Scotty Beam Mich Hoch

The Banners hung up on either side of the stage spelled out: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – It Will Be Streamed.

Huey tapped his clipboard with a ballpoint watching a throng shuffle into Radio City music hall.

Cameras set up to cover an incoming trainwreck from every conceivable angle, streaming live. In the next few months, the taping will garner millions of views for the full video alone, and tens of millions collectively for clips and soundbytes. 

It started like all great things do, by getting shit-faced with your buddies.

The way they wrote “Jesus Built My Hotrod” was Ministry frontman Al Jourgenson got Gibby Haynes all liquored up, recorded his incoherent ramblings before Haynes passed out, and set them to pure, unadulterated thrash.

The story’s about the same.

Record the chatter. Remix. Put it out there. 

Some dive up in the Bronx. They were all crammed into a booth, downing piss-tasting Blue Moon. Nestor was warming up. Sheldon knew it was time to get his phone ready.

“Fuck Fascism. Fuck Communism. But most important: Il Duce reminds us that Democracy is beautiful in theory, but in practice is unsustainable. “You in America will see this someday.””

“Il Duce got capped and strung-up by the people who once adored him.”

“Plato also warned us against Democracy. And what happened? A jury of puss-for-brain mouthbreathers voted that he eat hemlock. That fuzz-haired Southern poofta who wrote Huck Finn once told: “If voting actually mattered, if it made even a speck of difference, they sure as hell wouldn’ let you do it.”

“Wha’, you mean to say you don’ wanna jump into the spiteful tug-of-war for this nation’s soul?”

“What fucking Soul? The closest thing this place has to a soul is the mass Indian graveyard we hot-tarred our strip malls over. I’m shocked that every household in this country doesn’t have some ‘Poltergeist’ shit happening 24/7.”

It ran on like that for a while. Oh, and he would say such clever things.

For the next few months, the video got a few thousand views. Then the algorithm stuck it onto the homepage. By the end of the next month, it had just under 1.5 million hits.    

Sheldon kept taping. Nestor kept the hits coming.

“I say fuckit. If some MIT professor wants to run over a grown man with the IQ of a five-year-old, I say let him. Right, Natural Selection needs both processes working in tandem: the cultivation of the genius and the liquidation of the retard. What good does it do our species to cultivate one genius, if we’re gonna defend one hundred dipshits? Not only that, but these commie fucks are more than happy to sacrifice this once-in-a-generation too-smart-for-his-own-good bugger to avenge just one of those rejects.”

After that, he did a slew of podcasts. Joe Rogan, Mark Maron, you name it. Joe was the biggest. Those go from several hundred thousand to millions, the most popular episode hitting the twenty million mark. Nestor thought: Joe’s a bald-headed baffoon. He’s the American Karl Pilkington.

Joe’s eyes are glazed and Nestor wanders if he’s having an epileptic fit.

The following week he blew up after making Ben Shapiro cry on national television. Ben accused him of being one of those cartoon Krauts from Education for Death – Nestor hushed him by repeatedly grabbing his own crotch, screaming about how he’d Joy Division’d enough Jewesses to populate half of Miami.

Huey eyes the poor dumb bastards who paid to be here.

Upstairs, they’re getting Nestor liquored up while projecting Triumph of the Will onto an office wall for the umpteenth time, telling him look, look, position your hands just so, and pause this many seconds for maximum effect…

At the bar, eyes raised to the six o’clock news. Slow news night, so the cameras zoom in on another round of gluten-free Malcolms waving picket signs that day.

Nestor grits his teeth. Sheldon prods him.

“Of course I’m pissed off! Charlie promised us Helter Skelter. Seemed like we were gonna get it not too long ago, but as usual those sun-roasted Gopniks just looted shit, then gave up. Worst part is, they looted their own. See, I read The Spook Who Sat by the Door, and in it, Sam Greenlee assures us, the reader, that when urban warfare does happen, the brothas will only be ripping off whitey.”

He’s already the color of Nosferatu – but only the Klaus Kinski version, so there’s hints of pink in certain lighting. He picks up another tumbler, working his way down to Max Schreck levels of pastiness.

“All I see is brothas rippin’ off brothas.”  

The circle jerk becomes mosh pit as more Burning Man washouts with nothing to do on a weekday flood in, and the sea of Mansa Musa’s broke-ass grandkids turns into a flurry of snowflakes. Nestor shakes his head and grits harder.

