Douche Thrills

Covid appears to be settling in for the long haul, so there will be no decent interval observed before full resumption of clown-world identity politics (no social distancing for social justice, alas), as we've seen with the budding Ahmaud Arbery hoax. I suspect that, as after 9/11, it will come back with a vengeance.

Comparing Covid with 9/11 is a good measure of the extent of our disintegration as a nation; briefly after the latter there was a sense that we would finally come together as a nation. Now that initial moment of unity, false or not, isn't even possible.

We were collectively faced with a threat from without, a la President Reagan's cold war era "alien invasion" scenario and I thought I sensed even in liberals the hope it would end the misguided direction of American "civil rights"--just as they once hoped AIDS would calm our sexual chaos.

(We see how that all fared now.)



The press seized on this speech as further proof of Reagan's bumptiousness. Sadly their mockery has been borne out by 9/11 and now Covid; Reagan was naïve. But the very cynicism with which his statement was met is the same that renders it naïve: even an alien invasion would not dilute their disdain for Reagan and those he represents.

That cynicism still defines our politics. The same class mocking Reagan now hangs on every Trump utterance for no reason other than to sink him, finally. They were right about Reagan, but his naivete was the lesser part to their malice.

If alien invaders ever showed up, you can bet they'll be met upon landing by a contingent looking to ally with them in their fight against white supremacy and patriarchy (there's a story idea).

Like General Casey fretting our marvelous diversity might end up in a pool of blood like Major Hasan's victims, some are now saying it would be a shame to conquer Covid only to strengthen the patrarchy:

And yet, even these lifelong battles for a place in science have left us unprepared for the gendered and racial inequalities we have experienced in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The worst impacts of the coronavirus will undoubtedly be the loss of lives, the collapse of economies, the disruption of humanitarian aid and the decay of democracies. But we fear that the hard-won progress for women in science will be collateral damage of this crisis.

In the spirit of generosity I went looking for something I could agree with in the above piece. Maybe this:

…men’s voices are being amplified over expert women because they have been identified through informal male networks, or have blustered their way in to social media and TV interviews and are therefore perceived as “high profile”.

Okay. now we're on to something. I think we can appease this woman. How about if we get rid of this guy?

Maybe the girls just need to work on their hair more.

The lady-doctor complaining the crisis is shaking up her field, causing some to distinguish themselves and others to fall out along predictably disparate lines, is ironically complaining that nature (in the form of Covid) is making a mockery of her socially constructed equality in the natural sciences.

Toqueville would recognize it for what it is:

"Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man."

The uncomfortable implication of seeing nature avenge herself for diversity in the present crisis is that it must always be wringing out its vengeance, less dramatically but society-wide, in our environment of imposed diversity and equity.

And as Covid and the attendant economic depression progress and less and less mediocrity and waste is sustainable, we can expect many more of these laments, on behalf of a variety of groups finding their uselessness suddenly exposed.

Nothing is ever all bad. They might even lose.

"Time is on their side, yes it is..."

The one thing the layman can trust is he can't trust the experts. Because they don't trust him.

Experts, if they aren't fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.

There's a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society's energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest--the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.

The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.

It's not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign--that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.

How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?

Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people--us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.

They want you to "shelter in place" because they don't trust you to carry out basic instructions.

Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let's not expect it. But it's becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counterproductive:

...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.

This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.

They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%.

The elite's reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing--recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.

But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It's like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.

The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring "science" and valuing "jobs" over "lives".

That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.

Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.

Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?

Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it's acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can't have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.

Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:

American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country's unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns
Eight 'pandemic profiteers' have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic. 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company's staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company's day-to-day running. 

According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent

Time is on the side of the powerful.

For some reason I flashed on this scene from the film Creepshow



Our elite is betting they can hold their breath a long, long time.

Playing Chicken with the Global Elite

The powers that be have determined the shutdown hurts you (evil white middle class America) more than it hurts them. Thus the increasingly partisan debate over shutdowns.

I wanted to argue there's a cost in mortality to such as the depression we're foisting on ourselves. But apparently it isn't that clear-cut. In 2009 researchers went looking for presumed increased mortality during the Great Depression (as I just did in finding them), but instead found that

 Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

The last twenty years of economic expansion have been awful for white Americans generally and good for every one else. The White Death and declining white life expectancy alongside the growth in population (and malice) of non-whites have been its hallmarks.

