Fathersland - A Videotome

Fivestarcrest's latest essay is a shockingly effective, fragmented psychodrama told in Videotome format.

The artist has also graced us with a Videotome game version of this essay. So if you'd rather interact with the prose via visual narrative, check it out over on Itch. We recommend this experience, as the visual and audio work sets a perfect ambience for the prose.

"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, Sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, They wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world." - J.G. Ballard

July 3rd, 2022

Ellie is having a bad time. Her life isn’t dangerous (yet). It’s just dumb. She shares it with this guy, Wally, who sees her friends as unnatural and degenerate. The first tumors of a growing rot. His goal isn’t to “rehabilitate” or “reintegrate” them on terms he knows they’ll never accept, but to amputate. Excise them from the sickly limb. Wally believes that like with a race’s undesirable genes, undesirable queerness spreads through the population. This contagion is part of a war on the social order, with each man’s most vital defensive position being his family.

Wally feels possessive of the women and children in his life. So he must protect his possessions from contagion. Queers will groom, tempt, and indoctrinate his children. Foreigners will rape, seduce, and steal his women (daughters and wives both real and imagined). If they get hurt, Wally doesn’t take offense at their pain (he hurts them plenty), but at an invasion of his property.

Wally doesn’t even need a family to defend, an imagined potential family works too. Online images of women provide Wally titillating practice in what this family could look like. When Wally sees foreigners with women he desires, the invasion feels just as real. When wounded, Wally fancies himself a hero spurned. When wounding, Wally relishes being a despot.

Wally is a sadist for cruelty so common and unremarkable that he can call others perverts for finding pleasure anywhere else. Wally scoffs at consent because earning fear through coercion is easier than earning respect. Consent would require valuing anyone else’s choices and autonomy. Intimacy would require vulnerability and trust. Wally craves fucking and hates sex, and his inability to tell them apart means he will get to do neither.

Segregation is a temporary fix because what if undesirables jump the fence? Wally covets the violence and vitality he imagines is on their side anyways. An addiction to cuck and trans porn barely feeds his lust. Rehabilitation is laughable because Wally’s “race realism” says they can’t help their nature. They’re too dumb to learn his ways, too violent to restrain themselves, too impoverished not to covet what’s his.

These beliefs rest on a frothing base of lies and conspiracies. But his obsessions are more coherent than they may seem to outsiders. Wally’s transphobia grows from his misogyny, which is comorbid with his racism. One by one, seeing minorities as trespassers on his birthright, as foreign Seeds taking root, as a Question to answer rather than equal participants in society, Wally rejects every option short of extermination.

May 14th, 2022.

Wally is a child of empire. Having only known life in its borders, Wally sees migrants in his country and rejects that it could ever be theirs as well. Wally ignores that migration is the inevitable outcome of looting their homes. He enjoys an economy that’s run on coercing their labor for centuries. He drives by cotton fields on a freeway built to fence in the Black Ghetto.

So where does the South belong? Certainly not in the South. The rubber in her trees, the rare metals beneath them, the ocean air sweeping over her mountains and into her cities – all of that is for him, and all manner of international courts bends to ensure it. She has gone hungry and walked (or been dragged) North for centuries. But does she belong any more in the Darien Gap? The Calais Crossing? How about in the Jenin camp? In Kakuma?

The answer is no, because Wally belongs everywhere the South does not. He feasts on nations he will never see in person, much less be able to point out on a map. He is furious she would even set the table. No wage is low enough. Wally will never know her fear and will never have to. The border is already stronger than his wildest dreams.

Two years from now, Wally will watch with glee as his cousins in Britain and Springfield launch pogroms. Across Britain, they will blame a murder on a Muslim asylum seeker. The “Ali Al-Shakati” they blast over social media will turn out to be Axel Rudakubana, a Christian born in Cardiff. For one blistering summer week they will indulge in all the crimes they accused migrants of. They will burn immigrant stores, hospitalize cops, smash the windows of a hotel housing asylum seekers, and deface Muslim graves.

It will only end when thousands of anti-fascist protestors rally against them in the streets. Of those arrested, two-fifths will have previously been reported for domestic abuse. All of Britain will know by then that more violence is possible. The parties will conclude that the bloodthirsty wolf of Reaction will be happy with just a pinky. Starmer will roll up his sleeves to extend them an open hand.

In Springfield, Wally’s cousins will spread a lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating pets. The lie will spread from neo-Nazi Facebook groups to the Presidential debate stage within days. A fascist candidate will repeat it on national television to an audience of 67 million. The next weeks will see dozens of bomb threats at Springfield’s schools, hospitals, and government offices. Local Nazi chapters will spread flyers for “a stand against forced immigration.” Haitian families will flee the factory town their labor revived.

