Welcome to the Hyper-Feudalist Future!
If not for cosmic-level screwups by Germany and Japan, America would still be an ass-backwards shithole.
That, plus the serpentine genius of F.D.R., birthed the alternate-timeline universe that we inhabit today, which is now run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Palm-sized mind-control devices stream an endless feed of sex, violence, and outrage porn while our neurodivergent elites plan gated communities on Mars.
For those mystically inclined — or maybe just hopped up on Marvel lore — there’s a serious case to be made that we’re living in an alternate timeline, one diverging sharply from the path we were meant to follow. A “universe” where Christianity is doomed to end in failure; where Hegel and Marx — and the rest of the progressive left — are proven dead wrong about humanity’s dialectical march toward progress. A historical itinerary where every attempt to build a humane, collectivist model of industrialization is thwarted by charismatic leaders with dark-triad traits, propped up by the wealthiest actors in their respective societies, hellbent on global domination and imperial destruction. Adolf Hitler. Joseph McCarthy. Barack Hussein Obama. And now Donald J. Trump.
Humanity’s best shot at building a sane industrial society probably ended when Kaiser Wilhelm let his overconfident military brass talk him …
Ticks
They looked like stone busts of Roman emperors or something
Gorged on Beagle gore
If not a willing carrier, I have been a faithful one.
Sometimes at night when I shut my eyes, and sometimes, for that matter, when I cinch them in prayer, what flashes up on the walls of my mind is a series of three images. Like the dinosaur slides my daughter switches in and out of the View-Master, which, no matter how familiar, retain a capacity for surprise, the first picture emerges from out of darkness and is replaced by darkness before the next one, and then the next one, appears.
Three deer ticks, each the size of a grape, bigger, are arranged in a loose triangle on a stone splash block at the edge of a house. That’s the first image. In the next one, three blood stains, dark, distinct, are all that remain. In the last, the blood on the stone has likewise vanished. Something or other has washed it clean.
The sequence derives from a memory, or collection of memories, from my childhood in Tennessee. Why I’ve smuggled these pictures across …
Who’s Shooting All the Pretty Horses?
Wild horses are symbols of the vanished West
They are also living, breathing creatures
May the mark of Cain be upon their killer, as it is upon us
Far out on the fringes of Utah’s deserts, cradled between a chemical-weapons testing range and an army depot, there run the Onaqui wild horses. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, pintos and palominos. Someone keeps shooting them.
“Pyrite bled out just down the road from here,” says the woman standing beside me. This sturdy lady is my souped-up-4Runner-driving guide to the Onaqui’s 200,000-acre range, a lonesome stretch of desert a couple hours southwest of Salt Lake City that is home to a herd of 300 or so wild mustangs.
My guide comes out here nearly every weekend to be among the horses. Her eyes can spot the animals hiding in the cracks of the hills. She agreed to show me around on the condition that I don’t use her real name. Snowflakes, wind-kicked from the ground back into the air, flicker all around us.
Pyrite, a young palomino stallion, was shot in the first week of November; …
