Evert is a writer-performer. He grew up in apartheid South Africa and was raised to be an elite Afrikaner fascist. However, something went terribly wrong in his choice of teenage reading material, and between Darwin, Freud and Bertrand Russell, he ended up rejecting his nation, his religion and his family. When a riot of white cops vs. black protesters sent a teargas canister rolling into the lobby of an ad agency heʼd just started, he thought about emigrating. Then the apartheid regime banned his first play A Very Butch Libido, and he took off for the freedom of America. He continues writing plays, novels, poetry and songs, and attended the OʼNeill Playwrights Conference in 1993 with a play about torture. In advertising, his work on the Absolut Vodka campaign rocketed the brand from nowhere to the #1 import in four years; it's now the longest-running campaign in advertising history. He performed his one-man show How to Cook a Man on three continents. His rock group, the Dingbots, created the rock opera Kidd Radar, available on iTunes and CDBaby.com; their video The Obama Karma Song is on YouTube. A semi-legend on the 1990s slam poet scene, he won the 1997 National Poetry Slam, and starred in the PBS documentary Slammin'. His poetry is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and collected in Suck My Poem from Lulu.com. He's working on his first musical, Cinderella and the Empire of Chocolate. Email: evertcilliers [at] yahoo.com
by Evert Cilliers Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note. To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for…
by Evert Cilliers If you'd have told me that America would ever spritz $65 billion of its annual taxes and manpower into yet another country's civil war, I would've said you're articulating via the IQ of your sphincter. Wasn't our own Civil War painful enough? If you'd have told me that this civil war was…
by Evert Cilliers Problems come in two types: real and BS. Your kid snorting cocaine, that's a real problem. Unless she's living in your house, having a mother-in-law is not a real problem: it's a BS problem. BS problems can infect entire nations, because they roam wider than herpes. Take illegal immigration. Perfectly natural: we've…
By Evert Cilliers Before Obama one would have to go back to LBJ and FDR to find a US president with any balls. The rest of them have been there to serve the wishes of our elite like sissy lackeys (they're not even Heideggers fronting for the Nazis; they're more like insect-munching Rensfields to Dracula).…
By Evert Cilliers Who is the quintessential American character? Honest Abe Lincoln, whose war killed more Americans than Hitler? Founding father Jefferson, who bonked his favorite slave in secret? Jaunty FDR, who betrayed his own class? Preacher MLK, that oddest of American leaders: a fellow driven by morality? Genial Ronald Reagan, a stalwart stooge for…
My fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle: Ever since my election, I’ve been watching you implode, my eyes dilated in horrified fascination (like they were glued in that Indiana Jones movie to the Nazi’s face melting into molasses). Now I know I’m the last man on earth you want any advice from,…
First, let's state these facts about the human race, and more specifically, about the 5% of Americans in it: 1. People will believe any crap, and the facts are useless against a crap-filled belief system. 2. When one bunch of people looks at the problems of another bunch of people, they always ask: how can…
by Evert Cilliers There is a specter haunting the planet. It is the specter of the failure of Western capitalism. All that is solid — jobs, homes, retirement savings — melts into air. Our cock-a-hoop capitalism is staring into a pesky abyss which is either Lacan's mirror or the funky Weltschmerz of its own rectum.…
by Evert Cilliers A few weeks ago I closed my account at Bank of America and opened an account at a credit union instead. I cut my ties with one of the banks responsible for our economic crisis — one of the banks whose actions have caused countless Americans to lose their jobs and their…
by Evert Cilliers “Larry, I can never get an easy explanation from Tim Geithner. He's always looking down, like he's talking to his dick. Explain to me how his bidding thing works to buy toxic assets.” “Mr President, we now call them legacy assets. Words matter.” “Words be damned, Larry. This is me talking to…
I don't agree with most anything the pundits say about Obama's first weeks on the job, so I feel a little like a hooker working the Vatican: naked and cheap, with nothing but my distrust of men's motives to earn me a quick rhetorical buck. I think Obama could be a transformative president a la…
1. Casino Capitalism — making money from money with other people's money What financial toilet is our government trying to flush us out of? Here's the best explanation I've read of the cause of our trouble — toxic mortgage-backed derivatives — by independent trader Jeffrey Carter: “The collateralized debt obligation that is talked about is…