thought it was someone else in the picture? Bezos went from looking exactly like who he was, to what John Travolta wished Nick Cage would see him as.

It’s a facile comment, I will grant you, but what if they burned all that spackle-injection money on childhood cancer instead? What if they sighed and shrugged and were resigned to be who they are? Is not the desire to radically alter less a personal aesthetic than a manifestation of the insecurity that would drive you to Maxx your Imperial Status to begin with?

If that all seems too personal, it probably once was. At least prior to owning and destroying The Washington Post, or bankrolling the inauguration, or cashing out all regulatory inspection, or greenlighting “Melania”, a film that continues to do brisk business in Swiss euthanasia clinics but is otherwise seen around the world to be exactly the propagandistic bribe that it is.

Jeff Bezos is not special. He is just another business wheel who, through hard work and an unusually gifted schematic mind, capitalized at exactly the right time in technological shifts to build one of the most amazingly successful businesses in human history. The fact that the business is also predatory, anti-worker, monopolistic, invasive, the tool of community destruction and isolation, and one of the main drivers of the immiseration of millions of people in exchange for convenience, speaks to the fact that the true talent of Jeff Bezos is leering into the camera to twirl his mustache at the ethical void.

Being a billionaire is grotesque, but perhaps it is a useful marker of the edge of the observable universe. Being a proud multi-billionaire who thinks they deserve such a status without spending at least a percentage of their haul alleviating the suffering of others is a pathology that can be cured with Bottle Service uranium. At some point, wealth is more destabilizing than religion, because exclusivity becomes its own scripture, and that includes presuming the right to rape young girls without consequence is a byproduct of NASDAQ share value.

Let’s say, starting tomorrow, that 90% of every dollar earned over one billion is taxable forever. That is not socialism, it is sanity. The billionaires will not all flee, we will not descend into collectivist turnip farmers, and no one will be any less incentivized to dominate markets or start new and highly-profitable businesses. Also, if the billionaires do flee, fuck ‘em. Go. As I understand it, there are plenty of private, lightly-used islands for sale that the next two decades can be happily spent sandbagging against the rising sea levels of.

There are many ways to help the poor, and I do not believe that simply handing out cash on street corners is one of them. Free high-quality basic education and nutrition through age 18 for every single American child would help the poor more than any other single thing. Or even dozens of other things (in addition to making this country a much better place for every person in it). Being surrounded by the well-educated is priceless for all. And it could be paid for with half of what we’ve spent bombing Iran over the last six weeks. There is nothing America cannot afford. There are only greater or lesser priorities, and most of them are rooted in greed.

Ultra-wealth is an anachronism. The Rothschilds were, for many years, the richest people on Earth. And they made their entire fortune by servicing the debt of Europe and the fledgling United States. Their brilliance was to realize that making debt so geographically interconnected that it could never be defaulted upon, then buying it back and turning it into investible hard currency, was an unbreakable cycle. They built nothing. Manufactured nothing. And their methods continue to this day. The entire industrialized world is in debt to itself. Really. We all owe each other degrees of each other, represented in endlessly printable but ultimately worthless currency.

So feel free to laugh at Republicans who simultaneously spend without taxing and then bleat about the national debt, because the only thing that keeps any country afloat is the endless flow of taxes. Investments are for amateurs, debt itself is actually revenue, and wealth depends not only on cheap labor, but also on cheap labor being 51% convinced that they deserve to eat it so that macabre, preening rapacity can attend The Met Gala in dresses made of orphan skin.

In almost every respect, The People should rise up with torches and machetes and take every last penny that Jeff Bezos has, send his wife on a one-way rocket back to space, and force him to product-pick in an Arizona warehouse at a non-union hourly fee for most of August. But they don’t, and one of the stupidest things about the exceptionally stupid percentage of this largely stupid country, is because, despite every shred of evidence, they secretly believe they have a shot at the wealth class themselves. Of course, much like the lottery, or consistently winning at blackjack, they have no chance at all. Even with the requisite money, they would not be allowed to walk freely among the well-bred, and their cash would be stolen or adjudicated away before the next sunrise.

But the fantasy of the cinema rich is too alluring to the documentary poor not to stand up and refuse to be fucked.

Speaking of which, America is fucked. As in collapsing. So it is long past time for verbally pulling punches, or trying to be nice and inclusive and understanding while analyzing the collapse, or worrying about hurt feelings. It is exactly at this time that harsh words are required, because nothing else has kept us from blithely waltzing where Babylon, Rome, and Carthage once confidently tread. Which is to say straight into the maw of their own demise on the backs of the greed of the wealth class.

