WATCH US BURN

It started with his words, slick and tasteless, like pre-packaged meat on supermarket shelves. The cheap stuff with added water. Nothing real about them, nothing nourishing, but enough for people to chew on. Lips and arseholes, as they say. We clapped our hands, licked our greasy fucking fingers, and asked for seconds. And why wouldn’t we? He gave us exactly what we wanted: something easy to swallow that made some other poor cunt accountable for our problems.

At first, it was almost funny. Watching him swell with every word they believed, growing bigger, redder, louder. But then the foundations of his platform solidified and it wasn’t funny anymore. The lies built up, brick by brick, until they blocked out the sun. We sat in the shadows, cold and starving, while he lounged in the glow of a fire we didn’t know we’d lit for him. 

And still, we fed him. We fed him our fears, our anger, our need to feel seen. We fed him through screens, through scrolls, through hashtags and trends. He got fatter and we got smaller, shrinking into ourselves with every promise he made and broke, every truth he warped into something more palatable. We pretended we didn’t notice the cracks widening beneath our feet.

He told us what we wanted to hear, that everything would be fine, that the chaos was someone else’s fault. Anybody who thought differently, anybody who spoke differently, and anybody who looked differently. They were the issue. Nothing else. 

We bought it because it came wrapped in neat little soundbites, easy to digest and easier to repeat from behind the safety anonymous social media profiles. He knew the game better than anyone: sell them the enemy, and they’ll forget they ever had allies.

It wasn’t just him, though. He was a symptom, not the disease. The fire he thrived on was built long before he struck the match. We stacked the kindling ourselves, layer after layer of delusions and distractions. Every controversial tweet, every clickbait headline, every Facebook advert with a brown faced devil. And each time we turned a blind eye to all of it, it was all fuel for the blaze..

The truth was, we liked it. The spectacle. The chaos. Watching it all burn down while pretending we weren’t part of it. Tutting and writing paragraphs into the void about how stupid the other side were, how self-righteous the other side were, how intolerant they were. 

It was addictive, that slow torture he offered us. We convinced ourselves that when it all ended, we would be the ones on the right side of history, and used that as an excuse to keep playing the game. Meanwhile, he sat back like a bloated pig in a suit and watched us tear each other apart, as his paymasters in the shadows siphoned cash off into the accounts of their own paymasters. His only job was to keep the fire burning, and we made it so damn easy for him.

He called himself a patriot, a saviour, a man of the people. He built his kingdom on their fears, their hopes, their hunger for anything that felt solid in a crumbling world. But it was all smoke and mirrors. All fucking bullshit.

And he was Commander-in-Chief, Billy Bullshit.