What is the cause of our sickness? Truth is reviled and the artifice runs so deep. There are no teachers. How can I begin?

Wait...I must stick to the facts. All doubt vanishes when it is tested against reality.

America is on its death-bed, the spirits of our forefathers cry in their tombs. Our revolutionary independence, based on a gross physical willingness to endure the hardship of life on the frontier, is being sucked dry by blood-hungry profiteers, parasites on our living dream. They have wooed us with terrible deliciousness, poisoned our senses, projected our images into space. The American Dream is sick and worried; an intoxicated, docile host. Our grain is rotting in our silos, we are not vigilant, the worm has grown.

America has become a valley of shadows, our wilderness cordoned off into dead subdivisions, the featureless kingdoms of unknown landlords, and unrelenting fear and loss is the price of survival. The fruit of the earth is hoarded, forbidden, wasted. Common life is relentless striving over areas of expertise, conceptual ownerships, systems of rent and taxation. Acquisition precedes gain in the ordering of mankind, miracles die on the vine. Yet we churn on as if pursued, slaves to our grotesque hunger, unable to enjoy the quickness of life in our veins or the thick flow of history that will carry us away. We are lost.

We are being lied to! Their map will only lead us deeper into the mire! With parasite-voice they say freedom needs cash, that our freedom should bow to their money. As if independence could depend on anything! As if their money had sired the cosmos! It is their cash-law parasitism that depends on freedom -- our freedom. Do not give it up! They are trying to sell us our own dream.

Shut out their individual independence based on market value. It is an axiom designed to produce the ugliest life imaginable, the least defensible being, magnitude without substance, a living death of exchange through bank windows. Perfect host. Maximum profit. America has taken up this grim logic, confusion reigns, life is indistinguishable from death, fear from desire, the lethal from the vital. We are ignorant of the miracle of growth, our gaze no longer wanders to the horizon. We believe ourselves masters because we lord over a sterile orb, and rich for trading truth for cash.

And we eat. Sorry and loathsome, we cannot raise our heads from eating. America will consume anything, blind and ignorant -- it is our only function left in the world. Food, poison, shit, flesh, money, plastic idols, disposable furniture, useless technologies, insane artifices, engineered famine. The blood and suffering of the entire earth. Engorged breasts spurt tainted milk, mouths snap, tongues flail, throats retch, assholes suck. We fuck unfecund.

How can we find our way off this horrid empty globe, and onto the broad earth, into the open sky? What can justify an improbable and suffering life to this harsh world, free and rebind time and space around a single form? Without a living inheritor, history cannot be loosed from the past, and the future is void. But how can we be prepared to pay the price of freedom, to make humanity a machine for the transformation of spirit into pure radiance, when failure equals doom? What skin is adequate to the task -- so porous sometimes, and sometimes burnished bronze?

I say that it is pride, sheer pride, that can protect the sensate body at the limit of human endeavor, pride that illuminates the territory the body needs to flourish, pride that keeps experience unified and uninterrupted. With pride, we can know feeling as the unmediated truth of our existences, gather our pasts on a single loop of thread, and push forward in the darkness and peril of cold space. We can each take up a personal history from the collective lot, travel at full sails and chart unknown waters. Eliminate the isolated world of selfhood, we are free from grim designs. Not one experience need be excluded. Not one person need be excluded. Pride in the straight, pride in the bent. There is no shame that cannot be outlived, no guilt that cannot be expunged, no wrong that cannot be righted.

I cherished my existence that could not be taken from me unripe, arrested and reduced to cash, but I could not defend it. I saw the loneliness and hurt in my classmates, but I could not comfort them. Because I could not bear to touch them with my exposed self, vulnerable in its infinitesimal meaning, I had to progressively retreat and define myself out of existence. So they advanced, hungry, malicious, and I could not beat them back. They hunted me down and took my pelt, left my flesh to rot in the sun. What good is some fucking dead hide? Why would my classmates steal from me what they could not use?

I have struggled to remember the faces of those who condemned me, seen them staring at me silently, inscrutable, punishing. It’s all I was left with, and I’ve studied every minutiae for some clue to their motivations, and gradually, the faces have changed, the extraneous details have worn away, and I have seen something else. Not faces, but an operation...their programming has been revealed.

The Babylon program -- total vanity -- count-down to death.

