Large capacity magazines

[Fairgo]

62. Guns and monsters

I walk the streets of Sydney, stripped of my god-given american right to be a self styled and well armed militia of one. This heavy burden allows civilisation to flourish, unimpeded by the retrograde logic of the Devolutionists who are wont to cower in fear of each other.

Americans at home have the right to be armed to the teeth and engaged in a cold war with every shadow they pass on the streets.

Our corporate masters chuckle. The profit from our fear seems boundless. They gleefully sell the bullets, we eagerly wear them like chains and beg for more. For every 50 round magazine you buy, you worry that your enemy, your neighbour, will buy two. It's an arms race at the shopping mall. The beauty of unbridled capitalism is the chase to the bottom of your wallet as you try to buy freedom from fear. The gun market trades in stacks of blood money. Business is booming. Gun frenzied fear funds the inverted rise of the totalitarian state, for in the end those with guns terrorise those who refuse to play army. Fear and loathing and isolation become the proxy for community. A marketplace of death replaces the public commons. Ennui and despair settles over a nation set against itself, immobilised, "...like a patient etherised upon the table". And so democracy has become hollowed out, starts to crumble around the edges, and beneath the shell, the face of Donald Trump leers up from the slab.

There is a science we can use to describe our wicked problem with guns. There would be interventions forthcoming from a rationale analysis. But the US is not rational. It is a gun junky cultural more likely to OD in the gutter of fascism than reclaim its virtue. Uncle Sam will have to hit rock bottom before recovery can begin.

But will it be too late? The rest of the world laughs nervously at the garish symptoms of US decay, and worries about the hell-bent trajectory of our self-destruction. US exceptionalism is based on extortion at a biospheric level with the world economy in one bloody fist, and the largest arsenal of death every conceived by sentient creatures pointed directly at the head of very mother and child on the planet. You see, our obsession with guns and death is in the bones. And apparently we want it for the world.

People used to ask, "Why did you come to Australia?" They were shocked to hear that I saw Australia as the land of opportunity. They do not ask any more, but offer their embarrassed consolation. I never meant to become a refugee. Seeing Leviathan from a safe shore...I ask, can you give me sanctuary?