I’ve been tipped off recently that the hounds of Hell are after P.G. Wodehouse again. And we can’t have that sort of thing going on.

The occasion for fresh attacks on the great writer is the publication of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters in the UK. (Not available in the US yet.) It gave an opportunity to UK journalist-creeps to write book reviews in which they dredged up the old scandal about Wodehouse, the only old scandal, involving the time he was interned by the Nazis and wound up giving some cluelessly chipper radio broadcasts which got him condemned as a collaborator.

This encourages a bunch of review-reading morons to blather online about refusing to read Wodehouse anymore—that’ll teach him not to collaborate with Nazis in the afterlife! Or else they forgive Wodehouse his moral lapse, and will condescend to re-read Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Young Men in Spats and Mulliner Nights and all his other great novels and short stories.

Fuck all y’all! You aren’t good enough for Wodehouse! Go suck on some T.S. Eliot, that’s all you deserve!

Anyway, the capper is that Wodehouse’s vile biographer, Robert McCrum, has taken this opportunity to weigh in as Wodehouse’s defender.

That’s a laugh! McCrum knocked himself out finding ways to present Wodehouse as a sad, cliched neurotic, even though technically not a Nazi-collaborator, in his “definitive” 2004 biography. And all McCrum wants to do is sell a few more copies:

The publication of PG Wodehouse‘s letters and Sophie Ratcliffe’s brilliant account of their author’s peculiar genius in last Saturday’s Guardian has re-awoken, for the umpteenth time, the Cerberus of Wodehouse’s war. This rough beast is getting quite long in the tooth, but he can still manage to give Wodehouse fans, of whom I am one, quite a nasty flesh wound.

For a complete account of the tragedy of Wodehouse’s internment and subsequent disgrace, the interested reader should consult the fourth part of my 2004 biography, Wodehouse: A Life.

God, it’s sickening. That these people—these people—aren’t prevented by law from saying or writing a word about Wodehouse! Obviously they can’t be prevented by shame, the shame of being exactly the kind of heartless high-literary Brit scum Wodehouse never stopped skewering, because such as them has got no shame. Just look at McCrum’s “defense” of Wodehouse:

Does it matter that Richard Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer, or that TS ELiot can easily be convicted of anti-semitism? Do we change our views about Virginia Woolf when we discover that she was a terrible snob who wrote some fairly nauseating things about the British working man? And, finally, does it disable PG Wodehouse’s claims to greatness that he had no grasp of the moral depravity of the Nazis, and allowed himself to become their dupe?

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that it’s the writer or artist’s work that matters. If he or she did not commit a crime, other than against posterity’s verdict on important social and cultural issues, and/or good taste, then they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt, leaving us free to enjoy their work with a clear conscience. This is, I concede, a liberal, laissez-faire attitude and critics with a less elastic moral compass will take a different line.

With defenders like these you don’t need enemies.

Note how McCrum just lets it linger, the overall sense that Wodehouse is seriously guilty of something that McCrum himself, with his smirking “liberal, laissez-faire” attitude, is generously willing to overlook. Observe how he leaves Wodehouse hanging out in company with horrible ticks like Wagner, Eliot, and Woolf, where he doesn’t belong and never could belong. See, this is the kind of vaguely accusatory shit that sells books.

For a complete account of Robert McCrum’s sick befoulment of the wonderful P.G. Wodehouse, the interested reader should consult my 2007 eXile review of McCrum’s nauseating biography, Wodehouse: A Life: exiledonline.com/woe-is-wodehouse-and-his-biography/

This article was first published in The eXile on October 4, 2007

Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse was published in 2004. At the time, I ignored it. I know the formula for these bios. You won’t catch me sanctioning the work of some insidious culture-sucking creep who’s picking over the bones of PGW, the peerless writer, I said to the bookstore clerk, who edged away. But you know how it is. Time passes, resolve weakens.

You find yourself back in the bookstore and everything there looks more or less rotten anyway.

So I finally read it, and it follows the formula, all right. It’s so toxic in its formula-following, I felt the public ought to be warned. If you come across this maddening tome, now in paperback, drop it like a hot brick. If you’ve already read it, you must counteract its brain-softening effects by immediately re-reading it in the following way: as an accidental self-portrait of the bio’s author, one that should be entitled What’s Wrong With McCrum?

McCrum doesn’t have that name for nothing, you know. He’s living up to its potential. You might doubt that anyone could have such a name in real life, not even this pernicious literary editor of The Observer who writes novels and smirks in his book jacket photo. But just take a look at the equally fantastical names attached to the blurbs for his book, things like Terry Teachout and Mary Welp. Clearly in certain lit-crit circles it helps to have an impossible handle like that; they recognize McCrum as one of their own and shower his work with praise. Incoherent praise, mainly. In one typically burbling rave, the noxious Christopher Hitchens writes, “His biography has a tendency to let in daylight upon the magic.”

What we have here represented on the book cover is a united front of one type of human loathesomeness that Wodehouse himself did his best to mock out of existence: the insufferable literary git. In his fiction, Wodehouse named his git exemplars Raymond Parsloe and Rodney Spelvin, Percy Gorringe and Honoria Glossop. He portrayed them as the enemies of all that is good: they routinely snub the honest and humorous, bully the benevolent, and kowtow to the false gods of yawn-inducing high culture. They write psychological novels called Grey Mildew and existential poems called “Darkling: A Threnody.”

And now one of their real-life counterparts has got P.G. Wodehouse in his clutches.

Just to clarify, for those of you still living in darkness, never having read Laughing Gas or Uncle Dynamite or “Bingo and the Peke Crisis,” this much-esteemed Wodehouse was the man who gave us the Jeeves and Wooster chronicles, the Blandings Castle saga, the Mulliner tales, the Ukridge stories, the great stuff on Hollywood and golf and boxing and so on, God knows how many dozen volumes that he cranked out with incredible steadiness from the 1910s to the 70s. On top of that, he was a big deal in Anglo-American musical-comedy theater of the 1920s and 30s. Considered the Grand Old Man of 20th c. lyricists, Wodehouse was an early partner of composer Jerome Kern, as well as Ira Gershwin’s personal mentor and hero. If you care about such things, that’s very big stuff. One stellar career in an impossibly competitive field is amazing; Wodehouse had two going simultaneously in two impossible fields, popular literature and theater.

But even as he racked up these triumphs, Wodehouse acknowledged that his life made for bad biography-fodder:

As a writer of light fiction, I have always…been handicapped by the fact that my disposition was cheerful, my heart intact, and my life unsoured. Handicapped, I say, because the public likes to feel that a writer of farcical stories is piquantly miserable in his private life, and that, if he turns out anything amusing, he does it simply in order to obtain relief from the almost insupportable weight of an existence which he has long since realized to be a washout.

Characteristically, McCrum quotes this passage as proof of Wodehouse’s neuroticism. That’s mainly how McCrum turns Wodehouse’s demonstrable happiness into evidence of underlying misery: just by claiming that it is. Describing Wodehouse at the fizzy peak of his career in the 1920s as he whizzed around from New York to London to the South of France and back again in a whirl of stage hits, bestselling novels, posh hotels, shopping sprees, and fine dining with pals, McCrum intones, “If Wodehouse’s output during these golden years had not been so exhilarating, it might be hard to escape the conclusion that there was something rather joyless about his incessant cycle of work and restless travel…” It is hard to escape the conclusion that exhilarating success is somehow joyless, if your name’s McCrum. Reverse logic is his dish. Wodehouse’s amiable contentment will be proof of his discontent; his success will represent failure. The way he smiled all the time will show just how keen his agony was.

It was the only way to make Wodehouse: A Life fit the formula of the respectable hardcover biography, the kind you always see at the front of the bookstore. They are often called things like “A Life,” which should serve as a warning. When confronted with a biography, you more or less expect to be reading about A Life and don’t need the clarification, but there appears to be some rule against interesting titles. An old British author is pretty sure to have A Life that can fill out one of these stodgy bios. Because, see, all that boring cultural merit and reverence must be shot through somehow with scandal and heartbreak. Even readers of respectable biographies have needs. They must have something to electrify 500 pages of small print, something that’ll give the minutia about boarding school and first publications and late middle-aged sciatica a little zing. The formula requires that all the achievements be tied to some central psychodrama dating back to childhood, which can be laid out by the biographer in lofty tones of understanding and sympathy for the poor old sod. Ideally, the subject’s nursery room angst will have resulted in closeted sexual deviancy that lends every grey literary triumph a lurid flush of horror, and who’s a better prospect for that than an old British author?

Meet Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the biographer’s dilemma. Always inclined to be content with his lot, which was pretty good to start with, Wodehouse was solidly upper-middle-class, healthy, even-tempered, popular, good at sports, and above all, brilliant at what he wanted to do with his life, which was write. He was hugely successful early, and kept it up for a 60-year run. He also had the rare good fortune, for a comedic writer, of being a consistent favorite of critics and literary bigshots like Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. He made friends easily: he had a few close cronies he kept all his life, plus oceans of entertaining acquaintances. He married youngish, seemed to like his wife, adored his step-daughter, doted on the family dogs, traveled extensively. Any way you slice it, he had a great life, just like he always said.

You can see the problem. What’s a McCrum to do with material like that?

Fortunately for him, Wodehouse also had typical British parents of a certain generation and class who could be counted on to put their sons into boarding schools at an early age while they went off to do their bit for Empire. This serves the biographical formula nicely, providing the life-scarring neglect at a formative age that is regarded as necessary to launch literary genius. In fact, Wodehouse’s first school was one that catered to the needs of “families of colonial civil servants,” showing that if the boy Wodehouse was cruelly cast off by his parents, at least he had a lot of company. But in this early deprivation of a mother’s love McCrum finds the key to every hilarious thing Wodehouse ever wrote in order to hide his presumably aching heart:

So Wodehouse, the perfect Englishman, developed a preference for keeping the lid on things. He also acquired the habit, which stayed with him the rest of his life, of looking on the bright side of life, and of accepting philosophically whatever fate (which features throughout his work) should hand out. With the wisdom and the vocabulary of hindsight we should say that, when he observed, ‘I can’t remember ever having been unhappy in those days,’ he was in denial, a state of mind he sustained throughout his life.

After that, the book writes itself.

McCrum is a thoroughly modern kind of jackass. He loves “the wisdom and the vocabulary of hindsight” which gives us tired Psych 101 terms like “denial,” and can make the most remarkable person in the world seem like a collection of boringly-described symptoms. Remember that ham actor who shows up at the end of Psycho to explain away Norman Bates? There you have your Contemporary Biographer. Pompous, dull, but longing to be fascinating, in love with a reductive model of human psychology that went out forty years ago, he concludes his long fatheaded explanation by crowing, “It was the MOTHERRRR who did it!”

And so the chief fascination of the book is a perverse one: witnessing this contemporary jerk trying to describe and explain a fairly noble non-contemporary man he doesn’t understand. McCrum doesn’t sweat it, though. Oblivious to the impact of having his main claims about repression and denial rub right up against the evidence that contradicts those claims, he quotes from letters showing Wodehouse to be an absolute gusher of affection and fervently expressed concern for those close to him. Here’s Wodehouse writing to his stepdaughter Leonora when she was about to have her first child: “‘This is just a line to tell you how much I love you and how much I am thinking of you. I am praying that you won’t have too bad a time, because you’re very precious to me….I can’t bear the thought of you being in pain…’.” Or how about this letter to a bereaved friend who’d just lost his wife: “‘I wish to God I could be with you. I feel so utterly helpless all these miles away…’.”

I get the feeling this McCrum doesn’t have a lot of experience with true repression. You may trust me on this, repression doesn’t speak the language quoted above. If my own father ever said or wrote any such thing to me on any occasion, I’d pass out from the shock. But McCrum merely observes, “Wodehouse detested the intrusion of pain and suffering in his life,” somehow managing to suggest that those who are well adjusted don’t mind it a bit. Everything is packaged as proof that Wodehouse is profoundly messed-up, and that’s the source of his genius, because in bios that’s always the source of genius. Meanwhile, as we slog through McCrum’s opus, every thoroughly researched fact and quote he provides begin to add up to something else, a kind of life-equation we fear might actually be true:

Talent + a work ethic that would kill an ox + a sunny temperament free of the tendency to fuck up your own life with a lot of bogus self-dramatizing crap = a fair shot at the kind of success that gets you the whole world. (And you’d deserve it.)

McCrum’s got one undeniable ace in the hole, though: Wodehouse did mess up pretty badly once. In 1940, placidly residing in the south of France, the Wodehouse menagerie neglected to get out ahead of the invading Nazi army. Wodehouse found himself, at 59, an internee at a series of Nazi camps, along with all the other ensnared male residents under the age of sixty. His reaction was typical of him: he kept writing. He finished Money in the Bank and outlined his new Blandings Castle novel, Full Moon. He entertained his fellow internees with short stories about camp life that he planned to publish one day in a volume to be entitled Wodehouse in Wonderland. For nine months, with no idea what his own fate would be-trucked from camp to camp-wasting away on a diet of watery cabbage soup and the occasional potato-worrying about what had become of his wife and parrot and Pekingese dog Wonder after their forced separation-cut off from any news of the rest of the world-Wodehouse kept writing. Fellow internees cracked up and attempted suicide but, after helping haul them away from the window ledge, Wodehouse kept writing. Perhaps you’re not a writer, or don’t know any writers, so you might not quite understand the significance of this fact. Writing, for most writers, is hard. Even at the best of times you’ll make any excuse to stop writing. A sore throat, a mildly annoying e-mail, a broken dishwasher, almost anything can provide the rationale for why you can’t write anymore that day. Internment in a Nazi camp would be sufficient excuse for most writers to take a break for, say, the rest of their lives. But not Wodehouse. He was a writing Titan.

It was his sheer awesome writer-focus that got him into so much trouble. When the Nazis finally figured out who he was, they took him out of the camps and had him do radio broadcasts. Never politically savvy and now clueless about the desperate state of the war, Wodehouse delivered bemused comic Wodehouse in Wonderland riffs on his experiences and his own boneheadedness in getting himself into such a spot. Here’s an excerpt from his first Berlin broadcast in 1941:

“Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.”

The embattled British were, understandably, not in the mood, and tarred him as a collaborator. After the war and to the end of his days, spent in pleasant rural exile on Long Island, Wodehouse remained a bit bewildered by the furor, insisting he only meant to reassure his friends and fans that he was all right and carrying on the same as ever in spite of all the Germans could do. But he also took his drubbing stoically, saying, “‘I made an ass of myself and must pay the penalty’.”

This strange interlude finally gives McCrum something to sink his fangs into. He frames the whole bio with this one nasty debacle of Wodehouse’s long life, treating it as emblematic of Wodehouse’s essential hollowness and dysfunction. It’s the ultimate proof, see, of how repressed Wodehouse was, of how his colonial British childhood so stunted him he, uh, repressed everything, by working hard, and traveling a lot, and staying married, and being keen on sports, and taking long healthy walks every day, and uh…oh yeah, collaborating with the Nazis.

McCrum’s not alone in throwing out this argument designed to appeal to the contemporary hatred of anybody with a modicum of self-restraint. I once ran across a grad school syllabus that proposed teaching one of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels in tandem with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The obvious intention was to rip into Wodehouse by comparing his most famous creation, the perfect English valet Jeeves, to the uptight English butler in Ishiguro’s novel, who keeps himself too busy polishing the silver to protest his aristocratic employer’s conversion to fascism. You remember, no doubt, the dreary Merchant-Ivoryish film version with Anthony Hopkins martinetting around as the butler. He’s a very repressed butler, see, and repressed people are forever letting Nazis get the upper hand. They won’t just say, “Get the hell out of here, Nazis!” like you or I would. So when it comes time to pin the blame on somebody English for colluding with Nazis, Ishiguro suggests that in some ultimate sense it’s not the Duke of Windsor or any of his privileged Tory pals who deserve our condemnation. No-it was the BUTLERRRR who did it.

I’m expecting any day now to hear that McCrum’s bio is going to be made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins as the glum, empty-eyed, incipient fascist writer P.G. Wodehouse. It will be directed by Merchant or Ivory, whichever one isn’t dead at the time. Don’t go see it!!

This article was first published in The eXile on October 4, 2007

The first rule of debate: Never accept your opponent’s characterization of his own position. But for decades, liberals–in their perpetual Nerf-war against conservatives–have done just the opposite. While conservatives bloviate about traditionalism (Buckley), skepticism (Burke), sobriety (Taft), and order (Mill), liberals are the first to bobblehead in agreement. “Yes,” they say over paté and pinot at Davos, “That’s you.”