Diversity's economic component is akin to a financialization scam, where clever bankers find some previously unmolested source of wealth--in this case the white middle class--and rationalize into existence some vehicle by which it is looted. Diversity and inclusion are as mortgage backed securities and junk bonds. They're also bubbles.

I still think it's probably naive to think a prolonged economic depression will be good for white America, considering the condition we're in approaching it and the fact we have no advocates, still. The increased mortality of the economic "good times" may simply be a result of so much more activity taking place; for one instance, there will be many more fatal accidents. Of course, there are certainly many more people working, and partying, themselves to death.

Nonetheless, while we should resist whatever "new normal" any bastard using the phrase intends for us, we should remember always--old normal was bad for us. And getting worse.

Hope rises.

When the masks go on, the Mask comes off

The Atlantic takes advantage of the present crisis to go all in:

Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs... 

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them...

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

Ironically if it's eventually decided by the right people the virus didn't originate in the wet markets of Wuhan this article will be arguing for its own censorship.

Author Jack Goldsmith argues for using the Covid response to make permanent and official the private sector's censorship of genuine dissent because of the fake news and Russian interference canards.

Goldsmith is author of another piece for the Atlantic, " The Cost of Trump’s Attacks on the FBI".
Yes, the same FBI recently exposed for framing General Flynn--in its attempt to get Trump. Not that anyone is paying attention, but the argument and source are laughable.

He goes on to cheer the privatization of censorship via information monopoly, acknowledging the long complaint of the censored right: of course, and it's a very good thing, now that the social media oligopoly is working together like one giant Ministry of Truth.

Lain aside as no longer necessary are the fallacious place-holder appeals, "if it isn't government it isn't censorship" and "build your own platforms"; already some feel safe not even pretending these were offered in good faith.

What in the effing hell is going on over at The Atlantic?

The Covid crisis is on track to end in a social and political catastrophe that will have little to do with the initial health crisis.

The Absolute State of Oregon

Reporting on the protests against Oregon governor Kate Smith's continuing coronavirus lockdown today May 2, 2020.

Drag-free Story Hour: A Boomer Tale

The Golden Years
a scene



Above is the first installment of my (hopefully) weekly story hour where I read an original work of fiction. Here I'm reading the story below, "Day of the Red Eye", so you don't have to!

Day of the Red Eye

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.

Rapper Tha Prince was history's single most famous person.

No name or image before his had ever been as familiar to as many. The details of a personal life had never been so widely revealed and examined--and much of it in the moment, broadcast live in "real time".

Cameras followed Tha everywhere, always. The first performer to amass a fortune in the tens of billions he was an industry unto himself; his very minutes were processed and packaged and delivered in a variety of forms to waiting media nodes, where they were consumed daily. As one of Tha's management team (he called them his "hebros") noted, its model was the food distribution system, daily sending out trucks with perishable goods.

His lyrics and random musings were the subject of several college courses and analyzed like a sort of daily gospel stream, despite their stupidity and incoherence. His insubstantial expressions would have floated away on the breeze like spores if not for the weighty anchor of his popularity. Between the global wrath of his admirers and his economic might, Tha crushed all dissent. None dared note his lack of intelligence, the garbled, inarticulate speech (the absurdity of his Nobel for literature!), his child-like narcissism, his celebration of violence and street crime.

The legend of his genius was sacrosanct. That he wrote and produced his entire fourth album in his head down to the minutest detail was not just believed, it was received gratefully, confirming the selection of Tha as prophet.

And his wouldn't be the first prophet's life shrouded in questionable myth--as his intellectual apologists pointed out. Making people believe Jesus walked on water was a greater feat than Jesus walking on water--the former being the whole point, whereas the latter, if not witnessed, would have been pointless.

Besides, what god worth his salt can't walk on water? But, for a mere mortal to make the world believe he does? There's an achievement.

That Tha's work and life were of a seamless whole was one of two core tenets to which he held true, the other being his celebration of greed. He praised money as a means to power and revolutionary change in his work but his actions belied little genuine interest--he was a coveted but stingy and unreliable political donor to causes familiar and trendy.