The men responsible will later win the Presidency and begin their promise of mass deportations, arresting tens of thousands without trial or criminal charges. Like in all American prisons, it will only be a matter of time before one of their victims dies from heatstroke. The agency responsible will grow from a domestic arm of the War on Terror to a masked paramilitary force with $45 billion USD in funding. It will receive more money than all but thirteen countries spend on their militaries, in a nation where medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy.

When federal judges point out the lawlessness, they will receive legal overrides from above and death threats from below. The orgy of violence will spread to graduation ceremonies, citizenship exams, baseball games, and shopping malls. Some will be too busy quibbling over the definition of a concentration camp to realize their neighbours have started disappearing. It will be, in effect, a policy of White nationalist terror.

November 29th, 2022

Ellie remembers coming home from a high school walkout and calling him a fascist. She doesn’t bother anymore because Wally doesn’t mind the label. He’s not a fascist. But Wally doesn’t scroll away when fascists are talking. He feels more sympathy than contempt for them at a point in his life where empathy is atrophied and scarce.

If a Fascist Party came knocking tomorrow, Wally would be more ready to sign up than if a Socialist Party did. Wally already knows the enemy, the euphemisms, the not-quite-slurs, the habits of conspiratorial thinking. Wally can already imagine his place in a racist society with unrestrained cops, where imperial violence abroad and sexual violence at home is quickly forgiven. He imagines this violence would pass over him, onto people he hates. Maybe he’d even have a chance at swinging the baton.

Ellie knows by now that the nice men in fatigues wouldn’t be starting from scratch, only giving him a method and a gun. There are paramilitaries training in the woods, vets and retired sheriffs trading notes. It shouldn’t be this easy to become an American fascist.

But neither Wally nor these patriots are ready for revolution. For now they resign themselves to slashing powerlines, stalking journalists, stealing equipment from Army bases, calling bomb threats into drag shows, mailing pizzas to judges’ homes. The January Capitol putsch and its betrayal are a distant memory. Their prophets skipped town with the merch.

Wally will see Arab grocers, abortion clinics, Black apartments, synagogues, gay nightclubs, Marxist campuses on the drive back from his first rally. Sodom surrounds him, lays siege to his senses. It’s getting harder to explain the gap between the world behind his eyes and the reality in front of them. Surely, it’s occurred to him by now. Wally can’t cum anymore but gunfire might feel just as good.

Wally is screaming at the TV. Wally is typing a death threat in the comments. Wally is glaring at the Dominican girl bagging his supplements. Wally is running for Congress. Wally has long forgotten the first gymfluencer who sold him eugenics. Wally is ribbing his nephews for sharing AI nudes of their classmates. If Wally ever kills his girlfriend (and he is statistically the most likely person to kill her), local news will run the scoop with his graduation photos.

There are new threats to home and country. A New Man must fight to make the land and her daughters fertile again. Could it be him? Maybe. But he won’t be as brave as he thinks he is. He won’t see the status, safety, or prosperity promised because suffering doesn’t grow from people he hates. His humiliation isn’t in their hands. Yes, Wally is powerful. He will hurt hundreds more in the coming years. But he’s also a fucking idiot. He is trying to birth the New Man from a body that still bleeds, still ages, still longs for clarity and companionship that its pilot has abandoned. He is the last gasp of a dying Order, mumbling its anthems and butchering the lines. He has learned all the wrong lessons from his suffering.

He is building a State that would hang him once it was done with the rest of us, if its negligence hadn’t already left him to die. Wally is chosen, just by an Order that cultivates cruelty and dysfunction. It is a society of lawnlord snitches, office suck-ups, air-conditioned bullies play-acting Legionnaire. It is the inheritance of every lynch mob defiling Black Reconstruction, every McCarthyist writer turning in their friends, every Vichy collaborator loading trains, and the talentless hacks in every generation who see state terror as a chance for personal gain. It sacrifices a future that could exist for a past that never will. It is doomed to only win by taking all of us down with it.

There’s still time for the sleepwalking public to see Wally like he sees their neighbors, nannies, schoolteachers, and friends: repulsive. There’s still time to keep their sons from his vision for the land. As for the girl? Ellie is becoming so much more than her father’s son. He will not win, and Ellie knows she will live to see him buried.

It’s 2032 and we are still alive. We dress better than when we first met. The world is so queer that we don’t stand out anymore. I don't know what the years after this look like but I know you need to stay alive. There is no future where any of this gets easier without you. It’ll take a while. So I’m not waiting for heaven to be happy. No Rapture, no Rebirth, no Tribunal will do it. HRT might.

Is that unfair? We’re deergirls in headlights, canaries choking on the smog. Our world is killing us (but we’ll keep living). We’ve endured before (but not all of us made it). It’s getting worse (but it’s not over and it never will be so long as we draw breath). So draw breath. Find and light a thousand candles until their terrible night ends.

Music from Fathersland, also made by fivestarcrest, is available on the HOUDINI Fall/Winter compilation on Bandcamp.