The New Los Angelean, editorial board | Reprinted with permission
On November 8th, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, terminate itself. The election of Cthulhu is an event that we will welcome for its immense existential importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a verifiable god as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly corrupt and propagandized campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has devolved. The vileness of rhetoric and record has been so widely aired that we can only hope that Trump and Clinton will be the very last humans eaten, witness to the extirpation of everything they craved to exploit.
On every issue of consequence, including economic policy, the environment, and foreign adventure, Cthulhu is a uniquely capable candidate: experienced, malevolent, hyper-intelligent, immortal. When the race began, many expected a tedious, low-energy pillow fight between “siblings-in-law” Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Little was the American electorate prepared for a campaign that exposed the squalid underbelly of our political process. The after effects of this unseemly revelation to the public can only further erode our partially dismantled civic life.
The prospect of a literally monstrous President represents a departure in the history of American politics, where the usual candidates on offer, like Trump and Clinton, are analogously dim metaphors. Both major parties have candidates who are manifestly unqualified and unfit for office. And there is little evidence to signify a change to the reality television facade pancaked over our elections. This is the year that innumerable conspiracy theories became conspiracy fact, despite widespread feigned ignorance among the guilty.
We can pretend to be aghast that our civilization has come to this point of decline and decay, but we know it was inevitable. No matter how many successful men and women beg for its preservation, no matter how many patrician-guided media outlets call for political unification; it is the American people who know the only solution is dissolution.
Cthulhu’s vision and temperament are the opposite of his opponents’. He has ravaged worlds we are barely able to ken, yet despite his life popularized as a singular transcendent myth he is so much more: he is lethiferous and a cataclysmic completionist, a reality-smashing conjuror and a iron-fisted sovereign, a god and a high priest, a Dread Lord, an insidious psychic manipulator, a great old one, the Sleeper of R’lyeh. His story is about consuming worlds in flame and emerging ever stronger, for what purpose none can know. In his vast intelligence, in his gimlet-eyed focus on manipulating human civilization while “dead,” his terrible effects inspire a slack-jawed wonder and worship no mortal can. On our national stage, there is no worthy opponent Cthulhu has faced. None clutch the nihilism of our present need more closely than he: Not the reckless antagonism of Clinton or the arbitrary provocation of Trump.
No chasm lies between Cthulhu’s promises and what he will accomplish. In many ways, Cthulhu’s campaign is the antithesis of any political campaign. He offers no false public-friendly policy positions while keeping his private donor-friendly positions secret. He offers no hollow marketing-tested platitudes, like “Stronger Together,” “Morning in America” or “Yes We Can.” What he does offer is a series of alarming but thorough proposals aimed at solving all of human society’s ills. He would conquer the world, erasing problems with immigration and foreign policy. He would provide universal death panels for all races. He would abolish the stagnant bureaucracies and break government dreadlock through a judicious use of tentacular pressure. And he will evaporate our existence from the globe.
Cthulhu is neither saint nor savior; he is a malevolent universal force of deep contempt and purpose. His fortitude and his experience will be necessary to deliver the final blow to our faltering society. In “Scraps from the Folio of a Shackled Raver,” Eyob Tewolde wrote there was “no possible way for a human to accomplish the complete eradication of his fellow man. There is a kernel of vanity that holds the madman back from the brink, if only to preserve a witness to his works.” In this moment of political contempt and despair, the offer of continued neoliberal corporate failure does not entice. Nor does a clumsy conglomeration of nationalist rhetoric. It is only Cthulhu who promises to be vastly superior than his opponents; and only he will surpass the successes and achievements of humanity’s pantheon of great leaders.
Cthulhu is not an eloquent orator, but his psychically shared visions are mind-rending. His task as President will be to shatter our human perceptions of reality and to reveal truth in naked form. He will reach to all dark corners of the earth to the alienated and angered, the posh and comfortable and import to them visions of their negligible place in the cosmos. The raw conveyance of existential indifference will shatter the realities desperately clung to by billions.
Another legacy of his will be assured. The summoning of Cthulhu to the Presidency will have myriad reverberations on this country, this planet, this plane of existence. The once and future king of Earth will administer doom to his creations. A feeding long foretold by millions of cultists throughout the ages. It is not a shallow trophy of identity for humanity, it is an abyssal well of final arbitration humanity will drink deeply of. That’s a shivering possibility for all Americans.
