By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
“And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.”
-Chief Seattle
Everyone who’s born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.
-Russell Means
Goddamn, I fucking hate November. Somehow between the pagan sugar rush of Halloween and the gold-leaf grandeur of Christmas, Satan shit out thirty days of windburned misery. My depression is a year round affair, but come November, the bitch breaks violent. Everything becomes heavy, basic daily chores become acts of contrition to a vengeful god, and all the jolly people, where do they all come from?
All sins considered, it seems only natural that this awful little month should be topped off by Thanksgiving, a strange celebration of American colonialism with Type 2 Diabetes. We all know it’s a racist fucking holiday, that if the Indians ever actually did share a smorgasbord of carbohydrates with the pilgrims, they paid for it with more than just indigestion. But what are we not going to scream at each other over a colossal bird stuffed with a soggy loaf of bread? That would just be silly.
The consolation this year is that the whole damn country seems to be nearly as miserable as me for a change. America is a full blown basket case. The election that never ended never did, leaving a nation of shrieking partisan imbeciles with one more reason to mow each other down in holiday traffic. We now have two sexual predators with dementia proclaiming themselves leader of the free world and our only hope for salvation from the other. Our best hope may be that the Covid plague kills them both before anyone can bomb another hospital. Precious moments like these find me pondering the people we stole this hemisphere from and thinking out loud; Jesus Christ, we fucking deserve this.
And even in the sweet psychosis of my depression fried lizard brain, I’ve got a point worth making. America is essentially a colossal luxury resort built on an Indian burial ground. How can any of us feign shock that this country is haunted? There was no First Thanksgiving Dinner. Not really. Just a bunch of Colonel Kurtz-ian colonial psychopaths in buckle hats, murdering tribe after tribe and fucking their daughters before they burnt them at the stake for doing long division. And the massacres never stopped. That tsunami of blood loosed from the elevator of the Santa Maria known as Manifest Destiny swept from sea to shining sea in what is still likely the most devastating holocaust in recorded history.
But we didn’t stop with the Indians. We couldn’t stop. By the time this nations native people were safely tucked into their desolate reservations, mass slaughter had become a booming global industry that defined our national character. So we just kept on killing, in the verdant jungles of the Philippines and Nicaragua, and right on to the desert hell scape of the Levant. And we seriously have to wonder why we’re not happy? Because mass murder is bad for you, stupid. There’s a reason most mass shootings end in suicide by cop, and now we’re coming at China with a Buck Knife in our hands and Helter Skelter in our eyes, daring them to pull the trigger. But do we really deserve this? Does anyone?