The Nutcracker

The thieves of joy don't realize what kind of story they're in. They're about to find out.

An Appointment

Being out of heart with government
I took a broken root to fling
Where the proud, wayward squirrel went,
Taking delight that he could spring;
And he, with that low whinnying sound
That is like laughter, sprang again
And so to the other tree at a bound.
Nor the tame will, nor timid brain,
Nor heavy knitting of the brow
Bred that fierce tooth and cleanly limb
And threw him up to laugh on the bough;
No government appointed him.

— W.B. Yeats

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Once upon a time — not so long ago, I’m ashamed to say — the version of the Gadsden flag shown above might have given me a chuckle. More than that, actually; the Dark Old Me would have used it as endless comedic fodder. I can almost hear that snarky bastard now:

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BREAKING NEWS:

FATE OF WORLD HINGES ON DEATH OF FANCY RAT.

FILM AT ELEVEN.

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I might have even questioned the manhood of said fancy rat’s owner, for fooling around with what resembled an animate plushie toy.

Or maybe I’d go the full cynical route.

The dude’s obviously grifting.

For all you know, he chopped off that critter’s tail himself, to keep it homebound and hobbled for the cameras.

In fact, I’ve already heard echoes of that younger man’s contempt, swirling about the Internet. From the Right, they appear to be rooted in sexual iniquity (“These people have an OnlyFans!”) which is then somehow extrapolated to a Q.E.D. for all other allegations of sin. While I’m not myself a Fan of the Only variety, summary judgments of this kind were never in my codex. I was always naturally skeptical of those sweaty TV preachermen, for instance, howling about ungodly Lust so loud and often I couldn’t help but think they “doth protest too much.” But I had other rocks in my ammo sack, ready to be aimed and fired at a moment’s notice, and other breeds of whore to fire them at.

I have since been transformed.

One consequence of that transformation is to see the future. Not perfectly, of course; the visions are still blurry, and much of them dependent on roads not yet taken, choices not yet made. But the big picture is now rendered much clearer and crisper than before, back when my windows were crudded up with slime and filth.

When

Daniel D

mentioned Peanut’s demise in an offline chat, it was the first I’d heard of the whole affair. We were on an open speaker at the moment, so my wife charged into the room and shouted, “They killed him?!”

I admit I was confused. Who got killed? A squirrel? Was it a terrorist squirrel?

What the hell was this fresh madness all about?

As they filled me in on the details, I got curious enough to spend a few hours of my Earthly existence trawling the various media packages. Having so recently taken a swan dive off the wagon into blackpill psychosis, I worried the lingering aftershocks might cloud my vision. After all, there's an infinite number of ways to view these players and events through the darkest swamp goggles, and an accompanying instinct to drag them down into the gutter’s muck.

Indeed, even during the first hour of investigation, I could already see what Mark and Peanut looked like through the occlusion lens. Here we had ourselves a strident pimp, cruelly exploiting his furry little slave to turn a buck. Lame.

But when you examine the same squirrel and man in the Light, they look like something else entirely. You can see through the material surface, and into the infinitely good story they were trying their best to tell, through the medium of their finite lives.

Here’s a preview of this very odd couple in Story Form:

In this tale, we meet an engineer: a builder of things, including of his own body and surroundings. His name literally means “Tall”, and it suits him. Heavily muscled and tattooed, with chiseled good looks and blazing eyes, he looks like a classic hero who stepped out of a myth. Like mighty Herakles, he’s no paragon of flawless virtue. On the other hand, he hasn’t murdered a bunch of innocent people (that we know of).

One day this flawed but gifted man stumbles across a tragedy. It’s a minor tragedy, to be sure. The type of thing that would normally escape our notice, even if we weren’t spellbound by black mirrors and phantom voices. In a faint echo of Bambi’s tale, a young squirrel’s mother has been crushed to death by a car.

There wasn’t any malice involved, and no need to start up an investigation if there was. Such collisions with the blind machinery of Man’s modern world are commonplace. Even in Bambi’s case, it was nothing personal, kid: people gotta eat. But Bambi is a cartoon, and so he wears impenetrable Plot Armor. Not so for our tiny squirrel. Hawks gotta eat too, after all. So that sort of bloody ending is also common.

