Wake Island: Exploring the Imagery, Sickness, and Energy of 2025: April

April Edition

and

May 01, 2025

New dispatches, curated and written by David Leo Rice and Paul K, are released on the first of every month throughout 2025.
Check out our podcast: WAKE ISLAND—a conversation series exploring the darkening undercurrents of contemporary culture. 🕳️🐇

“I plan to plunge whole-heartedly into the spring.” — Sylvia Plath

The Poison Pill

April 2025. The break becomes visible—not clean, but a smear across frames. Images drag from one side of the threshold to the other. On one side: the toons. On the other: the left behinds. The question becomes clearer than ever before: has America taken the poison pill that will lead to its final demise, or is the beginning of the cure—the long, gruesome process of sweating the fever out—coming into view? The catchphrase of the year so far is “short-term pain for long-term gain,” but what, if anything, does this mean? Has America, a nation that’s “had it too good for too long,” finally pulled the plug and initiated the final sequence, or are we doing what needs to be done, however sloppily, to transition beyond the 80-year postwar era, in which we ruled the world abroad and became a self-loathing consumer society at home, incapable of taking ourselves seriously? Have we, at last, brought ennobling suffering down upon ourselves, or have we simply booted up another season of entertainment that will leave us fatter, weaker, and more slothful than ever? Is it possible that this is a growth crisis, a crucible in which a more mature national character is being forged, or is it a sign of our intractable immaturity to even wonder?

What comes after postmodernism, or, better put, after postmodernism stops being loose, fun, puckish, and free? When critique of old dogmas becomes an old dogma itself… what then? Is there nowhere to go except further back, into the same old dogmas that postmodernism once debunked and made light of—resurrecting them as kabuki versions of themselves—or is there a third way, something yet newer, some place we’ve never been before, beyond the question of left vs. right, good vs. bad, funny vs. serious, and even real vs. unreal? Some fusion of these dualities or some place off that axis entirely… and, if there is, how do we get there? Are we already on our way?

And is any of this new—are there forces in motion that haven’t been in motion all along—or is 2025 just the logical, inevitable continuation of something no one can change? Are we in a moment we need to get through, or is this what it is, and what it’s going to be? Every American utopian project, of which MAGA may be a less unusual example than was once assumed—and all such projects may be a microcosm of the American idea itself, the New Jerusalem that can only grow older with the passage of time—has to battle the reality of the present to keep a dream of the past and the future alive… and the fate of all such projects depends on the outcome of this battle.

Welcome to Toon Town

Entry to Toon Town requires submission. You feed yourself into the AI filtration system. It spits out variations, stripped and recombined. The original face dissolves. What’s left is a replica with a smoothed-over surface optimized to register, not reflect.

Each mask reveals the anxiety it’s designed to suppress... the relief comes from the fact that now it’s just a mask, a piece of plastic, no one’s actual face. One month ago it was Studio Ghibli toons; now it’s AI-generated action figures.

Instead of dreaming, desires are generated and recycled from the feed. The self erodes. There’s a certain nostalgia in even positing these ideas today, like we’re “doing a routine” from the 2010s. Perhaps shtick is the fate of all cognition, the heaven where all philosophy goes when it dies.

It’s hard to fathom the slow cooling of human imagination, the drawing back of a magician's hand—replaced by a facsimile that reveals every trick, eliciting from us an astonishment that, while automatic and joyless, is nothing if not genuine:

“No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death. Every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions.
Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them: the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence. The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say "I will" and "I will not" and imagine ourselves, though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day, our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves."
— Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun

Soon, the tides stop turning. The shore recedes. The exposed terrain renders in grid-like tiles that repeat infinitely as they move, each step already mapped out.

The cartoon cigar explodes.

Welcome to Toon Town.

The Left Behinds

No one framed Roger Rabbit. We wanted what he had: immunity, elasticity, the ability to restart the game without starting over.

The Left Behinds know there’s no going back. Still, they dream of unstructured time outside the feed. They feel the snag of analogue time passing, heavy with skin, silence, sorrow. The fear of being dragged to a dungeon in the jungle ripples through the nation, half-plausible, a medieval fate surfacing from childhood make-believe to take root in an outside world whose contours are shifting and sliding toward a place where such a thing becomes possible — a sick, giddy thrill.

Within the Left Behinds, the neo-Luddites, there’s chatter of a return to an abandoned spirituality, a real life that some piper led us out of when we were too young to see it happening. But 2025 runs on the fear that all escapes are circular and all Reformations simply repackage the same spent materials: all roads lead to Toon Town.

In Possession of the Feed

When a society can no longer mythologize itself, but keeps performing gestures drained of meaning, you get 2025. Rituals survive, but belief and moral weight are gone. We didn’t just collapse the mythic cycle. We branded the wreckage.

In 1935, amid the rise of fascism, Walter Benjamin wrote: “Humankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” He was warning how mechanical reproduction strips art of its aura, turning ritual into spectacle aligned with politics and mass control, a mass yearning for release from an age that can only back them into a corner. What would he make of our moment, where even pleasure is speculative, flattened into “a vibe”? Where art is memeified into engagement, and destruction is not just aestheticized, but gamified into content and virtual gambling odds?

Neil Howe’s new The Fourth Turning Is Here presents history as a wheel, a cycle of rebirth after collapse—a pattern of four seasons that repeat endlessly, rather than the linear triad of Beginning, Middle, and End that drives Judeo-Christian theology. He claims we’re in Winter now, about 15 years into the “Millennial Crisis,” which began with the 2008 financial collapse and may end sometime in the 2030s. After this, so his argument goes, comes Spring, the beginning of a new age, a cause for optimism if we can make it through.