Yet no matter how many laws they break or billions they loot, how many phantoms they conjure, how many social ties they sever, how many innocents they imprison, torture and execute, no matter how many foreign monsters they champion, no matter how much they scream that two-plus-two equals five, and no matter how much they double-down on crazed schemes while swearing it’ll all be different this time, the liberal–dutiful little poodle that he is–still wags his head. “Yes, yes. Calm, measured, skeptical conservatism.” “Calm, measured, skeptical.” Who does that sound more like to you: Barry Goldwater or Noam Chomsky?

So it’s no great surprise that the New York Times–that great bastion of spineless bourgeois liberalism–hates Corey Robin’s new book The Reactionary Mind. So much so that the author, Sheri Berman, dubs Robin the left-wing Ann Coulter. But we can forgive Berman. If her crowd was to actually accept Robin’s arguments, they’d be faced with two options: 1. accept that they are little more than chumps basking in the same cushy privileges forged by the long conservative counterrevolution or 2. tip over the dinner table and drive a salad fork into David Brooks’s eye-socket.

Robin’s thesis is simple: ignore the Right-wing taxonomy. Conservatism–despite the seemingly incompatible respective ideologies of free-marketeers, slavers, neocons, neofascists, Buckleys, Federalists, Bloombergians, traditionalists, Tea Baggers, Randians, McCarthyists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldbugs, Jesus Freaks, J .Edgars, pro-lifers—has been, in reality, firmly united behind a single mission since the French Revolution: the creation of new regimes of privilege and domination in the face of democratic threats.

Conservatism, as Robin states, has never been about “taking us back” but about “great leaps forward”–from the ashes of the Ancien Régime into the arms of a new one of the conservative’s making. Conservatives aren’t looking for exact “restoration,” but radical new constructions—building new regimes of power and domination to replace the old and unworthy elites–unworthy, to conservatives, because they failed to beat back a democratic threat. Robin quotes Burke, “It is truth that cannot be concealed; in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors.”

Burke despised the monarchy for being unfit to rule, Goldwater saved most of his hellfire for the Rockefeller-dominated GOP, and now, Sarah Palin bemoans the “crony capitalists” and “Ivy Leaguers” that run the show. As Robin states, the GOP is now the party of “Scalia, D’Souza, Gonzalez, and Yoo.” This need for reinvention via the injection of fresh blood has long been a cornerstone of the movement, which makes it more–not less–accepting of outsiders willing to throw-in for the cause: “Maistre was from Savoy, Burke from Ireland. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock in Nevis and rumored to be part black. Disraeli was a Jew, as are many of the neoconservatives who helped transform the Republican Party from a cocktail party in Darien.” It follows that 21st century Conservatism is Dick Cheney’s lesbian spawn going on TV and calling the president a pussy because he refuses to torture enemies of the state.

“Conservatism,” writes Robin, “is not a commitment to limited government and liberty–or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and everchanging modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force–the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.”

“Freedom,” “Liberty,” these were the battle cries of American Radicals–Wobblies who got their skulls cracked open by the Chicago PD, feminists who said “fuck you” to a lifetime of bad sex and black-eyes, Midwestern abolitionists who went to war against slavers, reds from Brooklyn who shipped off to Spain in the 1930s, black men and women who got their eardrums punctured by firehoses while dogs ripped their legs to shreds.

But a ‘winger shouting “Freedom!”? Give me a fucking break. This is the rhetoric of Jacobins recycled and reloaded into the right-wing arsenal. Forty years ago, it would’ve sounded as absurd coming from them as their charge of “racist” sounds today whenever they hurl it at the NAACP or Planned Parenthood (remember: the 21st century Pro-Life line against abortion is that it’s “a genocide against African Americans.”). And let’s not forget that whey-faced little shit James O’Keefe brags about using “Saul Alinsky tactics.”

“Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics,” Robin writes, “conservatives have had ‘a sound enough instinct not to attack’ it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission.” In other words, the freedom to fire at whim, the freedom of a fetus over the mother, and,most recently,the freedom of corporate campaign cash to flow as it pleases.

So despite the well-oiled coif, Reagan wasn’t a return to the 1950s—capital controls? 90% top marginal tax rate? Median wages that supported a single-earner household? Nearly 1 out of 3 workers unionized? That’s the socioeconomic framework of the America of 1950s. Reagan and his crew were out to build something entirely new. Even Jim Crow looks quaint next to Reagan’s multi-billion dollar crusade for racial purification (i.e. The War on Drugs).

As Garret Keizer put it in Harper’s, Reagan “will be seen as the last of the California hippies, a man who told us that if we just let the markets run wild and the Magic Bus of juggernaut capitalism go barrel-assing down the road with its freak flag flying all would be groovy and out of sight. What was his ‘Morning in America’ bit but a cover of “Aquarius”; what was his presidency but the last act of Hair?”

But in a truly sick little twist, the liberals have–in recent years–started cribbing stale right-wing rhetoric, dutifully neglecting any call for a “Morning in America” of their own. Now, it’s the liberals who are repeating all that Taft-era bullshit. They’ve long since turned up their noses at the grand projects of emancipation, forward marches into a glorious future (“didn’t Lenin, like, kill people?”), and have instead begun to squirt out the very lies that conservatives told about themselves fifty years ago–whether it’s Carter, Mondale, Clinton or Obama wagging his finger about balancing budgets or some anarcho-liberal down at Zuccotti calling for the return of “mom and pop shops.” (I got news for you: mom and pop were among the first to screech about OSHA and the EPA and never cared much for “the Coloreds” either.) The difference is that conservative elites—in practice—never believed any of this shit, whereas liberals gobble it all up and ask for seconds. Hell, half the chapters out of Pat Buchanan’s last book read like Naderite manifestos.

You’d almost forget that anti-Communism is, in itself, a militant and internationalist ideology all its own–one with a 20th century bodycount that rivals the bloodiest work of Stalin. This is wholly understood in conservative James Ellroy’s pathologically gory “Underworld USA” trilogy but flies over the heads of liberals, perhaps because some of their biggest champions–JFK, Orwell, Truman, etc.–bought into it whole-heartedly.

But there’s another component to Robin’s argument that makes the Times crowd squish up in their khakis: how exactly do conservatives get the masses on-board in the first place? Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?, the preferred liberal Rosetta Stone to unlocking the right-wing brain, suggests that non-elite rightwingers simply get “tricked” into supporting conservative policies. The Big Scary GOP demolishes labor unions with one hand, but draws crosshairs on Tiller the Baby-killer with the other. It’s the only way Frank can explain such “irrationality.”

Robin calls bullshit on that. Non-elite conservatives–the Red State bubbas that have cursed this land for so long–reap very real material rewards, but they’re rewards which fly in the face of the cheery “every one’s good at heart” worldview of liberalism.

Conservatism offers them something Robin brilliantly calls “democratic feudalism.” In other words, dominion over your “lessers” in the private spheres of the workplace (middle-management tyrants) and the home (lockin’ down the wife and daughter’s ladyparts): “the most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.” This is the link between the Santorums and the Pauls of the world–one which Reason magazine, the Mises Institute and other appendages of the supposedly “anti culture-war” libertarian propaganda circuit work very hard to obscure.

Robin points out that the U.S. stands alone in the Western world–as it does these days on most everything awful–in the enormous size of its middle-management and supervisory workforce. “Every man a king!” sounds great, but who plays “the serfs”? That would be the usual roster of women, immigrants, and all those who stink of poor–well, poorer than the “little conservative king” handing out the pink slips. The hedge-funder gets the capital gains tax cut and the Walmart Assistant Manager gets to hold the livelihoods of dozens (and their families) in the palm of his hand–permitted to inflict an economic violence on each and every one that, in some ways, makes a public flogging look like a demerit.

So it’s no surprise that Robin locates the purest manifestation of American “democratic feudalism” (and thus, conservatism) in the ideology of the plantation lords. “The democratic promise of slavery,” writes Robin, is “the fact that it put the possibility of personal mastery within the reach of every white man…This was not just propaganda: by 1860, there were 400,000 slaveholders in the South, making the American master class one of the most democratic in the world. The slaveholders repeatedly attempted to pass laws encouraging whites to own at least one slave and even considered granting tax breaks to facilitate such ownership. Their thinking, in the words of one Tennessee farmer, was that ‘the minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman…you make him an abolitionist at once.”

But the slavers were not without an egalitarian streak, however perverse it may have been. Take the loathsome Vice President John C. Calhoun: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Fittingly, Calhoun is, today, a hero to the contemporary American conservative and his name adorns over a dozen schools across the country.

Small wonder then than Rep. Ron Paul–the arch-conservative with whom liberals are supposed to find some common cause—recently called neo-Confederate historian Thomas DiLorenzo to testify before Congress. DiLorenzo’s a member of the League of the South, an outfit that calls for another southern secession and the restoration of rule under “Anglo-Celts.” DiLorenzo, an economist at Loyola University, just so happens to be a champion of Austrian School of Economics, which, of course, is all about “freedom.”

Despite libertarian efforts to recruit the young and liberal-minded into the flock with promises of ending the wars, closing Guantanamo and calling off the cozy relationship with the Likudniks, The Reactionary Mind makes it clear that there’s no fundamental difference between any of these right-wing breeds, and thus common ground is neither possible nor desirable, particularly with the libertarians. “When the libertarian looks out upon society,” writes Robin, “he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.”

So why do liberals let conservatives get away with this shit? Where’s their battle cry of freedom? Let me let you in on a little secret: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death”? Liberals don’t believe a word of it. Not one fucking word. They’ve long since abandoned the emancipatory call of the Enlightenment. “The common American liberal today,” says Roger D. Hodge in his scathing review of Obama’s first two years The Mendacity of Hope, “is mostly interested in lifestyle–and the not inconsiderable virtues of tolerance, compassion, decency, and fair play. Lifestyle liberals tend to express proper environmental pieties and feel very strongly about respecting the rights of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. All of these perfectly admirable liberal qualities and attitudes…but as modes of action and behavior they do not necessarily follow from a coherent political philosophy or a theory of government.”

But, says the mealy-mouthed “progressive,” Obama, Clinton, “they’re not real liberals.” Of course they are! Liberals make no challenge against a society’s given socioeconomic framework. Instead, liberalism promises only to open up that very same framework to the greatest number of people. That’s it. Hence Obama’s “free market solutions” to education and health care. Sure, when Keynesian-welfare state was the name of the game, we got Medicare and the Great Society, but count that model among conservatism’s many scalps as they rode the 1970s neoliberal wave to total victory.

So despite all that bullshit about federalism and limited government, Conservatism is thus revolutionary, crusading, impassioned, combative, and–let’s face it–creative. Basically, it is everything that liberalism is not. Both conservatism and genuine Leftism calls for a grand societal project that terrifies the liberal.

Of course a liberal doesn’t want to face any of this: that at least a fifth of the population needs to be fought and defeated for anything close to “progress” on those supposed “Enlightenment values” to take hold. Because that means, oh nos!, a fight! Combat! Saying “fuck you” instead “we agree to disagree!”

Robin believes, as I do, that the current incarnation of the conservative movement is approaching its terminus–though I’m fairly certain that the death rattle will be loud, long, and bloody. Without a significant democratic challenge (the labor struggles of the 1930s, the revolts of the 1960s, etc.), conservatism has nowhere to go. It’s been too successful. “Loss–real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige–is the mustard seed of conservative innovation. What the right suffers from today is not loss but success.”

The Millennial, living with the rents, sans health insurance, and buried beneath tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt is–according to a recent Rasmussen poll–split on socialism vs. capitalism. I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic when I say that my generation’s gonna be a tough “get” for the GOP. I don’t know a single one that isn’t itching to go to war with Republicans and baby-boomers of all stripes (perhaps this explains the recent fad in New York City of blue Union Army caps.) Which is why the multi-billion dollar libertarian think tank empire is pushing the Paultard phenomenon so hard. “At least,” they say, “he’s against the war.”

But soon, even Dr. Paul’s mystique will wither and die, and it will be up to the conservative true believers to carry the fire to initiate their next grand project. My money’s on Andrew Sullivan, the supposed “very serious” self-described Burkean conservative (and diehard Thatcherite) who’s 1. Irish 2. Catholic 3. gay and 4. a devout–to the level of mystic—Obamican (remember: Burke was a Whig, not a Tory). He’s pals with all the young DC liberals and even has sex advice columnist Dan Savage fill in for him from time to time. His conservative tentacles ever a-twitter, he ditched Bush just a few months before the rest of the ruling class did. He has distaste for the “shrill,” and falls back on a sunny and congenial disposition. (He responded to Robin’s book by simply re-posting The New York Times review. Cut a little close to the bone, I’m guessing.) Last week, a friend of mine enthusiastically pointed out a recent article by Sullivan in support of Occupy Wall Street, countering my skepticism by saying that Sullivan had “changed his mind” and now supported the young protesters whole-heartedly. I checked. By the third paragraph, he’d managed to gather up both the Tea Baggers and the Occupiers into his good graces, admitting that he shares both group’s frustrations, namely, you guessed it: “entitlements.” Well-bowled, you wily fuck.

Maybe I’m being a little too hard on liberals. After all, a liberal is fundamentally a more “decent” person than a conservative. And there’s something to be said for decency. But good manners, sympathy for the powerless, and a congenial disposition are useless in beating back conservatism after its gone hegemonic–and who could possibly deny that it has? Maybe that’s the most frightening lesson from Robin’s book, and what makes it all so hard for liberals to take: that the fight is over, the battle is lost, and the bastards won. And if we wanna do something about it, and it’s starting to look like maybe we do, we might have to summon up some of that dangerous radical fire that’s propelled every worthwhile step we’ve taken towards a more civil and egalitarian society.

Connor Kilpatrick is a Senior Writer for Jacobin.

Would you like to know more? Dissect your neighborhood reactionary by reading Mark Ames’ “We, The Spiteful” and “Why The American Right Never Liked V. S. Naipaul.” Also, read the great Dr. John Dolan’s savage takedown “Reagan’s Cheshire Snarl.”

There’s a book out about Rin Tin Tin, the old dog-star of Hollywood, by that stuck-up New Yorker hack Susan Orlean. She’s best-known for writing the bestseller The Orchid Thief, which got adapted by lofty screenwriter Charlie Kaufman into a smug self-reflexive film called Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman the screenwriter trying to adapt The Orchid Thief for film, which just shows you how up its own ass this movie is. And guess who plays Susan Orlean in it? Meryl Streep. Yeah, the snootiest most high-culture over-Oscared WASPy revered actress alive. Amazing how those kind of “quality” people still get together, as if they all belonged to the same private club where they meet regularly for cocktails and lucrative business deals and deciding who will play whom in the film.

It’s very unfortunate that Susan Orlean should write a book about Rin Tin Tin, because I’m actually interested in reading a book about Rin Tin Tin. So I read hers. Battled my way through it, actually, against the tremendous obstacle of the author herself. There’s an awful lot of Susan Orlean messing up Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Every time you settle in to read about some charged moment in the life of an interesting German Shepherd, you find yourself swamped by the high-toned musings of Susan Orlean again.

It’s too bad about New Journalism, which seemed like such a good idea at the time. You actually want to read about a thing and instead you’ve got to read about the irritating super-literary schmo who found out about the thing, and all the trouble the schmo went to, and how the schmo felt about it. Somebody really ought to clean up New Journalism, at least enforce a No-Schmoes policy.

Anyway, New Journalist Susan Orlean narrates how she learned about Rin Tin Tin by talking to many exotically primitive, non-quality people along the way, and by doing amusingly grubby things like  rooting through their public storage units. But such excursions are well worth it to her, because that way Susan Orlean finds out more about how fascinating Susan Orlean is:

For me, the story of Rin Tin Tin let me cast a line into the pool of my childhood memories, an undertaking that felt more urgent every day I walked further away from the edge of that pool. I began the story of Rin Tin Tin soon after my father died and my son had been born; the idea of continuity was suddenly very real to me. Reeling Rin Tin Tin into the present would not only revive his story but also perhaps clarify my own—the story of who I am and how I happened to become the person I seem to be.

Orlean’s favorite tone is that of soft profundity, the kind that only the privileged can afford. “Leisure class” breathes through every syllable. That fishing metaphor’s a beaut, isn’t it? Casting a line into the pool of childhood memory, reeling in Rin Tin Tin. So evocative of an agrarian past, but not the dirty starved hard-working one, no, the gentler more contemplative never-never world of Walden Pond, The Andy Griffith Show, and blonde airbrushed Americanized water-walking Jesus H. Christ telling disciples to be fishers of men. It’s so perfectly trite and phony there’s a kind of sick genius in it. Of course, Susan Orlean probably has a pond on her 55-acre property “where she lives with her family and her animals in Columbus County, New York,” as the bio-blurb informs us. And I wouldn’t put it past her to fish in it, either, in a wistful, bemused way that she’ll write about later for The New Yorker.

