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Friday, June 13, 2008

The Decline and Fall of the Exile

posted by on June 13 at 12:15 PM

Ryan already covered the shutdown of the Exile, the Moscow-based, American-written biweekly that Mark Ames, the Editor-in-Chief, described as “a low-tech suicide bomb designed to destroy our journalism careers and take down a few assholes with us.”

I’ve always loved the Exile. In the aftermath of the 2004 election, the Stranger wrote Urban Archipelago issue. Too extreme? The Exile replied, Gas Middle America:

The awful reality is that George W. Bush won by 4 million votes. No, the awful reality is that he got any votes at all — but he did… he won the popular vote. He won a mandate. He won — get it? Bush won! They voted for him, the stupid fucking suckers, after he gave them four years of the most shocking warp-speed national decline since Franz Josef abdicated. There is nothing normal or sane about what these Americans did. There is no way to spin that. It’s just nauseating, sphincter-twisting, horrifyingly stupid and evil. So the coastal elite — and we are an elite, thank god (what moron wouldn’t want to be part of the elite? “Hey, I’m not elite, I’m akshully jus’ a fuckin’ stupid piece of shit chump who gits used by the elite, ‘n by gum that’s how’s I likes it!”) — and the Democrats and everyone with a brain should stop flogging themselves or falsely localizing blame on a clique of evil Republican operatives who manipulated Middle America, and put the blame where the blame lies — on the 59,000,000 fucks who voted to destroy America. And don’t just blame those 59,000,000 fucks, but blame their families, their friends, their dogs and cats, their furniture, and everything they ever touched, smelled, peed on, or otherwise left DNA samples in. They all have to go. Every last one of ‘em. We don’t like the thought of all that collateral damage that nuking or gassing Middle America would bring, but…aw shit, who are we foolin’ here? We LOVE the thought of all that collateral damage, we DREAM about it! We’re sorry for the 30-40 percent who voted blue in the red states — just like we’re sorry about Dresden and Hamburg, and lose sleep over it every night. That is to say, if you stay there, you’re no longer innocent. Collateral damage in Fallujah is depressing— but collateral damage in Alabama, a giant welfare queen state sucking from the liberal pro-Kerry states’ tax dollars? A few Trident II’s oughtta turn ‘Bama into a Crimson Tide of Manhattan Chowder. M’m-m’m tasty!

Let’s not whitewash what this election was about. It was about racism, bigotry and Fascism. In fact the South and Midwest, taken as a “nation,” are the last and only Fascist state left in the white world, an incompetent and vulgar Fascism, without brains and without uniforms. Many of them are openly proud of this fact. They voted for a doomed war, against progress, against modernity and against culture. They are driven by envy and cult superstition and hate. And they want to slaughter other people to make up for the fact that they cannot produce anything of value, that they are nothing but welfare queens and cheap labor whose only consolations is that they aren’t niggers, queers, spics, or…well, they don’t openly hate Jews so much anymore, but their newfound bizarre embrace of Israel and Jews is every bit as sick as their former anti-Semitism.

When I started writing my science column about a year ago, the War Nerd column was a pretty big inspiration—hilarious, informative and insightful.

So, if you’ve every wondered how a government goes about shutting down a paper, check out Mark Ames’ posts on Radar’s blog.

At 11 a.m., four officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage arrived—the men in shabby Bolsheviki suits, and a squat middle-age woman with pudgy arms and hands that pinched the seams of her wrists. On the advice of a Russian attorney, we greeted them with a box of dark chocolates. It was solid advice, and probably did more to protect us than a hundred attorneys’ briefs could have…. The varied emotional responses to the meeting were interesting. The Westerners, who until last week supported our paper and kept it alive, immediately cut all ties with us, so they weren’t there. The younger Russians on our staff were relatively calm about it. But when our Soviet-era accountant opened the office door and saw the four squat figures in bad official Soviet outfits, she turned white and vanished, the door closing on its own. When our middle-age courier arrived, she too turned white, stopped, then put her head down and walked past us, crossing herself three hurried times in the Orthodox Christian fashion before locking herself in the design room. You have to understand, to anyone with a memory of the Soviet era, those bad suits that the officials wore are extremely menacing, like red stripes on a reptile.

Great stuff. An excellent preview for the demise of the Stranger during Jenna Bush’s first term as supreme president of the homeland.

RSS icon Comments

1


eXile's downfall has always been that it's just too subtle.

Posted by Original Andrew | June 13, 2008 1:18 PM
2

Good. So now we can go in and invade Russia to bring Freedom and Democracy to a nation that has officially given up, because that's what we do with nations like that, isn't it? Isn't it?

Posted by DavidG | June 13, 2008 1:31 PM
3

Ha, Andrew! I love the Exile precisely because its utter lack of tact or subtly. Another classic from them? Cleanse the World. When one writes this bluntly it's satire, making pathos of the present feel like a splash of cold water to the face.

DavidG: This is our future. The Exile could only be taken down when the Russian government finally figured the American government really doesn't give a shit about its citizens or "honored principles." Did you know that a US congressman asked the Russian government to crack down on Ames? Awesome!

I have a feeling the First Amendment will meet the Roberts court with an unpleasant smash--meeting the same fate as the fourth and fifth amendments.

Posted by Jonathan Golob | June 13, 2008 1:46 PM
4

All hail Jenna! Come to the ranch where we roast...oops, I mean toast gay marriage.

Posted by Vince | June 13, 2008 2:11 PM
5

Damn. Welcome to Putin's Russia. The Exile was great while it lasted---who could forget their recording of "Straight Outta Grozny"?

Posted by Toe Tag | June 13, 2008 2:14 PM
6

Jonathan Golob @ 3,

Did you read Vlad's Daily Gloat?

Now that was subtle...

Posted by Original Andrew | June 13, 2008 2:25 PM
7

59 million people voted for Bush out of over 300 million? Why is this man president?

Posted by yucca flower | June 13, 2008 2:30 PM

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