Why in the first place he would be interested in a revolution overturning this world he bestrode like a colossus did not even occur to the people. That this contradiction was lost on them was an unappreciated feat, a sort of negative miracle of which no one was more oblivious than Tha himself: this novel prophet had made the seeing blind.

This is not to say he was without talent. His forays outside of music were all genuine, not simply the lending of his name, and they were all equally successful. He was an auteur carrying his own distinct aesthetic across various media.

He was known for his love of the bizarre hybrid and curious deformity. His work skirted the morbid and grotesque, stopping just short of repulsing a long-jaded public, no mean feat.

Despite his lyrics lacking all nuance, their true novelty was lost in all the reverential praise. He didn't employ transgressive humor, joking about violence or sex (or violence and sex) to outrage, no, he blended humor and violence and sex in a way that you didn't know where one left off and the other began. To Tha saying violence was fun was like saying sex was fun.

To him violence wasn't fun; violence was joyous.

Domination achieved by violence and maintained by cruelty as the highest good, as religious ecstasy; this was his theme, and message--the most successful and least understood artist, and prophet, of all time.

On the day Tha's fashion label Red Masque launched its spring line with the usual hype, a university researcher on the other side of the world squinted through a microscope at a soft red bloom. A local doctor had sent the sample, unable to explain an alarming nerve disorder among workers at a textile mill.

Slight tremors announced its onset, felt most acutely around the soft tissue of the eyes, which soon became painfully sensitive to light. All sensation gradually intensified, becoming unbearable. Sound became amplified and shrill. Sufferers reported everything tasted of ash, even the air.

All the while the tremors progressed gradually into violent convulsions. Eventually the victim thrashed about as if in comic dance, arms and legs flailing with an electric, tremulous action, often injuring himself to the point of incapacity--a blessing as only in the final stage would the most horrifying aspect reveal itself when the eyes, their whites turned red from burst blood vessels, bulged and pressed forward, illuminated and pulsing with a neon glow (possibly bacterial bioluminescent luciferase) before death's merciful release.

"The Red Eye", as it came to be known, took just 24 hours from first sign to death; with a curious precision, no cases varied more than a few seconds from this mandate.

Early on one of Tha's hebros, before the true threat of the disease was known, called it a "happy accident" that at the same time their spring line employed as a recurring motif a sort of rose bloom, its center subtly suggesting an eye, with jagged petals above blending below into a pattern of red tears. "Instant notoriety," he said approvingly.

He had no idea: examining the work more closely one might have gleaned Tha's meaning--and here he had been unusually focused. Transfixed by the image of a viral host cell, the work started developing in Tha's mind as if of its own accord. Had he the awareness he would have described being under the influence of genuine inspiration.

Each successive item of apparel in his runway show represented a visual analogy of the next stage of a virus' progress in capturing a host cell and reproducing itself, culminating in the final piece of apparel Tha modeled himself.
Tha's spring line was a celebration of contagion, representing Tha as a benign viral agent in divine turnabout capturing the culture of the Man, enslaving it and forcing it to turn out endless copies of Tha. Only he knew what he specifically meant in titling the show "Positively Spring".

The speed and certainty of the disease's course meant all lived under the threat of violent expulsion from society at a moment's notice. Anyone visibly trembling in public would throw anyone near into a panic; the universal response was to run away--if one could. If one couldn't, all manner of unfortunate acts of desperation could and did happen, as in the case of a man pushed in front of a subway car by commuters wielding clubs and bars and whatever they could grab to avoid touching him. Many cases of mistaken, rash actions taken against such as epileptics or anyone with a physical condition causing tremors--one young woman narrowly escaped a mob after shivering excessively in the cold--were recorded in the few days before everything fell apart and normal life ceased entirely.

Heartbreaking stories of family or friends abandoned in an instant, and of those who refused to abandon their fellows, abounded. Often a good soul would recognize the onset of the Red Eye and flee--bravely running away, shouting warning. In the end many more jumped than were pushed before subway cars. The horror brought out the best and worst in us.

Within a week of the Red Eye dropping Tha Prince convened the hebros.

"It's good to own an island." One of them offered. A look from Tha revealed he had forgotten about it.

"Two years ago. You may recall, we were thinking about making it an offshore pay-per-view site when regulators were still giving us trouble over Combat Sports League.