All this is rotten, because Rin Tin Tin was a beautiful animal with many fascinating qualities and an epic life story. When she can stop writing about herself for awhile and focus on the dog, Orlean gets some good stuff across about him. He and his litter-mates were rescued from a bombed-out cellar in World War I France by an odd, lonely, dog-loving soldier named Lee Duncan, who already knew about the then-rare-in-the-US breed called the German Shepherd. He named his puppy for a little French toy that was popular at the time, trained him to do astonishing things, and took him out to Hollywood where, against all odds, the dog became a top star of the 1920s. Such a top star, his box-office earnings regularly bailed out Warner Brothers studio, where he was referred to as “the mortgage-lifter.” His celebrity made German Shepherds the most popular dog in the USA for many years.

The charismatic dog had a very dark face, which made him difficult for cinematographers to light; later Rin Tin Tins, some related to the original German Shepherd star, some not, were more classically handsome representatives of the breed, and always had more tan markings. But none ever matched the remarkable combination of star qualities that the first Rin Tin Tin had. After the dog’s death in 1932, Lee Duncan’s life was a sad one; he was forever trying and failing to recapture the perfect relationship he had with the perfect dog-star, and then resigning himself to living as the keeper of “the Memory Room” full of Rin Tin Tin memorabilia.

Rin Tin Tin the First was athletic, with an amazing ability to leap walls up to twelve-feet high, which was obviously cinematic gold. He had a matchless range of expressions (Duncan trained him to do a lot of them) and, in repose, an admirably grave demeanor that inspires some typical Orlean oversell:

[He had] the resigned and solemn air of an existentialist. In his most popular portrait—shot in the 1920s, copied by the tens of thousands, and signed “Most Faithfully, Rin Tin Tin” in Lee’s spiky script—his jaw is set and his eyes are cast downwards, as if he was thinking about something very sad. Even when photographed doing something playful like, say waterskiing or sunbathing or riding a horse or getting a manicure or snowshoeing with starlets or drinking a glass of milk with a group of children who were also drinking milk, he had a way of looking pensive, preoccupied, as if there were a weight on his soul.

Well, it’s a lovely photo of Rinty, all right, let’s just say that.

His typical character in movies was that of a Jack London-esque dog torn between his wild side and his tame side, and his dark face could look nicely atavistic when he was running with a wolf pack but trying to decide if he ought to slip off and rescue some rare worthy person in trouble. The description of these dog movies in which the dogs are the real heroes with moral dilemmas sound pretty good, I have to say. Silent film fostered the possibilities of animal-acted drama. A dog’s face is every bit as interesting to study as a human’s, after all—more interesting, actually—as many an upstaged human actor knows to his sorrow, animals will act you off the screen every time.

Later on, when Rin Tin Tin III was starring on a hit TV show, the dog character wasn’t nearly so central. He mainly hung around waiting to save some hapless idiot, without seeming to ponder whether such a lifestyle might be an ignoble one for a proud wolf-descendant. The “Lassie, come quick, Timmy’s trapped in the well” narrative was the order of the day.

The Talkies ended Rin Tin Tin’s career as a huge movie star. After Warner Brothers made The Jazz Singer and sound film became the only game in town, Jack Warner sent a cruel memo to Lee Duncan reminding him that “dogs don’t talk” and therefore they wouldn’t be renewing Rin Tin Tin’s contract. It makes one happy to think that Rin Tin Tin once bit Jack Warner; according to legend, he bit most of the film types he worked with, or at least threw himself into fight scenes with such enthusiasm he was a menace to human co-stars. Atta boy, Rinty! Good dog!

(Reminds me: I was on a film shoot once, working with a novice director who was a real rat-bastard. The scene involved a German Shepherd and the director wasn’t pleased with the dog’s performance and didn’t know anything about dogs, or directing, or anything. He decided to “adjust the dog’s position” without asking the trainer, strode up and pulled the dog’s front legs forward. The dog growled deeply in his face, the bastard director leaped back as if shot, and the entire crew lit up with joyful anticipation. But the dog was a disciplined dog: he didn’t proceed to rip the director’s throat out, and the rest of the rotten movie actually got made and released. It was a real shame.)

Susan Orlean tours through a lot of related subject matter surrounding the “life and legend” of Rin Tin Tin, and some of it is pretty interesting. Stuff about the breeding and popularization of German Shepherds, the rise of the concept of the “companion animal,” other dog stars like Rover and Strongheart and Lassie, that kind of thing. (My favorite bit of info was the fact that there was a film genre known as a “snow” in silent era Hollywood, when audiences were fascinated by the idea of the “frozen North.” Only they didn’t call it a “Northern.” So somebody might say, “We’re going up to Canada to shoot a ‘snow.’”)

Orlean seems to be good at research. If she’d stay off her own feelings and quests for “meaning” in everything and rein in the bathetic prose style…which she won’t. Get a load of this doozy, which occurs after Susan Orlean stages a big scene of “meaning” for herself by visiting a World War I cemetery:

As I drove away in the dusky light, I kept seeing the tailored rows of graves, those tiny repositories of stories that are hardly remembered, all those sad and broken boys resting in the velvet lawn of St. Mihiel, forever. Almost one hundred years of resting there, enough time to be forgotten, the lives that continued after theirs ended having now filled up the space that opened up when they died, so their absence now has been lacquered over, smoothed out, almost invisible.

What lasts? What lingers? What is snagged by the brambles of time, and what slips through and disappears? What leaves only a little dent in the world, the soft sunken green grave, the scribble on a scrap of paper, the memory that is bleached by time and then vanishes bit by bit each day?

“What is snagged by the brambles of time?”! It goes drooling on like that, the whipping-up of one’s own emotions into a sentimental froth that fourteen-year-olds indulge in, fourteen-year-olds whose lives have been pretty cushy, anyway. It’s interesting that in telling the story of Rin Tin Tin, Orlean has to describe genuinely ghastly things happening, and some she chooses to weep and pontificate over extensively, while others she reports with crisp brevity. After describing the widespread use of dogs in wartime military service during World War I, for example, and relating a number of anecdotes about the indispensability and incredible heroism of the dogs in combat and all that, she rids us of the war dogs thusly: “The French military destroyed the majority of its dogs as the war skidded to a close. The British, German, Italian, and Russian military likely did the same.”

Suddenly the drive to do intensive research deserts her, as well as the impulse to drivel over the unremembered dead. Lee Duncan managed to save Rin Tin Tin from the wholesale slaughter—he’s the dog that we’re waxing lugubrious about here—so, moving on. Interesting mix of the sopping-wet and the suddenly dry, the mushy-soft and unpleasantly hard, in Susan Orlean’s prose. In other words, a nasty rich bitch peeks out occasionally through all that whipped-cream wordplay.

Still, the dog himself is great, and few film stars ever get a worthy biographer. If you look at it that way, it’s not so bad.

My idea of a Norwegian was always some cheerless Social Democrat in a knit sweater whose greatest joy in life was comparing the price of beer in Prague (cheap) to the price of beer in Krakow (even cheaper). Then I read the just-released new edition of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, a cult classic that first appeared in 1998.

Dude. No, seriously. Du-hu-huuude! All I can say is that Norway fuckiiin’ rocks!

Lords of Chaos chronicles the rise of Black Metal, Norway’s extremist contribution to the underground metal scene in the late 80s and early 90s. What made Black Metal so exceptional wasn’t just the speed and thrash of the music, the violence of the lyrics or the amount of corpse-paint that its death-obsessed members wore, but rather the number of real corpses and smoldering churches that the movement left behind.

The rise of the Black Metal movement in Norway is a case of humorless dirtheads taking a joke way too seriously. The joke was Satanic rock, which Lords of Chaos skillfully traces from its early origins in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Coven (who transformed from performing black masses on stage to perpetrating the weepy hippie hit “One Tin Soldier”) to metal’s second big wave in the early 80s and the rise of kitsch Satan-rockers Venom. To our modern eyes, Venom looks the spitting image of Spinal Tap during their Smell the Glove phase, but to dirtheads who didn’t know any better, Venom was the long-sought embodiment of evil. It was from the Venom branch of evil-metal that all of metal’s more violent, “evil” forms descended, including Black Metal.

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks. But metal had its rivals for the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and metal’s own competing mutations. The competition forced metal’s leading edge to metamorphose into harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching its apex with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-80s. Death Metal was as violent, Satanic and musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so it seemed.

And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man character in this dumb, bloody saga, comes in. Norway is not only a completely humorless society (it banned Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for being too offensive, leading to ads in rival Sweden boasting that the movie was “so funny it was banned in Norway!”), but worse, a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland, caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which raises an interesting question: Do boredom and blandness “count” as real suffering, and if so, do they justify murder the way other forms of oppression make murder seem a likely, even understandable response? The Black Metalists of Norway think so.

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its own as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously had changed his name to “Dead,” offed himself with a shotgun. His friend and lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered Dead’s brains splattered all over their apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is run down to the village store to buy film, run back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead’s corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then call the cops. Now that is fuckin’ cool, dude.

Dead’s suicide photo used for the cover of bootleg Mayhem album

You’ve really got to hand it to the Norse for keeping it real. I for one will be scratching them off the “Eurofag” list.

Euronymous eventually got offed himself by a rival Black Metaler, the surprisingly interesting neo-Nazi Varg Vikernes of Burzum, in large part because Varg thought Euronymous wasn’t “evil” enough. Vikernes’ own account of how he killed Euronymous, chasing him around an apartment building knifing him while the Black Metal victim screamed for help, is truly one of the great slapstick moments in murder history: “I hit him directly into his skull and his eyes went boing! and he was dead.” (I particularly like Varg’s Looney Tunes “boing!”)

Varg Vikernes cheerfully recounts how he murdered Euronymous

The book, particularly the first half, is often laugh-out-loud funny, in a metal sort of way. For one thing, Black Metalists are incredibly pedantic–as laughably pedantic as the worst jerks you knew in the college rock/punk/hardcore scene, and pedantic about the very same stupid things: who is more “genuine,” “authentic,” “extreme,” “on-the-edge” and in metal’s case, “evil.” It’s almost painful to read about the various figures’ internecine pedantry wars because they’re so similar to battles that were/are waged by pedants in the “alternative” subculture, which had always considered itself far superior to “lowly” metalhead culture.

And frankly, who’s to say that metalheads were lower or lamer than punks? One thing that’s hard to argue with the Black Metalists about is why many of them chose metal over punk: For them, punk copped out. Punk started off going for the throat of Normal Society, but in the game of chicken it didn’t have the nerve to go all the way, snagglepussing safely leftward or detouring into kitsch just when it had to lay its last cards on the table. Punk copped out almost at its inception, with The Clash quickly abandoning “White Riot” for pastafarian hippie politics, or the Sex Pistols devolving overnight from terrifying chaos to self-parody, a depressing degradation chronicled in The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle.

The Black Metalists understood this copout quite consciously, opposed it (as they opposed Death Metal’s cringe in the face of real extremism) and therefore pushed their war with the Normals to its logical conclusion: They went for paganism, National- Socialism, church-torching and murder.

And why not go all the way for murder and arson, considering what the “consequences” of murder are in Northern Europe. Oo, a Northern European jail. Oo, I’m so scared! The sentences, when they’re even given out, are laughably light, while the jail conditions were described as a “holiday” by one of the victims’ mothers, or “time flies when you’re having fun” by one of the perps.

Convicted Norwegian murderer “paying” for his crime in Bastoy Prison

One lesson of Lords of Chaos is that it pays to murder in Northern Europe. Literally. Going to prison there is like getting comped at a Comfort Inn. You can’t possibly get locked away for long, and even if they give you 10 or 20 years–and that’s if you’re lucky–you can still get off on weekends for unaccompanied home visits, enough time to participate in another murder. Prisons there are so comfy that even the metalists complained about getting treated too well. As Varg Vikernes sneered, “It’s much too nice here. It’s completely ridiculous. I asked the police to throw me in a real dungeon, and also encouraged them to use violence.” Naturally, they didn’t.

Which got me thinking: If and when my own fledgling writing career dives for good, I know what I’m going to do. Put on some corpse paint, get myself an axe, go on a Scandinavian murder spree, then call the cops and demand that they jail me in the nearest Comfort Inn for life.

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying contemporary America’s glorious imperial war machine right at the very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these grown-up war nerds are.

Let me just say here that I had always thought that draft-dodgers like Perle (who snagglepussed from the Vietnam War, exit stage left) and Frum (who, as a Canadian, was born a draft-dodger) were just your run-of-the-mill corporate fags, but after reading An End to Evil…dude. No seriously, du-hu-hude. Dude, I’m telling you, these chickenhawks fuckiiiiiiiiiin’ rock!

Seriously. They rock as hard as Burzum and Mayhem. The proof? First, both the Black Metalists and the Republican authors are obsessed with evil, as the title alone shows. Indeed, Frum is the author of the famous “axis of evil” line that has crippled Bush’s room for diplomatic maneuver. And Frum, like the metalists, got in trouble for boasting about how he’d made that line up–the same way that all the Black Metalists eventually got jailed for boasting about their murders. For their boasts, Frum got fired while the Black Metalists got rooms at the Comfort Inn. Gnarly.

Then there’s Richard Perle, who, like Dead or Euronymous, has his own infamous Black Metal nom de roque: The Prince of Darkness. Arrrggghhh! Launch fireworks and pyrotechnics from front of stage, set off explosions, lower giant skull as The Prince of Darkness and David “Axis of Evil” Frum take to the stage in their End to Evil monsters of hardline ideology tour!

Richard Perle, “Prince of Darkness”

The similarities don’t stop there. Whereas Vikernes and other Black Metalists saw heathen Norway in a life-or-death struggle for existence with the Semitic tribes’ Judeo-Christianity, Perle and Frum see Judeo-Christian America under threat from Islam. And both have the same solution: War, dude!

To be fair, Vikernes and another Black Metalist murderer, Hendrik Mobus, come off as far more interesting, intellectual and complex with their second-rate Nietzschean ideas mixed up with D&D mythology, whereas Perle and Frum’s war manifesto is surprisingly dull and sparse. Indeed, on each page the words are spaced so far apart you could drive a fertilizer-packed white van between each line. I read it in one sitting and came away with only one memorable line, in which they disparagingly called Belgium “France’s pilot fish.” On the other hand, Perle and Frum have used their influence over Bush to rack up a far, far higher corpse-count than the hapless Norwegian dirtheads, so they more than make up for their lack of aesthetic flair or stylized corpse paint with genuine blood on their hands.

Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes Perle’s and Frum’s pained, wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments, and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them. Perle and Frum will never forgive America for this humiliation and therefore they want to egg it on to its suicide by prodding it into a multi-front apocalyptic world war.

Their Black Metal plan is simple: Push North Korea to the brink and China right along with it; set the path for war against Iran; foment a Shiite independence movement in oil-rich eastern Saudi Arabia; kick Russia out of the G-8; invade Syria and Lebanon, while pushing Israel to turn the heat up even further on the Palestinians; and lastly, openly declare our hostility to the European Union, even if it means making enemies of France and Germany.

This raises another interesting question: Should Black Metalists cut their hair and vote Bush-Cheney ’04? Dude, I think the answer’s pretty fuckin’ obvious. In fact, thanks to these guys, America has become the world’s first Black Metal Nation.

This article was first published in the New York Press on February 10, 2004.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American Right devotes an insane amount of resources into manufacturing hagiographies on anyone whom they believe makes them look good–even the Soviets couldn’t compete with today’s American Right when it comes to glorifying their pantheon of degenerate cretins like Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlafly, Friedrich von Hayek…

I found a few passages that I think explain why they never liked Naipaul much. Basically, it comes down to this: The American Right only needs “team players”–shameless, cynical hacks who can be counted on to churn out whatever rank propaganda ordered up by the Heritage Foundation. For that, you need a Rotary Club nihilist like Dinesh D’Souza, someone totally devoid of a literary ego, intellectual curiosity or a gag reflex.

I was just reading Patrick French’s brilliant biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, and came across this interesting scene from Naipaul’s visit to America in 1969. Naipaul had already started developing a reputation at that point as one of the rare examples of a dark-skinned reactionary Tory from a Third World colony, making him one of the most despised literary figures among the trendy-left.

