We stay and pour it for them and they die

Luke O'Neil

19 May 2026 • 17 min read

Truly there has never been such a great time for blasphemy. The blasphemers are eating well boy. Respecters of the establishment clause aren't doing so great on the other hand.

On the other other hand at least a bunch of AI-kissers are ~getting yelled at~ by college students at graduation ceremonies around the country. Turns out young people don't love the idea of being ushered into the working world by smirking tech turds gloating about how replaceable they all are.

Certainly not the worst thing a college administrator has done of late I should mention.

It's not stopping a lot of these amoral media fucks from using A.I. to make stories up and getting their ass in trouble though. "Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I." is a pretty funny headline you have to admit.

At least there are still some guys who get it left out there:

“I don’t understand what it’s supposed to do," Seth Rogan said. Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is, like, the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn’t be a writer, because then you’re not writing.”

“Go do something else. And if you don’t want to go through the process, you shouldn’t be a writer. The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing,” he said.

It all almost makes a person happy to see a good old-fashioned regular plagiarism scandal emerge. So retro.

Var Lawrence, who wrote this piece below for Hell World about being locked down in a nursing home in NYC during the peak of Covid has passed away. Chip in a few bucks for his funeral if you can. Thank you.

I wish more people knew that Cuomo’s a fucking asshole. He let them stick people that had Covid in here side by side with us. It led to a lot of people dying. When people liked Cuomo’s press conferences, it felt fucked up for them not to know the truth. There were bodies being carried out of here left and right while people were complimenting this man on doing a good job. He actually did a fucked up job. He could’ve prevented a lot of things from happening the way it did. I want to tell the next mayor not to do the same dumb shit Cuomo did to us and to realize that people in nursing homes matter.

I won't keep you too long today because it is too fucking hot to do anything here in the northeast for the first time all year. I have a work phone call later that I was considering canceling. Sorry but it's simply too hot to talk on the phone. Yes I know that's stupid. That's how hot it is.

Happy get in a fight with your partner trying to install the window unit day to all who observe anyway.

I'm gonna share a handful of brand new and newish pieces of short fiction by me. One for everyone then the rest for paying subscribers.

As always a subscription is much appreciated.

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First a couple things I enjoyed reading from elsewhere:

An extraordinary short story by Robert Stone I haven't read in years.

She ran a hand through her hair and bit her lip. “No, we stay,” she said. Anger and distraction made her look young. Her cheeks blazed rosy against the general pallor of her skin. “In my family we stay until the fella dies. That’s the tradition. We stay and pour it for them and they die.”

A chapter that explains basically how it all works from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds I was reminded of the other day.

Suppose we started with a particular story about how child labor in Indonesia is contracted by multinational corporations at near starvation wage levels. This information probably would not be carried in rightwing publications, but in 1996 it did appear—after decades of effort by some activists—in the centrist mainstream press. What if we then crossed a line and said that these exploitative employer-employee relations were backed by the full might of the Indonesian military government. Fewer media would carry this story but it still might get mentioned in an inside page of the New York Times or Washington Post.

Then suppose we crossed another line and said that these repressive arrangements would not prevail were it not for generous military aid from the United States, and that for almost thirty years the homicidal Indonesian military has been financed, armed, advised, and trained by the U.S. national security state. Such a story would be even more unlikely to appear in the liberal press but it is still issue specific and safely without an overall class analysis, so it might well make its way into left-liberal opinion publications like the Nation and the Progressive.

Now suppose we pointed out that the conditions found in Indonesia—the heartless economic exploitation, brutal military repression, and lavish U.S. support—exist in scores of other countries. Suppose we then crossed that most serious line of all and instead of just deploring this fact we also asked why successive U.S. administrations involve themselves in such unsavory pursuits throughout the world. And what if then we tried to explain that the whole phenomenon is consistent with the U.S. dedication to making the world safe for the free market and the giant multinational corporations, and that the intended goals are (a) to maximize opportunities to accumulate wealth by depressing the wage levels of workers throughout the world and preventing them from organizing on behalf of their own interests, and (b) to protect the overall global system of free-market capital accumulation.