But what the man did next was not so common. He looked beyond the plain facts of the world — past the tiny alien’s teeth and claws, past the red smear of roadkill that was its first and only connection to the world — and saw something that compelled him to act.

What Mark Tall found lurking underneath all that pathetic noise was a story in progress, and the instant understanding that he could step into the page and rewrite its ending. That’s our unique gift as human beings, the inherited spark of our Divine lineage: We can identify the kinds of bland, mechanical horror stories that the Fates would normally tell, and then barge our way into them, to rewrite their plots on-the-fly. This is also the purest definition of a hero, in my opinion; a physical author, who battles the blind Fates for control of the pen and wins the day.

And so, the tale of Peanut the Squirrel was hit with its first major plot twist. The hero would take this strange orphan home, and care for it as one of his own. Early in their friendship, he tries his best to prepare it for a life outdoors, so the squirrel can go on to fulfill its natural destiny. But the hero is not a squirrel, and knows nothing of squirrelly ways. There is hubris in the attempt.

And so, this mission fails. His ward returns home wounded and terrorized. Indeed, the creature it was made to be died that day beside its mother. The Fates are not all-powerful storytellers, but they are still very strong. So the hero gives up on that editorial quest, and begins a new one. He will keep the orphan close, feed and nurture it. Roll the dice, and see what happens.

What happens is a transformation. Over a period of time, what was once a wild animal — and a future snack for hawks — is transformed into a new kind of creature. Not a human, obviously. Not a real little boy. But not quite a squirrel, either.

Peanut had entered a different kind of story, and he would grow to become a different kind of character as a result. Instead of cracking nuts, he eats waffles. Instead of scampering up trees in terror, he hitches rides on his Treebeard father just for fun. Over this period of time, he becomes a sort of otherworldly comedian, delivering slapstick and sight gags with uncanny timing. Instead of cracking nuts, he cracks us up. Together with his adoptive dad, he spreads joy and wonder, to a world that’s starved for both.

We laugh when we watch Peanut’s wacky antics, and rightly so. Mr. Longo stumbled upon tragedy, and rewrote it as comedy. Thanks to our digital technologies, he can share the non-squirrel’s funny new story with the rest of us. By the final season of their strange little show, Peanut has become the man’s best friend and business partner, even if he himself doesn’t see it that way. At the very least, such heady concepts are beyond his fuzzy wits to verbalize, or to even comprehend.

But that’s hilarious too! Sure, the squirrel may not know how silly he looks wearing the cowboy hat, or leaping onto his father’s shoulder the moment he walks in the door. Yet my observation tells me Peanut still senses the reaction of his adoptive family, the vibrating warmth and light of their infectious joy, which swims across imperceptible bandwidths and currents. Call it a mammalian version of Spidey Senses. He detects happiness, and so tries to generate more.

In that regard, Peanut is very nearly “in on the joke” — and maybe more than we most of us could imagine, dull as we sometimes are.

For example, when Peanut holds up his tiny signs, why does it seem like he’s mugging for the camera? Maybe we are just anthropomorphizing. On the other hand, maybe that word indicates something more “real” than we’ve been trained to think it does. We alter reality by questioning its nature and limits. The greatest lie we tell ourselves is that we perfectly know what those answers and limits are.

Nature is full of mysteries. That’s something else you learn real quick, when you are transformed by the Light. You realize that you don’t have all the answers, and won’t get them while you’re still alive. And that’s okay, too; who doesn’t love a good mystery?

But in these memorial clips, we are also watching a bit of a love story unfold — a bizzarre, impossible one, of course, entertaining because it’s so farfetched. How could the act of rescuing an animal from certain death transform it so radically that it can actually love a human being?

Sounds like the stuff of fairy tales to me.

But we are God’s children, and so we’re capable of telling some pretty fantastical stories in the material. You might even call this ability a kind a magic, though not the Devil’s version of it. There are no tricks involved in the casting of such love spells. The key ingredients are bravery and mercy, with a dash of comic timing thrown in for good measure. If you manage to pull it off, not even the wildest swamp monster can resist.

Like most truths, this one also stands the test of reason. On the worst day of a your life, providence arrives in the form of a friendly stranger, who housed and fed you, kept you warm and safe from a cold and mechanized world. The care alone might not guarantee love, but it can kick down damn near every obstacle to it.