His first impressions of America weren’t good: ”They [Americans] are really now a group of immigrants who have picked up English but whose mental disciplines are diluted-European,” he wrote in one letter home.

In another letter, he confessed:

I now dread meeting Americans, especially their alleged intellectuals. Because here the intellect, too, is only a form of display; of all the chatter about problems (very, very remote if you live in an ‘apartment’ in Manhattan: something that appears to be got up by the press) you feel that there is really no concern, that there is only a competition in concern…The level of thought is so low that only extreme positions can be identified: Mary McCarthy, Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver and so on. Ideas have to be simple…The quandary is this. This country is the most powerful in the world; what happens here will affect the restructuring of the world. It is therefore of interest and should be studied. But how can one overcome one’s distaste? Why shouldn’t one just go away and ignore it?”

A good question–I ask myself that just about every morning. The “relevancy” argument he raises is losing its persuasive appeal fast. (The best answer I can come up with is, “To make some of their lives as miserable as they’ve made mine.”)

Anyway, it’s interesting that Naipaul mentions the name of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver here in 1969–because Cleaver’s name comes up again in an essay Naipaul published in 1984 on the Republican Party Convention in Dallas. This was at the height of the Reagan counter-revolution, when a reactionary like Naipaul should have come to pick up his check, make a few speeches, write a glowing account of America’s turn to Conservatism, and find his books turned into bestsellers via the right-wing mail-order pipeline.

But Naipaul was always too intellectually honest–and too vain. In the essay on the 1984 Republican convention, titled “Among the Republicans,” Naipaul describes the degradation of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther whom he once lumped in with all the “simple” American intellectuals he had contempt for. It’s the first morning of the Convention, and Naipaul sees this announcement in his Dallas Sheraton hotel:

11:00 AM. Press conference, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips, Populist Conservative Tax Coalition. Subject: “Are Liberals Soft on Communism?” Guest speaker: Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther.

Eldridge Cleaver! One of the famous names of the late 1960s: the self-confessed rapist of white women, the man who had spent years in jail, the Black Muslim, the author of Soul on Ice (1968), not really a book, more an assemblage of jottings, but a work of extraordinary violence, answering the mood of that time. In 1969, when for a few weeks I had been in the United States, I had heard it said of Cleaver that he was going to die one day in a shoot-out with the FBI. That hadn’t happened. Cleaver had found asylum in Algeria and then in France; he had become homesick there and had returned, a born-again Christian, to the United States.

In Paris earlier this year I had met a man who had made an important film about Cleaver during the revolutionary days of the late 1960s. The film man now regarded that time, which had its glory, as a time of delusion. And now Cleaver himself was part of a side-show—or so I thought of it—at the Republican convention.

It seemed a big comedown. And it was even sadder, when I got to the conference room, to find that there was no crowd; that Cleaver was not the most important person there, that he was sitting on the far right of the second row, that some people didn’t seem to know who he was; that the few journalists asking questions were more interested in the other people of the Populist Conservative Tax Coalition.

So ordinary now, so safe, this black man for whom a revolutionary’s desperate death had been prophesied. I had known him only from his younger photographs. He was now forty-nine and almost bald; what hair he had was gray. There was something Chinese, placid, about his eyes and cheekbones; he looked very patient. His eyebrows were thin, like penciled arcs, and his hooded eyes were quiet.

Seeing Cleaver paraded around like a defeated, conquered aborigine struck Naipaul hard, opening up deep raw wounds: that of a colonized, backwater, dark-skinned twerp whose only way out of Trinidad was through Tory England, his conquerors.

Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing about the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj).

Naipaul continues:

And at last Cleaver stood up. He was tall beside the CIA man. He was paunchy now, even a little soft-bellied. His blue shirt had a white collar and his dark red tie hung down long. The touch of style was reassuring.

Somebody asked about his political ambitions. He said he wanted to get on the Berkeley city council. And then, inevitably, someone asked about his attitude to welfare. His reply was tired; he gave the impression of having spoken the words many times before. “I’m passionately opposed to the welfare system because it’s made people a parasitic dependency on the federal system…. I want to see black people plugged into the economic system…. Welfare is a stepping-stone to socialism because it teaches people the government is going to solve our problems.”

That was more or less it. It seemed to be all that was required of “Eldridge,” that statement about socialism and welfare. And soon the session was declared closed. A repeat began to be prepared. As in a fair, shows were done over and over again, and in between business was drummed up.

Naipaul is so affected by the sight of this conquered, lobotomized-Republican Eldridge Cleaver that he goes back again to Cleaver’s Black Panther days and finds himself not just empathizing but actually appreciating Cleaver’s literary and intellectual talents, something Naipaul couldn’t see back in the 60′s:

…Away from the dark corner, Cleaver, placid, gray-haired, leaned against a wall. Two or three journalists went to him. But the very simplicity of the man on display made the journalists ask only the obvious questions, questions that had already been asked.

There was a many-layered personality there. But that personality couldn’t be unraveled now, with simple questions in a formal public gathering. To find that man, it was necessary to go to his book, the book of 1968, Soul on Ice. And there—in a book more moving and richer than I had remembered—that many-layered man was: with his abiding feeling for religion and his concern with salvation (as a Roman Catholic, then as a Black Muslim, then as a revolutionary); his need for community constantly leading him to simple solutions; his awareness of his changing self; his political shrewdness:

And here Naipaul quotes an amazing passage from Cleaver’s Soul On Ice:

I was very familiar with the Eldridge who came to prison, but that Eldridge no longer exists. And the one I am now is in some ways a stranger to me. You may find this difficult to understand but it is very easy for one in prison to lose his sense of self. And if he has been undergoing all kinds of extreme, involved, and unregulated changes, then he ends up not knowing who he is….

In this land of dichotomies and disunited opposites, those truly concerned with the resurrection of black Americans have had eternally to deal with black intellectuals who have become their own opposites….

In a sense, both the new left and the new right are the spawn of the Negro revolution. A broad national consensus was developed over the civil rights struggle, and it had the sophistication and morality to repudiate the right wing. This consensus, which stands between a violent nation and chaos, is America’s most precious possession. But there are those who despise it.

The task which the new right has feverishly undertaken is to erode and break up this consensus, something that is a distinct possibility since the precise issues and conditions which gave birth to the consensus no longer exist.

That was Eldridge Cleaver in the late 1960′s, describing exactly what would happen over the next two decades.

Now that Naipaul could compare the two Eldridge Cleavers–the Black Panther vs. the Republican lackey–the message was clear. If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American Right-Wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front-lines of the ideological battle of the 1970′s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.

Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American Right by doing what he was always best at: Describing exactly what he saw at  the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering. Here is Naipaul describing the effect of the climactic speech by Ronald Reagan:

So that at the climax of the great occasion, as at the center of so many of the speeches, there was nothing. It was as if, in summation, the sentimentality, about religion and Americanism, had betrayed only an intellectual vacancy; as if the computer language of the convention had revealed the imaginative poverty of these political lives. It was “as if”—in spite of the invocations and benedictions (the last benediction to be spoken by Dr. Criswell)—”as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more.”

The words are by Emerson; they were written about England. English Traits, published in 1856, was about Emerson’s two visits to England, in 1833 and 1847, when he felt that English power, awesome and supreme as it still was, was on the turn, and that English intellectual life was being choked by the great consciousness of power and money and rightness. “They exert every variety of talent on a lower ground.” Emerson wrote, “and may be said to live and act in a submind.” Something like this I felt in the glitter of Dallas. Power was the theme of the convention, and this power seemed too easy—national power, personal power, the power of the New Right. Like Emerson in England, I seemed in the convention hall of Dallas “to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow.”

All of the young reactionary intellectuals I knew when I was younger eventually came around to a similar epiphany. At some point, it just couldn’t be ignored: These people were scum; mean, sleazy, boring scum. It became impossible to be near them. They–we–dropped out of the Right, and wanted nothing more to do with it all. But by ruining everything in this country–economically, culturally, intellectually, militarily–the Right essentially chased us wherever we went, poisoning everything they could get their hands on. Until finally there was nowhere to go but Leftward. A hardened, mean Left.

Either get the Republican lobotomy (just look at poor P.J. O’Rourke), or go Left: those are the only choices in this country today.

Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic and unpredictable; there was space carved out on the Right for reactionary talent like Naipaul. They had to struggle for publishing success at a time when the printed word was dominated by left-wing/Marxist philistines. Those Left-wing intellectuals no longer exist today, except as phantom boogeymen in the heroic fantasies of the Right. What’s worse, the American Right has no need of unpredictable talent like V.S. Naipaul, so they’ve driven his species into extinction as well, poisoning the intellectual eco-system forever, making it impossible for a new Naipaul to threaten them again. They’ve replaced the Naipauls with libertarians, the fake, predictable, genetically-modified version of reactionary intellectualism–so insanely corrupt and so profoundly retarded that, like a skunk spraying foul stupidity whenever threatened, libertarianism has successfully scared away anyone with brains and dignity from bothering them while they feed.

Naipaul always despised facile thinking. It was because Naipaul was so committed to merciless observation that he allied himself with reactionary intellectuals of the pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher era–it was the Left that wore the rose-tinted glasses back then. What Naipaul didn’t realize was how much worse, how much more intellectually stifling America’s right-wing intelligentsia would turn out to be once in power. And sentimental to the point of disgusting–that’s the other thing that comes through Naipaul’s essay on the 1984 Republican Convention: the cheap, contemptible sentimentality of the American Right, the very opposite of rigor.

What’s left today, three decades after Reagan’s victory, is a ruling class of Rotary Club nihilists. Right-wing degenerates. And they’re not even interesting degenerates anymore, the way some Right-wingers used to be. They just scream a lot. Scream and bang a stick on the ground–and at the end of the stick-banging, they go to pick up their checks from their billionaire sponsors.

All of which brings me back to Naipaul’s original question: How can one overcome one’s distaste? Why shouldn’t one just go away and ignore it?

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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I’ve decided to write a sequel to my piece about DFW and American drug lit, and talk about how five Aussie writers have handled the same topic. But don’t worry, most of these people have been published in the US and Britain so this isn’t just for Australians. Bear in mind that I’m a bit patriotic here – two of them get a thumbs-up, two get a thumbs-down and one gets a thumb to the side.

As you can see, I’m counting down here – worst first! Also, since I’ve recently been forced to move thanks to bedbugs, most of my books have either been thrown away or put into storage. So, I’m quoting ALL of the books in this article from memory. It’s been OVER FOUR MONTHS since I read any of them. The wording mightn’t be exact, but I’ve tried hard to keep to the spirit of the prose. It’s also the most I’ll be writing about drugs for the time being. So here’s to a few loose ends.

#5 – Rohypnol by Andrew Hutchinson, 2007

Despite being one of the worst novels ever written by an Australian, Rohypnol somehow managed to win a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (“for Best Unpublished Manuscript”) in 2006. The story goes like this: a bunch of rich kids terrorise inner-city Melbourne by forming a “rape squad.” They find girls, spike their drinks, take them to expensive hotels and, well, rape them.

The problem is that Andrew Hutchinson is a classic brat pack novelist of the Less Than Zero School. He assumes that you can double the shock value of any crime – even rape – by making everyone coolly apathetic about it – even the victims. So, none of the girls in Rohypnol seem to have any problem with getting drugged and gang-banged by a quintet of prep-school sociopaths and one girl even finds it a turn-on. But, since most of the sex acts in the novel don’t seem to go against anyone’s consent, how exactly are they “rape”? That’s the genius behind Hutchinson’s utter idiocy: combining two topics that are horrifying in isolation (rape, apathy towards violence) in a way that miraculously neutralises both of them.

What you’re left with is a story about rich kids having drunken sex, forcing Hutchinson to raise the stakes. Soon his brat pack is bombing railway stations, stealing 18-wheelers and committing vehicular manslaughter. (However, they draw the line with IV drugs – the dangers of playing chicken on an interstate highway with a hot truck are nothing against the menace of opiates.) In the novel’s climax, they accidentally kill one of their nonchalant rape victims and face lengthy prison terms.

Apparently, the reason sexual assault is bad is because it’s a gateway crime leading to grand theft auto, murder and terrorism: “Remember kids – rape only seems like fun until one of you gets hurt!”

As much as Hutchinson wants his book to be some raw, uncompromising tale of wayward youth, it’s not much more than an overpraised schoolie daydream. The leader of the brat pack is described as looking exactly “like Ethan Hawke,” with the rest of the gang having similar movie-star looks, making Rohypnol perfect escapism for zit-denialist sprouts. And guess who the Famous Five choose as one of their few, undisputed rape victims: a stern-but-hot female teacher – that old, reliable Billy Madison fuck fantasy. Her feelings about the rape are never given, but Hutchinson kills many trees describing the (apparently greater) pain of her cuckolded husband.

That’s because Hutch doesn’t really know much about Rohypnol, or tranq amnesia in general. His rapes read suspiciously like those alien abduction stories where the Greys beam their victims up for a couple of hours, anally probe them and wipe their memories. Real sedatives don’t have that sci-fi efficiency. The only way to guarantee zero recollection is to take enough for a TKO. Since the scores of girls molested by Hutchinson’s brats are still able to stagger into their posh apartments, I’d wager that most of them would have sufficient recall to: a) feel violated, and b) supply the police with at least one face or address.

Rohypnol is full of just-don’t-get-it adults asking the boys what their motives are, and that’s a pretty good question. The narrator admits his friends have no trouble getting laid one-on-one, so why commit a complicated crime involving at least four people (spiker, decoy, lookout, driver) just so three of them get sloppy seconds, sloppier thirds, and sloppiest fourths? Worse, the boys’ plan their rapes with so much bad caper movie dialogue that you can almost imagine it as a voiceover, set against a gliding casino-security montage. If you forgot it was all about rape (which isn’t hard) the book would read like one of those teenage super-spy YA novellas.

Just to balance things, Hutchinson has a few chapters where his narrator gives a manifesto for what he calls “the New Punk” (which is just the usual dumbed-down Nietzschean philosophy espoused by every hack from Ayn Rand to Anton LaVey). These chapters carry some of the worst lines in the book (“Fact: Bad people do bad things.”) leaving no doubt that stark, stupid Frey prose has finally infected Aussie literature.

I wouldn’t even be writing about Rohypnol if it hadn’t won a Premier’s Award. According to the State Library of Victoria website, the 2006 judging committee consisted of: Melanie Ostell (senior editor at Text, a major Australian lit-fiction publisher), Chris Thompson (chair of the Victorian Writer’s Centre) and Wayne Macauley (a successful novelist).

Three important figures in Australian literary society, and at least two of them are fools. That ought to speak volumes about Melbourne’s UNESCO “City of Literature” status.

#4 Monkey Grip by Helen Garner, 1977

Written in the late 70s, Monkey Grip is now considered a classic within the vast Aussie genre of share-house lit. The narratrix, Nora, is a whining hippie mother. You know the type: collects stacks of Dr. Spock parenting manuals, accuses everyone of trying to hurt her children while simultaneously telling them to chill out and stop being “neurotic” or “possessive” or whatever pop psychology phrase she’s learned this week. (I’ve got an aunt like that; woman had issues about letting her kids watch Naked Gun movies because they were “too violent.” I’m not remotely kidding. Hippie mums are the biggest fascists you’ll ever meet. It’s thanks to them that Where The Wild Things Are became a bestseller. What a hideous book, too, telling the tykes that any attempt at self-respect is a losing battle – the grown-ups will starve you into obedience in due course, boy! – then compounding the insult by being all whimsical about it.)

Anyway, the action of Monkey Grip revolves around Nora’s relationship with a junkie thespian named Javo. Nora wants Javo to get clean. Javo promises he will. He relapses two minutes later. Nora fumes. Javo promises to get clean, again. He relapses two minutes later. Nora fumes while Javo tries the geographic cure. He comes back, seemingly clean, until Nora finds him stoned with “dead white eyes” (pinned pupils, that is) and tells him she “want[s] his baby blues back.” This goes on, and on, for over 300 pages. I don’t know what incentive Javo had for dating that awful woman, but it seems wounding her vanity makes him some kind of misogynist. Garner should’ve titled the book Why My Postnatal Hippie Vagina Is Better Than Smack (And May the Goddess Roast Any Poor Chauvinist Who Disagrees). Truly, you’d have to be a fool to give up even a tic-tac habit just to stay with her whining, entitled protagonist.