Oratory is a poor substitute for the guillotine, but it will have to suffice for the moment.

Also, I’ve already alienated most of my friends and robustly lengthened my queue of enemies, so it would be disingenuous to pretend that it actually matters to me personally, or in a universal sense, but the real problem with America is how many unforgivably stupid people live in it.

If you do not immediately and reflexively see, on a purely animalistic level, exactly what Donald J. Trump is, you are a danger to the herd. If you still prefer his brand of rapine fraudulence, or believe it benefits you in a way that forgives the rest, at least admit it and we can have that discussion.

But if you continue to sincerely buy Trump’s act, at this late date, you, friend, are a fucking moron. We are way past politics. This is survival. Stupidity was once a hurdle, now it is an active danger and you are the unexploded ordnance of congenital dimness.

I am aware that I often sound like a lunatic, but I no longer care. I’m 57, and my life is just fine and I have a little Zen Retreat in Northern California and I can spend the rest of my years writing, playing music, walking the dog, and eating dense, nutritious breakfasts while remaining mostly unaffected. I have LUXURY, which is to say, the luxury of only caring about the collapse of humanity to the degree that I choose, but I continue to think, perhaps like MAGA cretins under the impression that Donald J. Trump does not loathe them precisely for failing to identify his artifice, that some small justice is possible.

Or once existed to the degree that it can be returned to.

The truth is that pretty much EVERYONE in a certain social and economic strata knew Jeffrey Epstein. He was murdered in his cell and fully deserved every gasping, sweaty, desperate second of it. Donald J. Trump raped underaged women, which is another word for children. Melania was a pay-for-play escort who pretended for a minute to be in the business, at the end of a lens instead of a penis, so of all the women on the planet knows exactly what her husband did, yet still chooses to guzzle the stem cells of those once in her position in exchange for couture, day-long facials, and unlimited cloud storage for life.

The real evil of fascism, in the end, is how banal it ultimately is. As our man Pasolini well knew, the wealth class may be nothing but animals, but it is the idiots who grin and eat their shit who are both unbearably sad and primarily to blame. The wealth class steals like a rhino tramples trophy hunters — out of pure brute instinct. The lazy and easily manipulated choose not to fight their manipulation, instead cobbling together an anti-lifestyle by blaming black people for their own social and economic drift.

Yes, let’s go there. Being racist is about as bone-stupid a position as it is possible to hold. Taking solace in a manufactured superiority based on genetic levels of melanin while ignoring three-thousand-years of human beings owning other human beings in every country and civilization in the history of the world, but finding a rationalization for yours, is the definition of clueless incomprehension, unearned heritage, pig-fucking, and horrible music.

ICE is not about borders or jobs or even votes — being anti-immigrant is the only way left to continue to hate black people for free.

With complete seriousness, if both the House and the Senate were disbanded today, and all 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen were immediately replaced by randomly chosen black women from every state, political affiliation, and economic class, half the problems in America would be fixed in a week.

So, yeah, the Supreme Court can go fuck itself with Clarence Thomas’ Stepin Fetchit cock, Harlan Crow’s gift-condom assortments, and Anita Hill’s undegraded truth.

The court, in fact, is no longer either supreme or a court. It is a breezy corporate ATM. It is Enron with Robes. It is Opus Dei with health care. It is the legacy of John Roberts, which is not one that a wise man would care to lug around in public fifty years from now.

Hey, want to avoid wading through six circuitous and turgid books of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in one sentence because he is the mentor of Alex Karp, billionaire part-owner of Palantir, and one of the most powerful men in the world? Palantir, you’ll remember, is that company likewise owned by Peter Thiel which combines the best attributes of illegally invasive, privacy-dissolving state surveillance with the finest components of an Artificial Intelligence whose stated plan is to render most human labor obsolete. Plus currently identifying-for-death most of Gaza with facial recognition efficiency, and also all the Girls’ Schools in Iran long overdue for collateral targeting.

Basically, Habermas believed that any given country could be re-branded with a completely disembodied political identity based on rational free market discourse unencumbered by the ingrained tribal parochialism that describes all of human behavior throughout history.

