Culture Blues

State of Fear Address

It's that time of the year again! Halloween week, which means a gathering of all the unsavory denizens that lurk at the fringes of our universe at, you guessed it, The Evil Convention/Meet-and-Greet That Shall Not Be Named. Our very own Jeff Hart was there. He managed to transcribe the annual State of Fear address, delivered by the High Overlord Gothicus.

Thank you. Thank you all for the heartfelt bowing and scraping. For those of you in attendance with slaves, manservants, captive virgins, or other prisoners, please muzzle them. While their wailings and gnashings are indeed flattering, I would prefer to deliver my address in a respectful silence akin to that of the fourth pit of Abhoth.

Do feel free to clap when appropriate.

Before I begin, I would like to extend my sincerest loathing to the many speakers and honorees that have made this year’s conference one of our most repugnant yet. A very special thanks to former Governor Sarah Palin and The Cobra Commander for their joint presentation on how to use one’s own incompetence as a tool to horrify the masses. Truly inspiring. Also, I hope some of our less presentable brethren had a chance to attend Michael Eisner’s lecture on passing for human, or a pop star. His advice should prove invaluable as the end days approach.

How about another round of applause for the evening’s Lifetime Achievement Award winners? Menacing Stranger, Spider-Eggs-Laid-In-Stomach-Erupting-in-Lethal-Discharge scenario, and Robert Englund, you have all contributed so much to our community. You mean so much to me, personally, that my black heart swells to bursting with an acidic pus of the greatest unrighteousness.

Our nefarious convening here, in the Netherworld Sheraton Conference Room B, happens only once a year, for the Feast of Samhain. We gorge ourselves on the finest lobsters raised in a state of perpetual crustacean terror in Cthulu’s underwater palace Ry’Leh. We quench our thirsts with the menstrual blood of Cerebus. And for dessert we snack upon the gooey nightmares of orphan children. Also, I am told that the pig roast was a big hit this year.

We rub elbows and tentacles. We congratulate each other on our successes. We violently punish our failures. We gather for team building exercises in the afternoons. We spend the evenings unwinding with daiquiris at Caligula’s annual orgy of violence where there is no orifice off limits, where the bar for bloodletting and wound humping is raised every year to levels that would make me blush if my face was not comprised of shadows and corporeal bad intentions.

It goes without saying; we have a busy three day weekend.

Which is why it always surprises me when the attendees of this hellish gathering find the time to meekly approach my profound greatness and ask, without fail, a single question. The same question, always.  All-Powerful Overlord Gothicus, you ask: is it working? Are they afraid of us?

My response is always the same. I pull my unlubricated fist from an unwilling high school quarterback, or kitten, I pause for a moment, as I will now, a pause that stretches out like a howling abyss, a pause that many of you who have known me since before the dawn of human time can attest to as a trademark of mine.

…

And I answer thusly:

Yes, they are afraid.

Ladies and gentlemen, incubi and succubae, terrorists and child molesters, hedge fund owners, goat spawn, boogeymen, deformities, creepers, crawlers, clowns, primordial oozes, and other nightmarish lurkers that defy classification in any human tongue, I tell you this now without any equivocation.

They are afraid like never before.

It has been a banner year for fear. We hold domain now, more so than ever, over every particle of the mortal coil. We are no longer simply the unspeakable evils that darken closets, that hiss amongst the shadows, the stuff of children’s stories. We have taken root in their hearts.

They still fear the night. Worried that someone is watching, that someone is dragging fingernails across the frost covered window, that someone will pull them from their beds and jam their heads into a rusty bear trap attached to an egg timer.

They no longer fear vampires, but they do fear black people again, a trade off you are probably comfortable with after the Lestat/Idi Amin roundtable earlier today.

They fear each other. They fear exploding. One thought on what next to stuff down their worthless pink gullets, the next thought a decorative smear on a fast food restaurant window. They fear strangers who don’t smile, and they tremble before strangers that do.

They fear their own bodies. Walking germ incubators, all of them, fearful of their own kind as if they haven’t always been covered in filth and disease. Hypocrites snuffing out first rats, now pigs, as if they themselves aren’t vermin. Coughing into napkins, certain that the tickle in their throat is black death come to take them.

They fear their own silly superstitions. Tossing salt over shoulders, knocking on wood, forwarding e-mails. By the way, all, keep in mind on the way home tonight that if someone flashes their headlights or asks you for the time, they are a gang member planning to slash up your face. Let them! And revel in the fact that you will soon become an urban legend, a hideously scarred cautionary tale, a reminder to always be afraid.

They fear the decay of their cities, of their homes, their lives. They have seen how just a tiny push can topple their childish system of exchanging paper for trinkets. They have brushed up against lawlessness, against butchering each other in the streets for canned beets, and they have found themselves strangely aroused as their baser, more animal instincts take hold. Should we have our way, soon the blood stained welcome mats of their dilapidated ranch homes will read “Eat thy neighbor.”

They fear the wilderness. They fear vacations. They fear the internet. They fear cell phones. They fear wind. They fear rising temperatures.

Perhaps best of all, they fear the unknown again. They fear that the end is coming, that the planet will turn against them, that the universe will swallow them, that Xenu will finally land. They fear things that they don’t yet have names for.

My friends, we have entered a renaissance.

By creeping into every sector of their pathetic universe, we have created a constant state of crippling fear rubbing wantonly against feverish anxiety. They’re afraid to stay still, but too terrified to move. Everywhere they look, lurking around every corner, waits one of our pouncing atrocities. One that will certainly, undoubtedly be their demise.

That American buffoon who we soul-grafted to Hitler all those decades ago, as a goof? He had it wrong.

They have everything to fear, but fear itself.

Because fear itself is the Lord High Gothicus, and I’m too busy getting shitfaced.

Let’s party!

Tagged as: conventions, dick cheney, evil, Lovecraft references, the devil, what we're scared of