I’m not the only person who hates the book, either. “RA” is an editor friend who works deep in the belly of Melbourne’s nepotistic publishing industry. This was her take on Monkey Grip:

I find the book frightening, because it sounds like it came right out of the head of a friend of mine, if she was living in the 70s. This was a girl who bought a puppy with her boyfriend – a tremendously cute puppy – even though she knew she would be out five days a week studying law, and then got rid of the puppy because it was shitting and pissing everywhere, wasn’t trained. Yeah, and the way she basically ignores her child, and then gets randomly freaked out when she finds a fit [that's Australian for “syringe”] in the laundry and is like: “Oh my God, my daughter!” I don’t know, their demeanours are so similar.

I’m not honestly sure why this book became a “classic.” Because the hippies said so, I guess. Ageing boomer ladies (the kind who loiter near the La Mama braziers in full “When shall we three meet again?” mode) still have enough clout to make everyone else listen to why theirs is the Generation of Generations.

The dimmer elements of Gen-Y are impressed by the novel for different reasons. See, Helen Garner had the good luck to mention lots of Melbourne restaurants that haven’t gone out of business yet – the University Cafe, Lambs Kebabs, Shakahari. This gives her work that patina of name-dropping “realism” that Bret Easton Ellis fans adore. (“Hey, there’s still a Pastis in Lower Manhattan; this guy was spot on!”) I recall one young book reviewer telling me that Monkey Grip hadn’t “lost its relevance” for this alone.

That should be a lesson for all you hacks: keep your Good Food Guide close and you won’t go hungry.

#3 The Complete Works of Christos Tsiolkas

I’m putting this guy right in the middle. There’s plenty he’s done right, and plenty he’s done wrong. Tsiolkas specialises in what you might call the Amphetamine Novel of Ideas – lots of plots, scenarios and philosophising, but not much in the way of style or anything that rewards close readers. This isn’t surprising, because he’s cited Dick as an early inspiration (though a minor one) and he’s done a ton of speed. And he’s written some good suburban-marital dramas that, just occasionally, remind me of PKD’s great divorce stories, like Clans of the Alphane Moon or “The Pre-Person”… I could go on).

His fiction has also gone a long way towards stripping back the fuzzy SBS view of Aussie multiculturalism and showing the rainbow of racisms that this country really is. It’s rare to find a migrant writer who can totally resist the temptation to cutesify his people and pimp them out to the Anglos. And Tsiolkas does pretty well at dis-endorsing the Greek community, giving a huge “fuck you” to the wogs of his generation (1965-) who “integrated” by absorbing the worst prejudices of the dominant Anglo group while selling themselves as cheerful Big Fat Moussaka Chefs. Sabotaging your own group’s upward mobility like that takes balls!

Sadly, Tsiolkas is also one of those novelists whose fiction is more honest than his non-fiction. That’s because of a wonderful loophole – the supposed difference between “author” and “narrator” – which allows writers to use their novels as sandboxes for all sorts of notions that could get them into trouble if they were presented as personal opinions. And there’s no greater sandbox than the Amphetamine Novel of Ideas. This leaves Australia with two Tsiolkases – Sandbox Tsiolkas, the chronicler of bigoted suburbia, and Saturday Age Tsiolkas, who writes timid reflective essays in dawdling PC-speak while praising Evelyn Waugh and Ingmar Bergman (just to reassure the boomers reading The Monthly that he’s on their side).

His Waugh adoration appears on a side-project of The Monthly called “SlowTV.” That name says a lot more about the arts in Australia than its creators would guess, since I suspect the biggest sin of Aussie film and literature is droopy, ponderous Melancholy – it’s everywhere! Sullying every bookshelf like a spotty black fungus!

Personally, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt this “melancholy” thing. To me it’s a weird, semi-fictional emotion, a bit like sadness only – alas! – more vacant and artsy. And slower, the kind of thing indie directors really dig, filming all those twilit scenes of people looking weary while the crickets chirp behind them. I can’t recall many Australian Gen-Xers who went for McSweeneyite gimmickry, but the trade-off was getting infected by the black mould. Now, Aussie literature is a garden of snail-sluts, creatures who find opinionless reflective essays “thoughtful” precisely because the wafflers who write them are too “mature” to take sides. And the only way for a perceptive author like Tsiolkas to survive in such an environment is probably to absorb a few snail-slut mannerisms himself. I guess I can forgive that.

He has more serious flaws, though. For starters, he mentored Andrew Hutchinson as part of some programme and donated two (!) blurbs to the cover of Rohypnol. (Both authors are published by Vintage.) There are also moments when he lays the grunge on a bit too thick. The narrator of his third novel, Dead Europe, complains that his room in an Athens backpacker hostel is cheaply painted. Nu, you get what you pay for!

Later, visiting Prague, he complains that the city’s lost its, um, authenticity, or something. This is from memory and not an exact quote, but I swear it’s the best reconstruction I can do after the bed bug disaster:

“When I first came here after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Czech girl ran up to me in the street and kissed me. ‘Can you taste the freedom on my lips?’ she said. But now there was a dirty McDonalds in the middle of Wenceslas Square and prostitutes and (grunge), with (grunge) lining the (grunge).”

Here, Tsiolkas’ narrator isn’t really mourning Prague’s lost innocence. He’s mourning his lost Godhood, the time when he could get any Slav in bed with him just by waving a pair of old Levis around. And sweet Lord! A McDonalds among the fairy castles of Praha?!? Don’t rob me of my sacred illusions!

Still, Tsiolkas recovered and wrote a better book called The Slap, which pissed off all the right people, from grammar fascists to pro-suburban chirps who found it “implausible” that so many grotesque, drug-addicted wogs could fart around at one family barbecue. Thank heaven for that.

#2 Candy by Luke Davies, 1996

Luke Davies is a Sydney author who was a junkie for about a decade and wrote a novel called Candy based on that period. As I said in my Foster Wallace piece, it’s not a perfect novel. Davies is pretty much on the AA side of the recovery debate, so the opening and closing chapters are gloomy as all hell. But the guy has much more drug cred (and desperation cred) than DFW, making it a decent book overall.

I may as well start with the pitfalls, though.

Candy’s biggest flaw is it’s a first novel written by a poet. Not just any poet, but a fan of Baudrillard and Virilio whose favourite words are “gravity,” “velocity” and “momentum.” According to his publisher’s website, Davies was reading pretentious French theory even back in his junkie days. So Candy has a few pointless, hyper-lyrical sections where the narrator won’t stop wanking on about flowers, pollen, momentum, gravity, passage-of-time metaphors, fluid mechanics, et cetera. Luckily for us, Davies seems aware of the issue. So whenever you see a chapter where all the words are in Italics, that means “Optional.” Strictly for snail-sluts.

The other problem with Candy is the clumsy way it mixes realistic autobiographical scenes with much weaker fictional material. Davies more or less based the narrator on himself, but then decided to disenfranchise him a bit more than he needed to. No university degree, no Froggy theory, no writing aspirations – no aspirations at all, in fact. When he first develops a habit, Candy’s narrator seems to make money solely from dealing. (Davies was a newspaper cadet.) When he finally dries out, he describes himself as a “blank slate” with no idea what he wants to do with his life. (Davies, as I said, was planning a literary career long before he got clean.) To really prole things up, Davies makes his hero utter awkward boganisms (“You can’t sit on your arse and slide uphill.”) just to remind us he’s all-Aussie. But still he goes on about gravity, momentum, velocity, light reflecting in “scallops” from a pool, flowers, insects, cross-pollination. One moment he’s a directionless yob; next he’s Marcel Proust.

He also has a junkie girlfriend (the titular Candy) who doesn’t always work as a character. Sometimes she has a distinct, separate personality from the narrator. (During shouting matches, mostly.) Other times, she’s more like an imaginary girlfriend, a raft of erotic similes, the standard Song-of-Solomon machinery: hair like fields of wheat, deep blue eyes like pools of water. (Junkies nearly always have blue eyes in literature. Especially if they’re beautiful, melancholy junkies. Makes it easier for their sober love interests to walk in on them pinned, gasping in horror.)

Taken as a whole, Candy feels artificially sewn-together, a Frankenstein monster of a novel. But then, who said you had to take it as a whole? That’s where the book redeems itself, since it’s less of a novel than a short story collection with recurring characters – ‘Dad and Dave’ on dope. Yes, there’s a chronological order to the stories, a melancholy sense of the characters sinking lower and lower towards rock bottom over ten years. But their descent is so gradual you could probably swap a third of the chapters around without changing much. That’s the kind of book it is: a bunch of mostly autonomous sketches revolving around two characters.

Storytelling like this (where every episode begins and ends with the same great, immortal Situation) is really meant for comedy – whether it’s The Simpsons or highbrow stuff like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet. On the other hand, I haven’t heard of any successful situation tragedies. (A tragedy, by definition, has to end far worse than it began.) That’s why Davies should’ve ditched the melancholy when he had the chance, traded the black bile for more black comedy.

Still, once you skip over the italicised prose poetry, Candy is a funny, well-written book. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, it’s about two characters who hatch a long succession of failed schemes. They grow a marijuana crop (only to get ditched by their self-righteous pothead accomplice). They steal wallets from closetcases in public toilets. They run a homebake laboratory. They nearly get killed by a meth-addicted police inspector. They raise a litter of cats and accidentally starve them. And none of it’s that far-fetched. If anything feels weird, it’s the sheer number of schemes, rather than the schemes themselves – the novel reads like a compendium of every means that junkies have ever had of making a buck. Except, of course, white-collar employment.

And, while there are a few anti-drug sentiments at the beginning and end of the book – as with death porn anthologies or old-fashioned libertine novels, you always need a moral preface – the self-pity quickly evaporates once the sketches appear. Davies’ characters don’t have any fake remorse for the ordinary fuckin’ Australians they rob. They’re Ubermenschen (real Ubermenschen, not some pot-bellied, libertarian tycoon-heroes who get called “brave” for announcing wage-cuts) and they damn well know it. Why shouldn’t they feel superior? Most junkies have far more willpower than the average battler: a mix of monkish frugality and crazed pain endurance. You wouldn’t know this from a lot of US literature, though, which shows them as a race of regretful, nail-biting invertebrates. DFW certainly couldn’t stop taking cheap shots at them for cumming prematurely. (Always with the sex, huh?)

After you get through the moral boilerplate, Candy’s narrator has the sort of elite vor pride junkies have in real life. The non-users in the book are mean, stupid, and flabby. (Limonov’s phrase, “the goat herd,” immediately comes to mind.) They’re also damn miserable. In one chapter, the junkies get a phone call from a depressive trying to reach a suicide helpline. Candy sweet-talks the guy, agrees to “date” him, and milks thousands of dollars out of him while the narrator pretends to be her “gay friend.” In another chapter, the narrator snatches a closetcase’s wallet. Knowing the guy will cancel his cards soon, he phones him to apologise, claiming he’s “new in town,” “very lonely,” and willing to return everything the next morning. (What is it with gay guys and thieves, anyway?) This stalls the victim long enough for our narrator to clean out three bank accounts and an insurance policy. And despite having suffered my share of rip-offs, and even a rare, one-time mugging, by junkie-jocks like him, I fucking cheered.

Davies may have gotten enough pain from cops and withdrawal to call his addiction a “decade of darkness,” but he doesn’t pretend it made him into a loser, or that “dope is for dopes.” Unless, by “dope,” you mean marijuana. The chapter titled “Crop Failure” has one of the finest attacks on comfortable, pot-smoking squares I’ve read since Burroughs’ Junky. In it, the narrator grows weed with a preachy slacker-bro named Mason who gives him useless advice – “Just stay off that junk,” he chirps – before ditching him out of sheer bigotry.

You’ll probably like Candy if you’ve read and enjoyed Hans Fallada’s stories about Weimar-era morphinists. Same nervous rhythm, especially in the long scene where the narrator goes from bank to bank, withdrawing cash from hot credit cards, dorking it up in front of the tellers (“How are we all this morning?”) and hoping he won’t be arrested.

And even if you can’t stand the italicised prose-poems, at least they keep the wankier stuff away from the vulnerable, vulnerable story. Not every author has the decency to use snail enclosures.

#1 In My Skin by Kate Holden, 2005

Not sure if this is the most honest addiction memoir ever written, but it’s the most honest one to have become a bestseller. In My Skin’s about a five year period when Kate Holden was addicted to smack and working as a hooker in Melbourne. The prose is pretty so-so – same fashionable melancholy you’ll find everywhere else in Australian literature – but the book says a lot of things I haven’t heard from any US bestsellers.

“Here are the pros and cons of taking heroin and selling sex to strangers. Maybe it’s for you and maybe it isn’t.”

Just one example: Holden’s motivations for quitting. In a typical US bestselling memoir, the addict only does it after some kind of near-death experience – getting their face cut into chunks like Frey “did,” or OD’ing like Nikki Sixx. And if a memoir has a person going sober after one pissant miscalculation, it’s usually either: 1. fake, or, 2. written by someone who didn’t have much to quit. (Davies even makes fun of it in a chapter called “Candy’s First Overdose,” where everyone jokes about it after the girl regains consciousness and the narrator considers it one of the happiest times of their life together.) What about Holden? Well, she quits mostly out of boredom and exhaustion.

That’s what I’ve always found curious about this book. Why has it taken so long for someone to write an undramatic memoir about the life of a completely ordinary addict, not a celebrity, not a criminal, just an average Melbournian? It’s not the subject matter. Everyone likes to read about whoring and drugs.  I’m also not sure any reviewers really noticed Holden’s biggest accomplishment: just writing down what happened. Really, just writing it down. No trying to be tough, or worse, “literary.”

There’s a big advantage to just writing it down. Holden reminds me of people I’ve actually known. That is, regular middle-class junkies. I can’t say the same for Burroughs or Davies. Even the middle-class ex-junkies I know read Junky for escapism, not self-recognition.

Kate Holden, though, really is the gal for her time and place: the Melbourne of Generation X. As any newspaper review of her work will tell you, she came “from loving parents” (that is, middle-class ones). She took Classics and English at the University of Melbourne (exact same majors as me), lived in a bunch of share houses, dresses entirely in black, hangs around cafes, likes historical fiction and Italian stuff, leans towards the Greens politically. Perfect specimen, then, neither hugely better nor worse than anyone else from the same background. (Except she was also a junkie whore for five years, so I suspect she’d hold her ground in a lot of situations where Bret Easton Ellis would pee his pants, Irvine Welsh would shit himself and James Frey would curl into a foetal position around Ellis’s warm wet trouser cuff.)

Holden’s addiction story happened like this. She spent the 90s sharing a series of houses in St. Kilda, which was one of Melbourne’s druggiest districts back then. Her boyfriend hung around with junkies and introduced her to smack, which didn’t impress her the first time she tried it. But she underestimated the stuff and eventually became an addict. After a while, her habit got too expensive to keep working in retail, so she became a whore, first on the street, then in a legal brothel. Several years followed, full of the usual brothel politics – girls sniping at the managers and each other, complaining about Indians – and a large mix of clients (some decent, some dickheads) until Holden quit through methadone.

She tried heroin one final time and found it did nothing but make her tired. That’s another truth you’ll rarely read in commercial memoirs: some people’s physiology really changes like that. Opiates don’t do anything for them ever again no matter how hard they try to abuse them. It happened to a friend of mine: she quit dope, got prescribed pain meds six years later – pain meds she would’ve killed for in her addict days – and felt nothing. Just nausea. That’s how undramatic it can be.

Here’s something else you’ll hear from Holden that I’ve rarely found in other memoirs: in the five years she worked as a brothel prostitute, nobody noticed. It’s not like she was a PA or an accountant or some other kind of white collar addict. This is whoring we’re talking about – one of the smackiest industries around, along with nursing, modelling and freelance IT. If anyone could spot a Limbaugh in the ranks, surely a whore could, right? Wrong! Holden stayed incognito for five years – it was only when she started tapering off methadone that they began suspecting she was “on something,” for completely wrong reasons. Goes to show.

Need any more proof that Holden’s memoir is doing something right? Look no further than the 2-star comments on her Amazon page. According to a reviewer from somewhere in the Bay Area:

Although I appreciate the author’s writing style, I had trouble with this book. Ms. Holden is a gifted writer – her phrasing has a floating, melodic quality, which harmonizes well with her dreamlike account of heroin addiction. But her story feels so removed from the horror of her past life, as if she is disassociated from her emotions. She seems so blase about her years of prostitution and heroin use, and comes across as blithe and even proud regarding her past.

[…]

She eventually goes straight and it seems that her sole reason for getting clean is that she became bored with her lifestyle.

