The Memory Vacuum

Electric Wizard—We Hate You (2000 / Sludgy Hateful Doom)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re fucking disillusioned.

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PART 1

Here we are again.

Four years ago, I posted the first SERMONS! to Substack with the following:

The world we’re living in is certifiably nuts. The year of our dark lord, 2020, has cranked the volume knob on the madness to 11. Many nights, I find myself curled into a fetal ball, unable to grasp why my whole psyche feels like it’s being dragged underneath the axles of rusted out 1974 Gran Torino.

I was attempting humor then. Today I don’t have that. Today, I have disgust.

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When I wrote that, I had just returned to the US after nearly a decade in Canada. I had watched from afar as a caricature of American Success™ won the top job in the country, after a long campaign of pure lunacy, and then proceeded to jam his tiny fat fingers into every orifice of human decency, groping America like he’d groped countless women before. The country had become his latest assault.

But three years later I had to return to the US and endure his final chaotic year in office. A single year was exhausting and I thought about all the other Americans that had been managing the daily bewilderment of life under Trump for longer. I felt like I was living inside a blender.

Making SERMONS! was an escape for me, and a way to process my roller coaster of emotions through song. It was also a branch, held out from the riverbank for anyone who might feel they were drowning in the undertow.

PART 2

In my teenage years, I lived with a very toxic man. He poisoned my family. He poisoned me. He and Trump were cut from the same cloth. Men you can never really know, can never please and will twist you into believing they’re special. He was charming, flashy and fun. We drove around in nice cars and ate at nice restaurants where the staff would make sure to come say hello. He had two types of men always circling: those just like him, and those that wanted to feel seen by him. He made people want to be close, to touch the aura of his seductive power.

My hatred for men like him—and Trump—burns with nuclear intensity. My stepfather died a miserable death. I don’t take comfort in that, but it doesn’t upset me either. I’m able to have a peculiar pity for Don Jr, because for years I had wanted my Papa Trump’s approval—until that moment his hand shot to my throat and gripped it, his angry red face inches away from mine, mouthing the words:

You little prick

I can’t remember what the argument was about anymore, but from that moment I no longer wanted any of his approval. In fact, I now savored his disapproval. I never want anyone like you ever liking me. I broke that spell and that’s why I pity Don Jr.

But not enough. He is an asshole. And his family are assholes. And everything they touch turns to shit, reverse alchemy overlorded by a wispy haired King Meidas.

PART 3

My favourite documentary of the past five years is Adam Curtis’s Trauma Zone. With limited narration—via subtitles, Curtis utilizes BBC news archival footage to stage the tragedy of how the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was reborn in kleptocracy. I’ve told people to watch its horror as a warning.

In 2024, Americans have given the burglars the keys to the house. They were primed to do so. The institutions they had leaned on in the past failed them. It wasn’t accidental. Everyone behind the curtains had much more to gain by their failure than from the stability insured by their success. Keeping Trump out of jail and in the spotlight keeps the clicks clicking, keeps the corporate tax cuts cutting, keeps the church coffers coffing. Everyone who plays along gets their cut—it’s an industry on both sides of the divide.

Remember Dick Cheney starting a war in Iraq while having stake in Haliburton? I guess we will just shrug as Elon Musk steps into his new cabinet role.

According to an old man I overheard at Starbucks on the last day of early voting, I live in one of the “reddest” counties in Texas. I’m also surrounded by immense material wealth. Every morning, I drive past gauche Texas mansions flying Trump flags. I can’t determine what the owners so upset about. It can’t be the economy. I watch the brown skinned lawn crews manicuring their yards. It can’t be immigration. I suspect a simple truth, that America suffers from the inability to differentiate between fact and fiction, so we parse it into a version of truth. It’s no coincidence that we have a President that has appeared on professional wrestling and reality television—or built his cultural wealth on a multi-decade branding campaign.

Nothing is real, yet everything has real consequences. Wrestling wasn’t real but wrestlers got hurt.

The Democrats certainly failed, as they have for decades. They misread the room, again, through ineptitude, arrogance and a fear of biting the corporate hand that feeds. But mostly, they got fooled by their own amnesia, running the same truncated campaign they ran in 2016.

This is a nation shaped by illusion, and sharpened by myth. Our institutions are the screens we’ve always watched ourselves in, fascinated by our own sense of being special. We’re not a special people. We’re kind of assholes. We’re a nation built on imposing ourselves. We imposed ourselves on this territory, then imposed ourselves on the world. And we’ve imposed ourselves on each other, as well. The funny thing about the myth of Don’t Tread on Me is that the people who tout that kind of bullshit are constantly treading on me. Like my dead stepfather. Like Trump. Like every single asshole showing up to feast on the soured pie of our human decency, while people on the floor battle for crumbs. America doesn’t just eat it’s young, it eats itself while eating its memory.

And so today, November 8th, 2024 as the SERMONS! cycle begins anew, I say to all of those wretched ghouls and two-bit opportunists:

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