A Stream of Consciousness About America

Words:
Gil Scott-Heron, David Foster Wallace, and Woodrow Wilson
Images:
Lucas Raschbacher
Production Assistance:
Kelli Froland, Hannah Marion, and Torin Thorsgard

This is how to make it in America. This is

the black and gold issue. This is the left hand
steering wheel middle to finger to a bystander issue. This is the beautiful dark twisted
fantasy issue. This is the standard issue A4.
Welcome to the joyous choir of contemporary boredom. Sung on high to the rafters
and caught in the Bay Area Hilton with a felony vacuum sealed in a plastic bag rolled in
an affluent young womans riding boot. Did
you ever wonder how high you get from confirmation bias when youre texting a pornstar?
This issue is the product of putting your
money into mutual funds rather than the
creases and folds of the Midnight Cabaret
Club. We threw some televisions out windows
just to test gravity. We gambled, snorted, and
fucked our way into fame. Put suicide doors
on a wheel chair doing cartwheels out of the
sterilized hallways of your incompetence.
Till next time,

LAND OF
THE FREE
v | cypress | Year of the Swimming Pool

THANKS
TO THE
SLAVES
Year of the Swimming Pool | cypress | d

WHO WILL SURVIVE

IN AMERICA?

CANT
EVERYONE?
IT WAS
PROMISED

Comment
O
N 1
Gil Scott-Heron

Democracy, liberty, and

justice were revolutionary
codenames that preceded the bubbling, bubbling,
bubbling, bubbling in the
mother countrys crotch. And
behold, a baby girl was born, nurtured
by slave holders and racists. It grew and
grew and grew, screwing indiscriminately like mother, like daughter. They
will seek to hide their relationship with
the worlds prostitute. The signs of truth

were tattooed across our

often-entered vagina. We
learned to our amazement
untold of scandal, two long
centuries buried in musty
vault, hosed down dialy with
gagging perfume. What does Websters say about soul? All I want is a good
home and a wife and children and some
food to feed them every night. Who will
survive in America? Who will survive in
America? Who will survive in America?

BUBBLING,
BUBBLING,
BUBBLING

THE SIGNS
OF TRUTH

the

New Freedom

Woodrow Wilson

There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the
political platform at the present moment. That
singular fact is that nothing is done in this
country as it was done twenty years ago.
We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from
the past. The life of America is not the life that
it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it
was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas
do not fit the present problems; they read now
like documents taken out of a forgotten age.
The older cries sound as if they belonged to
a past age which men have almost forgotten.
Things which used to be put into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated
if put into a platform now. We are facing the
necessity of fitting a new social organization,
as we did once fit the old organization, to the
happiness and prosperity of the great body
of citizens; for we are conscious that the new
order of society has not been made to fit and
provide the convenience or prosperity of the
average man. The life of the nation has grown
infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon
questions of governmental structure or of the
distribution of governmental powers. It centres
upon questions of the very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is
only the instrument. Our development has run
so fast and so far along the lines sketched in
the earlier day of constitutional definition, has
so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled
upon them such novel structures of trust and
combination, has elaborated within them a life
so manifold, so full of forces which transcend
the boundaries of the country itself and fill the
eyes of the world, that a new nation seems to
have been created which the old formulas do
not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.
We have come upon a very different age

from any that preceded us. We have come upon

an age when we do not do business in the way
in which we used to do business,when we do
not carry on any of the operations of manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to carry them on. There is a
sense in which in our day the individual has
been submerged. In most parts of our country
men work, not for themselves, not as partners
in the old way in which they used to work, but
generally as employees,in a higher or lower
grade,of great corporations. There was a time
when corporations played a very minor part
in our business affairs, but now they play the
chief part, and most men are the servants of
corporations.
You know what happens when you are the
servant of a corporation. You have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not to
do, you really have no voice in the matter and
must obey the orders, and you have oftentimes
with deep mortification to co-operate in the
doing of things which you know are against the
public interest. Your individuality is swallowed
up in the individuality and purpose of a great
organization.
It is true that, while most men are thus
submerged in the corporation, a few, a very
few, are exalted to a power which as individuals they could never have wielded. Through
the great organizations of which they are the
heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything in history in the control
of the business operations of the country and
in the determination of the happiness of great
numbers of people.
Yesterday, and ever since history began,
men were related to one another as individuals.
To be sure there were the family, the Church,
and the State, institutions which associated
men in certain wide circles of relationship. But
in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary

