Welcome to Iconoclasm Today!

            Hello and welcome, friends, to Iconoclasm Today! the occasional blog of news, opinion, , and culture that is also a testament to my personal neuroses. I am Michael Gillham. I find myself here in the early twenty-first century in a mountainous backwater of the United States during the twilight of the American Empire. I am an aspiring member of the intellectual bureaucracy, an earnest, hard-working drudge of the American peasantry attempting, in my plucky Dickensian fashion, to ply an entry into the lower echelons of the chattering classes. I am a young man looking to win my way into the parasitic intellectual professions that keep America afloat with an inexhaustible supply of inky, indecipherable bullshit. I am talking, of course, about the opportunistic league of writers, intellectuals, and college professors that the State employs to delude the young that their futures are in good hands and assure them that they are special snowflakes, safe and free at last in the most enlightened society that was ever engineered. It is necessary to preoccupy the intellectual with pedagogical position because a person who thinks for themselves is a public menace who must have his ego massaged by a bureaucratic architecture lest he harass and disturb the decent and industrious public.

            I hold a Master’s degree in English which qualifies me to do next to nothing in an economy eviscerated by public debt and imperial corruption; an economy now primarily propped up by hale, optimistic, ruddy complected Protestants largely incapable of independent thought who serve a parasitic class of lawyers, intellectuals, physicians, and politicians who are even less disposed to independent thought. These cogs perform admirably as men of business, entrepreneurs, financiers, bankers, abattoir workers, car salesmen, and such, but I possess none of the optimism or delusion required for success in these professions.

            This charming mismatch of my personality with my surroundings has lent me with a colorful personality replete with the usual peeves and eccentricities that one can expect from such an individual. For example, I adore things like poetry, opera, cats, herbal tea, old films, and long novels. I claim to be preoccupied by such things as “politics,” “ideas,” and “morality.” I am obsessed by manias that I call “freedom” or “liberty,” “peace” and “love.” I am also not without my philistine interests, including but not limited to: comic books, trashy horror films, chocolates, football, and television. These things, taken as a whole, lend me the titular character of an iconoclast. That is a curmudgeon, a crank, a kook who belongs to the Neolithic past yet finds himself adrift in the technocratic age with no recourse but to become a mad, bearded, muttering hermit.

            But, dear reader, have no fear. I am a congenial enough hermit who adores having visitors in my cave. I will offer you a cup of tea and a place by my fire if you are willing enough to hear the tangential yarns of a young man who has addled too early but is not without a misplaced, youthful sense of optimism. Along the way you may meet my lovely, adoring fiancée and our sweet little daughter, my various friends and relations, maybe even my two cats, Ozzie and Satchmo. You never can tell.

            We will discuss many things without the stuffy formalities of form and structure; anything from politics and religion to film, books, and current events. We will cover anything and everything that my obsessive fancy happens to light upon, and perhaps have a few laughs along the way. Questions? Comments? Post freely and often. Look, my dears, we are very near the end. Thank you for coming and you are most welcome. Salutations, salutations, salutations.