I remember the modern man calling me to say he was going to buy a gun the day President Trump walked through the burnt down St. John’s Church in Washington D.C. The next time I saw him he was in the streets protesting, stripping naked and kissing the arsonists.
The modern man thinks he is the center of the universe. He demands accountability but cannot be held accountable. He hijacks truth and reason. He manufactures realities the way a snake sheds skin.
He will call you a bigot for not allowing your children to watch his striptease.
The modern man wishes death on his political opponents. He will find ways to destroy you to keep your ideas outside the public discourse. He is modern, but he will stone you just as the modern man always has.
His morality is fixed to a weathervane. He wages wars from behind his computer. He used to be anti-war. He is very knowledgeable. He has multiple PhDs. He is part of the pandemic of experts.
He’s ashamed of his parents, but begs the government to parent him.
He observes the world from within a vault. He is a fist and a boot in the shape of a peace sign. He screams about slavery through a machine built by slaves. He hires cheap labor and beats them for daring to show an ounce of dignity.
The modern man is not a happy man, but he smiles when the filter makes him smile. He can’t be happy until he segregates his paradise by pedigree. His original thoughts are recycled philosophies. He parrots hysteria.
He gets political about protecting women, but he attacks the women his enemies love because he is a scared and little man. He uses words like “eradicate” and “war” in small talk. He finds it righteous and good to go to weddings and funerals over Zoom. He’ll make a blacklist of all those who celebrate and mourn you.
He doesn’t know he’s a conspiracy theorist. He doesn’t believe in the past unless there’s something that happened once that he can use against you.
He can’t stomach your success. He wants to kill your confidence. He smears one dictator with another dictator’s words. He hates capitalism but he is a good little greedy capitalist. He hates struggle sessions but spends every day on the internet orchestrating them.
He defends the elite by telling himself the elite are the working class. He attacks the working class by telling himself the working class are the elite. He prefers one massacre over another massacre. He buries the criminal who held a gun to your mother’s stomach in gold caskets and weeps at the funeral for the cameras.
His business model is built around self-loathing. He is the drug dealer and the warden. He is an evangelist of violence. His soul is painted in the ash of all the bridges he had to burn to maintain his public standing. There is no problem too great to fix unless it happens to be within reach, unless you are a neighbor he doesn’t like in need.
He is incapable of authenticity. He is barren of anything unique. He is a copy of a copy.
His authority is rooted in superstition. He doesn’t know he would’ve been the medieval priest pulling limbs off heretics. Or the puritan hanging witches. He is the gimp for the State—for safety’s sake. He would’ve forced Japanese families into camps. He begs corporations to bring judgement to sinners who don’t take him seriously.
He says he loves free speech, but he will cut your tongue out if you say something he doesn’t like. He will read this and laugh. He will think this is a self-portrait of his enemies. Everything he does is a projection. He is a walking caricature. He only feels safe in a world made in his image. He hates God but seeks to create a Heaven on Earth. His brain is for sale. His skull is a glory hole. His gut swells the more the world starves. He doesn’t care for legacy, because it’s quicker and easier to profit from destruction. When he dies, other modern men will feast upon his cadaver. He will always return younger and more beautiful and louder than before. He will charm the youth. He will build a prison on your grave. He will jail the disobedient that remind him of you. He is nothing new, he is nothing new.