lol, i am not shitting you!

backstory: for a time i lived in a federal congressional district in a part of the country that has been subject to The Eye of Sauron / Capitalist Shithammer for a long time. it was one of the few and first places in the US to spontaneously develop a series of multiracial, anti-capitalist and militant armed insurrections. prison labor camps were liberated, stockades were burned, deputized thugs and strikebreakers were run off. eventually, the president had the military deploy some of the first military aircraft to drop explosives and chemical weapons on the striking workers and the communities that supported them. the strikes were eventually broken and the series of events has mostly been memory-holed under a project of national forgetting, the communities punished with deprivation and ruthless austerity while unfathomable riches were ripped away, poisoning their land and water. on top of this, the mass cultural products of the last 100 years spread around by capitalist media characterize the people and places as being savage, primitive, genetically inferior, and guilty of all manner of moral deviancy.

so after a hundred years of that, one can imagine this is a place people leave in great numbers. it has been and still is administered to be as miserable as possible by corrupt officials and purposely underdeveloped despite the incredible influx of public funding into the area… that somehow never reaches or helps actual people. not to mention, the easy resources have all been extracted with much of the old labor needs dislocated due to environmentally devastating mechanized extraction, so the prospect of work is limited. the young people with options flee. there are certainly enough people to maintain what extractive projects are still in place, but the federal representative that has lorded over this apocalyptic space, having grown very powerful within the institution over the last decades, was forecast to lose his district in a merger due to it falling below a minimum population requirement.

that’s when he shifted gears to court the carceral apparatus. a few prisons later, and his district is safe and his political machine is institutionally invincible. he’s one of the most evil and powerful motherfuckers in american government and practically nobody has heard of him. he has been re-elected 21 times and holds all the purse strings. the guy has multiple highways and bridges named after him, despite not being dead or retired. that is uncommon in the US. representatives on both sides of the aisle complain about how he redirects massive federal money to his own political machine in defiance of logic and common sense, but no one is crazy enough to challenge him. his name is hal rogers and he is the Wizard of Shit.