Outrage! How dare that hussy quit drugs without losing at least three extremities to gangrene! What kind of example is she giving our children?!

Another hater calling themselves “BayAreaReader” wrote this:

I found it sad that an obviously bright young woman could derive self-esteem from a) being “brave” enough to shoot heroin and b) being “adored” by men who were paying her for sex. It seems rather backwards. Why not derive your self-esteem from your education, intelligence, talents and loyal family? Apparently these things are what drove her into the seedy world of drugs and prostitution? The writing style got tedious – how many times can she refer to the light as thin??? Or shooting up as a “taste?” I also felt like the book lacked credibility. How much of the details can be authentic if she was using heroin four to six times a day? I imagine she would have been more like a zombie than the energizer sex bunny she portrays herself to be.

What crap!!!!!! Claiming that ijnecting herion makes people feel brave!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is she just trying to addict people or something?????? Everyone knows H is the drug of wintry cwoardice. Causes full-body chills upon injection. AND FEAR! #ven just seeing a hamster is enough to make a person curl into a ball once they’ve taken it. And how could this woman get self-esteem from a job that gives her $700 a night??????? She should be proud of her arts degree – i dunno what kind of work she’d get from that but I’m sure they’d pay her just as mutch. I’m guessing a “taste” is some Austrian slang word for a shot of hieron, but who wants to read a whole book in spoken vneracular English?????? How could she remember anything, anyway, after SIX doses of that junk????? I took ONE inoncent litle Abmien tqenty minutes ago and I’m not sure what I wrote just a couple of snetences back, even though it’s right in fornt of me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! & theyre both downerz, right???>?>>?

I don’t know why these Californians hate her so much, but down here she suffered from the opposite. The squares fell in love with her. While talking at a girls’ private school Holden was apparently surprised to find half the girls had already read her. Seems their parents had given them her book to warn them off drugs. Christ, had they bothered to read it first? Practically all of Holden’s problems were due to illegality. If they sold dope at 7/11, her life mightn’t have been too different from Louisa May Alcott’s: “Better have a shot before breakfast, then scribble up another chapter about the March sisters. Today it will be ‘Amy’s Valley of Humiliation.’ Drat! Drat! DRAT! Wherever did I place that bejewelled hypodermic? Here, fittikins! Here!”

In My Skin would also be a poor purchase if you want your kids to believe all poisons are instantly addictive. Holden’s habit took months to develop. And what about that dastardly final fate of the confirmed drug fiend? Death? No, the other one – the one that happens to girls. Holden didn’t find it that bad.  If there’s anything the book adds up to, it’s: “Here are the pros and cons of taking heroin and selling sex to strangers. Maybe it’s for you and maybe it isn’t.”

Unfortunately, after seeing five years of sobriety and the publication of her memoir, Holden fell into some real white slavery – lecture circuiting; in schools. And when lecturing minors is part of your income, you can’t really be too decisive about the War on Drugs. Even worse for an ex-junkie – if you call for an end to prohibition, you risk getting typecast and having your sobriety questioned. Holden’s also gotten herself a lazy weekend column at The Age, turning into, I guess, a Catherine Devenipuncture of sorts. It’s a waste of her potential. She knows it. But at least she’s getting paid.

But when she does get into politics, you can see how carefully she’s forced to step around the issues. Recently, Holden wrote an article for Crikey! titled “Lots of people like drugs, try asking them about it.” I’d never think she was the author if her name wasn’t on it. Who, besides a dweeby Parliamentary speechwriter, would ever say “Drugs make you high but we must work with the real world”? Probably thanks to those pesky lecture obligations, Holden never gives her own view about what should be done about the Drug War. The closest she gets is arguing that society should “start listening to drug users.” (Well doesn’t that include her?)

If you can’t see the full problem, picture this: it’s Chicago at the end of 1929. Al Capone massacred some people in February. The economy crashed in October. Booze prices are horrendously inflated. Once in a while, someone drinks methylated spirits by mistake, goes blind and dies. But now, at the eleventh hour, an ex-lush steps in with a Tribune opinion piece.  “If we want to engage with these issues,” she tells us, “we need to start listening to drinkers.” (Gosh, I wonder what advice these people might give! Maybe they’d say: “Prohibition is an absolute fucking failure – scrap it, now!” I don’t know myself, personally. But they’re sitting on a piece of the puzzle; that’s for sure.)

Even the bravest writers can get caught in the cloying slime of Escargotville. That really is a melancholy thought.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

Want to know more? Read Ramon Glazov’s: “David Foster Wallace: Portrait of an Infinitely Limited Mind” and “Inside Wikileaks: Revenge of the Second Banana.”

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–First, the Right accused WikiLeaks of endangering US soldiers and Afghan informers. Then after “Cablegate” the neocons conceded to the lack of evidence and switched to the opposite tactic: insisting there was nothing exciting at all about Julian Assange’s leaks. Spectator editorials appeared, claiming we already knew Sarkozy was a narcissist and Berlusconi was a womaniser. This didn’t work either. The cables had a lot of new information about DynCorp bribing Afghan police with “dancing boys” and Mubarak telling the US to install a “fair dictator” in Iraq.

Now a much easier way to discredit WikiLeaks has emerged: attacking Assange as a human being. It’s easy because there’s no need to touch any wider political issues. It’s damaging because (regardless of how right he is) Assange still needs technicians to work for him and a well-timed mutiny could hurt his organisation more than any external pressure. Worse, the man probably is a dickhead. He’s a brave dickhead, a talented dickhead, a necessary dickhead. He has a better chance of crippling the war effort than any of his competitors. But none of that makes him easy to work with. And WikiLeaks doesn’t just need volunteers, but extremely skilled ones who can maintain large servers and keep them running after all sorts of cyber attacks.

At the moment, Assange’s most notable competitor is a squishy little Kraut by the name of Daniel Domscheit-Berg (better abbreviated to “Shite”) who worked for WikiLeaks until last September. On January 28th, he announced that he was forming an “alternative” whistleblower site, “OpenLeaks.” Instead of publishing documents directly, OpenLeaks plans to provide a select list of media groups with inboxes and give leakers the choice of which inbox to send material to. They do not, however, have the choice of getting documents put up for the public to see. Instead they have to hope their selected editors will: a) find the document “newsworthy,” and b) publish as much of it as possible without trying to soften the impact. In other words, OpenLeaks isn’t really that open. And it gets creepier – Domscheit-Berg seems hesitant to put up more US documents, writing that WikiLeaks “should have ruled out any further publication of the American documents” after Bradley Manning’s arrest.

Domscheit-Berg’s attack on Julian Assange has been three-pronged. Not only has he formed a rival organisation, but he’s pinched several thousand documents from the WikiLeaks server and refused to give them back to Assange. He claims this isn’t theft – even though the leakers entrusted Assange with the docs, not him – because he doesn’t plan to publish them. Instead, he’s keeping them “in a safe environment,” whatever that means. Finally, he’s put out a memoir – Inside Wikileaks – attacking Assange for chauvinism, transvestism, uncleanliness, gluttony and animal abuse.

You see, Domscheit-Berg’s main advantage over his Australian adversary is his blandness. He’s monogamous, doesn’t play mind games with his employees and trusts his government to “respect the law.” He also objects to Assange turning Wikileaks into “a global political player – something it was never intended to be.” (Intended by whom, I wonder? Domscheit-Berg doesn’t dispute that Assange is the group’s “sole founder.”) He opposes Assange’s decision to give the name “Collateral Murder” to footage of a US helicopter gunning down Reuters journalists. And despite hanging around with an anarchist or two, Domscheit-Berg doesn’t really seem to have much against the Iraq-Afghanistan occupations. The worst he says is that “the suspicion can hardly be dismissed outright that the United States waged war partly for economic reasons.” (It’s the “partly” that does it.)

He even suggests Assange only gave so much attention to US military documents because focusing on Africa or Russia “wouldn’t have gotten him on the nightly news” or improved his “status.” It’s the same old argument the Right has always used: anyone who seriously challenges the status quo is just a narcissist. The goals they’re trying to achieve aren’t half as important as their motivation. Well, what if Assange is a narcissist? What if he is a jerk, a creep, a stalker, and an absolute pig to everyone who knows him? At least he’s actually trying to hurt the scum in power, fuck with bankers, and derail the war effort. Shite doesn’t even believe a whistleblower page should be about hurting, but, rather, about making the public “capable of behaving correctly” by giving them sufficient background information.

Domscheit-Berg’s nanny-leak philosophy is about as idealistic as he gets, if you call that idealism. In other regards, his blandness merges with a cheerful pro-corporate attitude. Regarding his wife’s job as a programmer, he says:

She worked for Microsoft on open government projects. In principle, she was trying to increase transparency from the top down, while [me and Assange] were working from the bottom up. I thought she was probably very good at her job.

And just in case you didn’t know what a perfectly bland, politically-correct teacher’s pet he is, Domscheit-Berg dedicates his book to “My wife Anke, who is my equal.”

This is Anke, Daniel’s equal

Domscheit-Berg seems like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s satisfied being bland, monogamous, and perfectly politically-correct. He admits that Assange’s alpha mindset threatened his pious Puritanism:

I must admit his fascination with women was contagious, even though I was already spoken for.

[…]

On our way back home from our absinthe evening, we both saw what amounted to an apparition. A woman in hot pants and a tight top whizzed past us on Rollerblades. We continued talking about the conference, other people we knew, and our future plans, but every once in a while one of us would say “What a woman!” Or “Boy, was she the business!”

Scary, scary picture. A debased Hessian IT worker who can’t fantasize about strangers without getting a sick feeling he’s deserves to be served with a restraining order. I don’t know if this retro Eurovision dweebiness is half as palpable in the original German, but the translator’s done a fine job nonetheless. You can almost hear ELO’s Xanadu soundtrack in the background when Shite mentions his “apparition… on Rollerblades.” And yep, the good Puritanical Domscheit-Berg’s favourite drugs are absinthe, weed and “a soft drink containing stimulants,” to which he gives a cosy product placement spot. I guess that’s supposed to show his healthy distrust of authority. Within acceptable limits.

But Domscheit-Berg’s Inside Wikileaks is more than just a cowardly smear job. It’s a well written one, too. Domscheit-Berg dictated the book to a journalist named Tina Klopp, whom, I suspect, is no stranger to Charles Portis novels. There are moments in the memoir when Domscheit-Berg’s thoughts about Assange are eerily similar to passages from Dog of the South. If you’ve read the great eXiled-recommended novel Dog of the South, you’d know what I mean – those bitter, jealous parts where prig-lord Ray Midge attacks the personal upkeep and manliness of his wife-stealing rival Guy Dupree (a leftist-radical megalomaniac). Klopp may have been trying to emulate them when she wrote these bits:

Julian ate everything with his hands, and he always wiped his fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my whole life.

[…]

Julian sat beside me, bitching. He was a terrible backseat driver. He complained the entire time that I was driving too fast, and to him as an Australian, the German roads seemed far too narrow and full of traffic. What’s more, he never quite got over the feeling that I was driving on the wrong side of the road.

[…]

When we reached Switzerland, I spent all my remaining money on Ovaltine. I love the Swiss chocolate drink, and for the rest of our tour, I couldn’t wait to get back home and make myself a huge cup of cocoa. But when we arrived back in Wiesbaden, the cocoa powder would be all gone. Julian had at some point torn open the packages and poured the contents straight in his mouth.

[…]

You usually couldn’t speak to him when he was working. He sat in deep meditation, programming or reading something or other. At most he used to leap up briefly without any warning and do some strange kung fu exercises. Some media reports said that Julian was at least the equivalent of a black belt in all known international martial arts. In fact, his improvised shadowboxing lasted a maximum of twenty seconds, looked extremely silly, and was probably intended to stretch his joints and tendons after all that sitting.

How much closer can you get to Ray Midge’s self-consolatory whine? We’re just waiting for Domscheit-Berg to tell us he can’t think of any Prime Minister who couldn’t handle Assange in a fistfight. He also mocks his former boss’s attempts at keeping a low profile (“You couldn’t have behaved more conspicuously than Julian did.”) and how he repeatedly loses his way through the streets of Wiesbaden. Yes, this makes our Julian seem pretty careless, but not as sloppy as Domscheit-Berg when he fails to make a back-up of the WikiLeaks server.

When the server breaks, Assange (rightly) tells Domscheit-Berg: “Wikileaks only survived because I didn’t trust you.” Seeing that Domscheit-Berg later stole several thousand files and kept asking for partial control of WikiLeaks’s money supply, I can’t help but wonder if this was deliberate sabotage on his part.

Domscheit-Berg is oddly incredulous, too, at Assange’s descriptions of his ancestry: “There were stories of him having at least ten ancestors from various corners of the globe, from the South Sea pirates to Irishmen.” Well, I’d believe a man had nine ancestors – but ten? That’s getting a bit excessive. And IRISHMEN?! Isn’t that just too exotic for words?

Klopp does a good job, though, of making Assange look like Portis’s Guy Dupree. He gets into a fight with a corrupt Italian ticket inspector, on the grounds that “the man in uniform has to learn his lesson.” He randomly attacks Domscheit-Berg’s cat “spread[ing] his fingers into a fork shape and pounc[ing] on the cat’s neck”:

“It’s about training vigilance,” Julian explained. Mr. Schmitt was a male cat, and male cats were supposed to be dominant. “A man must never forget he has to be the master of the situation,” Julian proclaimed. I wasn’t aware that anyone in my apartment or the courtyard had questioned Mr. Schmitt’s masculinity. What’s more, he was neutered.

Guy Dupree’s words–“I know your movements and have access to your pets”– might actually be scary coming from the founder of WikiLeaks.

However, there’s a key difference between Assange and his Portis-universe doppelganger. Our Julian might be a control freak, but there are plenty of reasons to believe he’s a genuine ubermensch. He works for days on end, hardly eats, has no fixed address, sleeps on cold tables in a Berlin convention centre and carries all his worldly possessions in a single backpack. He’s also taught himself to type completely blind, because “working without optical feedback was a form of perfection, a victory over time.” He refuses to bribe the Italian conductor even when he’s likely to miss a flight to Germany by doing so. Domscheit-Berg, on the other hand, the perfect Social Democratic yuppie, can’t stop mentioning how much he loves cooking and shopping at “lefty alternative macrobiotic” groceries. And yet he tells us he’s storing Assange’s files “in a safe, secure location” because “children shouldn’t play with guns.”

In fact, his whole OpenLeaks model is designed to keep as much heat away as possible from the website operator, who’s little more than a go-between between the leaker and the media. Domscheit-Berg isn’t even likely to get a threatening letter from someone’s attorney. That only happens when you’re publishing, not handing out exclusive email accounts. In his own words:

OpenLeaks can be seen as a kind of sober, neutral infrastructure. We see ourselves as technological engineers, not as media stars or global galactic saviors. Some people may even think we’re boring. That’s just how we want to be. The main thing is the system works.

Dickhead or not, at least Assange can deal with pressure. He’d rather go fugitive, sleep rough and live on his wits than surrender his servers. This is the guy I’d trust in a guerrilla war campaign, the old “inflict-and-endure.” Compare that with Domscheit-Berg, who claims to give homelessness a try for half a year before running to his fiancee’s doorstep. Even his tolerance for messy hotel rooms is much lower than any of Assange’s other lackeys.

In other words, a pussy. But aggressively marketing his pussy-ness, with the goal not so much of making the reader like Domscheit-Berg, as in trying to peel away Assange’s crucial left-progressive supporters.

But let’s take Domscheit-Berg at face value. How much value does he bring to the WikiLeaks movement, compared to Julian Assange? Here’s an easy way of telling if someone poses a real threat to the Powers That Be: How much can they endure? If a bit of ceiling mold is enough to make them hoist the white flag, they’re not the guy you want to back against the military-industrial complex. If they have real conviction – ANY real conviction, whether it’s self-sacrificing altruism or a self-inflated martyr complex, creepy or not – they’re much more likely to scare the neocons and see the battle through to the end. The difference between a careerist hanger-on and a martyr has nothing to do with selfishness and everything to do with posterity, a Higher Purpose. A careerist has no notion of posterity. A martyr does. That’s the difference. Domscheit-Berg’s pain-and-poverty threshold is so much lower than Assange’s that you wonder what he’s doing there, why he’s not delivering mail or serving in some safe job as a Social Democratic Party hack.

What about all the insane surveillance and death threats? Well, Domscheit-Berg won’t even admit that Assange was harassed, at any point in his travels, by cops or spooks. Take note: anyone who laughs death threats off into conspiracy theorist territory will buckle, and buckle fast.

