Happy Halloween

Dad had lots of spare mil surplus gear lying around, and with me being lazy, I decided to just cobble up his fatigues and gas mask to go with the whole Fallout / 28 Days Later look for Halloween. It went well, one of the kids even went "woah!" and I went and breathed ominously at kids' faces.

 

The Quarantine Zone.

With Candy Bag.

 

Lurking in the shrubbery.

 

Behold, my evil sistor's true form.

With Captain America and... NINJA!

 

Someone else in fatigues!

The Answer to Infection is here! It is candy!

Thoughts on the Occupy Movement

A friend asked me "what happened to the American dream" and "is the American dream dead?" and I was gonna quote Watchmen and quote the Comedian, who said cynically as he was teargas shotgunning people: "What happened to the American dream? It came true, you're looking at it!"

But then, I realized, that the American dream hasn't died. No, it's born again. In the shape, size and form of these protesters. They are fighting for the American dream. They are its last, best hope. For peace.

It's morning again in America.

Think about it, the masses are actually fighting to regain the nation's soul. This mere act, that those chuds are willing to march out en masse and get themselves tear gassed in the face by all the authoritarian establishment-cuckolding pricks out there, no matter if "they don't have a coherent plan" or some shit, but just out of sheer moral outrage at all that's wrong in your country, this is actually beautiful. It reinvigorates ones faith in a nation, in a country, in a people. You'd think all was lost, but you see this, and you realize that it's not lost, and there's still something there that's good, that's right, that's worth fighting for.

Those masses of littering yuppies and unemployed folk and bedraggled veterans and poor people and college students and whatnot, screaming in youtube, sleeping in the streets, tenting and defying the establishment by getting brutalized by the po-lice and just expressing themselves for all to see and hear - they are America, and they are what makes that nation great. They are the American Dream.

And shame on all those who disdain them, those who spit at them or strike them down, those who mock them or deride them or ridicule them, because if you want to be all melodramatic and poetic about it, you can say that what these lowly protesters are doing is either the last gasp of a dying country, or the first breath of a nation reborn from the womb of turmoil into a brave new world of limitless possibilities. The twilight comes before both dusk and dawn, they are the sun of the nation, whether they fall or rise and herald the coming night or a brand new day.

Prepare to be Freedomized!

MURCA: The Land of the Free

In the bloodstained streets, the victorious sovereign citizens were cleaning up their sullied nation. They lined up the doctors and nurses who had worked in hospitals and abortion clinics funded by money Bari'bamacare stole from the tax payers. 

A Shroomedian took his grenade launcher and began executing them one by one.

"But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to Algeira? What's happened to the Algeiramerican dream?!" cried one of the nurses.

The Shroomedian pointed his grenade launcher at her.

"It came true. You're lookin' at it." 

A collaborative work inspired by, and sarcastically satirizing, the violent statements of certain Hyper-Patriotic Conservative Americans who advocate everything from the use of chemical weapons on union workers on strike to bayoneting student demonstrators and killing journalists. This ongoing story is a shining tribute, and a relentless mockery, of the ideals these psychos stand for.  

MURCA: The Land of the Free takes the statements of these hyperthyroid stormtroopers to their illogical extremes. As someone said, it is "Be careful what you wish for." As applied to American neoconservatism.

Or, as another reader commented: Mang, this is a work of such subtle parody that your veiled references often shoot right over my head. Could you perhaps make this a nat's crotchet less mind-boggling devious and complex please?
 
With MURCA: The Land of the Free, we return to America everything it's given us these last few years. Their nation generously invades other countries and drops bombs on other people - so we return the favor by laughing mercilessly at the stupidity of a nation that's lost its mind.

Show your patriotism! Madness? This is SPARTAFREEDOMERICA!

The Exorcist: A Moviegoer's Guide to Parental Neglect, Demonic Possession, and Gender Roles in Film

 

Daddy wasn't there! 

There was a power outage this morning, bereft of electricity I was forced to abandon the laptop and play with my dog instead, substituting keyboard taps with belly rubs. In the early noon heat I ate spicy Cheetos while skimming the newspaper and making "witty" comments to myself. I saw an ad for the new Anthony Hopkins demonic possession movie, The Ritual, and my mind wandered to the mother of all demonic possession movies: THE EXORCIST.