In fact, you’d have to be totally blind not to see the bonds of love that formed between Peanut the squirrel and Longo the man.

Profoundly blind. And profoundly stupid.

Enter Big Government, stage left.

In case you haven’t noticed, the hero of this revised story is a man of substance, purpose, creativity, competence and strength. In other words, he is practically an avatar of the masculinity that the progressive Left both fears and loathes. When an idea or opportunity presents itself, he dares to act on it without asking for permission. And so, he converts Peanut’s internet fame into a fundraising mechanism for a privately run animal rescue operation. Opportunity transmits to action, with no middlemen required.

This is Sin #1:

Thou shalt not be self-sufficient.

Worse, Mr. Longo is also white, also a native English speaker, also a married man who earns his keep and tries to expand the boundaries of his life. Longo’s wife Daniela is an immigrant, which should — in theory — buy back some regime points in his favor. But she is the wrong color (white) and ancestry (German), and she arrived on our shores honestly and legally instead of by government-backed criminal trespass. Doubleplus ungood.

In other words: Mark Longo is the personification of everything the regime hates and vilifies at the moment. He stands in stark contrast to their footsoldiers: an icon of spiritual and physical envy who mocks their small, ugly, petty lives just by the plain fact of his existence. He can also rewrite stories without their input or license, exposing their ultimate uselessness and unearned authority. When he happened upon the baby squirrel and its dead mother, his first instinct wasn’t to call a bunch of pencil-pushers at the DEC. If he had, the creature who transformed into Peanut probably would have died a miserable, lonesome death long ago. Instead, Longo grabbed the pen and started scribbling.

I’m sure many more names will be added to list of finks and functionaries who, whether out of petty hatred or blind obeisance, intervened to turn the tale of Longo and Peanut back into a tragedy. I won’t dwell on the details of the seizure and execution. I’m guessing millions of indie investigators are already on the case, dredging up the various players and machinations that led to such a pathetic, cruel, absurd, and ultimately pointless result.

What interests me more is the motive behind this new plot twist, forcibly inserted into the story at gunpoint. Aside from all the Rube Goldberg machinery that justified the killing on paper, I detect something more intentional and sinister at the bottom.

As we know, Envy is the most invisible of sins. A man will know who he lusts after, which duties he wants to shirk, what kind of luxuries he’s greedy for. But envy is a ninja who drugs your tea, murders your wife, then blames it on your next door neighbor with the fancy car. People rarely recognize their own envy for what it is, and therefore couldn’t even confess it if they wanted to. I think this explains quite a bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome, actually. They hate his guts, but lack the self-awareness to know why.

Envy is also the most obvious explanation for this ugly plot twist. If it wasn’t bad enough that Longo has movie-star looks, a fulfilling job, a loving wife, and a happy home, he had to go and prove himself their moral superior, too. To the untalented, unlovable, lazy malcontents who infest New York State government, it must be torturous. To them, it’s like watching the captain of the football team save a bunch of kids from a burning building, then get interviewed on the news by a hot reporter who flirts with him. Doesn’t this asshole have it good enough already?

So they will concoct a plan to knock this “hero” down a peg, put him in his place, show him who’s boss. At the behest of a witch with a snitch, a judge with a grudge, and other fairytale monsters, the hero and his lady fair are ambushed in their castle, dragged out into the bailey, humiliated and degraded while a bunch of armed rabble ransack and loot the keep.

It would be bad enough if this was just a normal raid, meant to harass and intimidate, but they had more sinister designs. They were there to kidnap the famous squirrel, that viral celebrity and magical jokester, whom the hero rescued from the wheels and beaks of Fate. And in doing so, they would fatally wound the good story he was trying his best to tell.

Did they think they might steal a little of that magic for themselves? Boost the DEC’s subscriber base on social media? Maybe; they really are that dumb, after all. Or maybe the plan was always to kill Peanut (and maybe the Fred the Raccoon, too; the details of his own demise are fuzzy, no pun intended).

Because I’ve been paying close attention to the villains of similar stories lately, I tend to think it’s the latter. These people are not only blind and stupid, but so utterly joyless that the sound of songs and laughter stings their eardrums, the way the joyful noise of Heorot drove Grendel insane with rage.

