It only looks like uncontrolled rage to the suburbanite crackers who control Columbus
Those in charge don't want you to know that righteous anger will get you further than voting ever will. The funny part is I might have fallen for their little scheme if I wasn't an alcoholic.
The common critique about The Rooster from the Columbus Cocktail Circuit used to be that I was only a raging alcoholic taking potshots from the sidelines to feed the swollen ego that hides my pulsating inferiority complex.
To their credit, they were right about most of that. But none of them actually knew me. They had no idea that I would not only do the exact same stuff sober, but it would actually turn me into a sulfur-mine assassin.
I detest the feckless nerds that serve as human furniture to our city’s political “elite” precisely because, if not for my raging alcoholism that caused me several personal failures, I might have wasted my life on the doomed ship that is American political careerism. It would have been more honorable to die penniless in the gutter with a half-empty bottle of Tito by my side.
What my critics at the time didn’t know was that my political journey began when my mother took me to Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. I remember staring at a bunch of asses and not even being able to see anything, but I remember my mom, God bless her, radiating with pride.
I didn’t understand what 12 years of Republican rule had done to her psyche. But I could feel her joy that something great was about to sweep America. And even at that young age, I felt honored to feel a part of what I felt was a genuine political movement.
In my defense, I was six. But in retrospect, I should have seen it coming.
We all know what happened next. Bill Clinton turned out to be a serial liar and pedophile. His economy was built on juicing the stock market for rich assholes while selling out the last shreds of America’s industrial core to cheaper labor pools overseas.
That was a good warm-up for the dot-com bubble collapse, Enron, 9-11, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and the novel coronavirus. Just to name a few national crises in my 36 years as an American citizen.
What my enemies don’t know is that in high school, I would work for the Dennis Kucinich presidential campaign (whose “radical” platform in 2004 is now standard-issue liberal boilerplate) and the Johny Kerry campaign.
Both campaigns lost in humiliating fashion.
Under Kerry’s campaign, on my graduation résumé, I list that I “volunteered for staff for Zanesville, Ohio rally,” and “went door to door,” and “talked to undecided voters.”
Under organizations and clubs, I list “Junior State of America” where I apparently “worked in Freedom’s Answer” (whatever the Hell that was) and “debate coordinator.”
During that conference, I randomly went into the Congressional offices and stumbled into my then-political idol: Cleveland Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
He, too, would reveal himself to be a major loser over a decade later.
In 2018, disgusted with my tinpot tyrant of a boss at Eleven Warriors, I decided to quit my job and run as a Statehouse candidate in the middle of Trump Country.
I knew I was going to lose unless my opponent, current Warren County resident Jena Powell (R-Arcanum), somehow croaked. But I spent $50,000 of inheritance on my own campaign to try to hold the line against the Republican onslaught in rural districts.
There’s an entire documentary about it:
The Rooster is a direct result of the spiral that the statewide results of the 2018 midterms sent me into.
The Rooster started in December 28th, 2018, with, “Adios, Urban.” A takedown of my old tinpot tyrant boss labeling me tweeting, “I’m glad Urban is gone, actually” as a private citizen on a random December morning as “The Worst Take of 2018.”
Eleven Warriors stopped running that series that year.
If you go read The Rooster’s archives, Lord knows I won’t; you’ll see some decent points and outright alcoholic ramblings strewn through my trademark, typo-ridden screeds.
Somehow, despite having an alcohol problem for well over a decade, the business line continued to rise.
Because here’s what these political nerds don’t understand. They just looked at me and saw the booze and the typos and blew me off as a chump. They thought that my audience was them.
I intentionally do not speak their nerd hobgoblin language. I don’t care if I swap effect for affect. Nobody who actually has to work for a living actually gives a shit about any of that.
I speak that sweet, sweet honkey hog talk, perfected on the frosty streets of Marion, Ohio—the City of Kings as the locals call it.
And through all that drinking and drugging, all that human misery, my mind has never left its main desire: To do God’s honest work to improve the material conditions of people who actually have to work real jobs in this country. And we can’t do that with the status quo.
