THE AUSTERITY PROGRAM’S JUSTIN FOLEY ON WHY SENATOR JOE LIEBERMAN IS THE FUTURE OF METAL

I saw Until the Light Takes Us last week and was mildly surprised (again) at some of the unusual belief systems swirling around that scene. When you think about it, there’s nothing intrinsic to heavy or extreme music that must link it to scary, misanthropic stuff. Still, people all around the world who get into this music want to put their emotions into some additional context. When the music feels violent or painful, maybe it’s just natural to want to surround it in images and language that also feel violent and painful.

But here we are in 2010. Churches have been burned, dead religions exhumed, forearms branded and medical pathology textbooks scoured. If you and your bandmates are skipping homeroom to do this meth-ed out hatecore thing you’ve been G-chatting about and you really want to blow minds, what’s left? You think anyone gets unnerved at the sight of a pentagram? (Answer: no.) Do you really think that wearing black nail polish is making some statement about anything other that your ability to source black nail polish? (Answer: same answer as before – no.) I am telling you that it’s all been done, it’s not scary and it’s about time that folks did a damn sight better.

And better is what I’ve got: To take your band’s nightmare vision of moral obliteration farther than it’s ever been taken, there is only one ideology left to use.

I’m talking, of course, about Joe Lieberman.

Joe Lieberman is an undead disease-terror that someone needs to start writing records about right now. Fonts must be upended, guttural utterances (gutterances? *ding!*) growled, drum heads lacerated and speaker cones set a-vibrating. Metal can get right back in the drivers seat of freaking the world the hell out by doing this Joe Lieberman thing P-R-O-N-T-O.

I don’t share his politics (if there are any real politics in there, somewhere) but I think that’s separate issue. Lieberman is an anti-life-force walking-black-hole on the face of the Earth because he exists only to serve the interest of his one dark master – Joe Lieberman. Examples? Oh, if it’s examples you want then I’ve got plenty.

In 2000, a whole bunch of people spent a whole bunch of time and whole big bunch of money trying to get him to be the second most powerful person in their clan. Eight short years later, he’s in front of the opposite clan, at their big shindig, saying that all those other folks are fools.

In 1995, Joe Lieberman made a big deal against the filibuster in the Senate, saying that it could be the end of the world. Guess what he was threatening to do a few weeks back? (Maybe he did this to try to end the world.)

My favorite was about ten days ago when he killed the Medicare buy-in option by making its death a condition of his support for a Senate bill. A Medicare buy-in option. You know, exactly the type of thing he was saying he was for in September.

Okay, okay. A lying, hypocritical politician is not a rare item. But what makes Lieberman a thing of unsurpassed bleak horror is that he is most active only when he can do the most harm. It’s like he somehow made it so that the Senate would become incredibly partisan and then split so that his vote would always be crucial. Only in such a fragile time can he gleefully launch plague after plague of nutmeg-scented pestilence on the Earth’s living creatures. I honestly think that he threw the Dem vote in CT JUST so that he could go back to DC with no claim upon him.

(Useful though he may be to the Republicans, don’t imagine for a moment they think he’s on their side. You think Mitch McConnell is calling up Joe before Sunday supper to say “Why don’t you come have dinner at my house and hang out unattended with my plump infant grandkids?” No, he is not. You don’t turn away from a back-stabbing cobra that has miraculously figured out how to wield a rusty barbeque fork dripping with Lassa fever. You smile and say “Nice little snakey,” slowly backing towards the door. These guys know what their eyes behold.)

– Uh oh, here it comes –

“Why you write about politics on the site? I go to site to avoid politics. Maybe I get politics elsewhere. Maybe I don’t think important. Maybe I simply do not have capacity to care about anything other than Metal all day always all the time. Why you try ruin this for me? No politics!”

No. No! That’s the whole point! Once you recognize that this is a US Senator who has no purpose other than his own virulent and malignant growth, all that “Christraping Black Metal” stuff seems downright froofy. Who cares about politics? Not Joe Lieberman. He probably doesn’t even care about snacking on souls or slurping up the still-steaming bone marrow of albino virgins. (Probably.) It’s so, so much worse than that. The kind of worse that you can only begin to hint at with a new, ultra-brutal type of metal that will lay waste to all who listen.

And this is not hypothetical. You – Satanists – you ever seen Satan? Anyone ever watched Odin conduct a newsconference? Gotten a solicitation for campaign contributions from whatever deity racist nationalists love so dearly? Of course not. But Joe Lieberman doesn’t require some leap of faith. He’s right there on “Face the Nation.” A real, terrible dude – eating, breathing and reaping death upon the land even as he brushes his teeth in his pajamas. There can be nothing more scary.

I do not know what shape of musical psychosis all of this will take when it is put on tape. What I do know is that the kids who get their acts together about this will be instantly banned from clubs and have constant DoS attacks launched against their MySpace page. Baptist preachers will interrupt Oral Roberts’s funeral to rail against this band. Sixteen Guatemalan nuns will fast in a mountain chapel and maintain a constant silent vigil against them. There will be a restraining order against the band playing a show within 300 miles of any public watershed supply, etc. They will be feared and hated and FEARED. You want someone to write you a ticket to everlasting notoriety? I’m writing you the damn ticket. Start a metal band that worships Joe Lieberman and empires will crumble in the wake of your vision.

(I hope Joe Lieberman doesn’t read this site because the last thing I want is for him to know someone’s on to him like this. I’ve got a family that I love and I don’t want to lose them.)

– JF

Stare into the unsurpassed bleak horror that is The Austerity Program by visiting them on MySpace.