by Corey Taylor
What a boring sweet hell that would be: just a sad country full of nothing but white motherfuckers in shitty suits and horrible company. I’d rather chug bleach on national television.
Hope might be hard to come by in a state like this, but I still have it. I still have hope when there are people like Elizabeth Warren, Tom Nichols, Van Jones, Cory Booker, and a host of others who refuse to just let the despot have his way. If we can all find a way to see the truth, no matter how shitty it is, we might avoid the eviction of Eden and not have to move in next door at the Dystopia Hotel. Yeah, the rent’s cheaper, but you pay a heavier price at the end of it: the hidden fees will literally kill you. We need to focus on the things we do have in common, but we also need to accept and find a way to love the things that make us the different and cool members of the USA. We belong because we love it here. We’d fight for it because we love it here. We’d all die protecting it because we love it here. Never mind the rah-rah patriotic horseshit—I’m talking about loving the cities, states, countryside, coasts, people, diversity, sunshine, snow tops, mountains, deserts, highways, byways, rivers, oceans, majesty, and majority here. Not only could this country still be the freest, but it’s also one of the most beautiful. If we could only get it to be cooler, I think we’d really be on to something over here.
Grab someone’s hand today and tell him or her it’s going to be okay. When the turds are flying at the windmill’s blades, hand out some umbrellas or do the noble thing and block some of that shit with your body. Be a hero for a stranger. Be a friend for an enemy. Be bigger and better than those little assholes. There’s a way to “go high when they go low,” where it doesn’t feel like we rolled over and showed our bellies before we pissed in terror. There’s also a way to have humanity and compassion while also lending credence to the idea that “if you dare to fuck with me and mine, I will most assuredly do some fucking damage to you and yours.” It is not a violation of the human spirit to defend people you care about. It is not abandoning your principles when you fight for what you love. Like I said before, we are not nearly as evolved as we’d like to be; stop acting like a fucking hippy science fiction movie, and kick some ass for once. It feels good—really good, actually. It might even make you fuck a little better and harder at the end of the day.
Sadly, until that happens, we are left to pick up the pieces left on the playground while the accused shuffle back to class, looking for one last chance to fuck each other over before the bell rings. Make no mistakes, boys and girls: this reckoning is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Whether we choose to learn something—anything—from this experience is for you to decide. I still feel terrible for letting myself think that things were better than they were, and I think that’s how it got away from us. We stopped trying to be a decent nation, and it bit us right in the dicks and grabbed us all by the pussies. So we allowed the uninformed to make a horrible decision that they won’t truly comprehend for a very, very long time. But I also think the damage is going to head into their own backyard sooner than later, so they’ll be just as fucked as the rest of us when the shit storm comes raining down on the Macy’s Parade. I might need to bring you some better umbrellas, to be fair. But we’ll see what happens.
Until then, remember:
There is war in the eyes of America, and the targets are closer to home than they’ve been in a long, long time. America is going to burn, and what’s sad is that for the most part, it will deserve to burn.
CHAPTER 5
HILLARY, EMAILS, AND THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF KENNEDY
LIBERALS, LOOK, SERIOUSLY, WE HAVE TO TALK.
