The Curse You Gave Us

A creative piece submitted to The Needle.

As with all pieces in our Creative column, this article does not represent the views of The Needle.

The Curse you gave us, By Morrigan Vandelle

Charlie Kirk died and I smiled.  I watched the video of his death more times than I can count.  I became intimately familiar with the final frames of his public existence.  

> The relaxed posture he had on his stool, his shoulders relaxed but not quite slumped.  

> The practiced expression of sanguine indifference, a mask molded perfectly to his death's head skull.

And then the moment of truth– A new hole, the size of a dime.  

> His hands come up to just below his chest before a spurt of blood reduces his blood pressure so dramatically that he goes into shock.  

> His fingers palsy into his palms like a hamster's paws, and soon the muscles in his abdomen and back can no longer balance his head on his spine.

> He collapses, and each time I watch this I realize I'm holding my breath and so I exhale, a dreamy release.  

The world comes into sharp focus and I am beset by shame and pride and fury and, most of all, sadness.

What you just read were the musings of a highly dysfunctional mind.  The thing that I am and am trapped inside my skull with.  A shattered mirror that cuts itself.  It's okay, I have good days, too.

The feelings make sense, but the urges and thoughts and behaviors that come from those feelings aren't worth the energy they cost to create, aren't worth the consequences that come with them, aren't worth the pain and frustration and disappointment that follow them.

To say nothing of the fact that we watch our political and philosophical enemies bray for our blood with all the social insulation that being straight or cis or white or male or being some or all of those things at the same time brings.

Some people say they can feel eyes on them. I posit that trans people can feel bullseyes forming over them.  It's hard to put into words the kind of fear that engenders in a person.  It's even harder to predict what that fear does to a person.

> Does it make you small?

> Does it set you on fire?

> Does it make you more human?

> Does it make you less?

> Does it make you angry?

> Does it make you furious?

> Does it make you bite your lips and cheeks until you feel the red sting of flesh splitting and the sweetness of pennies on your tongue?

Some of that might apply to you.  All of it applies to me.

I have awful ideas and terrible beliefs tattooed on my very being.  

> The lie that is white supremacy.  

> The lie that is capitalism.  

> The lie that is imperialist colonialism.  

Sometimes, I feel like the body of my spirit is more contrived propaganda than essence.  A broken machine aware of its growing faults persisting for want of a better mode of existing, and knowing there is no way of discovering that but by trudging forward.

And sometimes when you're trudging, you lose your sense of direction.  Forwards became backwards when you weren't paying attention, and now you're howling like a jackal because a political agent got shot in the neck.

Not a good look, bestie.

I'm so tired and I'm all too aware of that fact.  Being too aware of my exhaustion made me less aware of the fact that I shouldn't be celebrating what I now recognize as an inevitable outcome of the games we watch rhetorical warriors play.

Talk shit, get hit is an axiom that speaks to the core of the human condition in the capitalist context.  Sometimes, a person's mouth can be moving too fast to see the cashing of a cheque that no body can cover.  No human being is faster than a bullet.

Charlie Kirk's death, such as it occurred, was inevitable.  And in writing this, maybe my own has just been made all the more inevitable for it.  

One of the few things Kirk and I have in common is that we attract the antibodies of society.  Kirk seemed to want to attract them.  Me?  I just want to live, write and have weird sex sometimes.

But when one of your political enemies dies and you feel good about it because maybe it means more "good things" will happen as a result, all you can really do is hope you remember not to hold your breath.

> Death seldom brings positive change.

> Death generally only heralds more death.

Marx was a fan of characterizing the monied classes as vampires.  The blood drinking aristocrats drained the proletariat, shortening the lives of workers to extend their own lives unnaturally long.

Except that now most people in the imperial core can count on living at least as long as the average aristocrat from which the mythological metaphor was born, and we've learned that a long life is not always a happy one.

No, if you’re able to stop and think about it for more than a moment between the move-every-minute-you’re-awake etherealness of the gig economy, or the ever-looming tidal wave of bills you can only just stay ahead of, or numbing brain-rot riptide of the content machine so many of us are plugged into, you come to the realization that a long life is a terrifying one.

> How long can you live comfortably without a nest egg or retirement plan?

> How long can you live comfortably without children to look after you as your body begins to fail?

> How long can you live with loneliness as your family and friends pass away?

> How long can you live in a society that doesn’t care enough to invest in your life, let alone your comfort?

This is how the decadent thirst of the aristocrats becomes the common thirst of the working class.  But instead of feeding upon the demons that jail us in the world of contrived scarcity, we feed on each other.  The contrivance of our scarcity does nothing to diminish its very real effects.  A false thing can be made real if its boundaries are enforced effectively.

I don’t believe in god, but the men who make the laws that bind me say they do.

I guess that makes god real.  If you squint.

I assert that the same is true of the bloodlust I am cursed with.

I am a target.  A lucky target, comparatively speaking.  I live in a country with health care, where trans people deal with societal discrimination and not the quite the same levels of institutional discrimination that’s become some commonplace in the U.S.A. and the U.K.  And yet I am still scared.  Still angry.  Still filled with the desire to instill in my ideological and political enemies the very fear they have filled me and my siblings with.

I want their blood.  I want the terror in their eyes as I hover over them.  I want them looking in the shadows for the idea of me whenever they hear something they cannot explain.

Again, the musings of a dysfunctional mind. 