But maybe what we’ve inherited in 2025 isn’t the path to the next phase. It’s a failed reboot: a deep dream spam simulation caked in web junk. Lore without narrative. The image of the Great Wheel turning in the absence of any such wheel—the grand sweep of history flattened into a Spotify audiobook. No final act before renewal—only the feed, our final side-quest, where crisis is navigated not to find meaning, but to find God inside endless loops of degraded memories and mimicry, an endless swirling-together of frenzy and inertia.

The rituals that brought us here: swiping, scrolling, curating, liking, customizing—didn’t transform us. They toonified us. Where Howe sees archetypes—Hero, Prophet, Nomad, Artist—we see filters. The Hero is a fitness influencer dead lifting Tesla cyber trucks for Bitcoin. The Prophet is a 24/7 podcaster bending cultural narratives to sell dick pills. The Nomad streams travelogues on YouTube, a pseudo-explorer seeking undiscovered terrains to broadcast TikTok dance videos. This isn’t the uncanny valley before rebirth. This is the resolution: a streaming-era limbo where creativity is harvested and re-fed into the system.

We are not being reborn. We are being possessed. This is the crisis and its resolution superimposed onto one another.

April 2: Liberation Day

Trump's 'liberation day' tariffs 'could spur raft of new trade deals'

April 4: Pro-Life Activist Bloodied After Sucker Punch During NYC Abortion Debate Interview

April 7: Dire Wolf Species Identified in New Findings, Marking Return of Extinct Predator

April 8: Nightclub Collapse in Dominican Republic Kills 231, Injures Over 200 in One of Nation’s Deadliest Disasters

April 9: Pallbearers Fall into Grave During Philadelphia Funeral After Platform Collapse

April 10: Police Searching for Man Who Sexually Abused Corpse on New York Subway

Around 11:44 p.m. Rojas first sexually assaulted the victim, with his waist the same height as Gonzalez’s mouth as he was “repeatedly thrusting his hips back and forth,” it was revealed
He then allegedly moved Gonzalez’s body to the floor of the train car and removed his and the corpse’s pants to rape him, court papers reveal.
The rapist would zip up his pants, pull Gonzalez’s trousers back up and wait on the train bench during stops before repeating his sick behavior when the subway starting moving again and no one was around, documents say.

April 10: China Amplifies Anti-American Sentiment with AI-Generated Propaganda Amid Escalating Trade Tensions

April 11: Family of Five and Pilot Killed in Hudson River Helicopter Crash During Child's Birthday Celebration

April 11: Trump Replaces Obama Portrait With Trump Assassination Painting

April 13: Viral Video Shows Woman Controlling Prosthetic Hand via Nerve Signals

Open Bionics shared footage on X of a woman using a prosthetic hand connected to the nerves in her arm, allowing her to control it remotely. The video has since gone viral, showcasing advancements in neuroprosthetic technology.

April 13: Armed Militants Kill Over 40 Christians in Nigeria on Palm Sunday

April 13: Russian Missile Strike on Sumy Kills 34 During Palm Sunday Service

April 13: Instagram Influencer 'The Crooked Man' Goes Viral for Training Only One Side of His Body

April 13: Bernie Sanders Preaches Anti-Wealth at $600 Coachella Concert

April 14: Katy Perry Kisses Ground After Return from Celebrity Spaceflight

“We’re putting the ass in astronaut.” — Katy Perry

April 14: Trump and Bukele Meet to Discuss El Salvador’s Security Model, Called a Modern Concentration Camp by Rights Groups

April 15: Bolsonaro Shares Hospital Video After Sixth Surgery Tied to 2018 Stabbing

“What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” —Arthur Rimbaud

April 16: Bodycam Footage Shows Moments Leading Up to Police Shooting of After Chase

April 21: Thailand Unveils AI Police Robot Equipped with Facial Recognition

I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
— Fernando Pessoa

April 20: On Easter Sunday, JD Vance Was Among the Last Leaders to Meet with Pope Francis

“The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.”
—Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo

April 21: Trump Says He’s ‘Bringing Religion Back’ at White House Easter Egg Roll Attended by Thousands

“Trump was a liar who couldn’t lie, much like an AI image cannot lie. Duplicity requires duality… It was almost as if [Trump and Musk] were beginning to feel—and, in some sense, be—free of the fundamental quality that distinguishes reality from fiction: consequence… That is, when these men speed run through the world as if it’s just fiction, I think a very human part of most people—left, right, and center—hopes or even senses that they’re right.”
— Gideon Jacobs, “Player One and Main Character” Los Angeles Review of Books

April 21: 'Tiger King' Star Joe Exotic Marries Fellow Inmate

April 22: Far-Right Hindutva Group Attacks Easter Service as Gunmen Kill 20 Tourists at Kashmir Resort

"India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir for a thousand years... They will figure it out one way or the other." — President Trump

April 24: Virginia Giuffre, Who Accused Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein, Dies by Suicide (Soon After Surviving a Bus Crash that apparently “saved her life”)

April 25: Ukraine Hit by Deadly Russian Strikes as Trump’s ‘Vladimir, STOP!’ Plea Falls Short

April 26: Trump and Zelensky Hold Private Meeting at the Vatican Amid Intensifying War

“‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.”
― Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan

April 26: World Leaders Gather at the Vatican to Mourn Pope’s Passing

I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility! The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke…. Trump MMXXVIII! — Lindsey Graham

April 26: College Students Compete in World’s First ‘Sperm Race’ to Gamify Plummeting Fertility Rates

Stephanie Sabourin, Director of Clinical Services for event sponsor Legacy, said 'We're in a global fertility crisis right now'

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