But the man hung himself with a belt.
Donald Trump tried to enact a coup in 2020 that was unsuccessful. In 2024 he successfully enacted a coup by using billionaire technocratic oligarchs to buy the election & install new digital & more easily hack-able voting machines.
I have been thinking a lot about the movie Man of the Year. How right now we have someone who was elected purely on reality TV popularity alone. Our very own Zaphod Beeblebrox to hide the actions of the paper pushing Vogon war generals.
The thing I hate most about Elon Musk is how he’s clearly one of those bros who pretends he’s read certain books to seem smart or “one of the group” when you know at most he read the google summary & watched the movie.
I dislike Tolkien because he’s such a narcissist that he wanted to “create” a fantasy history for “white” people because to be white is to be divorced from your culture’s actual lineage of myth. Whiteness (and blackness for that matter) basically means you have been successfully turned into a cog, a part, an extension of a type of person instead of actually knowing who you are & where you came from. It’s a lot easier to control people when you teach them that their families & histories were nothing but “abusive”. Instead of trying to understand & reveal the past in the modern era, many are trying to control the past & shoehorn it into a box it is never going to fit into.
Donald Trump has us so focused on whether or not we’re going to “win”. He got us to completely ignore that some of us are just excited to play the game. Those of us who just want to be included and be a participatory member of society.
The civil war of public shootings which have been enacted by a loud majority, upon a minority who is focused on peace, has been going on for quite some time. That is why we’re involved in the 3rd global war now. With russia, china, & amerika taking stake in their respective territories. I worry about the strength of the EU. The first blow by Britain was strong but came to be such a public mistake. I hope the continent where the people have actively chosen not to forget the 2 world wars, & are still very close generationally to the loss felt, will shield us from the worst of what is to come. And of course Canada has always stood up to amerika. The real North of the Civil War, where formerly enslaved people had to actually escape to, to be free.
Right now we’re in the Wizard of Oz & the projector, the flame thrower & the hot air balloon are unfortunately how you’re reading this right now. Whether on your “phone”, “computer” or “tablet” I guarantee you’re on your favorite screen right now to read this.
It’s the only way.
We cannot throw away the baby with the bath water. We need incremental change to a world where we acknowledge, accept & understand the risks of these new technologies. Whether it be brain tumors & cancers from phone radiation & cell towers, poisoning everyone’s food & water with “data center” vampires to satiate our craving for content, or the unspoken mental health crisis gripping most of human society inflicted upon us by the technoligarchs who love to sell us addictive behaviors.
The Sphere in Las Vegas is a great example of what I mean. The Sphere was obviously built by very wealthy people to be an attraction & make “profit for investors”. But somewhere out there are the (probably) young artists who got to work on the remaking of the Wizard of Oz. Some actual person embraced the idea of AI infecting the art world so early on that they were willing to take individual things on the screen & pull them out of the original 1938 film to make them feel immersive & as if they had come to life. Like the trees in the forest outside of Oz.
A team of people invested a lot of energy into all that man made magic.
It’s no mistake that the Sphere & one of the most popular musicals of our time, Wicked, which is much more socially beloved than anyone previously thought a theater musical turned movie could become in this overly produced era, are both based on the political underpinnings of the Wizard of Oz which was written directly in between the amerikan civil war & the establishment of social services in the United States.
The artists who helped make the version of the Wizard of Oz for the Sphere & who worked on the movie version of Wicked understand that they can only do so much to effect change in this very anti-art, anti-history world the technoligarchs have created. That if they are to make any change at all, it will be with the help of their art loving friends & by using the powerfuls' resources against them, right under their noses, to tell meaningful stories. Stories that people who were given A’s for just being “who they are” will never be able to comprehend the depth of. So they can be hidden right in front of their eyes. They’re so zoomed in they can only see it as an invisible dot on an invisible dot. When those of us who know we’re part of a collective cannot help but have a macro view.
My mom always says, “sometimes there’s only one person between you & the thing you want in life so you have to get along & negotiate with them.” My spin of that to my son was, “I don’t make the rules, we all collectively make the rules. If you want to have a say in who makes the rules you need to know what they are & how to play the game.”
We are all in a gamified existence. We have limited choices. But for now we still Have Choices. We still have art. They are destroying the NASA library. But some wiley librarian out there has hoarded copies. I know it.
We need to realize that we may be stuck in another man’s game but it is our choice whether or not to work together for the incremental changes & understanding that is needed right now, or to sit out & not play at all.
Every gamer should know that most good games have a collective element & all the hardest games had a manual to learn from & later, a message board. Some of us are too focused on winning & have lost the love of the game. I’ve seen enough high school & college football games, to see my son play baritone saxophone & march on the field, to know that no one enjoys watching a massacre. Where one team is clearly stronger than the other & kids on the weaker team just keep getting dragged off the field hurt.
We saw during the 2024 US presidential campaign & when Luigi Mangione shot healthcare CEO Brian Thompson that the people who thought they were immune from war have been targeted. I am sure all people at that level have hired “private security guards” aka soldiers now & created another “billion dollar industry” so the bourgeoisie won’t get that chance again likely any time soon. Even the dogmatically pro-gun nuts, like Charlie Kirk was, must have hired “private security” soldiers now. Because nothing can stop a bad guy with a gun but another bad guy with a gun.
Or so I am told.
When will the violent majority stop being allowed to trample over our right to peace?
I don’t know
but I do know it will start with incremental change. With painfully convincing one person at a time out of their “us & them” mindset so we can start solving all these problems the technoligarchs are creating.
Until Next Time…
Love,
Jackie Lane
P.S. - Usually one, or at most, two people inspire a thing I am writing & this one came with many muses. I never name people directly but I know whomever it is would notice which part of what I wrote came from them.
PPS - This was written on January 6th, 2026 & never pressed the post button. I should have because I now find this entire piece irrelevant or at least missing a huge part because of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. I am writing another piece about that but it does not belong here & may take me a few days to edit as I have a lot to say. Or at least I want what I say about it to be very specific. Anyway I hope this is in some way relevant or enjoyable to anyone. Love and revolution be with you all.
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