Stalinist Americana

At the communism versus libertarianism intellectual deathmatch

I feel like I’m always saying this, but I’ve been pretty busy in the last month between day-job obligations that intensified dramatically once the summer ended, and a bunch of other mundane life things. Most “Substack-worthy” experiences I’ve had are more like scattered impressions than full narratives. Mildly amusing things, like meeting this black biker dude who wears vampire fangs and walks with a cane because he fell off his motorcycle swerving to avoid hitting a cat, he’s gregarious and generous with his cocaine, he’s insistent on white women calling him the n-word while he’s fucking them, he’s telling me and the other white dudes that we need to be fucking more black women and calling them the n-word while we do it because it’s a sign of love, it’s an imperative of love, it’s our duty, there’s nothing hotter than raceplay. I can’t really relate but I’m not going to tell this guy how he ought to be getting off. He reminds me a little bit of Basil, but heterosexual and without any evident diabolical scheme to ruin his former-allies-turned-mortal-enemies. Then there was the anonymous operator who claims they have a hot tip that Drop Site News was just funded with seven million dollars from the Qataris, “look at Scahill’s reporting on Hamas and PIJ and ask why,” and tells me to write this down and put it in the Substack if I call myself a friend of the Palestinian resistance. Then, the enormous mural of Quetzalcoatl. Then, the insane cowgirl who flashes her titties and says that we gotta go out to her family’s ranch in Montana where she’s gonna teach me how to ride horses. Then, Brace Belden pulls up to the function and says “I feel like a schmuck right now” before reading his diaries from rehab a decade ago, where there was basically nothing to do but masturbate. Then, Marlowe texting me that she’s cancelled her flight back to North America because she’s found a lover in Athens, adding “I really feel I am meant for more ancient places.” Then, the dream I have about meeting Thiel in some bar, the man was wearing this white Henley shirt beachy fit and I had a water bottle in my backpack that was leaking so I had to make sure it didn’t get my books wet. Then, the woman who has a print of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde above her bed. Then, going out to Bushwick with the based libtard corporate surrealists to meet the sex worker elves from outer space, who unfortunately aren’t as interesting as we’d hoped because the elves fucked up the date on their party invitations. Then, attending the “gonzo ketamine psychoanalysis session” with Sunshine and listening to Lucia aka Bubblegum spin some outrageously lurid and certainly fabricated fantasy to her “analyst” and then showing us a strange, discolored wound on her inner groin (which she had made worse by attempting “spirit surgery” on it) and watching Sunshine and the analyst try to come up with psychosomatic explanations. Then, the 17-year-old runaway and self-proclaimed genius who always has the blues and who hangs around with the corporate surrealists. Then, sitting on my fire escape with Sunshine watching the old singing Haitians come home from church beneath us while he’s counting up money. Then, the poets Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow telling me about this party at a house up in Connecticut where the guests were supposed to use a Port-a-Potty because the house’s old pipes were still clogged from Hemingway’s meaty turds back from when he was writing A Farewell to Arms there, and Marlowe was there blackout drunk telling Delicious Tacos she was going to kill him for the rape fantasy literature he writes, the literature for which he was receiving some kind of award from the hosts. Then, Bonnie telling me about how writing for Playboy was much better when Hefner was still alive because he’d let her write whatever she wanted, and how she would come up with all the sex tips they publish in Cosmopolitan, they could never re-use any so the tips would have to get ever-increasingly arcane and absurd, “you have to think about every possible thing you can do with a penis, every imaginable permutation of what a body can do.” Then, and then, and then, and then…

I think about how all these disparate impressions and illusions just bounce around in my skull, and whenever I come for them they scatter and dart around and hide under the beds and furniture of my mind like cats, until something like the fucking Sovereign House debate with Haz of all things gives them a reason to come out, to finally let me pet them. What’s the connection? The potency of delusion? Bizarro Americana? That’s all I can come up with. Whatever it is, it’s indirect. Inspiration is strange.

***

So Thursday afternoon I get a text from Matthew Donovan asking if I’m going to the debate at Sov between Haz Al-Din, streamer and Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party, and Benjamin Williams aka “PraxBen,” a libertarian advocate of anarcho-capitalism with over 200,000 followers on TikTok. I had recently learned that they regularly host debates like this at Sovereign House but hadn’t been to any. This one is particularly up my alley because of the connection between the Hegelian E-Girl thing and the ACP. (Nikki is the only one of the original Hegelian E-Girls still hanging around downtown parties promoting that brand.) ACP is nominally left-wing but speaks in the ostensibly nonpartisan “Rich Men North of Richmond”–type of right-wing grievance, evident in the casual talk about vaccines, wokeness, degeneracy, and the like. So, to an outsider they might appear like groypers, but they themselves are convinced that they’re the true communist radicals and anti-imperialist militants, they’re the ones with connections to governments hostile to the United States, and organizations like the DSA, with all their blue-haired baristas and pedantic grad students, are the actual CIA-collaborationist Democrat-sheepdog wrecker imitators. It's possible the ACP is just misunderstood. In any case, the ACP finds a platform at Sovereign House before it finds one at Woodbine.