Wake Island: Exploring the Imagery, Sickness, and Energy of 2025: May
May Edition
New dispatches, curated and written by David Leo Rice and Paul K, are released on the first of every month throughout 2025.
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
“Heil Hitler” and the American Pope
Ye’s Heil Hitler track becomes ubiquitous at the same time as the first American pope is chosen. This isn’t coincidence. It’s convergence. One cultural figure ascends cloaked in a kind of pseudo-sanctity, while another floods the algorithm with performative blasphemy. Both Chicago-born, one blesses the masses, the other shocks them. Together they form a mirrored gesture—opposite ends of the same inverted ritual. A new faith and a new heresy, both hollowed out, both viral. Both human, yearning to be more.
In Nazi Germany, “degenerate art” was branded as a disease of the soul. It was ridiculed, criminalized, paraded through exhibitions as warning signs of cultural decay. But in trying to suppress it, the censors made it sacred. They gave it power by fearing its influence. They feared that once you strip away discipline, tradition, and race, what remains is raw instinct, dangerous and democratic.
We’ve taken the opposite route. We didn’t censor degeneracy—we sponsored it. We turned it into the main event. What the Nazis feared would corrupt the masses is now pushed to their phones with curated precision. The aesthetic has gone from criminal to core. From subversion to subscription—perhaps the road to a more durable form of Nazism, one that no one can save us from since we’ve brought it upon ourselves.
A woman calls a child a n****r and makes half a million dollars. A teenager kills another and receives sympathy in the form of an equal amount of cash. The machine doesn’t punish—it distributes rewards according to reach. As long as the narrative hits the right notes, two can play that game.
“Man these people took my kids from me, then they closed my bank account” … “With all of the money and fame i still don’t get to see my children” … “All my ni**as Nazis, ni**a, heil Hitler” – Ye
This is where the American pope presides: not over a church, but over the ruins of cultural meaning. It’s not faith he offers, it’s vibes. It’s not doctrine, it’s branding. The old icons are broken, so new ones are chosen—faster, flashier, more scandalous. A spiritual rebellion against the algorithm fed right back into it.
The question isn’t what kind of society we are. That’s already clear.
The question is: what kind of spirit is being formed in us—in each of us and in the incomprehensible network within which we all play our part—preparing to emerge from the shit show?
What kind of nervous system?
What kind of will?
The only question I absolutely know the answer to: now the J**s are never going to let Ye see his kids again.
The Inverted Tower
The original Tower of Babel, in Genesis 11, tells the story of a united humanity: one language, one project. They attempt to build a tower to the heavens to make a name for themselves. In response to this hubris, God scatters them, confuses their tongues, and fractures their unity. The message is simple: when man tries to play God, the result isn’t elevation; it’s collapse.
Today’s Tower isn’t made of stone, it’s made of servers. Not reaching skyward, but stored in the Cloud. A digital Babel. Billions of people still trying to make a name for themselves, only now through avatars, viral clips, outrage spirals, racist GoFundMe accounts... screams from the depths scrawled in disappearing ink.
And instead of divine punishment, we get something more insidious: a slow descent into a mirror world. One that reflects us back out, not into light or God but into spectacle, for our own delectation, as if we’d been reincarnated only to watch the Greatest Hits of the dissolution of our former selves.
The Cloud holds everything: our culture, our memories, our money, our fears, but it doesn’t elevate, it distorts. It pushes us downward into a current of collapse. A purple-black storm cloud, swelling with rain that refuses to fall.
The more we upload, the more we forget. The less durable and momentous the timeline becomes, the more easily everything slips past. The more we say, the less we mean. The way we internalize images turns into a game, a weapon, a stunt. A psychic firewall against prophecy, against acknowledging that the Flood came and went without a trace, declining to take us with it.
We swipe past executions between subway stops then glance at ads for sex toys, crypto apps, and CBD sleep gummies. I’ve never opened one of these ads. Has anyone? Or is that the point, that advertising now lives ambiently, waiting. Brand awareness becomes instinctual. You don’t remember where the idea came from, you just act on it. It becomes part of your language.