What did they get in the end? Nothing but to hunt. A momentary respite from fear granted by exercising lethal capabilities, a moment of clarity within living-dead confusion, a measure of life by death’s yardstick... ‘Some dead hide?’ What else is there but dead skin when appropriation is the only sustenance... And always, the trading. Trade up, trade down, continue to procure the unholy sap of the process, their living-dead sex-thrill: controlled predation, the jerk of puppet strings.

But the class was filled with proficient skin-traders, why would they risk everything to eliminate me? Because the death trade demands certainty, already-completion. They would rather fashion me into a killer than to leave me as an unknown. In towns where vanity reigns -- Littleton, N.Y., L.A., Washington -- death-thrill is the last reliable value and the only form of communication. Our leaders will defend their monopoly on violence with single-minded devotion, numbed to everything else by their limitless greed. Every American must obey their blind tyranny; everyone feels their stinging touch. The Living-dead commandment: "Everyone Gets Skinned."

America is dead, yet it lives -- profiteers, boards of corporations and heads of government, have raised an army to counteract the forward motion of history and arrest our country at the moment of death. But their blockade cannot hold forever. Are we rough enough to survive the break? The American Dream or the vanity of Babylon...how long until revelation?

But to make time when there is no time...the army of the undead marches.

They speak:

<murmuring> "Future? What future? History repeats itself. The universe is infinite, don’t waste your time. You’re late for work as it is."

<vampire>: "Let’s be professional about this. You’ll be better off if you co-operate, sell yourself a little. Be sensible. I’ll only bleed you from 9 to 5. It won’t hurt...much..."

<mummy> "Peace, still. Listen to the silence. You are safe in my surety. This is how I love you -- from inside yourself. I am everywhere, and no-one escapes the grave."

<skeleton> "I want your body. I need your flesh. Give me your meat."

<chanting> "Flesh, Flesh, Shame. No truth. No science. No evidence."

Do not listen! They are an unAmerican unpeople, administers of annihilation, crude amalgam alive-dead, perpetually poisoned, writhing and scourging the world in their ugly wrath. They have with their bodies, their one body, fused America onto the world as they have fused Death onto the American Dream.

If they cannot rest, they must feed. I have stared into the face of vanity. We must shut it out and lock the door. It will devour our senses, strip away our instincts, mar our spirits. I thought a proud future could be produced in accommodation to the conventions of the dead. But pride and vanity cannot combine, they live in unavoidable confrontation. Only pride can communicate with pride. I could not join my classmates, I could not oppose them, I hovered at zero magnitude, as vain as I was proud. I sensed life close at hand, bright and buzzing, but I found myself bound to shadows. I wanted nothing more than to see something living emerge from my classmates, but all I called out was their fear. I was nothing they could identify, and they responded by cutting me off completely.

So, in the end, I was starved out, I broke down, my instinct took over, and my pride wavered into the positive.

Forced back into myself, I had to take a stand. It is through my body alone that I touch the world, and for the first time that body must belong to me. I will not live in the ways of death, and I will not be bled willingly. My pride must contain an attitude of war, a violent cleansing of the gray doom that threatens me, a shrugging off of the commandments of a dead god so that a living god can spring into existence. I will not douse my anger, my light will shine fiery as well as luminous. I take my steps with this in mind. I will build what I need. I will wage war.

A new future will cost us everything we have and give us everything anew. Betrayal, bad faith, and morbid blindness -- that is what they’ll give us. They would choke the vastness of space so that it can neither fill nor empty, steal our lives and give us a slot in their monarchy of fear and despair. They have offered us an anti-future, why not put a match to history?

Ignite the Spirit -- we may yet rise! Change is alive!

Pride has enlarged my heart, I have been changed, even my persecutors have done their part. But I cannot abide by their vanity any more. We have been too generous to these filthy thieves liars and traitors, too long given them the benefit of anonymity when we should curse their names to the cosmos. They are doomed, and they will take us all down. They deserve to be beaten and broken and driven into the sea. Making allowances to them is not strength, it is vanity! Isolate and arrest all undead parasite hosts! Act immediately. America is past year zero... The fallout has begun.

I’ll take pride, the future will be mine. I’ll be weird and livid under the American sky -- and fuck you if you can’t take a joke.