I mean, we usually have a lot in common: we have empathy for other people (mostly) when it appears they’re being oppressed, we tend to give a helping hand to those in need, we love the challenge of fighting for equal rights and freedoms for those who can’t fight for themselves, and we all love to point out the hypocrisy of those shits on the other side of the aisle when they act like they’re doing everything they can for people. Just like you, I am dedicated to trying to fix those misconceptions the politicians love to keep alive out there along with all the other rhetoric, like “working class” only means white people and “poor” or “poverty level” is code for minorities of any other color. Just like you, I love a good rough-up with a big, bad bully. Just like you, I despise prejudice on every level, including when it comes to the prejudices on the Left, like treating people from the South like common criminals or like they’re all dumb hicks who don’t know a damn thing about anything. I feel you. I’m with you, honestly. Even all you Hollywood liberals who make yourselves targets by putting yourselves out there for every opinion and accepting the fact that “common folk” are going to argue and disagree with almost every newer concept you float out into the void, like a nice, fat softball easy for the joy zone. I know you all mean well. I know you all seem like fairly intelligent cats for whom the big matters of the world and our country for the most part are very, very serious causes that you would give all kinds of time to if you weren’t so busy. I get it—or at least I try to anyway. You truly are trying to keep everyone’s best interests in mind as it pertains to the masses who need a good washin’. But, um, I have a question, one that’s been bothering me for a few months. It shouldn’t take long—then again, I shouldn’t have to ask. That’s life, I guess. So here goes.
If you’re all so fucking smart about shit that makes yours not stink, then how the fuck did you allow the screwing of that much pooch at the Oscars?!
I mean, for fuck’s sake, I watched that shit with a slack-jawed hopelessness that left me stunned like a catfish after the lightning hits the water. It wasn’t even funny; it was Steve Harvey all fucking over again, and I thought that situation was a weird fucking put-on to begin with. But this… Jesus wept. Between the look on Warren Beatty’s face and the painful correction that was eventually delivered by the gentleman whose name I never bothered to learn because of fucking angry reasons, no amount of rubbing my eyes was going to save me from the butt-fuckery happening on that stage. I might’ve let this go if it hadn’t been the capper in a line of frustrating errors committed in the name of most of us progressives just trying to do what’s right. Don’t believe me? How about the commercial that the Hollywood Left shot imploring the head of the Electoral College to take it upon “himself” to do what was right in order to block the election of the Cheeto. They all read from printed-out pages that stated the various legal powers granted to the head of the College, including—and I’m paraphrasing—making the decision to swing those votes toward the more just candidate. Each and every celebrity—be they actor or singer, male or female—implored with true emotion that this “man” do what was right for the country, even using “his” name, as a sign of playing like they actually knew “him.”
There was only one problem with that, and it’s also the reason I’ve been using quotes this whole time: the head of oversight for the Electoral College was, in fact, a woman. You’d think they would have checked on that before they shot a very expensive-looking commercial. There’s haste, and then there’s fucking rushing to judgment. I’m not saying that I didn’t agree with what they were fucking saying, but motherfucker, you’d better make sure you don’t look like a goddamn asshole yourself when you’re trying to paint somebody else as “unfit for the job.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, before you even come at me with that shit about “liberals don’t all live in Hollywood,” it was a joke. That seems to be the prerequisite for being a liberal or a progressive on the Left these days: no fucking sense of humor. I’m not talking about shitty racist jokes or demeaning misogynistic anecdotes; I just mean jokes in fucking general. You can’t find the humor in imperfection if you believe that you yourself are a perfect snowflake in danger of melting in the heat of truth. Then again, it might be the massive ego trips and elitist attitudes that have caused an entire political party and its way of thinking to be ridiculed or immediately treated with disrespectful scrutiny and disd
ain. That sort of reaction was usually reserved for those zealous bozos on the Right back in the days when everything they said was poison and every program they tried to push through Congress seemed to leave no one with clean water or air. Nothing’s really changed, but now everyone seems suspicious of liberal points of view, like suddenly it’s a sin to be successful and informed—when you can be, that is—except when it comes to their Great Orange Dick Tater. I find it amazing that Hollywood is vilified for having values in their tax bracket, and yet Trump on paper appears to be the same way, but they listen to him because he’s parroting shit they think they believe instead of looking at the reality of what the Left has to offer.