Make them think it’s their own idea and they’ll never say no.
This isn’t a return to the light. It’s overexposure, floodlights thrown over every corner of human depravity. The effect is simple: these images don’t just reflect our reality, they overwrite it. They slip in through the wet corners of the eye, nest, rot, metastasize until they become real.
There is no off-switch.
The Flood doesn’t come all at once. It passes through the seams as clips, headlines, posts, video and image: A pit bull mauls a service dog. A man is thrown from a bridge. An Uber driver with a gun to her head begs for her life. A child drowns in a crowded pool. Biden is diagnosed with cancer and a flood of books comes out detailing how demented he was all throughout his presidency—“shocking” secrets revealed as soon as it’s too late to make any difference.
And if we try to look away, toward safer, saner feeds, what then? BlueSky? TikTok? Threads(lol)? Places where the aesthetic of escape and community, of honesty, masks a deeper rot. An even more insidious facsimile of connection compared with, say, Instagram, where we perform idealism while quietly envying people we pretend to like, or wish we could hate but have instead been ineradicable conditioned to worship. News channels that now exist solely to be screenshotted and mocked. Liberals with Ukraine flags and Palestinian emojis in the same bio, unaware that their sympathy registers as a hustle.
Tower of Babel 2.0 hasn’t toppled, it’s inverted.
We scroll down, not up. Not toward God, but toward something roiling quietly underground. Something algorithmic, post-human, anti-meaning.
The tower still speaks in tongues, but the new language is visual. The dialect is viral atrocity massaged into sharable suffering. A glistening eye ball exposed to humanity’s open grave. A dimension where everything staged feels more authentic than anything real.
Mayday
May 2025 has been a month of regrouping. A time for laying low and trying to regain energy after the year’s first salvos. A time to regain the ability to think and focus, or at least to salvage what’s left of it. A month with no overriding thesis, no clear direction. The “first 100 days” are over, and a low-level mixture of fear, boredom, and lingering hope that something new might be on the horizon, sets in.
I often think that I only have one main idea, which I return to, intentionally or not, in everything I do: the interpenetration of the normal and the weird in all things, as if the ultimate essence of reality were composed of these two elements merging. Everything that seems normal turns weird the more you look at it, and vice versa, until there’s no distinction, only two paths to the same place.
I recently had a conversation with a friend where we were discussing someone who, in older age, has fallen into incoherence. Not senility or dementia, just someone who never got their mind under control, never found any order or system of thinking. Now they talk constantly without making sense, or even trying. That friend said something that stuck with me:
“You never know what the tether is that’s holding the rest of your life together, but if it gets severed, or if it never takes root, then everything else falls apart.”
This month feels like that, like we don’t know what the tether is, what’s holding the narrative of the present together, and whether it’s fraying or firming up. It’s been a formless month of feints and vague possibilities, of over-reported and under-reported stories that all trail off into a lull or a lurch.
After the tariffs, the renditions, DOGE, and the marquee events of April, May has been a grayed-out month where the earlier narratives and sagas of what happened with Biden and why Trump came back and woke vs anti-woke and all the tensions that seemed to matter until recently have turned brittle and cracked away, revealing nothing but a faint scumminess underneath.
Maybe one day we’ll look back on this month and understand what mattered. We might trace some subterranean tremor to an eventual earthquake, but not yet. For now, the next things feel latent, simmering, out of sight. Perhaps only after the next shock or flare up will we be able to say, “That was the moment. We had an opportunity and missed it. Now we know when it started. If only….”
“Oh what I do for the crown prince…” — Donald J. Trump
At a graduation speech in Alabama, Trump talks about momentum, about how important it is not to lose it. About how he’s never lost his. He calls it, “momentum time.” You have to know when your time is, and how to maximize it. Take your best shot! Don’t slow down until you absolutely have to.