"E's been using it for his private parties, you know, and while that's been a negligible source of revenue for us he has built the place up. Well, it's just sitting there. It's got a small hospital we were going to use for fights; E even had a little dentist's office set up there. It's got a good airstrip. Still, we'll have to build it up quickly, of course, but it's a great start. Then there's the question of who we'll, of who you'll bring along." 

These last words fell like train cars off a cliff into the tense silence of the videolink.

Tha grunted for him to continue.

"We could outfit the place to survive indefinitely with what we've already laid by as far as food and basics--longer-term, should the need arise, there's arable land, good fishing and even some game running around--we could stock a lot more. We've got cattle in our holdings already without a market--we're slaughtering loads of them just to clear the books right now."

"Well, what we waiting for?"

Creating Tha's island was a logistical project on the scale of a military invasion.
Cargo planes flew round the clock. A motley fleet of private planes joined in--their owners angling for a spot on the island. Unauthorized planes, boats and others tried to crash the island--but Tha's team had put a crack security force in place first thing. Showing what cooperation can achieve, ex-officers of the Israeli Air Defense Command worked amicably with former Iranian naval officers, whose speedboats boasted a perfect record at intercepting boats, rafts, low-flying aircraft, two gliders and one innertube.

In flowed the pilgrims, beginning with the hebros and their families; then those upon whom Tha saw fit to bestow the blessing, his friends and their families, but not all, alas (there were so many!); and then the ranks of the useful: the "hoes", women all selected for a particular body type and look; there were performers such as dancers, musicians, DJs, acrobats and clowns.

There were people selected for necessary practical talents, such as doctors (no need to establish a lawyer quota, one of the hebros joked), electricians and engineers, chefs, mechanics and technicians. There were no writers or critics.

They brought sound equipment and lighting, for there would be shows; a pot farm and a chemical laboratory were transferred whole; they tried transporting a small amusement park but ran out of time. There was a brief attempt at a reality show competition for slots on the island, but things broke down too quickly.

Thirteen thousand made it past the weeklong quarantine--and never saw the crematorium downwind. Remorse, guilt and nostalgia waned quickly, as their early days were spent repelling desperate refugees, each representing a mortal threat. Their fear of the outside world hardened them to it. Eventually the world went silent, and the refugees stopped coming.

The summer was a continuous bacchanal. Their needs were met and their days were filled with pleasures.

One day sullenly bored Tha gazed upon an orgiastic scene before him and inspiration struck. It was time for a real party, one inaugurating their time on the island; it would be a masquerade. Tha would consecrate the occasion with a special composition, in the classic fashion.

There would be games, for the spirit of competition needed to be instilled in them now, he thought, looking at the writhing, fleshy bodies and dull expressions.

Let there be rap battles and dance-offs, a costume ball with the Red Eye as theme. He was enlivened. No one watching the lizard-lidded, slack-jawed Tha gaze upon the orgy would have guessed the ferment in his mind at that moment.

The hall arranged for the ball was a scene equal to the magnificence of Tha Prince.

Six suites faced off three-on-three across a round dance floor, each lit in a color of the rainbow--but for red--and representing a corresponding theme. The suites were open to the floor, and their walls angled outward away from their interiors--so that no place in the hall was out of sight of any other place.

Throughout the suites were the looted treasures of the old world. The Laocoön throbbed obscenely in purple, amid the writhing mass of dancing bodies. Via projection Tha's lyrics and writings continually scrolled down the body of David; he actually looked a bit sickly in green.

A round stage illuminated red from below stood in the center of the floor. Near the stage in shadow Tha slouched on a perfect copy of a throne Napoleon used--actually something he'd commissioned himself long before the Red Eye--on a tear-drop shaped recessed platform.

The dancers enthralled. The Red Eye's thrashing and tremulous death throes lent themselves perfectly to all manner of street dance, of course, and there was even a modern interpretative adaptation, and a ballet version, for they had not neglected to bring Beauty. Tha had only given one direction, the suggestion they incorporate humor. The dancers took up the license with enthusiasm, competing to outdo each other in Red Eye gallows humor.

Likewise the masqueraders. The costumes were eerily realistic--they had the resources of a Hollywood studio on hand--and obscenely comic. Skits were performed; they competed to create the most offensive.

All the while Tha nodded approvingly from the shadow of the teardrop.

