The center doesn’t hold and everyone bleeds together. The slow kill is the most painful, the most intimate. The social fabric unravels on a touch screen. Fascism comes wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross. But which flag and whose god.

The yankee stripes or the jewish star.

The rebel rag of the confederacy or the swords of Hamas.

The red black green of Palestine or the white flag of surrender.

What kind of American are you boy.

Were you born proper on this patch of dirt or the salted earth of elsewhere. Did you pass civilized through the switchback queue of customs at JFK or did your pregnant mother slog through the brutal muddy purgatory of Darien Gap to birth you on your new home turf.

Also known as the land we acquired from the local heathen in our own dark past.

Lest we forget, the western states were taken by force from Mexico two centuries after Spain slaughtered their own millions of south and central american less well armed native tribes, who themselves no doubt fought and killed each other over those same high desert and swampy jungle patches of dirt for five or ten thousand odd years.

Are you here on a student visa.

Are you paying a hundred grand out of pocket for one year of privileged learning. Are you one of the walking dead on financial aid.

Are you legal.

Do you seek asylum.

The first time I heard of the nation of Israel was in an episcopal church Sunday school classroom in Mississippi. Book of Exodus.

Pharaoh let my people go.

Now scroll back through fog of life and war to my earliest snapshot memories of world conflict on the evening news and every one of them feature the chosen people versus the followers of the final prophet.

The black September murders of eleven Israeli athletes in Munich.

The hooded hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. Jimmy Carter somber and defeated.

The US marine barracks smoldering in Beirut.

The kids in Gaza throwing rocks at an Israeli tank on their way to school.

The global fatwa thrown down against Salman Rushdie for writing a book the supreme leader of Iran didn’t like and likely didn’t read.

Kill the infidels wherever you find them and so on.

For such a tiny country Israel takes up an inordinate chunk of real estate in the collective consciousness, for good reason. Public school kids in America are taught more about the evils of the nazi holocaust than about our own sins.

The average fifth grader knows what happened at Auschwitz but goes blank about Wounded Knee.

Every president in my lifetime has been unflinching in their support of Israel. The only democracy in the region yada yada plus the unspoken consensus that jews in America are generally accepted as white.

Or dark white with an asterisk, depending on the audience and venue.

Anyway growing up here it was never questioned. Israel is our little brother colonially. They are roughly a hundred years behind us on the imperialist pioneer timeline. The manifest destiny go west young man shit sold to us by our forebears as a positive to distract us from the idea that we perhaps stole Texas and California from Mexico or the unpleasant truth that we ethnically cleansed uhh relocated the Cherokee and Seminole nations to Oklahoma for their own good has been repackaged by zionists for purposes.

The chosen people may not realize it yet but this slaughter in Gaza will be Israel’s trail of tears.

They will have to live with it but the shame will belong to us all.

Beware the slow blade, it comes from within.

The notion of a modern theocratic jewish ethno majority state ought to make all of us uneasy because how exactly do you maintain that majority without being a tiny bit fascist.

Look at the majority muslim states.

If a woman can be beaten to death by morality police while in custody for exposing her hair in public, and more women may be killed or locked up for protesting that murder, that is not a free society and most of us rightly condemn Iran for such Orwellian nazi shit.

And while I agree it should not be lost on the free palestine protesters that Hamas and Hezbollah and everyone who wants to erase Israel are backed by Iran and they might want to connect various dots to other dots and recalibrate some of their utopian rhetoric, the videos out there of american jews wrapped in the blue and white Israeli flag spitting on american student protesters and wishing rape and murder on them are grotesque.

The beauty and horror of Herbert’s slow blade is the intimacy.

Nitpicking the definition of genocide is a waste of time.

Likewise the nuances of jihad are a black hole. There is zero nuance to the core beliefs of evangelical christian zionists either. They want to bring about the end times and for that they need the Israeli zionists to hurry up with slaughtering red heifers and get on with it. They intend to spark a holy war over the temple mount and they will do so with american funding and american weapons, if no one stops them. If no one stops us. Meanwhile pointing to atrocities in Somalia or Myanmar or wherever is just white noise because apparently we don’t care when muslims kill other muslims.

I have personally never questioned Israel’s right to exist. Israel does exist and has done in one shape or another since the old testament days. There are only fifteen million jews on the planet. They have had a shitty time since the exodus and they deserve a home to call their own. Likewise the nation of Palestine exists in the minds of more than a billion people. It may not be marked on the average map but Palestine is just as real as Idaho.

The people of Idaho may want to secede from Oregon but they sleep safe and cool at night.

The people of Palestine haven’t slept easy for more than eighty years, or three generations.

Even as a nihilist punk teenager I could see the problem with the Palestinians is they are a country trapped inside another country. They don’t control their borders. They have no freedom of movement, no agency. They have no voice. They have checkpoints instead. They have the collective boot of Israel armed with american weapons on their necks.

If there’s a wall around Gaza guarded by IDF snipers, then it must obviously feel and function exactly like living in an open air prison. How that is beyond anybody’s grasp I just don’t know.