There’s another odd thing about Domscheit-Berg’s memoir: the feel-good moments. In one scene, a corporate executive contacts WikiLeaks, praises the site and offers to organise a fundraiser in Manhattan for it – if Shite and Assange retract a document or two. He threatens to call his attorneys when they refuse and they tell him to get fucked. Later, the head of Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, emails WikiLeaks and demands they remove a confidential report. They reply, asking him to specify which “BND-related” doc he wants them to remove. He falls for it, admitting that a file titled “BND_Kosovo_intelligence_report” is authentic.

Domscheit-Berg doesn’t tell us whether these emails were his idea or Assange’s. It’s always the royal “we”: “we responded… we wrote back… our next answer… we got a few laughs… our response.” Seeing as Domscheit-Berg and Assange rarely met in person during 2008 and communicated almost exclusively over a chat program, you wonder if the emails to German intelligence were really the result of teamwork. The email to the BND chief ends with the name “Jay Lim.” In an earlier chapter, Domscheit-Berg suspects this is probably one of Assange’s pseudonyms, making it fairly likely that Assange caught the spook on his own. Still, he can’t stand the idea of Assange teaching an authority figure a lesson, so the credit goes to “we.” At the same time, he theorises that WikiLeaks was probably a two-man organisation for most of 2008. So, Domscheit-Berg, was it you or Assange? Stop leeching off of him with those cowardly first-person plurals when the going is good, and then distancing yourself when things get rough!

Domscheit-Berg insists his motives aren’t really malicious. He insists that he isn’t trying to compete with WikiLeaks but provide a “complementary” service. Just to show how well-meaning he is, he even gives Assange a pious shout-out in his Acknowledgements. But why did he release his memoir in the middle of the state attack on Assange, when he faces extradition and trial? If that’s not malice, I’d hate to see the real thing in Domscheit-Berg’s eyes.

Even more suspiciously, Domscheit-Berg really seems shocked when Assange finally tells him he wants to run Wikileaks as an “insurgent operation,” as if it’s a drastic change of direction. This actually explains a lot – for instance, why Shite didn’t know the number of volunteers WikiLeaks had in its early days. A well-organised insurgent group wouldn’t tell the lower rungs exactly how many other lower rungs there are. This protects the group from betrayal by individuals under torture, and by Domscheit-Berg’s standards, torture is a smelly Icelandic motel room. It’s also evidence that he never had real leadership in the group. He joined at the end of its second year, had no idea how WikiLeaks was structured outside of his own cell and now complains that Assange didn’t move it closer to “other charitable organizations such as Greenpeace or Worldwatch.” You wonder why it took him nearly three years to realise what Assange’s basic strategy was. Didn’t he ever watch Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers?

I guess not, because even if his motives are innocent, the guy’s still a White Hat. Before joining WikiLeaks, he worked as a private IT security consultant for “a large American company that did IT work for civilian and military clients.” (We have to take his word for it that he didn’t work for any war profiteers.)

Twice in the book, he mentions Adrian Lamo and doesn’t call him anything stronger than “ex-hacker.” Lamo, it turns out, was a member of WikiLeaks’s original donor list. When Assange accidentally forgets to blind-carbon-copy a mass email he sends to his donors, Lamo sends him the addresses as an “official leak.” Instead of treating it like the brutal sabotage carried out by what everyone and his grandmother assumes is a government informant, Domscheit-Berg seems to think Lamo was only throwing the chin-strokers a bone:

It was interesting because we had spent some time philosophizing about what would happen if we were compelled to publish something about our own organisation. We agreed that we had to release things that were bad as well as good publicity. In fact, our internal leak went down well with the press. At least we were consistent and none of the donors complained.

I don’t know whether Domscheit-Berg is a spook himself or just one of their useful idiots, but he’s in for a long, long year of rat comparisons.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

This article was first published in the New York Press on February 8, 2005.

Thank God for the Iraqi insurgency. If it weren’t for the resistance tying us down, we would have already moved against far more serious foes like Iran or North Korea, foes we clearly can’t handle. Given the bang-up job the incompetents running our country have done in Iraq, you can bet that America versus Iran/North Korea would end with something like Bush commanding a rump American state from deep inside a Colorado bunker, cursing the American people for having let him down, as the Jihadi/People’s Army coalition troops encircle Denver…

This conclusion dawned on me while reading The Record of the Paper, a frustratingly rational, careful yet necessary critique of the New York Times‘ criminal coverage of—and collusion in—the march to war in Iraq.

Admittedly, I didn’t expect much from this book. It seems that everyone with a DSL line and a livejournal page is a New York Times critic these days. After reading the dry, legalistic introduction to Record, I was even inclined to feel defensive on behalf of the Times. Like, “Why’ncha guys pick on someone your own size—you know, like a really small academic periodical!”

The authors of The Record of the Paper, Howard Friel and Richard Falk, are a pair of grim wonks straight out of the East Coast Left. As left-rationalists, they take America’s official propaganda about our rational, Enlightenment-based culture very seriously. Consequently, they believe that the New York Times a) has a constitutional and civic responsibility to serve as a watchdog against the government; b) directly influences policy decisions, as its editorial page pretends to do; and c) is run by responsible civic-minded professionals who are sensitive to rational debate and will respond to criticism of the sort leveled at them in The Record of the Paper.

So rather than seeing the Times for the nest of Vichy collabos that it is, Friel and Falk engage the beast with punishing salvoes of rational argument. Their thesis is that by ignoring international law, the Times has failed in its civic duty to inform its readers of the government’s mistakes, and therefore allowed every awful, blood-soaked blunder from Vietnam through Iraq II. The cause-and-effect aspect of this thesis is, in its own harmless way, almost as loopy as the material they cover. If the Times had given more consideration to international law, they say, then the wars in Vietnam and Iraq might have been prevented.

The problem with this thesis is that it assumes that the New York Times people are nice guys. But what if they’re just a bunch of fucking liars, and they know they’re lying? How do you present rational counter-arguments to powerful people who lie intentionally solely in order to remain powerful?

You can’t. And that is why Friel and Frank come off as intellectual Mr. Magoos in three-pointed hats, living in a world of rational bliss, totally unconnected to the real, awful world where the brutes and the maniacs murder, lie and plunder at will, cheered on by a population that demands more lies and more slaughter.

Americans these days don’t respond to rational argument. Now that I think about it, I don’t think they ever have. They respond to the brute who picks up the biggest stick and beats it hardest on the ground, which is why the Right has had so much success over the past 20 years. The Right is merely playing catch-up with the base nature of Middle America, populated by the descendents of the same mob feared by Alexander Hamilton.

After My Lai broke, even after Americans knew exactly what had happened, an overwhelming majority supported the leader of the unit that carried out the massacre, Lt. William Calley, practically forcing Nixon to intervene and soften his sentence. Indeed, if Americans had their way, we’d probably still be bombing Vietnam today. It took the Vietnamese whipping our asses to bring some sense into the nation—not rational argument.

That’s why the Iraqi insurgents are saving us from ourselves. My own sense is that the Times, like so many other media, trumped up the war in Iraq not so much because they believed in it, but because they knew that their brutish, bloodthirsty consumers—the American newspaper-reading public—wanted war, any war.

Do Friel and Falk know this? Did they write the book to expose and shame the Times, or just to remind those of us who remember those jackbooted Times articles that we didn’t imagine what we read, that we’re the sane ones, not they.

Which brings me to the body of the book, the “evidence” section, which makes for blood-pressure-rising reading. Michael Ignatieff: That’s a name I won’t soon forget. An entire chapter is dedicated to this human hagfish. Ignatieff, the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, was not only one of the most vocal pro-Lebensraum propagandists in the lead-up to the war in Iraq—in January 2003, he published a Times Magazine piece called “The American Empire: Get Used To It”—but also, and most hilariously, the following May he published a piece arguing for reasonable levels of torture. I say hilarious because his piece on torture was published on May 2, four days after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. It was too late for the Times to stop publication.

But then a funny thing happened. As in, nothing happened. Ignatieff suffered no consequences whatsoever. In fact, eight weeks later, he published an article in the Times Magazine denouncing the Bush administration for allowing torture, crying out in moral outrage that their actions at Abu Ghraib “left you wondering if they had ever heard of the Nuremberg tribunal.” Just two months after writing, “Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedom… A lesser-evil approach permits preventive detention, where subject to judicial review; coercive interrogation, where subject to executive control; pre-emptive strikes and assassination, where these serve publicly defensible strategic goals.” He got away with it, as Friel and Falk point out—which leaves me wondering again, what makes you think that merely arguing well will stop this madness?

The body of incriminating evidence against the Times—all Friel and Falk had to do was cite that newspaper’s articles and editorials over the past five years—is so damning that you wonder how it is that the organization hasn’t been targeted by the International Tribunal in the Hague for war crimes.

A chapter called “Liberal Hawks” cites numerous examples of shameless pro-war arguments repeated all over the Times in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. In fact, “liberal hawks” is not an appropriate description for the goons who peddled war—”Squeamish Fascists” would be more like it, given Ignatieff’s and his entire newspaper’s grotesque abandonment of their hard pro-war line once the first IED’s started going off in Iraq.

As far as I can tell, America today is dominated by two “opposing” factions: the Incompetent Fascists of the Bush Right, and the Squeamish Fascists of the center-Right, the sort promoted in the Times. Which is why relying on mere rational argument is a cop-out—much as the Times’ own credo of “objectivity” and centrism is a kind of cop-out on genuine journalism. If the lesson of Vietnam taught us one thing, it’s that the Squeamish Fascists are in many ways more culpable than the Incompetent ones. When the Squeamish Fascists support war—as they did in Nam, Serbia and Iraq—the slaughter machine revs up. When the Squeamish Fascists squeam, as they’re doing now, the long, slow, tortuous road to withdrawal and self-examination begins. Without the Squeamers, the Incompetent Fascists have a much more difficult time putting their plans into action.

At the end of the book, the authors present a “constructive” argument for how the Times could improve its coverage, urging them to give full consideration to international law. Again, this line of reasoning may go over well with the high school civics teacher, but it has no basis in American reality. Rather than being constructive, I would suggest we get far more destructive.

First, let’s call the Times for what it is. Friel and Falk won’t say it, but they sure imply that the Times is guilty of war crimes. In 1999, America bombed the main TV tower in Belgrade and killed several Serbian journalists, citing the Geneva Conventions articles that say that any organ propagandizing for genocide is itself a legitimate target in warfare and for prosecution of war crimes. Let the Geneva Conventions be the basis for a similar argument against the New York Times: It is guilty of war crimes in Iraq and Serbia. It deserves to be punished accordingly, as the U.S. would punish any war criminal anywhere.

As for the Michael Ignatieffs, Judith Millers and David Brooks and all the other Vichy collabos, rather than nerfing them with well-presented arguments, they should be hunted down, have their heads shaven, and paraded down Broadway with wire signs around their necks reading “War Whore,” on their way to being sealed inside the walls of the ESPN center. Don’t ask them to consider international law in their work—apply international law to them instead, based on their records, and apply it roughly. That is the only language these people understand.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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PERTH — Western Australia is one of Oceania’s best sources of grotesquerie. In the same way the Southern States serve America, Western Australia provides an endless supply of serial killing tales, small-town hatred and supernatural horror. Melbourne might be the place to visit if you want to see Victorian Gothic buildings and spooky thickets of pale, twisted eucalypts. Northern Queensland is fine for gigantic nettle trees, box jellyfish and coastal taipans. But West Australian grotesquerie is far more depressing and resilient, probably because WA (Western Australia) is larger than Greenland and every administrative region in Siberia excepting Yakutia. There aren’t enough yuppies in the world to gentrify an area that size.

Before British colonisation, the state of Western Australia was roughly divided by a horizontal “circumcision line” that lay just above Perth. The tougher Aboriginal groups lived above that line, in desert that was 40˚ Celsius (104˚ F) on an average day. On flat ground, they chased red boomers and blue flyers, and raided emu nests. In the hills, they hunted fat, twitchy wallaroos. By the coast, they speared fish and crabs. They chewed pituri and battled rival tribes. Young men went “through the lore” and got circumcised in their teens – a much braver ritual than what Islam and Judaism came up with, especially for a culture that didn’t have metal tools. To this day, people in towns like Roebourne (where I spent part of my childhood) have a folklore with some of the strangest monsters ever invented: a snake deity called the wharlu that eats people with its arsehole, murderous doppelgangers known as jinnagarburri with feather-duster feet that don’t leave tracks, invisible fairies called the junna who can only be detected by their shit-like smell. This is just the stuff they’re willing to share with “whitefellas” – there’s undoubtedly plenty more.

Below the “circumcision line,” though, it’s always been wetter than Diana Mitford after the Nuremberg rallies. I once read a diary passage by Sir Charles Fremantle, from 1829, when he claimed the area for George IV. He took a paragraph to describe how awed the British sailors were to see hundreds of black swans in flight across the marshland – then added that his men “thought nothing” of roasting seven or eight birds a night. I remember throttling the animals as a five-year-old on family picnics at Lake Monger, so I don’t imagine it was particularly hard for the uncircumcised Aborigines until Britain got hungry for Lebensraum. Most likely, any toddler with Herculean tendencies could strangle enough swans in an afternoon to feed his whole family.

Even the venomous reptiles near Perth are disappointing. Our most common is the dugite, a snake with the LD50 of a black mamba and the personality of Jimmy Carter – since 1994, it’s only been lethal on paper. If you’re ever in Perth, try visiting the nudist beach at Swanbourne, which happens to be next door to an SAS firing range. In the 70s and 80s, the grassy dunes near the barracks were crawling with pervs looking for naked girls to pull ‘emselves off to. (I suppose our brave SAS commandos were left with some rather different ‘mopping up’ than they imagined before enlisting.) Today the beach is mostly deserted, but you’ll find a dozen signs, at the edge of the dunes, reading “BEWARE: DUGITE MATING SEASON – NOVEMBER TO FEBRUARY.” That’s how low dugites have sunk: their only job now is to frighten away Leopold Bloom types, the losers of the snake world fending off the losers of Australian society.

As it currently stands, the wealthier parts of Perth could supply enough petty stupidity for an entire shelf of Flaubert novels. In fact, WA is probably where the future of Australian literature lies. It’s the same sort of middle-of-nowhere place that produced Poe, Gogol, and Flannery O’Connor. Plus, it’s too provincial to create many people as synthetic as Bret Easton Ellis, too stagnant and unambitious to be a metaphor for anything post-modern. Its upper classes will use just as many vicious tactics (and Hayek quotations) to get money as any other elite, but they can’t write cheques without totally embarrassing themselves. Give them $10,000 to spare and they’ll spend it on some kind of novelty fridge magnet for lower back pain, even after Heath Ledger showed them the real way to solve that problem. Give them $150 million when they’re in a charitable mood and they’ll build a cultural precinct or stadium or some other “iconic” building that will finally “put Perth on the map,” only they’ll place it behind a bus depot or somewhere on the outskirts of town. It started in the early 70s with the Perth Concert Hall, a Brutalist building that was supposed to rival the Sydney Opera House. It was so successful it now gets rented out to private schools for graduation ceremonies. Then there was CityWest, a strip mall topped-up with a Buckminster Fuller dome. (Maybe it was meant to represent a literal construction bubble.) We also have a deserted Entertainment Centre, a hyena-clit belltower (designed, like the Concert Hall, to rape Sydney’s Opera House) and major skyscrapers with creative names like “Central Park” and “City Square.”

One area where Perth isn’t a backwater, though, is death porn. True Crime might well be the most vital part of Australia’s publishing industry – even the “literary” writing this country produces needs large amounts of truth and crime to sustain it – which is why death porn compilations are always a welcome sight, even when the writing is patchy.

Catherine Birnie: The Better Half of the Serial-Killer Couple

Women Who Kill: Chilling Portraits of Australia’s Worst Female Murderers is a good addition to the genre. It also has a very West Australian focus: one of the authors, Ruth Wykes, ran AIDS education programs at Bandyup Women’s Prison and met some of Perth’s most interesting murderesses. The book’s most detailed chapter is the first one, devoted to husband-and-wife team David and Catherine Birnie, who raped and killed four Perth women in 1986 – all within a month. While David Birnie killed himself in 2005, his wife is undoubtedly Australia’s most infamous female serial killer and the couple inspired at least one copycat killing (in Queensland) plus a few suspected copycats who haven’t been caught yet. The book features a few other killers held at Bandyup, and adding nicely to the mix are some Melbourne gold-diggers and a rural cannibal from New South Wales. Padding is provided by a couple of Maori killers who are more sad than scary, and technically not Australian – Tracy Jean Goodman may have gotten the longest sentence ever given to a woman in New Zealand but seems to have been a non-violent cat burglar until she killed an old lady (for unclear reasons) during a robbery. As far as victims go, old ladies don’t sit well with juries, so that explains the length of the sentence. And there’s nothing else that makes Goodman interesting enough to write about – she doesn’t come across as a sadist, a psychopath, or anything more than a Valium junkie born into the wrong social class.

