The End of Empires
© 2006




Here’s what’s going to happen, what happened to make me realize it’s going to happen, and how the whole god-damned thing came about one sweltering night in the summer of 95, in about 2 minutes and sixty four seconds.
It started in my friend’s back yard with a stunningly psychotic tetra hydra canibinol lysergic acid dylithamied colt 45 cocktail. Somewhere in between the day after tomorrow and the infinity before it I lost track of time, self, consciousness, and my Zippo lighter. I swam through a hallucinatory sea of random neural pulses and strange transmissions from outside sources, pondering the question of what was truly more important: Great taste, less filling, or a landscape free of logo feces smeared on every adhesive retaining service as blasphemous as that notion may be. And then I heard pink Floyd playing from the inner recesses of my ear, and the aphiny came like a projectile vomit from heaven.
Ok, pique this. The oil, the loob in the earth friction machine, is running out. By 2017 we’ll be living on accumulation. Without the infrastructure of alternative power in place, western civilization will slip into another dark age. The beast of the industrial revolution will stop dead in its tracks. And the funny thing about that is…''..
The economy will collapse, the money will be worth nothing, and then we’ll be getting familiar with some real down home domestic terror. Poverty, depression, political and social instabilities, orgies, vomitariums, serial killer, murderous clown, heavily armed mutants and beat dog flinchy rouge military brigades roaming around in tanks, just looking for a hippy killing good time.
Then it’ll get even better. As soon as the economy collapses the wealth will be expelled from this country like high velocity greenback money shot all across Americas back: promptly land in the open mouths of offshore tax shelters used to hide profits of guns, drugs, and the oil that has so recently disappeared.
Ok, wait it gets better. Then the first thing to fly of the shelves for the big national garage sale will be our strategic surplus of 200,000 nuclear weapons to any crazy fascist theocratic rouge nation that we are responsible for creating. Then America will be reduced to a banana republic in a few short generations. All these high paying education required jobs that we trumpet from the mountain top will be quickly outsourced to countries like India and Bangladesh, and then white people are gonna have to learn how to make Nikes and assemble consumer electronics pretty fuckin quick.
We got to set up cash flow, if you know what I mean.
The markup that the mob is gonna be charging for medicine will be outrageous. And then you gotta consider the protection money we’ll all be paying to the street gangs that are gonna take over. Shit, they’ll be the only ones standing between us and a horde angry drunken heavily armed good ol boys looking for some man pussy to dominate. Then there’s the added bonus of ronin military and law enforcement popping caps in the first living thing they see running. Wild eyed, craven desperate trained killers driven mad by the collapse of the system they have sworn to protect. It’ll be fucking Bedlam…''…''.
and Amen to that.
Because there is nothing more craven and desperate than the ruling class when the tiers come toppling down and their illusions of separation from the jungle dissolve away. This brutal echo of an empires death-throes will thunder on to the end of our pathetic species, a blink in the eyes of the sun, a forgotten shat from the cosmic rectum.
But don’t worry, because some day our spawn endure it again, and there larvae shall carry the tradition too. An un-ending cycle of agony, death, suffering, pestilence, famine, war, slavery oppression, crappy sitcoms, figure skating, shitty music, and vile pre-fabricated culture.

This revelation shook me in its utter obviousness on that sweltering night in 95 when I was frying balls, rode hard and put away wet. In the years following this realization I saw into the past and the possible future through the use of magical artifacts called books. Comparison made greater understanding possible, yeah imagine that.
Check this.
Thousands of years ago in the Aegean Sea the Athenian city states fought amongst themselves for power, status, wealth you name it. Then in the east a new rival reared its head, the Persian Empire. SO the city states formed common alliances against a shared enemy, combining their treasuries and resources to combat this new threat. They formed a union of what could be called early states, get it? In order to keep their wealth safe from any pillaging that may occur they put their shit on a small island called Delos. So what we see here is an offshore bank housing heavily guarded wealth used primarily to wage war on the Persians. Ten thousand years later and not a god-damn thing has changed.
We will go the way of the Mesopotamians, the Macedonians, the Greeks, the Byzantines, and the Romans; The way of the Carthaginians, the Egyptians, the Carolingians, and the Branch Davidians. The crusade marches onward into the oblivion of memory and the hate campaigns spill forth from the yoke of imperial nationalism. Soon it evolves to the point where we have millennia’s worth of hatred and loathing for people we are in every physical way detached from.
We hate people that we’ve never met, people whose languages we can’t speak. People whose world we know nothing about, save that the state tells us their dangerous and must be killed Pre-emptively. Then the genocide fun-wheel begins again; the circus of the American downfall grinds into motion.
War, the new reality TV, on 24 hours a day for the rest of our lives as Rumsfield so gleefully proclaimed. Vote for your favorite soldier online, and watch a video clip of the kill of the week. The soldiers who get the most votes win a lifetime of free dialysis for their DU poisoned kidneys. We’ll have stats and body counts for fighter pilots right next to the baseball scores in the Sunday New York Times. The new celebrity will emerge, mercenary gunfighters jerking lead in chromo-vision for an over-indulged desensitized public to deify, the new gladiators of the arena.
Violence will be worshiped, aggression coveted and might will make right, just like how it’s always been, just like now.
The show is just starting so get some popcorn and settle in. You wouldn’t want to miss the Abu Ghraib trained circus seal show. Watch with wonder as daring GI’s tame unlawful combatants with genital electrocution. Watch with horror as hearts and minds are crushed under naked pyramids, Lyndie England style. Or how about the weapons of mass disappearance scavenger hunt, where you look for unintelligible fragments of false intelligence amidst the remains of institutional credibility. If you’re fortunate enough to find conclusive evidence of WMD’s, you win the gross domestic product of China. And if that’s not challenging enough for you see if you can hold back your vomit when the Fox news, Aol/Timewarner, General Motors media conglomerate rollercoaster plunges you two hundred feet strait down into a seething morass of bullshit.
And at the end of the night bring the family to see the twin towers memorial fireworks show, where the death of thousands of civilians is used to whip the public into a lynch mobbin flag waving patriotic fervor. The blue angles will do a flyover; we’ll all exchange high fives. Then Lee Greenwood will come out in a star-spangled sequined jumpsuit and do a rousing anthem of proud to be an American while we happily renounce our civil liberties and reaffirm our hatred of dark skinned swarthy people. For the big closing a paramilitary police army we descend upon the stadium and “show restrain” by dispersing the crowds with tear gas, rubber bullets, and emotionally stunted rage fueled beatings.
But if you can’t make the show, don’t worry they’ll be another one in a few hundred years. Rome will be set ablaze, the Reichstag burned, the gulf of Tonkin provoked, and the Rubicon river crossed many more times in the march toward Har-Megiddo.
So kick back, spark up a joint, and kiss the lily white ass of consumer culture goodbye. The dark ages are coming again and most of us aren’t gonna survive. Discord will reign supreme and the iceberg of history will roll ever onward, indifferent to our lack of understanding.
But hey, it could be worse, at least you not peeing blood.