Then again.

I also remember a civilized argument about this with one of my jewish classmates and closest friends in college that ended with her calling me a gentile.

Shut up you fucking gentile there’s no such place as Palestine.

Not to get overly mired in the geopolitics of the whole business but it seems clear the longterm zionist goal is to reduce the Gaza strip to a stone age wasteland and drive the surviving refugees into a purgatory buffer zone while Blackrock and Palantir build some sort of hellish Trumpy golf club in its place and the American government left or right will let them do it.

But regarding the free Palestine student encampments I am of two minds. My gut response is to say yeah give ‘em hell. Damn the man. These are kids, most of them. Their hearts are still pure. They just want to stop the bombing of Gaza. They want their university to stop investing in the war machine. They want to stop the killing of children.

They do sound like useful morons if you stick a microphone in their faces but their demonstrations are tame and nonviolent by any rubric. Not to mention most of them spent a healthy chunk of high school under lockdown and it left them a little extra neurodivergent. And like most of the active duty IDF soldiers, the student protesters are most of them gen Z. They barely remember the hurt locker days of suicide bombings. All they see now are images and film of little brown kids being pulled from rubble on their phones and they don’t like it. Dismissing them as antisemitic marxist snowflake provocateurs and self-loathing jews is just lazy and ignorant and endlessly dangerous.

Where you going with that axe Eugene.

The images of riot police busting up the free Palestine camps are troubling to be sure and stink of overkill but stop and think. Revisit the past for a minute. The scenes at Columbia are nothing compared to the treatment of the occupy kids in NYC or the Standing Rock first nation pipeline resisters or the George Floyd protesters in Lafayette Square.

They are a cool foot massage compared to Kent State or the LA riots after Rodney King.

On the other hand there were no South African sympathizers coming out to terrorize apartheid protesters at Berkeley in 1989.

Free assembly and dissent are endangered prospects in this country.

The police and the agents of ICE will continue to drift to the martial law side of protect and serve especially if the free Palestine protests take to the streets. Violent crackdowns will be the norm going forward. I understand that some of us especially our boomer brethren are still a bit fucked up by 9.11 and for them the sight of American protesters wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags is akin to the notion of seeing NYU students in 2001 coming out in favor of al Qaeda. Trying to explain why this is a false or incongruous comparison is pointless because this is the post truth world. If they feel it then it’s true.

From the river to the sea and never again cut both ways.

Last week, a pro Israel zionist mob surged onto the UCLA campus to terrorize peaceful free Palestine student protesters boxed in by their own encampment while LA cops stood by and watched.

Bearing witness.

By pure dumb luck or miracle nobody was killed that night, but it’s only a matter of time before somebody starts shooting at these kids. Think about it. If you’re a brooding wannabe Timothy McVeigh what would you do on a hot lazy Saturday night with a death to the great satan march down the block.

American white guy mass shooters are our suicide bombers, if you hadn’t noticed.

Meanwhile the Texas governor who put barrels wrapped in barbed wire into the Rio Grande and whose name deserves no sunshine nor oxygen recently pardoned a white supremacist for executing a BLM protester on the streets of Austin in the sun with a thousand witnesses.

Now shut your eyes and go to your ice cave.

Imagine the mad max convulsions coming our way in 2044 or so when the white american christians lose their demographic majority in this country.

It will be miles past ugly and far bloodier than anything we’ve seen yet, if we let it be.

Drill down to the bone for the core lessons to take from both sides.

If you chant death to America on American streets and glory to the 10.7 martyrs you are starting a fire you may not be ready to navigate. I will defend your free speech right to burn the american flag all day and night but mind your manners. Burn your own sacred objects not your neighbor’s. If you pull old glory down from its pole and replace it with Palestinian colors on pilgrim soil you are begging for local mayhem.

If you mask your face and wear the perceived traditional garb of terrorists, the cops will treat you like terrorists.

On the other hand.

If you treat your own citizens like enemy combatants, they will behave like insurgents. The free palestine student protesters are americans, most of them. The tiny point one percent of them here on legit student visas rightly presume that american laws like the freedom of assembly apply to all. There are jews and christians and pagans among them. They are students. They are kids. American history is based on free speech and resisting authority. If our students don’t protest then we aren’t teaching them to think. If the american government gets in the habit of crushing nonviolent dissent then it is already lost. The next Kent State is coming if we keep fucking this up.

The looming question is what kind of American are you.

martyr.

heretic.

zionist.

infidel.

robot.

son of woman.

zombie.

child of god.

alien.

daughter of man.

enemy.

skinjob.

Beware the slow blade, it comes from within us all.

peace.

.

to the phineas poe faithful my heart is with jack fell and jude evers on the velvet stack.

enter the velvet

I’d much rather be in there ghosting the yellow 24/7 but these are extraordinarily surreal and dangerous times and I can’t not write these chronicles of the collapse of society and would much appreciate you hitting the share or restack button if you’re still with me.

much love from the velvet.

always peace.