I ask myself: when did this dysfunction first assert itself?  What inner working within my mind was so badly mutilated and when did it happen?  When did the dreaded count throw open my windows and avail himself to my blood, his crooked teeth marking me with his thirst as he slaked his own upon my veins?I was 9 years old when I saw Rambo 2 for the first time.  I saw the first Rambo at about 8, and I remember the movie made me cry because I thought John Rambo was just a very sad man who wanted to see his friend only to find his friend was dead.  Rambo 2, though?  Pure violence pornography. 

Hot, wet vengeance. 

Stallone sneering as he pulled the trigger of his machine gun or loosed the string of his combat bow or dug his knife into a foe, every kill more righteous than the last.  A 9 year old me watching it on VHS with my dad beside me on a green corduroy couch, punctuating each violent act with cartoonish “YES”s or “WHOA”s.  My father wasn’t even a particularly violent man at this point in his life.  We also watched Star Trek: The Next Generation together.  I try not to think about the proximity that milquetoast liberal utopianism has to outright fascism, but my memories will always remind me that I’m a Deep Space Nine fan in my heart of hearts.

Rambo 2 is literally for children in terms of the simplicity of its messaging.  As I grew older, I found more “textured” and “subtle” pieces of media that normalized my idea of righteous violence.  Two pieces of media that stand out are the Boondock Saints and The Way of The Gun.  I look back on these movies and I feel like my lower jaw wants to unhinge snakelike and work its way up to swallow the rest of my skull in one distended motion to express the intense embarrassment of having watched and enjoyed those movies so many times.  But in my early 20s, these movies defined my taste.

A destiny must be manifested, and truth comes out of the barrel of a gun.  If someone stands between you and justice?  Kill them.  Don’t think about the definition of justice.  Don’t think about the institutions that define it.  They’re settled.  They’re institutions.  They’ve always been there.

If someone stands between you and prosperity?  Kill them.  Don’t think about the fact that the person in your sights is just as far down the ladder as you are.  They are in your way, and if they’re in your way, they’re in your bullet’s way as well.

These are every baby’s first propagandistic hurdles.  Easily overcome with a bit of consciousness raising, and few things will raise your consciousness like realizing you’re actually a girl.  And then realizing you’re a girl who might also be an undefined beast of some kind.  And then realizing you’re actually several girls, a child-thing, and the revenant memory of the rage-filled impotent man you were raised to be for most of the years you wore your body.  You will either adapt to the reality that you are an entity born into a society that does not recognize your legitimacy fully by raging against it or trading pieces of your humanity to gild your cage.

That’s the thing about propaganda though, the best examples of it mutate to stay alive inside you.  The presentation does not matter so much the content.  Violence, anger, revenge, hatred, fury; these feelings feel GOOD.  They feel POWERFUL.  They feel LIBERATORY.

They do to me at least. Even when I know the opposite to be true, the lies still feel real.

Charlie Kirk had the bloodlust.  He wanted me dead.  He wanted people like me dead.  He wanted everyone who wasn’t his idea of picture-perfect christian nationalist dead.  And I imagine he had none to dissimilar media intake from my own in many respects.  I have it on good authority that for a little while we even liked the same porn.  In this way, Charlie and I are siblings.  

Bound by want of violent delights breeding violent ends. Violent ends, however, are about as final as ends get.  It’s not the closing of a chapter, it’s the closing of a book.  No more words, no more thoughts, no more actions.  Just memorials, if you’re known.  Just tears, if you’re loved.  Just dust if you’re none of the above.  And I want so much more than just tears or dust for my siblings and comrades.  And yet so many of them are neck deep in trauma and deprivation, and the sharp, nullifying joy of rage and vengeance can keep a mind full when the belly is empty.

I, personally, don’t think there’s anything wrong with being titillated by violence. I regularly am.  

As a sadist who only in the last couple of years learned to love herself, I had to do a lot of work to understand my relationship to consensual violence and how to effectively differentiate it from the more common forms of violence we see in our day to day lives.  I think about the masochists in my life (bless their hearts, one and all) and a common refrain I hear from them “There is a fine line between masochism and self harm.” and there really is.  It’s important to interrogate our relationship to the violence that physically and emotionally moves us, as masochists, sadists and everything in between.  Doubly so when it comes to political violence.

Our society has crossed far too many moral and ethical event horizons to render further political violence as anything other than a dread inevitability.  There are going to be casualties on every side of the conflict that contemporary fascists are stoking.  And not a single one of them are worth celebrating.I posit here and now that we should treat the deaths of fascists with the same fanfare and enthusiasm as wiping one’s ass after taking a particularly nasty shit.  With stoic indifference at best, and perhaps relief in knowing that the deed is done and that more joyful pursuits can, and should, be seen to.

Where the fascist extols the warrior, we the free should see the warrior with sympathy; the executors of a task that no human should have to undertake.  We should appreciate them, not venerate them.  Receive them not with celebration, but with the want to care for them and heal them of the traumas the wages of a warrior’s life takes.  We should encourage them to engage with the tragedy of the task that circumstance has forced them to undertake. 

We should work to keep the promise that so many people died to make at the end of world war 1, and let the most recent generation of warriors know, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that they are the last generation that will have to fight.

To be clear, I know I’m engaging in a particularly depressive form of utopianism.

Honestly, I think all forms of utopianism are cope.  I just want to be clear in my rejection of political bloodlust and cast that rejection into a possible future.  While the worm of capitalist realism has made a farm of my imagination, I can at least envision the last soldier closing their eyes for the last time, breathing their final breath knowing no one will ever have to die for imperialism ever again. 

I think I’ll hold on to that.