The problem with completely theoretical Utopian ideals (for example Marxism) is that they are doomed to be immediately co-opted by the wealth-class and used for the opposite purposes of their stated intentions. You may hate Karl Marx, but he is the only mongoose who can kill the cobra of Fascism, and most of tech-skimmed German philosophy is just overly wordy excuses for Technofascists to do what they were going to anyway, and pretend that it has an intellectual/philosophical foundation.

The internet has been highly successful in swindling you, YES YOU, into believing that developing technology to make much of human labor and creative output obsolete is a good idea. Most of us have blithely accepted that the ease, efficiency, and wealth creation that AI promises is not actually an anti-intellectual Trojan Horse posing as convenience, and that the demise of coding and copywriting and interstate trucking and music and literature and collegiate courses and other vital human pursuits will mark a whole new beginning.

Speaking of political oversight of Techofascist encroachment, are you like me in assuming that 84-year-old senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and 92-year-old Chuck Grassley (R-IA) do not possess a sufficient working knowledge of quantum computing, as they croon along to The Ink Spots on the Victrola every Friday night, to be trusted to do what’s right, as opposed to what most convenient to drool into?

The people making decisions about human obsolescence in the face of dangerous technology should not likewise be on the verge of physical obsolescence in the face of arterial plaque.

Friends, we actually could have a revolution. Not a post or a song or a book or a poem, a REAL revolution. You know, like the one we are FOUNDED UPON? The one that was a GREAT IDEA WAY BACK THEN, in the mighty 1776? All day and all night in the streets, a strike, a refusal to work, a shutdown of transit, a boycott of billionaire goods, a mass deletion of software, a rejection of the rights of wealth, a redistribution of sane political ideas and actions, policies that help the most possible people in the best possible ways, an embrace of virtue and ethics and concern for the welfare of one another that recognizes we are all connected no matter how much we pretend not to be.

And it has to start on the Political Right, with Marjorie T. Green and Joe Rogan and the suspiciously astonished “No way to see this coming” crowd suddenly speaking up. We need them all. The only way out is from within. The whiny, endlessly piqued, hysterical Left is giddily invited as well. There can be no sides or enemies here, none of the meaningless cultural bait can be swallowed any longer. The truth is that the aliens have laser-beamed the White House, and it’s time for the world to pull together and trans-kick their asses. Or at least have a mass-hug, the cops and the military and the hatted and the masked, in the streets, and be willing to be collectively wrong.

So, to recap: a rapist, racist, classist, conman grifter pedophile runs the United States.

And he has started a disastrous war with Iran on a whim.

What does a sane country do about its clear descent into insanity?

This, friends, is not one of those essays afraid of real-time solutions.

Here is where we must begin:

-Have a national discussion about the role that Christianity plays in propping up the least Christian man in world history, and the outsized territory seized by Evangelical Christianity in conservative politics, and the fact that Evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump don’t even believe, let alone understand, their own religion anymore.

-If your Holy Book book says that Donald J. Trump is a good human being, your holy book should be burned in a huge stack, in the middle of the street, with 200 gallons of kerosene and every last copy of JD Vance’s bullshit memoir as kindling.

-Jail for all for-profit jailers and their ilk.

-Data centers shuttered around the clock, Crypto outlawed.

-Gerrymandering illegal forever.

-Tax all churches, declare Scientology even more fraudulent than KashPatelogy.

-Explain in three coherent sentences why Ghislaine Maxwell is in a minimum security prison.

-ICE disbanded, Pet Eating mandatory

-Larry Ellison divested of all media properties, he and Ellison The Younger forced to start a company baking gay wedding cakes with mustache logos.

-Admit that the senate is crammed full of bewigged supposed-moderate dingbats like Susan Collins, who cast the deciding votes for Hegseth and RFK, and should be tried right along with them for murder.

-Just say out loud that the BALLROOM IS NOT A BALLROOM, IT IS GOING TO BE A REINFORCED BUNKER. Why the fuck do you think he wants it so badly? To trip on his tie/dick while dancing with Baron and Viktor Orbán? He is never leaving. We will never be able to get him out of there. They are not building UP they are digging DOWN. Donald J. Trump will be embedded in a state-of-the-art fortress like a deer tick gorged on liquid Filet O’ Fish, and even Teen USA models and the illicit blowjob-lips of Laura Loomer will not be enough to entice him out. Ever again.

Hey man, it’s close, but it’s still not too late to save the world.

So I am extending a hand. All you have to do is take it. And then grab a machete from that pile right to your left, no not those, the sharper pile, yes that one, and let’s begin with the Met Gala guest list and work our way up from there.

Together.