“There’s no winning with white folk. Before, W.A.S.P.s would lynch their own kind for being too friendly with the Help. Now, these guilt-ridden nutsacks will lynch their own kind for not being friendly enough toward Uncle Remus. You bitching and moaning ain’t gonna change that pile of ten million broken Kunta Kinte motherfuckers your way of life was built on. Mars Blackmon is a big boy who can bitch for himself, he don’ need your patronizing ass whining for him.”     

The house lights went down. The spotlights focused on the podium. Nestor clapped Huey on the back as he lightly stumbled past. 

A wall of applause that he silences with a wave of his hand. He leans over the podium – General Patton with Charlie Manson’s mane.

For a while he just wavers there, snickering to himself. Finally:

“The great civil rights leader Robert Freeman wisely said “You better not even dream about tellin’ white folk the truth.” Now, Jesus being a brotha I can handle. Ronald Reagan is the Devil, you got it. The fine line between patriotism and the call to ethnic cleansing – I think I can balance that. What I can’t stand is you fucking fruitcakes. All you delicate snot-nosed Karen gestations blowing shit out your nose, who should’ve done the rest of us a favor and caught the next comet outta here with Marshall Applewhite – you who barely come out your gated suburban cookie-cutter camps, afraid of you’ own shadow because it’s a tad too dark. Know that Harlan Ellison story about the uptight anal-retentive patrolman who tries to catch the n’er-do-well who chucks jelly beans at people so they show up late to work? Finally he does catch him and they do a whole 1984 on his brain, so now he’s a perfectly well-adjusted upright comrade, but now the patrol-schmuck is late to work?”

A sea of blank faces stare up at him. The cameras blink.  

“You tepid, non-committal Robert Marvin Shelton wannabe’s, with your timid little half-step Bellamy salutes – at least the fucking Krauts in that Donald Duck cartoon they called a Reich had the decency to give a good, proud leg-swinging goose-step - you would do well picking up and choking on those jelly beans.”

He sways against the podium, then flares up, seeing not a single ounce of recognition or stirring.

“Just because the hippies are even less human than you, doesn’t mean you Saint Ronnie plastic bobble-heads are ever gon’ to evolve past mere homunculi. Descartes was a fucking moron to think a single one of you people was anything above the rest of his automata. So you overcompensate; You read Ayn Rand and think that makes you fucking John Galt, when at best you’re assembly-line Patrick Bateman merchandise – though even Bateman had the decency to admit he was yuppie scum, and pick off other yuppie scum while he was at it.

And that’s the thing – at least Bateman had the decency to do it by his own hand. You can’t even do that. You string up Django by proxy. A torch-bearing mob no longer becomes you, so you just sick a wound-up trigger-happy T.J. Hooker who’s watched Robocop too many fucking times instead. Much more high-class. And you did some nice rebranding too. You’re not a bunch of slack-jawed villagers from the stix out to burn Frankenstein, you’re now a jury of one’s own peers. Bitch, if you’re there to fuck someone, you’re their to fuck someone. A lynch mob is a lynch mob, no matter how many extra steps you shove in there. And don’t fucking act like you’re capable of being impartial. Leo Frank wouldn’t be at your mercy if you hadn’t already made up your minds.”

Nestor chewed the inside of his cheek.     

“But you know what the biggest difference between savagery and civilization is? Tonto will jump outta tree and scalp you quick, the Puritan will cage you for thirty years and then strap you down and euthanize you. And he’ll pat himself on the back while he does.”   

Parts of the peanut gallery cheered. Some of the little Eichmanns had the sense to pitter-patter outta there while the lights were still dim, before the whole goddam thing turned into Saturday night at the Apollo. No sooner were they out than the whooping and hollering got louder and more ferocious.  

Watching the audience frothing, you’d think it was a tent revival - in Nuremberg.

Huey heard a crash in the wing behind him. One of Nestor’s drinking buddies was pulling black tracksuit pants over used Nikes. He had the nylon jacket to match.

“Hey, uh, you know where they got puddin’ around here?”

“Puddin’?”

“Yeah, puddin’. Don’ worry, I already got the Smirnoff and Barbital, I just need something to crush the tablets into.”

Huey doesn’ get it.

Nestor’s drinking buddy looks over Huey’s shoulder at Nestor in the spotlight.

“That idiot’s goin’to be president one day, an’ I don’ wanna be here when it happens. Here’s to hopin’ Marshall Applewhite beams me up.”