work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and

directly with one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great
impersonal concerns, with organizations, not
with other individual men.
Now this is nothing short of a new social
age, a new era of human relationships, a new
stage-setting for the drama of life. Some of the
biggest men in the United States, in the field
of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of
somebody, are afraid of something. They know
that there is a power somewhere so organized,
so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not
speak above their breath when they speak in
condemnation of it.
They know that America is not a place of
which it can be said, as it used to be, that a
man may choose his own calling and pursue it
just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue
it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields,
there are organizations which will use means
against him that will prevent his building up a
business which they do not want to have built
up; organizations that will see to it that the
ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to
certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the
monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers,
and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new
mans wares.
And this is the country which has lifted to
the admiration of the world its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be under any limitation except the
limitations of his character and of his mind;
where there is supposed to be no distinction
of class, no distinction of blood, no distinction
of social status, but where men win or lose on
their merits.
I lay it very close to my own conscience
as a public man whether we can any longer
stand at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon those terms. American industry is not
free, as once it was free; American enterprise
is not free; the man with only a little capital is
finding it harder to get into the field, more and
more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do
not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.
That is the reason, and because the strong have
crushed the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this country.
No man can deny that the lines of endeavor

have more and more narrowed and stiffened;

no man who knows anything about the development of industry in this country can have
failed to observe that the larger kinds of credit
are more and more difficult to obtain, unless
you obtain them upon the terms of uniting your
efforts with those who already control the industries of the country; and nobody can fail to
observe that any man who tries to set himself
up in competition with any process of manufacture which has been taken under the control
of large combinations of capital will presently
find himself either squeezed out or obliged to
sell and allow himself to be absorbed.
There is a great deal that needs reconstruction in the United States. I should like to
take a census of the business men,I mean
the rank and file of the business men,as to
whether they think that business conditions in
this country, or rather whether the organization of business in this country, is satisfactory or not. I know what they would say if they
dared. If they could vote secretly they would
vote overwhelmingly that the present organization of business was meant for the big fellows
and was not meant for the little fellows; that
it was meant for those who are at the top and
was meant to exclude those who are at the bottom; that it was meant to shut out beginners,
to prevent new entries in the race, to prevent
the building up of competitive enterprises that
would interfere with the monopolies which the
great trusts have built up.
What this country needs above everything
else is a body of laws which will look after the
men who are on the make rather than the men
who are already made. Because the men who
are already made are not going to live indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to
leave sons as able and as honest as they are.
The originative part of America, the part
of America that makes new enterprises, the
part into which the ambitious and gifted
workingman makes his way up, the class that
saves, that plans, that organizes, that presently
spreads its enterprises until they have a
national scope and character,that middle
class is being more and more squeezed out by
the processes which we have been taught to
call processes of prosperity. Its members are
sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms
me is that they are not originating prosperity.
No country can afford to have its prosperity
originated by a small controlling class. The

treasury of America does not lie in the brains

of the small body of men now in control of the
great enterprises that have been concentrated
under the direction of a very small number of
persons. The treasury of America lies in those
ambitions, those energies, that cannot be
restricted to a special favored class. It depends
upon the inventions of unknown men, upon
the originations of unknown men, upon the
ambitions of unknown men. Every country is
renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not
out of the ranks of those already famous and
powerful and in control.
There has come over the land that unAmerican set of conditions which enables a small
number of men who control the government to
get favors from the government; by those favors
to exclude their fellows from equal business
opportunity; by those favors to extend a
network of control that will presently dominate
every industry in the country, and so make
men forget the ancient time when America lay
in every hamlet, when America was to be seen

in every fair valley, when America displayed

her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her
fine fires of enterprise up over the mountainsides and down into the bowels of the earth,
and eager men were everywhere captains of
industry, not employees; not looking to a distant
city to find out what they might do, but looking
about among their neighbors, finding credit
according to their character, not according to
their connections, finding credit in proportion
to what was known to be in them and behind
them, not in proportion to the securities they
held that were approved where they were not
known. In order to start an enterprise now,
you have to be authenticated, in a perfectly
impersonal way, not according to yourself, but
according to what you own that somebody else
approves of your owning. You cannot begin
such an enterprise as those that have made
America until you are so authenticated, until
you have succeeded in obtaining the good-will
of large allied capitalists. Is that freedom? That
is dependence, not freedom.

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person

who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote
'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that
life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.
The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself
the same way a trapped person will eventually
jump from the window of a burning high-rise.
Make no mistake about people who leap from
burning windows. Their terror of falling from
a great height is still just as great as it would

be for you or me standing speculatively at the

same window just checking out the view; i.e. the
fear of falling remains a constant. The variable
here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when
the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can
understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to
have personally been trapped and felt flames to
really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Trust math. As in Matics, Math E.