Have you ever noticed how The Exorcist, and by extension most demonic possession movies afterwards, usually involve a woman or a girl being the victim of said demonic possession, while the protagonist is invariably a priest, who is always a man? It's usually a byproduct of the “damsel in distress” cliché, but I was thinking about the Freudian psychosexual subtext of The Exorcist, and it hit me like a rotten tomato splatting on a movie.

The little girl in The Exorcist was living with her mother. In the duration of the movie, I do not remember seeing her father at all. Maybe he's away on business, maybe he's dead, or maybe he's in the business of being dead. But the point is, the little girl lacked a father figure. Daddy wasn't there.

So, according to the misogynistic view of women being helpless damsels in distress, what happens next? She gets into trouble. Except this time, instead of the girl finding a bad boyfriend who does drugs or knocks her up, she ends up in the clutches of none other than Satan!

Naturally the mother is helpless against this and must call for the help of men who can be surrogate father figures who will save her innocent daughter. The young priest and the old priest. This is even more significant because, taking Christian symbolism into account, these priests are representatives of God, the greatest father figure of Christianity. The Big Daddy.

The surrogate father figures are now there to try and save the girl from the trouble she's gotten herself into. Like a dad who disapproves of a particularly bad boyfriend, or Liam Neeson killing kidnappers to save his daughter in Taken. This ties in to the fact that earlier in the movie, the girl did not have a father. Her longing for a father figure is what led her astray, into the clutches of drugs, of unwanted pregnancy, of the devil himself!

Anyone remotely familiar with Sigmund Freud will know what an Oedipus Complex is, where the son longs for the mother sees the father as a rival for the mother's affections. Mommy issues. The Electra Complex is the female version of that, where the daughter wants the affection of the father, basically the other way around. Daddy issues.

Now consider the scene where the demon-possessed girl in The Exorcist takes a crucifix and plunges it in between her legs while screaming “FUCK!” repeatedly. Sigmund Freud would have an apoplectic fit with that one. It is a minefield of unresolved psychosexual issues – all originating from the fact that the girl lacked a father figure, and is in dire need of one.

The priests, have to save the girl – but in doing so, they cannot allow themselves to succumb, and they cannot let the innocent child be corrupted. They are the surrogate fathers who have to set their wayward daughter right and, taking the significant Christian symbolism into account, they also represent God who must bring salvation to a corrupted soul. It is up to them to resolve the Daddy Issues of the girl, while maintaining her purity.

So what do they do? They give their lives, and in noble self-sacrifice the young priest saves the girl by taking the demon and jumping off a window in an act of heroic and selfless self-defenestration. The father saves his daughter at the cost of his own life, but in the end the daughter is saved and her purity is preserved. Her issues are resolved because daddy came for her and rescued her from her troubles. Daddy was finally there!

In short, the Exorcist is a metaphor, an allegory, for parental neglect - specifically the lack of a strong father figure - and the dangers faced by wayward daughters and troubled teens. Except the dangers of drugs, rock and roll, or unwanted pregnancy, have been substituted demonic possession.

In a way, it is exactly like Liam Neeson's Taken, with his daughter being kidnapped by sex-traffickers. Except, in this case, Liam Neeson is a priest and the kidnappers are demons.

The movie's themes can be criticized as misogynistic, sexist. Why is it always the damsel who is in distress? Most of the time, women are portrayed as helpless and in need of rescuing, and Exorcist is no different. The mother is helpless to defend her own child, and only men can do it properly.

One also wonders, was the director even consciously aiming for Freudian psychosexual subtexts, deliberately depicting distressed-damsels, Daddy issues and other dilemmas? Or was it entirely a subconscious thing, since hero-men saving helpless-women has already become a cliche, a literary convention, a meme ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist of movies and other works of fiction? Maybe even both?

On reflection, upon reaching the end of this short article, analyzing The Exorcist for not only psychosexual Freudian subtexts but also its religious symbolisms has proven to be an interesting exercise. I'm reminded of another movie, from a similar time, involving parenting issues and problem children. Namely, The Omen.


I wonder if I could do a similar analysis of The Omen, with Damien and his parent issues. Except that little brat killed both his parents, and pretty much everyone else in that movie.

