This is a rough piece, that I was originally going to put in the first section of my upcoming collection, and then I decided that I didn’t like it all that much, so I tossed it on the rejects pile for a while. Then, during the editing and sequencing process for said collection, I decided to fish it back out, and edit it a little bit more and see if I liked it any better.

Ultimately, I decided that the edited version worked best as an afterthought. There are a number of references in here, mostly relating to the current sociopolitical zeitgeist, and how we’re in an era, where almost everyone’s decision-making process is now ruled by passion and emotion, rather than reason and logic.

The title itself came from some hysterical online commentary in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, and the 2016 US Election, from certain individuals, who were loud and uncompromising in their stalwart, and utter refusal to accept either reality—that it was all about: “The Russians! The Russians! The Russians!”
You get the picture.

Another comment that was made was that both of those (unacceptable) realities meant that the world was entering ‘The Devil’s Year’. Because of course, the best stories always have Old Man Splitfoot as the protagonist, don’t they? And of course, with the concurrent rise in the new and trendy Anti-Semitism, it seems you can’t even breathe online anymore without bumping into someone, who feels the need to breathlessly tell you that t3h j00000z are the Devil in the flesh—that they’re responsible for all the evil in the world. (Or, they might approach from the slightly ‘cleverer’ angle of talking about (((Bankers))), (((Lawyers))), and (((Hollywood))) controlling the world (all, of course ultimately (and apparently) dancing like marionettes to the not-so-invisible hand of the House of (((Rothschild))).

Quite frankly, it would be both ridiculous and laughable if it wasn’t so utterly repulsive.

How quickly we forget the lessons of the past, after all…

There are a number of literary references in the piece, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as a well-known Biblical quote from Psalms 22:2(KJV), and there is also a musical nod to one of the Rolling Stones’ two masterpiece songs, namely “Sympathy for the Devil” (their other masterpiece, IMO, being “Gimme Shelter”, although YMMV, and YOMV and all of that).

This piece also sort-of functions as a loose follow-up to my earlier poem ‘The Devil is Kinda Busy’, specifically in the idea that all things that the Devil gets blame/credit for, one really has to wonder just where, and how he finds the time to do it all!

There are also references to the Japanese computer game “Katamari Damacy”, specifically a statement made by the King of the Cosmos that: “Eye-Lasers are better than spankings.” as well as to a very pivotal scene towards the end of the 2015 film: The VVitch, and also to the brief online moral panic in February of 2019 over the so-called “Momo Suicide Challenge”, where, apparently videos were being spread via What’s App, where an extremely creepy-looking doll named ‘Momo’ was (apparently) telling young children to commit suicide. As with so many other moral panics of the past, ‘Momo’ was soon discovered to be a hoax. Likewise, I think that nearly everyone, who grew up in the western world, will instantly suss out the reference of “Ignore that man behind the curtain!”