Love him or hate him, he’s onto something. A related thought that occurred to me: for Trump, he’s his own end-of-the-line. A profoundly self-interested man at the end of his life, all he does, sees, and thinks is about himself and ends with himself, and yet, through a strange combination of personal qualities and historical circumstance, he’s found himself at the head of the ship in a moment of national crisis and, for better or worse, national transition. For everyone else, history doesn’t end with Trump, and Trump isn’t the goal—he’s a vector, a hinge, an avatar of some era-shift whose nature no one, not even himself, can see the shape of.
The collapse isn’t public, its inside of us. I feel it shaping how I work and what I’m willing to risk. I’ve reached a creative plateau, a resting point between a fervent decade of nonstop production and whatever comes next. I could stop here and feel proud of myself, like I’d said my piece, or I could regroup and push forward into a brand-new phase. I could exceed all expectations, my own and anyone else’s.
Of course I hope this second path is how it plays out, but the energy will have to come from somewhere. For now, I feel sapped, like something in the world, in the air, will have to recharge me first.
In the wider narrative of the present, something similar is afoot. A national exhaustion, even with the fight over Trump, over everything he represents or is said to represent… have we, as a nation, as a people, done enough? Should we sit down and let it play out, and allow whatever is going to happen to… just happen? Are we waiting for something to wake us up and snap us out of it or are we entirely past that point, as awake as we’re ever going to be?
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
THE STATION
When I was a child in the 80s and 90s, I intuitively believed that movies depicted a truer, more adult version of reality. My life in my town was just a waiting room, a staging ground before I could enter the actual world depicted in The Silence of the Lambs.
In my early adulthood, I thought my defining loss of innocence moment was when I learned that this wasn’t true, that movies were just make believe, just commercial products with only the most diversionary relationship to the reality I already inhabited.
But now, entering middle age, I can see that my childhood instinct was more accurate. The real naiveté was believing that movies and TV were only entertainment. That’s what the adults of the era wanted us to believe, adults who were already horrified by how much power they’d ceded to the screen. They were trying to cover up the truth we already knew: that in America, in the late twentieth century, and even more so now, those images matter more than the lives of the people watching them.
As a child, excitement and danger reside in the outside world—the closet really is full of monsters, the woods full of witches, the basement and attic full of secrets. Whatever development is occurring inside of you feels secondary, or invisible—you don’t perceive your own imagination because it so fully enchants the world around you that you’d have no reason to draw a distinction between inner and outer life.
But as a modern adult, if you want to keep this sense of enchantment alive, you have to dredge it up from within—you have to go on adventures in your mind, and believe not just in “self-expression” but in real risk and opportunity in there, real discovery, real loss, real transformation, in a mental landscape as fraught with risk and opportunity as the Nile or the Amazon must’ve seemed in earlier eras. You can’t embark on a novel or any other long term creative project without the excitement of setting sail for an unknown shore.
And yet, just as journeys of exploration in earlier times required backers and accomplices to get off the ground, the energy to embark on this inner journey has to come from the outside world, just as the opposite is true during childhood, when the energy to embark on the journey into the woods or up to the attic or down to the basement comes from within, from the needs of your own developing imagination. This meeting point of outer and inner drives is analogous to the meeting point of the strange and the normal, a feeling of delicious deviation that makes transformation possible.
This month simply doesn’t have that feeling—the train, for now, is stuck in the station, though the tracks, as ever, extend out of view.
“In another life, we probably could have been friends.” — Christopher Pelkey, via AI, to his killer
I was doing just fine having not heard about the track incident or the nasty mom in MN! What is this sickness inside that makes me google for more information about something I do not need in my consciousness? Do we need to be aware of these things? I was going along feeling pretty good avoiding Facebook and not watching or reading news then bam Justine Bateman dragged me over here! 😉
Otherwise, I’m with you. The only way out is in. Trying to protect my family, but we’ve made too many mistakes already. Disentanglement might be harder than breaking a substance addiction.
"Of course I hope this second path is how it plays out, but the energy will have to come from somewhere. For now, I feel sapped, like something in the world, in the air, will have to recharge me first."
These days I wake up every morning hoping that thing will be in the air. I think we have to keep forcing its hand. I think time's too urgent to keep waiting for it. Regardless of how exhausting. I think.