Groundhog GTA

I find myself, like many, repeating a lot of conversations these days on Substack, like Phil Connors and Ned Ryerson. Emotionally I’m at the point where Phil stops shaving and starts committing suicide. My time on the planet diminishes with every passing heartbeat. So permit me the means to give the next person who makes assumptions about my ethos or what I stand for something to read. Or not read. One thing’s sure - my fingers will get a rest.

I hate fascism. It’s an abhorrent, morally bankrupt ideology. I’ll tell you what else I hate. War, genocide, ecocide, slavery, corporate malfeasance, racism, mysogyny, censorship, capitalism, marxism (at least, as a solution. As a critique it has merit), religion, tribalism, patriotism, exploitation, pollution, shallow philosophy, political parties - any kind of dogma or dogmatic thinking. I also hate all the systems and sub systems that feed off and nourish all of those in some weird vampire symbiosis.

I love you, your people, myself, my people, the heat, the cold, the wet, the dry, the mosquito to Marlon the dog. I love books, music, stories, poetry, films, photos, paintings, sculptures, jokes, comedians, the sun, the moon, the stars and all of the beauty and wonder contained therein. I love the reality of being on a spinning planet, corkscrewing through spacetime, feeling the heat from a nuclear reaction billions and billions of years old. Staring back in time through an uncluttered and unpolluted night sky. I love my beautiful girlfriend’s hair flowing free in the breeze against the backdrop of a pale Andalusian blue, framed by a blaze of autumal colour.

I dream of a mass awakening, where we realise the shit in our head is just the shit in our head. It may be of value, it may not be. It is unquestionably not from the same source as us, the planet or its multitudes of inhabitants, including the rocks and plants and microbes and everything else. It is nothing more than our responses to the reality we experience each and every waking moment. We store these reactions and confuse them with reality. Individually, collectively and generationally. So much so we manifest them in laws, systems, institutions, buildings and structures. Master set builders we are. Passing it all off as some ingrained part of reality, filmed in high resolution and augmented with glorious special effects. Which we in turn respond to, and the circle continues, getting ever denser, supplanting the wonder and ever changing miracle that sings at us every single day with rigid thinking we’ve long since ceased to question.

I blame no-one for that. We’re all Little Alberts, chubby bundles of love brought into the resulting nightmarish game of GTA and strapped in for a never ending gaming session that no rational mind would choose if left to its own devices. Instead, we play. Our parents and elders play, why wouldn’t we?

The reality is we are all wrong. Misinformed. Lost in this GTA so barbaric and never ending that we do everything we can to avoid staring at it. So we argue about who gets to play, which rules are right and which aren’t. What you can say and what you can’t say. Pay our fines and taxes. Thinking that a better position in the game will make it all ok. All of which ultimately serves one result only - to prop up the game and all its resultant inequality and horror.

And therein lies my core argument against censorship. The whole enterprise exists within the game, based upon the premise of there being an authority that decides who is right and who is wrong. A powerful position able to determine the conversation for its own benefit. It is right, everyone else is wrong. What starts out as well meaning “I fucking hate Illinois nazis” very quickly becomes, in the hands of power, the means to label and silence anything inconvenient to itself. Dissent, no matter how morally sound or needed, is wrong by definition and can be chucked into room 101. Ask Assange how that feels.

If you want precedent for emergency, supposedly essential bad guy laws or procedures being deployed in ways that no-one cheering for them paused to consider at the time, look at the abuse of the emergency powers signed into law post 9/11. Or the suppression and demonisation of questioning voices during the M-M-M-My Corona - from precedents set during the Orange Goblin’s tenure. Or how sports stars, actors and other celebrities are currently being fired and hounded for expressing messages of solidarity with the people in Gaza being slaughtered by the thousands. Oh, I hear some scream, that’s not censorship. Yeah, there you go again, arguing within the game about how the game is played. The net result is the same, so quaint semantic foxtrotting aside, it is the suppression of an idea and voice critical of the prevailing power structure and its current story. Censorship. It matters not if it is administered via a private company. Ask any Chinese citizen if there is any fucking difference - much of the censorship there is implemented by private companies. War used to be swords and fucking spears. We didn’t make the case it wasn’t war simply because the means of slaughter were updated, did we?

So as horrible as the ideas of some fascist, racist wankers with a couple hundred followers on Substack clearly are, they are not the globe spanning system that over the last couple of centuries has slaughtered and displaced 100s of millions of people, destroyed huge swathes of habitat, while poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the oh so precious reproductive material we pass on. A system cheering itself on in the process and issuing clever sounding rationale and rule changes to obscure the reality of it all. So why anyone puts their energy into cleaning up a corner of level three in the game rather than figuring out how to beat the end of game boss seems well intentioned but misguided to me, to say the least.

The game itself is what I fight in whatever limited way I can. It is what we must change if we are to create a fairer, more balanced, fluid and nurturing society. One that doesn’t pump out processed factory people of every flavour, including fascist and elitist, like the sausage factory in the wonderful Koyaanasqatsi.

To achieve that change, we too must change. Put down the dogma controllers, climb out of that haptic gaming chair and go outside. Stand tall and acknowledge we are all addicts of the game. And accompany that acknowledgement with a hand outstretched in solidarity and eyes full of love and forgiveness and acceptance for each other. And support each other as we log out and take our first steps back towards reality.

So if all of the above makes me a nazi loving, goose stepping, hugo boss wearing right wing nut bag, then I guess it’s time I buy a new dictionary.