"A caudillo (Spanish: [kawˈðiʎo]; Old Spanish: cabdillo, from Latin
capitellum, diminutive of caput "head") is a type of personalist
leader wielding military and political power."
Wikipedia

 

I was tired and hungover today.  Not from drugs or alcohol, but from a night of placing my faith in this world.  I listened to music, and imagined for a moment that God didn't call me down here to rest, after years of aggressive circumstantial instability and stress.  The effects of the relapse were devastating.  Even just imagining a world in which you filled in the blank space occupied by these words with a sentiment that would sound whiny and bitter to most people lit me up like a Christmas tree from hell, and I was up way too late listening to Dropkick Murphys and imagining a humanist paradise in which I was allowed to actually sing.  To Christians and pagans alike.

Paradise, indeed.

So why am I not up there killing it?

I was.

Don't you remember?

 

"I've learned five thousand times or more
To trust you ain't no use"
Dropkick Murphys

 

The reasons for my self-imposed and restful exile are starting to creep out of the shadows.  The death and hell we've all been waiting for are becoming more visible by the hour.  Be very careful which Christian YT rabbit trail you follow, but I can't find anybody up there who actually believes the United States is going to survive until November.  I mean, I'm actually rooting for the Hell's Angels to do what nobody else seems willing to do, and take care of business in Colorado this week.  That isn't good.  And let's take a worst-case scenario in which an obvious, beyond obvious, absurdly obviously-mindless DEI sock puppet like "Kamala Harris," who is such a pre-emptive national disgrace I can't even write her name without framing it in scare quotes, actually assumes the profoundly unearned, apparently-meaningless title of "President of the United States," by whatever means her handlers deem necessary...  I mean,

You think Mexico is dangerous?

I can't even finish the thought.

It makes me sick.

"It Will Always Be Too Late For Us" is a funeral dirge for love.  It appears on my album Love is Wasted, which title was inspired by decades of experience in the real world.  "It Will Always Be Too Late For Us" is a morbidly depressing piece of songwriting, but I think it makes a suitable music video for the future of America, which was filmed in 1973 during the Chilean presidential coup.  If you don't know anything about it, the Chilean military, led by Augusto Pinochet, seized control of the seat of government power in Santiago.  They employed shock troops and air strikes, and rounded up subversives of every stripe.  The attack resulted in the death of the sitting president, a socialist named Salvador Allende.  Allende was friendly with Justin Trudeau's father, who advised him to "not engage in extreme revolutionary acts which would give opponents an excuse to wreck or seize control of the economy, and maintain a proper relationship with the Chilean military until local militias could be established and consolidated" (Wikipedia).

Pretend you're someone you're not, and cozy up to your armed opponents until you are strong enough to overcome them, basically.

This photo shows two members of the Santiago chapter of the Hell's Angels building a scale model of Sodom and Gomorrah in the streets of the capital.  The soldiers built a replica of the doomed cities by burning a pile of socialist literature and gay children's books in the middle of the street.  The smoke of the torment of the subversives and degenerates trapped in the burning pages of the buildings could be seen for miles.

Two mommies for Maria?

Not in my town.

My take on the Chilean government coup of 1973 is an undecided one.  While I hesitate to paint Pinochet as an outright fascist, since he arguably saved his country from descending into a post-socialist Venezuelan hell, the muted screams of tens of thousands of Chilean citizens are impossible to ignore.  Pinochet's troops used the local football stadium as a makeshift detention center, Katrina style, and tortured and executed many people without due process.  The death of Victor Jara, in particular, provided the left with the kind of high-profile martyr it lusts after.  A Chilean songwriter who wrote that "no cannon will erase the groove of the rice paddy" of the "poet Ho Chi Minh," Victor Jara was executed a month after the coup.

What a mess.  It seems like everyone on every side was wrong about something.  Extrajudicial, communist-style roundups and executions?  The poet Ho Chi Minh?

What a mess.  All I see are grey areas.  

Will America be next?

Depending which American Caudillo wins the election in November, I would be very happy to return to work as a singer in a humanist paradise populated by Christians and pagans who respect the other person's right to be wrong about things.  If you can keep your wrongness out of my face and away from kids and animals, and if you can respect my wrongness, feel free to practice your own brand of wrongness in the consensual confines of your own private life.  And I will do the same.

Of course, it might be too late.  As Chile taught us in the 70s, the most confusing wrongness possible can be most easily achieved by people who can't possibly be wrong.  To believe that Ho Chi Minh was a poet and that communism is a noble human goal, it is necessary for one to never consider the possibility one is wrong.  To execute your political opponents without due process, it is necessary to never be wrong about anything at any point in your life, ever.  History's worst monsters all possess the clarity of wrongness necessary to commit atrocities.  The nearsighted omnibliviousness of the world's greatest dupes is always forged in a pure, airless vacuum of perspective.  To achieve the sanctified purity of oblivion, it is necessary for the heart and mind of the believer to never be adulterated by an honest, doubtful thought.  Jesus Himself said to "Seek and ye shall find" (Matthew 7:7), which is the opposite of "blindly believe and ye shall find."  To seek means to ask.  Jesus is telling us to ask, so that we may find something to believe in.  Not to believe things out of tradition, or boredom, or convenience.

He is telling us to ask.

Am I wrong?  Is Jesus God?  Was Ho Chi Minh a poet?  Was Pinochet a dictator?  Is Justin Trudeau the bastard son of a Cuban revolutionary?  Is "Kamala Harris" the greatest insult ever unleashed on the American people?  What about Trump?  Is he literally Hitler?

Am I?

Am I ready to meet the angel of death?  Perhaps tomorrow night?  Or sooner?

It may be too late for us.

It really might.

I was relieved to repent of the daydream of the world, and re-align myself with Christ.  There's an old hymn that says, "I'd rather have Jesus than to open for the Dropkick Murphys until they're opening for me."  It was written in 1902 by an Irish immigrant to Heaven, who finally understood the parable of the pearl of great price.  Caudillos come and go, but the Word endures forever.

Seek and ye shall find.

It Will Always Be Too Late For Us

Time is running out of the window
like a raven from Heaven
going home forever

My heart has grown colder
and I'm older
than the rest of the world
combined

I don't understand
why you can't just take my hand
and follow me down
through the pleasure and torment
awaiting us there
in our careless dreams

But there's hope
at the end of the tunnel
and someday the sun'll
devour us all

And the pain
as our blood starts to burn
and our bones turn to dust
it will always be
too late for us

What does it matter
if we tried
if it brought us to this—
this dead-end of endless dead
and loneliness?

And love,
the ostensible answer,
insensible master
of some other world

And if light never speaks,
but only shines,
cover your eyes
smother the sparks
and close the blinds

 

©2017 Nathan Payne