That is where the anger was coming from on Monday night. At least Statehouse Republicans will tell you to go fuck yourself. I can respect that.
But Shannon and basically every other elected Democrat in every major Ohio city is the same as Hardin. They are Republicans in everything but name. They will let Black and brown people get beaten and robbed in their city while being one of a handful of people in a position actually to do anything about it.
Then they’ll have their flunkies to reform-in-name-only measures while mocking me me behind my back for having the audacity to throw their “progressive” (whatever the hell that word means) credentials right back in their faces.
Nothing has substantially changed under Hardin. The cops still get all the money despite “crime spikes” proving that more money won’t solve the job anyway. Black and brown people continue to die.
This city won’t even fix an intersection when a four-year-old Brown child dies while walking through a crosswalk on Halloween with her mother! That shouldn't make me angry.
My anger isn’t all I have. My anger is all I have left. And I don’t understand why my elected officials don’t seem to have any anger at all—as if they’re regular people who get the right not to have to worry about the swamp that controls their lives more than most people will ever possibly understand.
If Shannon Hardin were actually angry about the state of affairs, he wouldn’t have let some out-of-pocket honkey disrespect him like that in front of the entire city. He didn’t understand it at the time, but I guarantee he does now.
But when Hardin finally saw me coming, he only saw the old, broken-down alcoholic who he thought was coming to make a mockery of his so-called people’s court. Well, he was right. I was there to make a mockery of his court. Just not in the way he thought.
I burrowed my way further into this snake den in one month off the sauce and playing hardball with those in power than I ever did playing by their rules, begging my neighbors to vote for their loser candidates like that was my job and not theirs.
I went to public school. I never graduated college. I’ve never worked in an office. I got kicked out of the IBEW apprenticeship because my joker-ass contractor — The Superior Group — didn’t like that I bombed Ohio State’s old ball coach in his own restaurant in the Short North.
The C-suite suits that orchestrated me getting fired like a dog in the middle of the casino’s parking lot on Oct. 14th, 2021, probably thought they would never hear about me again.
That I would go drink myself to death like the loser I was. Well, they will never know how close they got to almost being right.
But what did I tell that Wall Street Journal reporter that asked me about that video?
“I do have a reputation as somebody who enjoys serving the rich and powerful shit cocktails.”
My ivory tower critics don’t understand that I was built, by the failures of their bosses and those in my personal life, exactly for this moment. I am dangerous precisely because I didn’t spend a lifetime ingratiating myself into their privileged pervert circle.
I am dangerous to them precisely because of my lack of degrees. Precisely because, a lifetime ago, I wanted to actually work in politics. You know—to help people.
But I’ve seen how that career eats at people’s souls, and frankly, I’m glad the personal failures that cost me some joker-ass D.C. career ultimately put me at this moment in time in Columbus, Ohio… right smack in the middle of the biggest bout of sobriety of my lifetime, which grows every second.
I’m angry because I care, and it only looks like uncontrolled rage to people who claim to live in Columbus but actually live in places like Powell, Plain City or New Albany.
Suburbanites don’t know the real Columbus. They erected their entire existence around not having to know the real Columbus. That’s why, more than anything, Columbus City Council is the way it is. They don’t live in the real Columbus, because the people that run Columbus don’t actually live in Columbus, either.
It’s become clear to me that none of them know who they’re fucking with. Not because of anything I’ve written or done under The Rooster or my myriad of aliases.
I’m dangerous to these people because they don’t know the real me.
And they never will, either. The real me is for real people. And if any of these politicians or their servants, who all conveniently work within biking distance of my landlord’s spare half of a house, feel a certain way about my streetfight tactics, then they are welcome to quit their pathetic act and get a real job like the rest of us.
They might be surprised to learn just how much one person off the street can change things once they put down their own vices and stop carrying water for the losers in charge.
“My anger isn’t all I have. My anger is all I have left.” This part though. So relatable.
This is a beautiful piece of writing, DJ.