First-order predicate logic. Never fail
you. Quantities and their relation.
Rates of change. The vital statistics of
God or equivalent. When all else fails.
When the boulders slid all the way
back to the bottom. When the headless
are blaming. When you do not know
your way about. You can fall back and
regroup around math. Whose truth is

deductive truth. Independent of sense

or emotionality. The syllogism. The
identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity.
Heavens theme song. The night light on
lifes dark wall, late at night. Heavens
recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The
methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not
mortal. What it is is: listen: its true.

the

Entertainment

David Foster Wallace

Its of some interest that the lively arts

of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and
internal emptiness as hip and cool. Its maybe
the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of
Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness
or hip ennui. Maybe its the fact that most of
the arts here are produced by world-weary and
sophisticated older people and then consumed
by younger people who not only consume art
but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip and keep in mind that, for kids and younger
people, to be hip and cool is the same as to
be admired and accepted and included and so
Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. Its
more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that
the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once weve hit
this age, we will now give or take anything,
wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone,
we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young
age where the face is fictile enough to assume

the shape of whatever it wears. And then its

stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us
from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated
naivete. Sentiment equals navet on this continent... ...Hal, whos empty but not dumb,
theorizes privately that what passes for hip
cynical transcendence of sentiment is really
some kind of fear of being really human,
since to be really human (at least as
he conceptualizes it) is probably
to be unavoidably sentimental
and naive and goo-prone
and generally pathetic, is
to be in some basic interior
way forever infantile, some sort
of not-quite-right-looking infant
dragging itself anaclitically around the
map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft
skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is
the way he despises what it is hes really lonely
for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of
sentiment and need, that pules and writhes
just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

....the Crocodiles say they can't even

begin to say how many new guys they've seen
Come In and then get sucked back Out There,
Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and
put together a little sober time and have things
start to get better, head-wise and life-qualitywise, and after a while the new guys get
cocky, they decide they've gotten `Well,' and
they get really busy at the new job sobriety's
allowed them to get, or maybe they buy
season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover
pussy and start chasing pussy (these
withered
gnarled
toothless
totally post-sexual old fuckers
actually say pussy), but one
way or another these poor
cocky clueless new bastards
start gradually drifting away
from rabid Activity In The Group,
and then away from their Group itself,
and then little by little gradually drift
away from any AA meetings at all, and then,
without the protection of meetings or a Group,
in time--oh there's always plenty of time, the
Disease is fiendishly patient--how in time
they forget what it was like, the ones that've
cockily drifted, they forget who and what they
are, they forget about the Disease, until like
one day they're at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers
game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate

Center's hot, and they think what could just

one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time,
now that they've gotten `Well.' Just one cold
one. What could it hurt. And after that one
it's like they'd never stopped, if they've got the
Disease. And how in a month or six months
or a year they have to Come Back In, back
to the Boston AA halls and their old Group,
tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging
down around their knees all over again, or
maybe it's five or ten years before they can get
it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or
else their system isn't ready for the recurred
abuse again after some sober time and they die
Out There--the Crocodiles are always talking
in hushed, 'Nam-like tones about Out There-or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in
a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in
MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented
in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what
they did to get in there, Out There; or else, worst
of all, these cocky new guys drift back Out
There and have nothing sufficiently horrible
to Finish them happen at all, just go back to
drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars,
undead, back in the Disease's cage all over
again. The Crocodiles talk about how they
can't count the number of guys that've Come
In for a while and drifted away and gone back
Out There and died, or not gotten to die.

What

do you get when you

cross an insomniac, a troubled

agnostic, and a dyslexic?

What do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,

and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you

cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What

do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,

a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you

cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What
do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic,
and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac,
a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you
cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do
you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a
dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an insomniac, a troubled
agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get when you cross an
insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic? What do you get
when you cross an insomniac, a troubled agnostic, and a dyslexic?

Someone

who stays up all night

wondering if there is a dog.

US LIVING AS WE DO
AND THE WORD TO HAVE
IS REVOLUTION
BECAUSE GODS HOLE CARD
HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY
PIQUED THE YOUNGSTERS
WHO WERE PROGRAMMED
TO KEEP FUCKING
WOKE UP ONE NIGHT

WE realized
Every oval
office needs
a mistress

And america is now

blood and tears instead
of milk and honey hosed
down daily with gagging
perfume / america was a
bastard the illegitimate
daughter of the mother
country whose legs were
then spread around the
world

A RAPIST KNOWN AS FREEDOM THEN FREE-DOOM

ALL I WANT
IS A GOOD
HOME AND
A WIFE AND
CHILDREN
AND FOOD
TO FEED
THEM

AMERICA MADE POSSIBLE WITH:

PANTONE

PANTONE

PANTONE

1861 C
Slave Blood Red

1950 C
Wasp White

1779 C
Shining Sea Blue