If you doubt it, consider the recent trend of “rehabilitating” Disney villains. Sure, Cruella de Vil wanted to murder more than a hundred puppies to make a coat, but she’s really just a misunderstood hero, you see?

You see?

And if you still doubt it, have another gander at the face of Karen Pryzklek above, this Great Environmental Warrior Queen who lacks even a single windmill to tilt at or maintain. If you’re having trouble, try covering this scumbag’s “smile” with your fingertip, and just look into those blank, dead eyes. Same goes for Judge Richard Rich; in a staring contest, a fish would get the creeps.

The eyes have it, ladies and gents. Or in this case, they don’t. They have squandered and suffocated their Divine sparks, in exchange for unearned power and prestige. It’s a tale as old as time, really.

And so, this plot twist they inserted was also a knife, plunged and twisted into Longo’s heart. The murderers of joy aren’t fit to lick his boots, of course, or the paws of his furry ward. They are talentless, mindless parasites, lacking any purpose apart from obstruction and extraction.

And yet, even vampires must be entertained. I’m sure they got a chuckle out of this one. Look at the big strong crybaby cry! Waaaah!

The story’s latest arc is a target-rich environment for the Right, of course, because the absurdities of Big Government abound. There’s the unholy waste of it, for one thing: How much time, money, and manpower was spent to kill some guy’s pet squirrel? Someone with access should tally up that bill.

And who exactly is setting the priorities here, by the way? Even in the context of broken “environmental” agencies and their specious, money-grabbing agendas, there’s something surreal about this particular chain of events. An animal is proven literally incapable of living in the wild, and yet is somehow legally prohibited from living indoors. Is outer space an option? It sounds like the kind of Death-by-Paperwork that’s more suitable for a Douglas Adams novel, or a dystopic film like Gilliam’s Brazil.

“It says right here, in black-and-white, Mr. Peanut:

‘Claimant is not permitted to live inside or outside of a house.'

I’m sorry, sir. But rule’s a rule.”

That’s one of the big reasons this story has legs, and isn’t going away. It’s rife with examples of what has gone so horribly wrong with our paper-shuffling bureaucracies, and the rogues’ gallery of windup martinets and sadistic droogs who staff them. A massive, unaccountable, inhuman engine of State is leaking battery acid into the souls of the people who facilitate it. What other explanation could there be for grotesque-yet-entirely-believable details like this to emerge:

(from ☕️ Coffee & Covid 2024 🦠)

Four days ago, an environmental SWAT team of heavily armed officers descended on the Longo’s home, taking the small farm’s human and animal residents completely by surprise. A crack team of highly motivated climate agents forced Mark and Christy outside at gunpoint, fingers ready at the triggers, just waiting for one of the innocent homeowners to try something stupid or even complain.

For five hours, state agents turned the Longo’s home inside out. What they were searching for is anyone’s guess. They didn’t say. According to Longo, the climate cops even took his toilet apart. The Longos were told that, to use the bathroom, they would have to do their business while monitored by law enforcement during the, er, procedure. Christy held it.

Later, and hilariously ironically, agents sneeringly interrogated Christy over her legal immigration status. When they finally departed, the state’s literally brown-shirted, jack-booted “environmental police” hauled away two illegally housed rescue animals: Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon.

And so “power madness” is yet another explanation, for a story with more angles than a tesseract. Some assholes just get off on telling other people what to do. And when you arm such miserable people with guns and badges, what they tell you to do will eventually become morally hideous. And then, one day, deadly. It happens quicker than you think; the regime-faithful were trained to think of human beings as animals, at best. At worst? We are just numbers to them. Abstractions.

So the presence of depraved home invaders and other official monsters doesn’t discount the role of technocratic blindness. Once the chain of events is laid fully bare, we’ll almost certainly find names and faces attached of state employees who neither wrote the rules or ever stopped to ponder them. They were just quietly going through the motions, blindly doing what they were told without ever questioning their orders. That’s what makes us shudder, opinions on this particular case aside.

But whether malicious scumbags or automatons, what’s clear is that none of these people realized they were part of a story, let alone one that spread joy to millions. Some of them are probably still dumbfounded by the massive reaction, frankly. “I don’t get it. It’s just a stupid squirrel.”