I was sitting on a Southwest flight from Des Moines to Las Vegas, stuck between a young man furiously destroying imaginary battleships and an elderly guy who reeked of a 1970s casino, desperately trying to figure out why this conclusion was the case and writing it down as quickly as I could as it came to me in fits and starts (as opposed to shits and farts) when I finally hit on it. In fact, I’d already written it down. I’d figured it out a long time ago and maybe hadn’t wanted to admit it too loudly because deep down in my dark asshole of a soul, I knew that occasionally I was just as guilty as the liberals in this respect. I knew it—I just needed to say it out loud: most people tend to cringe and bristle at the thought of the Left because liberals come off as pretentious, elitist, egotistical, and mean toward “normal people.” It doesn’t matter whether most people could agree or identify with what liberals are saying. No one—and I mean NO FUCKING ONE—wants to feel like they are being judged. No one wants to feel like the sharpest glare is being reserved for his or her viewpoint. In every region of this country there are hundreds of cultures observed by millions of Americans as diverse as the original crowds at Lollapalooza ’92. We’re still a melting pot. We’re still an amalgam of colors, beliefs, and genders. But the fire that keeps it all boiling and bubbling is beginning to burn through the bowl, covering us all in crazy liquid plastic and white-hot rage.
It’s in fact one of the main reasons I wanted to write this book in the first place. I’ll quote my good buddy Stubs again: “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” As I’ll point out soon, I feel like most of the country is just like that. My biggest problem is that I have a hard time seeing myself in the various politicians and celebrities who purport to have the same ideals and beliefs that I do. I crave intelligence on a genetic level, but I detest the feeling of making people feel like they are ignorant. I support choice across the board, and yet I become incensed when the Left becomes just as cunty and inflexible as the Right appears to be. I want real change, but I also want change at a pace that’s consistent with the state of the nation, not change that’s a reflection of the pretense of the hierarchy and its casual elitism against those people who don’t have the easiest access to the latest information. Even when regular people see the info and have the time to process it, they balk and don’t immediately accept it because it may clash with their religious beliefs. Instead of slowing the roll and helping those people out, the cocks on the walk make them feel inferior because they “still cling to ancient gods for answers that science readily provides.” These are faithful people who look to the Good Book for guidance, especially when it comes to family and life, and you just shit all over their ways; yeah, I can’t possibly see why they would treat everything we tend to say with distrust and hate. Welcome to self-righteous reverse prejudice.
Sorry, we’ll get back to that, but first let me give you an example: Sarah Palin is a fucking moron.
Yeah sure, in certain angles of light she looks like she might be a bit savvy and even easy on the eyes, but goodness gracious great balls of fire, she makes Barney Fife look like Sir Isaac Newton. There was a story floating around the intra-webs right around the time President Obama was presenting people with congressional medals of honor, including then Vice President Joe Biden. There were pictures showing the former POTUS with an award of his own. Breitbart, the fake news site that shills for the racist right (and also where Trump goes to masturbate over stories about himself… allegedly…), posted a news item accusing Obama of giving himself one of the congressional medals of honor. Palin, dickhead that she is, saw the story and immediately tweeted the link across Twitter, including her own simple attempts at informed contempt. When the story was debunked and she was later found to be misinformed and mistaken, she took it down but left the snark because why not? After all, she hunts fucking moose and all. Look, I know I’m in dangerous territory anyway by skirting the very line between hypocrite and hoodlum that I was talking about, but Sarah Palin is no one to look to when you want to be informed. She has no credibility, barely any grasp on decency, and, from my perspective, is officially a shit-stained asshole with bits of paper clinging to the tiny hairs she couldn’t reach because she’s not smart enough to know that hair grows there, and if she knows, she keeps forgetting it fucking grows back. You may not agree with me and you may not think it’s funny, but I do and I don’t give a shit.
