BATTLE READY

TRUTH IS FRICTION / OTEP SHAMAYA

In a world where the likes of Rand Paul and Sarah Palin excel, where working people are the eager pawns for the filthy rich, where rats feed freely and the poor obey like insects, truth is certainly friction. In this case, the two opposing forces causing the friction are historical amnesia and pure pious stupidity.

This is not new. It has always been a vital part of our national identity: freedom for some, slavery for others, liberty for all - except women, indigenous tribes, slaves, gays, & the Irish. As a people, we tend to detest truth. Indeed, collectively, we are unwilling to see the forest for the matchsticks. What we desire is a given reality.

We are very much like a family who refuses to acknowledge that our shifty cousin Glenn has a gambling problem. So we sit, silently at the dinner table, avoiding the massive gorilla in the room contrived completely from the $14,000 in stolen retirement checks he nicked from Nanna. Do we address it? No, we just quietly pass the casserole and listen as the collective enamel scrapes over the cutlery.

But let's say this year, as you sit together round yon dinner table, something different happens. This year your bullshit quota overfloweth. So as cousin Glenn slugs back his fifth Pabst Blue Ribbon tall-boy, belching, and laughing loudly at his own poorly timed gynecological jokes with a mouthful of mashed potatoes and turkey tendons, you grimace, you can feel your entire body boiling towards a breaking point. 

Then you see ole Glenn lean over to ask Nanna if she has 40 bucks for another "sixer and a pack of smokes". 

Well, this is the moment.

Right here. Right now.

You push back from the crowded table, toss your fork to the plate and roar high and mighty, "Goddamn it, Glenn. You contemptible cunt! Stealing money from Nanna so you can play roulette at the Pink Palomino? She's on a fixed income you filthy bastard! Besides, roulette?? It's not even a game of strategy, you dick! If losing is your thing then I guess you're a professional, ay? Well, fuck off. Do you actually think we are all just gonna sit here and let you get away with this? Do you?? Well, I'm giving you one chance, you greedy pile of shit, to make this right. If you do not leave this table right now and find a way to repay her every single fucking cent, I am going to carve out both your eyes with this olive spoon and sell them to a couple of Serbian fellas I know who pay big bucks for usable organs and then do you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna march back into this house, step over your bloated body, and give that bloody money to Nanna. Are we clear, you syphilitic testicle? Or do I need to start prying out those baby blues?"

And just for good measure, you toss your mug of scalding tea into Glenn's great staring eyes and he runs out of the room screaming in agony. There's a moment of heavy silence and then chaos ensues.

It seems everyone was actually just going to sit there and let Glenn get away with it. Now the family erupts like a bunch of nervous baboons flinging their own excreta at a deadly cobra.

Insults hurl through the air. Poor Nanna is scrunching her sweater over her heart and Gramps is jumbling through his unbonded dentures for YOU to "GET THE FUCK OUT". Meanwhile, the other relatives are head-lighting you with harsh yellow judgmental scowls, whispering things like "unbelievable", "what a fiend" and "monstrous". Twenty minutes later, Nanna is on a stretcher with chest pains and you are being arrested for domestic violence against your degenerate cousin.

Is that fair? No. But this is how the responsible sect behave in a polite, civilized society. We must have selective blindness in order to survive. Anything else must be subjugated for the common good.

For example, if I was to state that American entertainment icon Michael "Jesus" Jackson died from an overdose of a powerful anesthetic injected into his candle colored arms every night so that he remained paralytic and unable to sleep-rape the children, I would be berated by the eager-doomed as a reprehensible miscreant only out to start trouble. 

No, no! It's far easier for them to believe Mr. Jackson had a severe case of restless leg syndrome so he had to be placed in a coma every night with enough drugs to vegetate a rhinoceros.

Another example would be if I said Sarah Palin believes the word America comes from the Bible or that she secretly hopes to start her own religious organization that is a sort of reverse Mormonism where the wife leads the household and has multiple husbands, or that she encourages her daughters to have anal sex instead of using condoms because she believes that it preserves the sanctity and Christian virtue of virginity.

Egads! If I wrote that, I would be flogged and labeled a traitor and a reprobate and tossed into the dank undercroft of Guantanamo and kept chained there as an enemy of the state.

Or if I told you that the majority of the rodents who want to keep America sterile of equality are closeted sodomites who fear that this kind of constitutional buoyancy would unmask them as traitors to their own kind. That those ministers, politicians and admirals who scream "NO" the loudest, have zero gag reflex and use chemical rectal constrictors to remedy all the years they've used a "wide stance" in secret restroom liaisons.

Well, if I wrote that, I would be bound in a burlap sack with a wild animal and tossed into the Mississippi river for revealing such truths.

It would be the same if I dared to inform you that hemp is only illegal because the versatility of the plant threatened William Randolph Hearst's newspaper/timber interests, or that every time you buy a gallon of gas you are funding terrorism, or that a bi-racial President can still be homophobic, or that you have more power than you know because THEY want YOU to be tame and apathetic, I would be hung from the tallest tree and set on fire.

No, my friends, we do not want truth. We want scripted reality. I have learned a lot since the spoiled Bush baby trampled our nation for 8 years and left it bloated from excess like a Congolese sewer rat in the rainy season.

I have learned to love my country but trust absolutely no one in authority. I have learned that this is a world where the rats poison themselves.

 Blurt blogger Otep Shamaya is frontwoman for heavier-then-heaven outfit OTEP. She's also a contributor to our print magazine and penned the essay "Whippet, Good" for our last issue. Watch for #10 and more of her writings in mid-March, on bookstore and assorted indie retailer newsstands.