Coil - 'Who By Fire' from Horse Rotorvator (1986)

Just a reminder that thirty years ago, in 1986, when Coil recorded this cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Who By Fire', queer genocide was the official policy of the Reagan Administration. Some of these people, including disgraced ex-Attorney General Edwin Meese, are getting onboard the Trump Train as I write these words. This is not only a nightmare, it is a recurring nightmare. The vice-president-elect, Mike Pence, allowed HIV to spread in Indiana by dragging his feet on enacting needle exchange, and has proposed diverting federal AIDS funding to Conversion Therapy Programs to cure queer people of their queerness by abuse, torture and electroshock. Whatever is left of public health and welfare programs are on the immediate termination block. This is a regime which ran on a platform of cultural and ethnic cleansing. A regime which ran and won on a platform of genocide. No Accommodation. No Collaboration. I have been thinking on and off about killing myself because I can't take any more of 2016, but then I read by accident that alt-right nazi frog trolls over at the Daily Stormer have been exultantly planning to bully vulnerable people into killing themselves on the internet because they can't wait to take away health care and send us to their prisons and gas chambers and reeducation camps. They have been telling us exactly what they want to do for years and years. They told us when we objected to being threatened with violence, rape and murder that they were just kidding and we were too uptight and too politically correct. I always knew they were serious. I always knew Trump was serious, and worse, I knew, in my heart of hearts, by Autumn 2015 that he was going to become president of the united states and I told everyone around me. Listen, nazi frog trolls - I am not going to kill myself. If you want me dead, you will have to do it by your own hands because you don't get to exult in my death, a death you will never even know about but I am going to make sure you hear from me while I am still alive. You may get to live a long time, never regretting your decision to back a White Ethno-Nationalist Xtian Misogynist Death Machine but the White Male Xtian paradise you dream of, without annoying/scary black/brown people, non-subservient women, confusingly non-compliant queers, SJW killjoys, etc, is doomed. It is doomed because you are a minority of a minority. Your world really is disappearing because you have decided to declare war on the world that wasn't you rather than embracing a world larger than you. I feel sorry for your stupid asses. You will never know a beauty greater than your pathetic self-serving narcissism. You want the world to be a mirror to your most putrid and venal attributes. You declare victory. Mission Accomplished and all that. Moreover, your White Xtian CisHet Paradise is doomed also because you voted in someone who will ensure that rampant anthropocentric climate change and biocide due primarily to fossil fuel and big agriculture not only continues but is accelerated and magnified. Our death was more important to you than even your own lives and the lives of your children. I hope you feel good about yourselves. Thrill in this moment, because from now on, a creeping, hollow unease after the glory of winning will set into you, make its home in the empty shallows where a human heart once was. You will never know true sleep, never know rest. You will always wonder if you were wrong. You will continue to blame others as your complicity in Universal Extinction eats you alive from within. Some of you will change your minds. Some of you will mean it and try to work for a better world. Some of you will cry and say it was just trolling, just a joke, just a protest but you won't really think you are wrong. You will just repudiate your rotting movement once it becomes expedient for you to do so. This isn't a curse or a hex I am laying on you because I am a witch. This is a curse you have laid upon yourselves and you will bear it forever. And it will get heavier as time goes on. How do I know this? Because I see it all around me and inside of me. I am 42 and I am nearly ready for death. Not a day goes by that I do not regret all of the awful atrocities I have committed and been a complicit party to. They are many. There is no absolution. There is no forgiveness, not really. Because it will never erase what you have done because you know inside what you have done is wrong. I am only advising you as someone who bears the weight of their own sin. You think Jesus will wipe your sin away. That isn't how it works. God might bear your sin, Jesus might bear your sin because you are part and parcel of your god, and your god suffers along with you, within you. But you cannot ever be clean. You cannot ever get rid of the consequences and the stain of your own actions and orientation to the world. Sure, one day you might put away your Pepe Memes and your MAGA hats. Maybe you will advance to more sophisticated forms of fascism and racism, maybe you will reject that altogether, but you will never be free from having done that. The best that you can hope for is to repudiate this now. That sinking feeling you are already feeling? It isn't going to go away. It is going to get worse. And it is your fault. If you reject hatred now it will take up less of you in the future. This is some friendly advice. One thing, though, that even though I want to die, and many many many people are going to die by your hand or their own which you will have pushed, or by removal of health care or death by cop or by violent mob, in me you have a person who isn't going to die by suicide, at least not yet. You, you mra fundamentalist nazi billionaire-worshippers, you have given me life, and for that I say Thank You. LOVE!!! nathaxn