He felt warm inside as he waited to give his final rap concluding the ball. The hall had grown quiet, the revelers were sated, the bass line fading out. They waited, looking up toward him rapturously. He swallowed down the unfamiliar lump in his throat--what was it? he asked himself-- and rose, turning toward the hushed mass.

They gasped. The hall shuddered beneath a single bass note that came from somewhere over and above the sound system. An electronic voice boomed the standard hip hop encore announcement:

"No, no, we ain't done, we ain't done..."

Still isolated in light amidst the darkened hall, Tha turned around and saw a figure in the half-shadow of the stage.

The bass line started rolling, building ominously; the hall's speakers hissed and smoked and blew out but the bass just kept getting louder somehow. The house lights popped and cracked and exploded one by one, but on the stage rose a white light, faint and slowly growing brighter. The figure became visible as the light rose, rocking his head to the bass line--and Tha couldn't help noticing how perfect it was, as dense as lead and expansive as sky at the same time.

The figure was of human outline if not quite form, with two arms, two legs and a head; it appeared to be made out of eyeballs, all eyeballs, eyeballs upon eyeballs, teeming, crowding, pulsing here and there--to the beat--with the familiar and horrible phosphorescent glow of the Red Eye.

His rocking gradually became a dance as he advanced slowly from the back of the stage to the center. He spun on the floor like a break dancer; rising and pretending to dust himself off he went into a moon walk and transitioned into a perfect slide; he popped, he locked--the swaying eyeballs lagged his motion, seeming to defy gravity as they sort of floated on him, like seaweed in the ocean current. Here and there they parted like tall grass.

He executed a perfect pirouette, spinning impossibly fast and long, with the eyes on their stems wrapping around him like flaxen hair. Still he went faster until he became a blur; just when it seemed he would come apart he stopped in an instant, the lagging eyeballs taking a moment to catch up and fall in place.

The figure motioned as if dizzy and needing time to recover.

He did "the robot" with a comic flair. He performed a jete. He split off into two and danced a waltz with himself and recombined. He formed a high-kicking chorus line, then recombined. By now he was close to Tha, who was standing stock-still, trying to find his voice. The figure did the shimmy, mockingly. The illuminated eyeballs started forming patterns, like the bulbs on a scoreboard. These began taking the shape of the designs from Tha's Positively Spring show; it even showed him designs that he didn't produce, but recognized as the half-formed ideas that hadn't come to fruition.

"Eat at Joe's...Eat at Joe's...Eat at Joe's..." The eyes spelled out finally. The figure heaved and held its midsection as if laughing, gesturing for forgiveness and pretending to wipe away a tear of laughter.

 Now Tha found his voice.

"I'm gon' kill this mothafucka!" He bellowed. The sound of his own words boosted his courage, and it was uncommon courage indeed by which he charged while everyone else in the hall crouched and knelt, faces lowered, too terrified to move. Ashamed of his early terror, disdainful of the cowering mass, Tha Prince advanced.

Tha drove a massive fist into the center of the beast. It was absorbed and held there as he tried to pull it back. He tried pushing off with his other hand; it too stuck. Unthinking in his panic he offered a foot. The figure began drawing him in as he thrashed and howled.

The process hesitated with Tha's face alone not yet submerged, Tha holding his mouth in the gaping pout of a swimmer going down.

"Tha Prince, motherfuckers, and I own all this shiii--"

The words were submerged as he was yanked in as if by a rope. Tha's signature roar, never more impressive, escaped from within the figure as a crescendo halting the music.

No sound from within or without relieved the silence; even the panic in the people's hearts could not escape their terrified throats.

The still figure began pulsing rhythmically, barely perceptible at first, with each pulse bigger and coming faster than the last. Now the whole of him began tilting side-to-side like a bowling pin; someone managed a pathetic wail; as if in response the figure exploded.

Eyeballs showered the cowering people. Eyeballs bounced off the walls, some sticking, some sliding down like slugs. Eyeballs trailed tendrils like pennants as they flew. Eyeballs landed on skin, caught up in hair. Eyeballs collided in air. Eyeballs slinked like inch-worms on their stalks across the floor. Eyeballs writhed like fish out of water. A gusher of eyeballs streamed from where the figure had been.
And then it stopped.

As one they felt the faint, fearsome tremors; as one they cringed beneath the light and sound; as one they danced the death dance. 

As one they were collected by the Red Eye.