It can be said of the United States that we are a nation of shoplifters; we never developed as a civilization because we never developed an agreed upon set of values. And so now, in the two-thousand and twenty-fourth year after the death of a silly carpenter, our very silly nation (who loves the silly ideas of that silly man…very silly, yes?) has begun to decay among funhouse mirrors, where the dentists have left the nitrous oxide on and where lies reign–lies like the idea that this is the land of the free and home of the brave.

In lieu of a civilization, we–over the objection of minorities in every form–have formed a land of mascots, mannequins, and Micawberists who wish for little more than to impose a way of life on everyone. Our Republic is a Melvillian comedy, the Fidele without a captain, careening down the rivers of a national comedy headed for tragedy. It could be said that the two ways to civilization are corruption and culture; and, somehow, our Fidelean Republic cultivated the former instead of the latter, and yet I see no civilization. I only see ways of life, with a golden dollar necklace around their necks as they drown.

This is not to say, however, that we are deficient in culture; we have many cultures on this large slab of dirt we call the United States. I cannot give an exhaustive list, for we contain multitudes. Consider: we have a Native American culture from people like Nampeyo and Maria Martinez, Black culture from W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, Jewish culture from Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Hispanic culture from Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, Palestinian culture from Refaat Alareer and Edward Said and…well, there are many–too many to have been so dammed up, so oppressed, so forgot–where we have a plastic culture for an action-hero morality that is imposed on us, the mildly curious individual will find that, outside this plastic jungle gym lays beautiful cultures that are beyond our wildest dreams.

In this, a nation of decay in the clouds of nitrous, the journal of Verdigris is born. What do we seek? We seek to continue the work of culture set down by many, and quite eloquently written by Matthew Arnold, the literary critic of ‘sweetness and light’: culture, he stated, ‘is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world’, because this is where the human spirit lives. In a nation so oppressed in its society, so it is so oppressed in its culture; in the case of America, nothing is allowed to live for all must be made in plastics. And we, at Verdigris, seek to bring this to an end.

Our commitments here are many, but above all we wish to be a place for voices that are left strangled, oppressed, and silenced. Not those who are rebuked and cry, but those who speak from the ground and call out to the world. Where those of most media platforms speak to their own, like the vainglorious podcasters of Left Media, the barbarians with cue cards in Right-wing media, and the empty suits of mainstream media, Verdigris wishes not merely to do away with these clowns; it wishes to go to war with them. We are against the Philistines, we are against the Puritans, and we are against the Professors. We are not here to talk among ourselves; we want to speak with the human spirit that has been strangled and muffled and sock-gagged. When we hear cries and demands and the shaking but determined voice of the world, we want to speak to those voices–in fact, to be closer to the truth, we want to offer these voices a place to speak for themselves. 

We do not want Tim Pool highlight reels like Majority Report, we do not want outrage promotions like The Daily Wire, and we despise the Tom Nichols and [insert other liberal journalist here, they are all the same] of the world. We are not here to recycle media for clicks: we are here to guide–through literature in all its proper forms–people to the most important but most simple frame from which to judge the world.

We wish to help you, dear reader, to look out the window, so you might see the decay at the heart of the human spirit of this society.

Can you see it?