Don't be afraid Americans

I really don't get why people are so upset when countries like China start behaving like America/the First World. Get iPods made by underpaid Third World employees who need to have nets outside their windows so they won't jump off their workshops and suicide. Outsource call centers to underpaid foreigners working at obscenely late hours of the night helping answer the dumb questions of dumb Americans. Enslave illegal immigrants who cross the border and make them do carpentry and have them harvest craps. Everyone wants to be America, man. This is why China is doing what its doing. Because it wants to be America. (Because this is what America does to the rest of the world) China wants to be First World.

This is the greatness of America. Contrary to popular opinion, the world doesn't hate America, the world is not repulsed by America. No. The world wants to become America! That is why it is both so beautiful and so horrible.

There can only be NONE!

They saw what America did, and what America did was magnificent. This is why I believe America will never fall, by the way. It cannot fall. It's impossible. Never. Ever. America is America. Defeat is absurd.

The reason why people (Americans) loathe what's happening around the world is because what they're seeing isn't China, it isn't Russia, it isn't the Third World, it isn't anyone. It's America. The reason why these countries do it is because they want to be America. That is why America is God's most beautiful creation. It lies. It says freedom this, democracy that, but as it does so, while its people enjoy all their iPods and consumer electronic shit and branded products, all the hardship and torture and depravities have been basically outsourced to the Third World. It's hypocrisy. But the greatness of America lies not in its hypocrisy, for all nations are by definition hypocrites. What makes America so great is that other nations want to partake in America's hypocrisy out of their own free wills, they want to join America, they want to lie with it. There is no coercion, there is no threat. Because deep down inside all of them is an American waiting to come. America came, and they want to join America in coming.

No other country has ever done something this great. But America did it. No other country has done it and no other country will ever do it again. What America has achieved is something never before seen in history. So what if America falls? So what if China replaces it? In doing so, China will merely become a new America, an America Two. Rejoice in this. For in this, America will never die. This is the truth of America.

God bless America.

China becomes more like the U.S. of A every day.


African Miners Shot By Chinese Managers

A backlash against China's powerful presence in the Zambian economy has been triggered by an incident in which 11 miners were shot by Chinese managers.

 China Embargoes Rare Earth Minerals

China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said this week.

America should be proud of its firstborn son. 

When China no longer oppresses its own people, and instead outsources suffering and death to worthless countries whose people are not as important as Chinamericans, then we can say that it has achieved the lofty standards of Western/First World civilized society. I think China should try its best to do this, so it will no longer have the moral failings people criticize it for. Then it can be a truly free, just and fair society.

It will become America.

Uncivil Disobedience

The environmental desolation sparked a wave of protest across the land. Not merely at the loss of livelihood from the marine catastrophe, but from long-simmering discontentments that had been bottled up for the past six terms of the regime. The dissatisfaction over divisive social issues, the disparities between rich and poor, the continuing persecution of the war against the communistas and the Moros, the curbing of media rights and the disappearances of political opposition, all was coming to head. For decades, the regime had kept a firm lid over these problems, but eventually some of it had to leak out.

People began taking to the streets in protestation. In civil disobedience to the regime and all it stood for.

 

But the regime was careful to quash any hint of dissidence. The Pulisiya had arrived in full force, and in ominous foreboding the military had also sent soldiers to support them, bringing with them armored vehicles and heavily armed troops with Armalites. For now, they stayed back, letting the Pulisiya do their work, cordoning the thousands of protesters with an anemic wall of riot shields, attack dogs and sticks. The thin blue line faced the angry masses of civiians, both sides staring each other down eye-to-eye. Taunting. Provoking. Calling each other out. It was a powder keg ready to exploderize. All it needed was just that one single spark...

Some of the protesters recognized one of the Pulisiya as a thug who had beaten their friend half to death a night ago for having violated the curfew. The Pulis man saw them and chortled, asking them what they wanted when they approached them, if they were looking for that friend of theirs who was now floating in a ditch.

They answered by smashing his skull with a rock, breaking his other bones with sticks and stones. They were done with words. They wanted it to hurt.

The Pulisiya had the excuse they needed. They advanced forward instantly at the sight their member going down, moving like a phalanx of shield and baton, implacable and unstoppable - even to the point of uncaringly stomping on their fallen friend even as he tried to get back up on his broken legs. The Pulisiya slammed their riot shields against the bodies of protesters, sending them to the ground where they would be beaten mercilessly with batons or face-stomped to the pavement.

They came with the ferocity of blue steel. Initially confident troublemakers had themselves taken down a notch when the Pulisiya's well-drilled baton-swings fractured their femurs like twigs, sending them down reeling and clutching their legs, where they felt shards of bone protrude through flesh.

