mallorys_camera | When Cosplay Goes Wrong (in case you're wondering what REALLY went down in Charlottesville)

In case you’re wondering what really went down in Charlottesville on Saturday…

You had a bunch of people wearing costumes. In fact, Charlottesville could have been subtitled: When Cosplay Goes Wrong.

The majority of self-styled white supremacists who showed up there are male Millennials who live in their mother’s basement, who play a lot of first-person shooter games, and who can't get laid. Their spirit animal is Dylan Klebold. They’re actually too stupid to understand the full significance of the Nazi regalia they sport. They only know that it seems to be a trigger. They're invisible people. Who are suddenly... VISIBLE.

They’re pushing the envelope, in other words. If we do this, they’re saying, you’ll have to notice us.

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On the other side, you had a more diffuse group of well-meaning individuals who are triggered by Nazi imagery.

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But manipulating the marionette strings behind the scenes, you always have the same cadre of billionaires who subscribe to a specific political and cultural system.

Let’s call that system Neoliberalism!

Neoliberalism perpetuates the extreme wealth inequality that results in economic scarcity, deteriorating infrastructure, and the inability to improve real wages, health, or happiness for the majority of people living in the United States today.

Neoliberalism thrives by pitting groups of working class individuals against each other. This is the way they maintain the fragmentation that allows that tiny elite of 0.01% to hoard all viable resources on this planet. Incidents like Charlottesville are a command shadow puppet performance that's executive produced by the members of that 0.01%.

Just remember: The ruling class wants the 99% to be fragmented.

The ruling class wants the 99% to focus on the players. Not on the play.

That’s the larger context you must keep in mind when you think about Charlottesville.

We’ve gotten used to Koch Bros-style tactics. Mercer/Bannon tactics still have the capacity to make us lose sight of the larger picture.

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Which is not to say that Nazi imagery doesn’t trigger me because, of course, it does. Big time.

I got physically nauseated reading The Daily Stormer.

I had to take a half-hour shower in extremely hot water when I logged off the site.

I wanted to go all Maenad on the asshole who runs the site. Tear his dick off. Feed it to a coyote.

Instead I researched rallies in protest of the White House’s tepid reaction to the events in Charlottesville.

Found one in Poughkeepsie. Went to it.

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Anyway, yesterday was a complete waste of time. I’m deeply disgusted with myself.

I did not get one lick of remunerative work done, and Alice still doesn’t know how to react to the sight of her cousin sitting in a car with the ghost of her dead father. So all in all, a completely useless day.

You’d think I know better by now, right?

As an early Internet adopter and all.

Social media is always the La Brea Tarpit.

There is never any excuse to stay on Facebook any longer than it takes to “like” the latest photos of your kid’s girlfriend and your pal in Kerhonkson’s engaging granddaughter, flirt desultorily with that guy you should have run away with 25 years ago (but didn’t), and play a couple of rounds of Bejeweled Blitz.

That should take – what? Twenty minutes?

Thing is once you’ve been infected by the social media worm, it is literally impossible to go back to thinking your own thoughts. I’m convinced this has to do with the fact that stuff you read transforms voices in your head that are the analogous to audio hallucinations – they pack that kind of power and compulsion. Social media creates symptoms of psychosis in people who aren’t necessarily psychotic.

Facebook is the only social media I do. (I don’t count LJ as “social media.” LJ is an upload of the actual diary I’ve been keeping since I was 12 years old.)

But I am thinking the next time I allow myself to slide down that particular rabbit hole, I’m gonna delete my Facebook account.