Kiwi Farms

Strap yourselves in for this one boys because this is going to be a weird one, but hopefully I can kind of get my point across.

Kim Newman is a British author known for horror and fantasy stories with an alternate history bent, he once wrote a short story called Illimitable Dominion about an American movie producer in the 1960s who starts an obsession in American culture with the works of Edgar Allen Poe that becomes all encompassing.

It starts with the real world Vincent Price Poe adaption movies, but then snowballs from there to where all of American culture revolves around Edgar Allen Poe, The Sound of Music turns into a Poe adaption at the end, Vincent Price hosts American Bandstand, Green Berets in Vietnam wear "Conqueror Worm" pins on their berets and so on, finally at the end of the story California sinks into the Pacific Ocean like the house of Usher.

I've always been fascinated since I read this story because I wonder what exactly Kim Newman was trying to say, perhaps the America in the 1960s reeling from the social upheaval and uncertainty of the times was ripe for some kind of mass hysteria to take over.

And when I look at modern America I see something similar to the story happening, except the obsession isn't Edgar Allen Poe, it's black people.

Increasingly in American culture and society absolutely everything is revolving around blacks, almost every movie, every TV show, every song, every advertisement and so on is focused on black people, last year people were burning down cities across America over the death of George Floyd, everywhere you look now it's black, black, black.

I guess what I'm trying to say is America has had a rough time of it these last 20 years, between 9/11, wars, economic uncertainty and other social upheavals our confidence in ourselves has been rocked and now I think we're in the grips of a mass hysteria, we're grasping onto to anything that can try to give us meaning, but considering how destructive this obsession can be, I worry that American society is going to collapse like the house of Usher.