The metaphor here couldn’t be more obvious. In case it slipped your mind, New York was one of the most lurid madhouses for Covid-19 psychopathy in the United States, even going as far as to push for “quarantine” camps and other tyrannical fantasies. As I mentioned in an earlier note: “According to their regulation books, we all have rabies now.”

We see ourselves reflected in Peanut’s sad death because they already tipped their hand, showed us what they would do if handed all the power they crave. Andrew Cuomo is being shoved back onstage as their latest blood sacrifice, but stories like this one demonstrate how the rot has permeated every root and branch, every leaf and flower.

Time to bust out the chainsaw.

They probably won’t even hear us rev that sucker up. They simply cannot fathom that this dark twist of theirs, however entertaining it was for them in the moment, isn’t hardly the end of the story. Like the squirrel’s mother, they can’t hear the car that’s currently barreling towards them, a deus ex machina summoned to settle all debts. Some of Peanut’s executioners may already regret their role in the crime, or soon will. There are a lot of animal lovers out there, and a lot of violent lunatics too. I don’t know what their Venn overlap is, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t zero.

But perhaps their worst fate is the ignominy that will follow them for the rest of their lives. After all, these are the losers who crave praise and social status above all else. The reason they join up with bureaucracies like the Department of Environmental Conservation to begin with is so they can pretend to be saving the world, while all they’re really doing is draining the public purse. And, apparently, raiding houses to murder small woodland creatures (for their own good, of course). I’m pretty sure we had a revolution over lesser crimes.

These men and women are beneath contempt. They have barged into the wrong story, for the worst reasons, and their pathetic attempts to erase Longo’s version have exposed them for what they are.

So enough about them.

What of Peanut himself? This squirrel who became just a bit more than a squirrel?

Though he led a charmed and funny life, Peanut’s tale unfortunately did not end in comedy. Not in the Materium, anyway; God Almighty can and will heal such wounds beyond the veil as He sees fit.

But his final moments here were likely ones of confusion and terror, surrounded by strangers who bore him ill. He’s certainly not alone in that regard. It’s the way that most living beings depart this vale of tears, actually, including human ones. You might even call it a blessing to leave it any other way. Tragedy is half of drama for a reason.

And yet, I’ve been thinking…

Maybe Peanut’s story ends in comedy on this side of the Veil too.

Perhaps in death, that cute little Viral Rodent becomes ten-thousand times the comedian he ever was in life.

With a little help from his friends, of course…

After all — as bizarre as this year’s been — who the fuck had “Assassination of celebrity squirrel threatens to sway U.S. presidential election” on his bingo card? Maybe we should elect that guy president.

And so, while our furry little prankster’s body is dead, the soul lives on and on. His jokes don’t quite write themselves, but they aren’t wholly authored by his admirers either. There’s something in the air, all around us. We might as well call it magic, since we have yet to come up with a better name.

The Clownworld regime and its cultists have gone crazy. Eveything they say and do is becoming maximally insane. Totally nuts, you might say.

And who better to crack a nut than a squirrel who hath ascended to meme heaven?

The dirty little secret about Clownworld is that none of it’s the least bit funny. Its agents and admirers are a legion of the miserable, who desperately crave your company. We are the Army of Joy and Fun. But we are also the Army of Sanity. Our jokes make sense.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot… we’re also the Army with Guns.

So maybe this isn’t a fight you want to start?

Lest we forget, even our buddy Peanut did not go down without a fight. For five full hours, he led his attackers on a merry Die Hard chase. And our little Bambo was even able to slip in a counterstrike of his own. He made them work for it. And bleed for it.

So may we all, if and when that dark day arrives.

People keep talking about the coming realignment. Not just of politics, but of consciousness.

Wouldn’t it be the funniest thing ever if a fancy rat in a cowboy hat was the straw that broke Leviathan’s back? That’s literally a God-tier joke, the kind of Divine punchline that transforms tragedy back into comedy once more, in spite of all evil players and their maniacal schemes.

We can’t hope to equal it ourselves. But we can do our best with the tools He gave us. All we need to do is look past the surface, and see all the good stories we can tell.

Let’s tell one of those tomorrow, shall we?

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