A woman tried to stand defiantly, taking cues from the tank man of Tiananmen Square. She stood alone, raising her hands as if to ward off the riot shields that came to trample on the disenfranchised Philippine citizenry. She was armed with no sticks, no stones, her only possession the knapsack of food and clothes and water she had brought with her on her trip to the city.

For a moment, the Pulisiya paused, not knowing what to do with her. Unarmed, unaggressive, did she deserve the indiscriminate justice they were doling out with such fury?

A brave man joined her stand, but at this interruption prompted the Pulisiya to act. They cracked his head open with batons, and soon he staggered back to the woman and she could see that his eyes were barely opened and rolled back, that blood and brains were leaking from his head and from his ears. The man, now knowing better, reached out to the woman and tried to pull her away from the Pulis.

But before he could stagger away and bring her to safety, the Pulisiya advanced on them and trampled them underfoot, boots stomping on their faces.

The protestations had stopped, the screams had started.

But the people would not go down quietly. Not this time. Not after so much. Not after everything that had happened, after what the regime had done to them. They were sick of the graft and the corruption, sick of the authoritarianism, the lies. They all knew someone who had been taken from them, disappeared to the secret jails, or salvaged and left to die in ditches by the goons. They saw what was happening all around them, everything that had transpired, everything that was going on in their country, and at this they said 'no'.

No.

Those of the protesters clad in blood red bandannas, signifying the color of spilled blood, took out their molotov cocktails - San Miguel beer bottles filled with flammables - lit them up and threw them at the Pulisiya. They burned. The black and blue turned into yellow and orange as they were set aflame. The Pulis tried to put the fires out with water cannons, but the water shortage saw to that and all they could get out of their high-pressure hoses were feeble impotent squirts. Officers screamed as they were slowly cremated on the spot, running all over the place until they finally crumpled over and shriveled like burned leaves.

The few survivors there were ran to the military lines, and there they told the army commander what had transpired.

Communista! Sputtered the Pulis. There were communists there. "Naay mga communista didto!"

"Pila?" How much, the commander asked.

"Sila tanan! Mga communista sila tanan!" All of them, they were all communists.

"Sige," the commander acknowledged. They would deploy the troops. "I-deploy ang mga sundalo!"

The armored vehicles came. The protesters were already waiting for them. Feets clad in slippers and sandals, stomping twenty thousand strong on the gravelly earth. They came in numbers, for so many they were that their footfalls in unison caused the very ground to shake. Now was the winter of their discontent, even if their country never had winters. In the sweltering humidity, they were drenched in their own sweat and reeked of body odours. The protestants came to face the soldiers, themselves armed with nothing but their bare hands while the troops shouldered Armalites and had armored vehicles.

Once more, both sides reckoned each other in the silence before the storm. Sticks and stones and face-smashing rocks, versus assault rifles, Armalites, and tanks. It was not a fair fight. Yet the protesters were not cowed by fear. The soldiers were the ones who seemed to hesitate.

Were they ready to take the lives of those they had sworn to defend?

Then a shot rang out. They echoed through the air like the crack of thunder that came after lightning.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!

"Shit!" screamed the military commander. They had guns! "Naa silay armas!"

"Unsa atong buhaton?!" What do we do, a subordinate asked.

"Pataya sila!" Kill them, the commander shouted.

"Pataya sila tanan!"

Kill them all.

"I-pang massacre sila!"

Massacre them.

  

They raised their rifles and fired. Armalites roared, but the echoes of gunfire could only be heard when the screaming stopped. The sound of a dozen barking guns were simply drowned by the sound of men, women and children dying by scores, they turned and tried to run but in their numerosity the stampede saw just as many of them die from being trampled underfoot, crushed by the sheer mass of humanity until crushed people started bursting like overripe zits. All while the dead piled on top of them, slain by hot lead.

Then it became quiet.

A faint weeping filled the air. A child held his dead mother in one hand, while holding a toy gun in the other.

"Pusil!" Gun, a soldier shouted.

An Armalite barked. The sound of a single shot echoed in the air, and then the rattling of a spent cartridge hitting the ground.

The weeping stopped.

The soldiers left in disgust. The midday sun began baking the strewn piles of bodies, hastening the process of decomposition - just as the entire country decomposed all around them.

