We’re History

Gods damn it, it’s not over and it’s never-ending. The history books have spilt open and all the demons come rushing out. Famines, plagues, wars, all supposedly banished to the past, suddenly now. Racism, colonialism, schisms, all thought buried at last, now out and about. The graves are empty and zombies walk the Earth. As Gramsci sorta said, “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” And he said that a century ago. It’s still fucking happening.

I grew up in the 1990s in Ohio—the most boring place on Earth. I was waiting for history to restart. Now that it has, I just want to get off. It’s too much, the real world, I long to just watch the Real World on MTV again, to be contained again in suburban anonymity, to get mad at some rando named Puck. As the curse goes, may you live in interesting times. We do. We live in someone else’s history. For us, it’s just bad luck.

History is all repeating, this time as farce. The 1918 pandemic, except we know better and just couldn’t bother. The pointless entanglements of World War I, now codified as NATO and completely for the benefit of arms dealers. The rise of fascism, just with worse fashion. The coming Greater Depression, which is incredibly depressing already. We hoped for flying cars and we got flying fucks. No one even cares. We’re just repeating the worst chapters of history because our ‘educated’ elites simply didn’t pay attention.

Everything I thought solid is suddenly immaterial and outright false. Democracy, free speech, all that liberal bullshit, it was just a shroud over a rotting corpse. I actually believed them when they said slavery, colonialism, it was in the past. That they’d reformed. What the fuck were we thinking? We should have slit their throats the moment they got off the boats and we still haven’t learned. We’ll never learn. We dig our own graves and look up meekly at our executioners. We just can’t believe that people would be like this, but they are.