You can get as assed as you want at me saying that, but seriously? After all the shit I’ve heard “good people” say about Obama over the years, none of which I’ll fucking utter here because it pissed me off so bad that I had to leave the room, you’re lucky I’m taking it easy on that club-footed mouth breather. And with that stroke of bias, I make myself just as fucking bad as all the other elitists floundering right now to prove just how right they are on the Left side of the country. I don’t think it’s the only issue they have, but it’s a huge one. You can’t be a party of the people if you can’t relate to people in the first place. Then again, am I committing the same sin by not acknowledging the groundswell that happened during the election? Yes, Clinton II had an overwhelming majority in the popular vote. It’s only because of tiny slivers of the voting public that Drumpf took the win in the first place. Seriously—look it up. He won the Rust Belt—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio—by tiny percentages. So when these asshats on the Right trot out their maps showing solid red all over the country with the exception of the blue on the coasts as a way to fuck with the “coastal elites,” it gets me savage for a variety of reasons. One, some of those southern states are very rural, so the concentrations of the populace are misrepresented drastically. Don’t believe me? Look at all the people who are still protesting in every town, city, state, and region. Oh, and by calling them “paid protesters,” you’re pissing off your own voters as well, Republicans. Two, touting that map as proof that there’s a mandate going on is complete bullshit as well. Clinton II clearly won the popular vote, no matter what your delusional Cheeto keeps harping on. Then you need to add in all the people who wiped their asses with their ballots by voting for Johnson and Stein. Then you have to consider the people who just straight-up didn’t vote because they weren’t comfortable with any of the choices. That pretty much takes your “mandate” theory and pegs it in the ass with a vacuum attachment. Sorry, but you’re wrong. I wouldn’t be as blasé and “whatever” about the whole thing if it weren’t for one simple thing: Clinton II was always described as so fucking unlikeable.
It boggles the mind. She had the stronger campaign. She had the stronger message. She had the most pop, the most momentum. She won the popular vote by the most votes in history. The only reason she’s not the president right now is because she didn’t get the right votes. Herein lies a clue to why people don’t generally like her: she is the face of that hated liberalism the Right loves to prop up like a Halloween scarecrow for the Reagan kids to laugh at. She represents everything good and bad about liberals: intelligent (pretentious), powerful (elitist), savvy (judgmental), and kind (the benevolent snob). I’m not saying I agree with any of this. I’m telling you what the other side thinks because I have that unique perspective. It’s not the various programs she wanted to champion; I feel like most Americans in any financial situation would appreciate the helping-hand initiatives she wanted to push. It comes down to what she stand
s for in their eyes. It has to—lower-class and working-class families have always been able to get by with some help provided by the government. So voting against their own interests has to come down to a real lack of likeability. I don’t think Clinton II is better or worse than any of the other politicians; I just think she’s a politician. She definitely had the goods to do this gig, and anyone who disagrees is probably too busy eating paste from a preschooler’s desktop. You think Trump is more qualified than Hillary? That fucking mook can’t even keep his Twitter in his pants at night. Fuck him.
The Hillary thing has to be because people just didn’t like her. Anyone screaming “emails” or “Benghazi” or any other shitty campaign herring can shut the absolute fuck up right now. Clinton II didn’t do anything with emails that both Colin Powell and former president George W. Bush didn’t already do before she came into the administration. Benghazi just happened to occur on her watch, just like Yemen and Syria just happened to occur on Trump’s watch. No, she may not have handled the testimony very well, but that’s not fucking illegal. This whole idea that she could be put up on charges for some shit like emails is preposterous, especially when you take into consideration that Trump had a classified briefing in front of hotel guests at his shithole in Florida, not to mention the military personnel who carry the nuclear football taking pictures with guests for Instagram. And before you start bringing up dumbass conspiracy shit from Info Wars and that cunt Alex Jones, do me a favor: burn my book. You’re not going to like me if you ever meet me. There was absolutely nothing that took away from Hillary’s qualifications for the presidency of the United States. From my side of the fence the reasons people don’t like her are thus: she’s cold and calculating, she’s a woman, and she served on the Obama administration. In the eyes of conservatives and the Righteous Right, that’s all you really needed to fight like heathens to make sure she didn’t win.