Then what if, from all this, we concluded that U.S. foreign policy is neither timid, as the conservatives say, nor foolish, as the liberals say, but is remarkably successful in rolling back just about all governments and social movements that attempt to serve popular needs rather than private corporate greed.

Such an analysis, hurriedly sketched here, would take some effort to lay out and would amount to a Marxist critique—a correct critique—of capitalist imperialism. Though Marxists are not the only ones that might arrive at it, it almost certainly would not be published anywhere except in a Marxist publication. We crossed too many lines. Because we tried to explain the particular situation (child labor) in terms of a larger set of social relations (corporate class power), our presentation would be rejected out of hand as "ideological." The perceptual taboos imposed by the dominant powers teach people to avoid thinking critically about such powers. In contrast, Marxism gets us into the habit of asking why, of seeing the linkage between political events and class power.

“Everyone is beginning to realize — thanks to the younger generation who is more aware of situations we’re experiencing quite directly on our phones and on other screens — this is unacceptable. It cannot be justified. And there can be no reason, no explanation for this genocide,” he said. “Therefore, I think what is happening is quite the contrary. I believe that those who are drawing up the so-called blacklists will actually be exposed, and they will be the ones suffering the so-called consequences, at least on a public and social level. And this is a major change.”

It’s easy to look for omens of Molina’s death in Magnolia Electric Co. because the album is swollen with Appalachian iconography but they are not harbingers of Molina’s own end. Rather, they are born from the strange mysticism that shapes life in a small town, places where one can feel so stuck you look to signs and symbols for direction. The last track on the album, “Hold On Magnolia” is the slowest and most instrumentally barren. He sings: “Hold on Magnolia…No one has to be that strong/ But if you’re stubborn like me/ I know what you’re trying to be.” Here, we get a recognition of Molina’s effort to hold on, to persevere and come out the other side. There is something particularly male about his language here, strength and stubbornness being cited as the exit strategy to escape the darkness but the eventual confession that it just isn’t enough. In the last lines, he seems to accept defeat: “Hold on Magnolia/ I think its almost time/ it’s almost time.” It goes without saying how similar Magnolia and Molina sound.

MTV Unplugged was the swan song of Natalie and 10,000 Maniacs, and it turned out to be the biggest hit they would ever release together, eventually going triple platinum on the strength of a cover of Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” The album is a curious document of a certain moment in college rock, the musical ecosystem built around boutique labels (often underwritten by majors, with lax oversight) and university radio stations (always DJed by enthusiastic undergrads, with no oversight). It was a time when poetic musings, progressive politics, and gentle, precise jangle-pop could excite as much passion as the fury and mess of grunge. Though 10,000 Maniacs were always more studied and less artful than their friends in R.E.M.—R.E.M. didn’t print their lyrics, while the Maniacs laid them out in prose like little short stories—both bands inhabited the same literate, history-conscious landscape, and cultivated a similar population of fans: “the sensitive kids,” as Dennis Drew put it when I interviewed him this spring.

It was nine years ago yesterday that we lost Chris Cornell. Read this one if you never did.

Please don't miss these recent issues of Hell World either.

Calling home

I was talking to my mother on the phone and getting brought up to speed like an ER doctor’s debriefing at the start of a shift. Who was sick and why and who wasn’t gonna make it out. That guy over there is gonezo. Yeah dead as hell out of nowhere. Nothing could be done. This other poor sonofabitch is about to go too. I think it had to do with the drugs she said. Quieter now as if anyone was eavesdropping on us. As if anyone in the world cared about a conversation between a mother and a son. His poor kids. And the wife etc. She was always a handful though she said. You remember when she did something I did not remember she said. In high school. I remember that I said. Wow. What else? What else… We don’t know yet what’s going on with the third guy but we’re monitoring the situation closely. Louder now for some reason. He was always very sweet on you though. Do you remember? Do you remember when we wheeled him into your life? You into his? It was just yesterday. Almost shouting at me and building to a crescendo. He was your father’s friend. My friend. He held you as a baby. Just yesterday. Time to wheel him right out of it now. Into the trash. It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok. No your father can’t come to the phone. He’s out walking the dogs. Jesus Mary and Joseph. With the state of his knees. He’s out walking the fucking dogs.

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