Feesh

Sometime, somewhere in the Philippines...

 

Fishermen hauled their boats down the garbage-strewn shores of their seaside lands. They pushed their vessels forward as they themselves waded into the waist-deep waters mixed with refuse and waste, deeper and deeper until the brackish filth was up to their chins. Then they pulled themselves up into their boats and began paddling out into the ocean.

They passed through a mangrove of death, the bloated carcasses of fish floating as the gases of decomposition inside them buoyed them to the surface. The whole place reeked, putrid with the smell of decay, much like the scent of rotten eggs. The filth of human wastes spewed forth by broken sewage systems, the industrial pollution of off-shore corporate mining and drilling drifting to the shore, all were mixed by the tides and provided the perfect growth medium for microorganisms - toxic species of dinoflagelloids - to multiply and expand at a geometric rate. They consumed the oxygen in the waters, suffocating the fishies, while infesterizing them and killing them with toxins, making even their carcasses inedible and unfit for human consumption.

A seagull swooped down to eat one of the floating fishes, and as it swallowed the fishy it too was instantly affected by the poisoning. The seagull spasmed mid air and dropped like a brick, falling into the black lagoon with a plop.

The fishermen shook their heads at this. It wasn't like this, not in the past, in the old days when men respected nature and lived in harmony with the ocean and the trees, the birds and the fishes of the seas. But now...

They were forced to paddle far out further than their traditional fishing grounds. They had begun their journey in the early morning, but only by midday had they reached their destination - the clear blue oceans where the poisonous red tide hadn't affected the waters yet, where all they had to contend with were the heavy metals seeping from off-shore corporate drill-mining.

Their ancestors had told them of a secret oasis of sealife in the middle of the deep blue sea. An underwater mountain protruded from the deep abyss, extending nearly to the surface, and there - so far away from the shoreline - bloomed a hidden reef filled with vibrant life, with colorful sea creatures and magnificent untouched corals.

This was the last hope of the forlorn Filipino fishermen. It would take too long for them to set up their drift nets and wait for hours, not when they had only so much time left until sundown when the curfew would come into effect - when the military helicopter patrols would shoot anyone traveling outside at night, even in the sea. For these fishermen, their livelihood was their only source of income, their only source of food. They had to get enough fish to sell to the markets, they had to get enough fish for their families.

They didn't bring their nets with them. Instead, they had with them glass bottles of Coca-Cola sodas and Pepsis. They filled them with powder, topped them with fuses. They lit them and threw them into the ocean.

The dynamites detonated and the sheer shock instantly killed scores of fishies. They also shattered the precious corals that were the fishies' homes, the one thing that sustained the fragile ecosystem of the secret reef. But the fishermen no longer had any care, for then they jumped into the water, with nothing but pouch-bags and bamboo snorkels, and they began stuffing the dead fishies into their beltbags and the broken corals too - which could be sold to the rich people in Manila as paperweights or as decorations for their aquariums.

By the end of the day, they had collected hundreds of fishies after dynamiting more secret oasis-reefs, thus denuding the life-filled peaks of those undersea mountains. As the sun sank into the horizon, the fishermen returned to dry land, paddling as quickly as their tired bodies could - not wanting to be late for the curfew and catching the government's unwanted attention. They arrived at friendly shores, where they were greeted by their worried families.

Children laughed and smiled and played with the carefree innocence of the young. They ran around the beach, one of them being pushed on a wheelchair that had belonged to an elder family member who had passed away recently when they couldn't afford her treatment and medicines. There was a puffer fish on the sand, gasping for water as its ballooned form slowly died. A laughing child came across it and began kicking it, playing kickball, sipa.

Before the child's parents could shout a warning, the puffer fish's spines stung the child's foot and soon she became ill from the poisonous fish's venom. They could not afford any medicine, so they merely tied the child's leg with rope and tried to suck the poison out of it.

****

Days later, after the fishermen finally had enough and protested to the government - and were subsequently beaten with sticks for their defiance - two children came across a beautiful blonde lady, a foreigner, a tourista. Instead of going on pre-arranged tour bus trips around the country's hand-sanitized tourist sights, she chose to walk around by herself, wishing to see the country's true face.

"Ask the American Woman, she will know," the first child said.

The second child nodded and hopped over to the foreigner lady.

"Ms. American Woman, will my foot grow back?" the child asked her innocently.




 Welcome to the Philippines