Of course, like most death porn, Women Who Kill has some truly horrid attempts at covering up the fact that it’s a book of murder yarns. It doesn’t want to embarrass its audience by suggesting they’re reading it for death-porn entertainment, so there’s a useless prologue that goes on about Australian morals and why killing is so shocking to “ordinary” people. Telling the truth – that most ordinary people are desensitized to violence, that it’s hard to catch a train at peak hour without finding some nurse or receptionist reading a John Wayne Gacy biography, that the most voracious consumers of death porn (and books in general) are women – is beyond the majority of True Crime writers. And the prologue to Women Who Kill is truly macabre, written like one of those undergraduate essays which, according to many, can in a number of cases be vague to a certain degree:

Ours is a world in which the moral compass is set to respect life, to keep it sacred and to treat every day we walk on this Earth as a gift. This is as it should be. In Australia our laws protect our right to live as free citizens; our religious bodies continually remind us of the sanctity of life; and our own individual codes of conduct show us a road map for what is right and what is wrong.

Australian society, in all its diversity, projects a strong message about life. It is enshrined in law that the taking of another person’s life is wrong, and if you do this, you will be punished.

Capital punishment, however, was abolished in this country many years ago. We do not recommend it, not even for those convicted of the most brutal of murders and regardless of the number of victims. Nor do Australian citizens have the right to bear arms – of any kind. So the use of firearms, especially handguns, is restricted to the likes of law enforcement groups, farmers, and sporting shooters. Despite these things, or because of them, we don’t have a lot of innocent citizens being gunned down because they go about unarmed; or because the ‘ultimate punishment’ is not an available deterrent. That’s not to say we don’t have gun deaths, because we do. But they are, more often than not, rival criminals taking each other out.

Our homicide rate – obviously we have one, like every nation – pales into insignificance when compared with some countries. It is much lower per capita, for instance, than in the USA or most places in South America.

Most of our murders are committed by a wide variety of other weapons, and methods that do not involve bullets. Traditionally, when Australians kill, they resort to using knives, or blunt instruments, or bare hands, or fire, or poison.

Apparently, every way of killing someone that doesn’t involve a firearm is a great Australian tradition, to be cherished alongside meat pies, shouting “cooee!” and waking up at 4am to remember our thrashing by Ataturk. This, despite Australian society “project[ing] a strong message about life” and the fact that we’ve only had federal gun restrictions since the Port Arthur massacre of ’96. Later, the prologue asks why women kill and admits that it’s a “pointless” question since women “kill for many of the same reasons men do.”

Worse, the authors seem to think that a good way to show a killer’s monstrosity is contrasting them with the banal society around them. There’s no good reason to do this. Being a non-psychopath doesn’t automatically make a person likeable – it’s only the bare minimum – and we don’t need a high opinion of 1880s London to hate Jack the Ripper. Not only that, but the authors of Women Who Kill aren’t very good with locales. They’re not so bad with the killers themselves, or even their victims – they don’t feel a need to make every victim sympathetic – but their descriptions of major cities and time periods are full of Tourist Board clichés. This is their cheery account of 80s Australia, at the beginning of their chapter on the Birnies:

The year 1986 was one in which Australian politics was dominated by the Labor Party. Bob Hawke, the charismatic bloke you’d want to have a beer with, was Prime Minister of Australia.

…Culturally, the Australian Ballet was bravely performing Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to surprisingly excellent reviews, but the arts event most Australians remember more was the debut of the movie Crocodile Dundee. Starring Paul Hogan, it became a worldwide smash. On the small screen, an ambitious soap opera made its debut. Producers and TV executives wondered how it would be received, but Neighbours is still entertaining us more than two decades later.

Giving the same treatment to Perth society in a later chapter, they say: “We’re footy mad, we tolerate gay people and we embrace every freedom offered to us.” (Imagine my surprise discovering both authors are apparently lesbians.) Never is there any mention of how mind-numbingly boring Perth is, how we taught the rest of Australia to suck nitrous from bulbs (or “nangs,” as they’re called locally), how Perth kids move to the east and write back home complaining that no one in Melbourne tolerates them using “abo” or “coon” in casual conversation, how the railway stations are full of billboards reading “Even the toughest taggers cry on their first night,” (in jail, that is) and “There’s no good reason for you to be on the tracks – the penalty is $200 or your life.” Even the book’s descriptions of weather are criminal: the authors mention that September is the time that Perth’s “world-famous wildflowers begin to bloom,” but nothing is said about mosquitoes or the psychotic behavior of magpies at nesting season, a much better back drop for the book’s subject matter.

Being under-critical of politicians and soap operas is one thing. But one of the book’s biggest flaws is making homicide cops look suspiciously heroic. The Birnies committed all their known murders between the 6^th of October and the 5^th of November, 1986. They found their first victim close to their “house of horrors,” in Willagee, on the south side of Perth. Their second victim disappeared in Claremont, a wealthy suburb on the other side of the Swan River. They found their last two victims at opposite ends of Fremantle, a port city to the west of Perth proper. The victims were aged 22, 15, 31, and 21. The Birnies were only caught after an attempted victim escaped their house and told her story to the cops – until then, the cops weren’t certain that they were dealing with a serial killer or that any of the women were dead. Thousands of people disappear in Australia every year. Four people with different backgrounds missing from opposite parts of the city sure doesn’t look like a pattern to me. Despite this, the book’s authors don’t question a detective who supposedly guessed from this evidence that Perth had a serial killer. Conveniently for him, he made this guess just before “Kate,” the would-be victim, ran half-naked into a supermarket and called for police. He was also, conveniently, the first detective who met with her. I wonder if he invented this prediction after the Birnies confessed just to make police look more responsive.

The place the Birnies called “Home Sweet Home.”

The pressure on police to look like they were doing something (other than waiting for people to tip them off) would have been intense. The Birnies are still the most hated criminals in Western Australia. I’d even bet that most people in WA are no more than three degrees of separation from one of the victims. When I was nine, I had an eye exam by an ophthalmologist I knew as Dr. Candy. I barely remember him, but I remember my mother telling me that I shouldn’t have made such a fuss in the examining room, because Dr. Candy “hasn’t had a happy life.” Years later, I learnt what she’d meant by that: his 15-year-old daughter was the Birnies’ second victim. According to Women Who Kill, when he reported her missing, the police accused the girl “of variously being a runaway, a prostitute, troubled, drug-addled, and attention-seeking” and refused to consider abduction as a possibility. This is according to a neighbour of Dr. Candy’s. The authors can’t fully accept how useless the police were. Their only comment is: “This second-hand account, while perhaps an overstatement in some ways, offers insights into how police were approaching the reports of the missing women at the time.” In other words, how they weren’t approaching the reports.

It’s rather odd, actually, that the authors can call Bob Hawke a “charismatic bloke you’d want to have a beer with” and still accuse certain sources of bias. One of these sources is a Perth court reporter called Bill Power, whose “colourful, if somewhat prejudicial, observations” are some of the most vivid in the book:

“They were a rather nondescript, ordinary-looking couple you might find running a petrol station in a country town. David was a weedy little man and Catherine his drab, slightly buxom wife with a very sour face.”

This is the correct, unflattering way to describe West Australians in the mid-80s, especially serial killers. It’s a pity the authors didn’t follow Power’s example instead of glorifying Paul Hogan and a few obnoxious detectives.

In fact, before looking at Women Who Kill’s portraits of killers and victims, we could start by asking, “Which police officers come across as the book’s real heroes?” Most of the killers in this book got caught in one of two ways: they broke down and turned themselves in, or the police got tipped off by an unusually sharp bystander. Generally, cops are just lucky enough to be a large central authority that people come to with information. The Birnie case pretty much solved itself, but only after the killer couple unintentionally nabbed a very intelligent, resourceful, young woman. “Kate” didn’t just trick Catherine Birnie into letting her escape. She also wrote down the Birnies’ home phone number and hid a pack of cigarettes in their attic to prove she’d been held there. That makes her the real hero of the book’s first chapter.

The most admirable cops in the book are undoubtedly the Arson Squad of the Victoria Police. This makes sense, because nobody’s ever made a TV series about them and they rarely get glamourised by the Melbourne media. Compare that to the Narcotics Squad, which is always putting out some stupid press release about “smashing” the latest drug ring and “making a big dent” in Mebourne’s opiate supply – in other words, they spend taxpayer money making street drugs more expensive and increasing the number of bike thefts on Gertrude Street.

The chapter where we see the Arson Squad in action is one on Melbourne gold-digger Vasiliki Efandis, who killed a businessman by drugging him and setting fire to his house. Not only did she manipulate him into signing away most of his possessions, but she defrauded two partners before him – oddly, all three men were called George. After drugging George No. 3, she texted him a goodnight message and used his mobile to text herself back. When police and fire-fighters arrived at the scene, she accused a business rival of starting the fire and made a melodramatic attempt to run into the house and “rescue” her partner. When police told her to back away, though, she calmed down immediately and drove home without any interest in his well-being – the first sign she might’ve been a teensy bit psychopathic. The start of the chapter mentions some of the politics behind crime scenes: if a person is killed and a fire is used to destroy evidence, the case belongs to Homicide; if the fire itself was the murder weapon, the case belongs to Arson.

Vasiliki Efandis finally arrested after her smash acting performance at the scene of the murder.

The most refreshing thing about the Efandis investigation is that lucky witnesses were only a circumstantial part of the Arson Squad’s case – most of it involved deducing motives and lots of yummy forensics. They concluded it was a murder and not a suicide because the fires in the house were lit in a clockwise direction, the oldest in the room with the body, the youngest near the exit. They traced the benzodiazepines in the victim’s bloodstream to two of Efandis’ prescriptions. They traced the kerosene she had used (instead of gas, like a moron) back to the supplier. They noticed her text message could only have been sent from the victim’s house because of the phone tower it bounced off of. When she claimed to have seen her victim’s rival driving near the crime scene, they found the car in her report had been sold to scrap dealers months before. At no point did the Arson Squad wait around in a stalemate for someone to burst into their office with new evidence. Nor did they boast about having Drebin-style hunches like the WA police did after the Birnie case. That’s about as talented as police get, so hats-off to them!

And after you get past the book’s prefaces, there are some excellent stories. Two chapters after Efandis, we meet an even stranger Melbourne gold-digger: Shirley Withers. Her victim was Peter Shellard, a wealthy Rolls-Royce dealer who kept illegal beehives on his rural estate and tried to avoid taxes by declaring his mansion a “place of religion.” The authors don’t pull punches showing what a pratt Shellard was, right down to the kitsch “Hellfire Club” bondage parlour he visited. Living in Melbourne, I heard quite a few stories about landlords and car dealers who thought their shitty lives were right in the footsteps of Byron and Rochester. A friend of mine once rented an apartment from a short, ugly Lebanese man who referred to himself as an “aesthete,” constantly quoted Don Juan, and leased rooms exclusively to pretty young girls. To avoid scaring them, he’d feign homosexuality for the first few weeks, then claim that he was “receptive to both male and female beauty.” (My friend doubted he was bi, though.) Once the girls were established tenants, he’d enter their room, get on the bed, and make “come-sit-by-me” hand movements. They also discovered that he was very knowledgeable about hidden cameras. However, in a token gesture, he gave about three rooms to pensioners at low rent. As a result, The Age broadsheet declared him “one of the 50 most influential people in Melbourne” instead of admitting he was a slumlord and garden-variety sleaze. Mr. Shellard, I’m guessing, was that kind of Melbournian “aesthete.”

Peter Shellard and Shirley Withers: This Don Juan shoulda stuck with man’s best friend

Withers became his girlfriend and decided to restrain him, force him into signing over his possessions, and kill him. As accomplices, she hired a pair of junkie wogs, who grabbed Shellard and hog-tied him naked on the bedroom floor with ropes and electrical cords. She tried to kill him by bashing his head in and administering multiple whacks of heroin. That didn’t work.

What did she end up using for the coup de grace? An oxycodone suppository.

Scarier is Katherine Knight, a woman from country New South Wales who roasted a piece of her partner’s buttock “and plated it up with potato, zucchini, pumpkin, cabbage, squash and gravy,” setting two places at the table for the guy’s children. She began as an abattoir worker in her teens, beat up a series of male partners, and got back at her first husband for dumping her by dumping their baby in the path of a train. It seems she really wanted to kill the infant because it was only rescued by chance, though the psychiatrists’ diagnosis was “postnatal depression.” After that marriage ended, she punished a de facto by slitting his puppy’s throat. She crawled into bed with her final partner and fucked him before killing and cooking him. When police arrived, she was snoring in the bedroom and pretended to have no memory of killing him. Knight may just be the book’s only true pre-modern: closer to Medea than Myra Hindley or Rosemary West. Her photograph, though, is pretty unimpressive: a middle-aged aunty type with bottle glasses and frumpy clothes. The victim next to her gives a better ‘path glare.

Queensland, another good source of rural viciousness, provides readers with a couple of curious ladies. The first is Valmae Beck, the admitted Birnie copycat I mentioned earlier. Beck’s husband, Barrie Watts, decided to take up serial killing after seeing the Birnie case in the news. He “began to fantasise about ‘being the first – and last – lover of young virgins’” and so did his wife. They managed one murder before they were caught in 1987, though others are suspected. In prison, Beck lead a very interesting life. She befriended Pauline Hanson, one of our more notorious anti-immigration politicians, during Hanson’s jail stint for electoral fraud. The One Nation party leader  came to Beck’s defence in an interview with Woman’s Day magazine, claiming the killer was “so sorry” for what she did. Beck returned the favour, telling a penfriend that Hanson was “a very nice lady” and that it was “God’s plan” she met the fake maverick. She coped with her sentence by over-eating and cops brought Tim Tam chocolate biscuits to interrogations in a failed attempt to find more victims. Typically for someone with a long-term sentence, she developed diabetes at the same time she “found God.” The disease finally killed her in 2008.

Tracey Wiggington: What jailed politician couldn’t love this?

Our second Queenslander is Tracy Wigginton, who was drinking at a lesbian bar with her girlfriend and another couple when the four of them decided to go and kill someone. They found their victim, a drunken middle-aged bureaucrat named Edward Baldock, near the shore of the Brisbane River. He accepted a ride from the wimmyn, who drove him to the riverside suburb of Hill End. Wigginton lured him out of the car by promising sex and taking off her blouse. She then stabbed the council worker 27 times. The striptease wasn’t a good move: she dropped a keycard at the crime scene and police arrested her the next day. It got worse: the other three grrls started claiming that Wigginton was “obsessed with vampirism” and that Baldock was killed in an act of lesbian altruism “so Tracy could feed.” Their accounts differed on crucial details – one womyn even claimed Wigginton was a devil worshipper who could read minds. (This, by the way, was 1991, when Satanic ritual abuse stories were at the peak of their popularity.) Adding to the voodoo, the court’s forensic psychiatrist used hypnotism and ‘diagnosed’ Wigginton with a multiple personality called “Bobby” – it seems she wasn’t just a lesbyen vampyre, but rather mannysh as well. She denied ever claiming to be a vampire and police began to suspect the real Carmilla was her accomplice Kim Jervis. The jury, though, was so calm and considerate that her trial lasted exactly nine minutes while the “lesbian vampire” headlines effectively killed all her parole attempts. Out of the other three, Wigginton’s girlfriend got life for murder, while “Carmilla” got 12 years for manslaughter. The womyn who told the psychic-devil-worshipper story wasn’t even charged with defamation.

A longer (but less critical) lesbian vampire chapter involves Jessica Stasinowsky and Valerie Parashumti, two teenagers who lived like typical Perth bogans until they decided to kill Stacey Mitchell, their chavvy British migrant “friend.” This is the kind of fool-on-fool action that makes good pure death porn. Nobody involved has many redeeming qualities, so leave your guilt at the door. In fact, the authors are a teence too respectful to reproduce the victim’s MySpace profile:

My name is stacey, Im english, i love me alochol,im a party gurl, music is me life, i cant live with out my friends, im a very loud person, i talk 24/7, im a very down to earth person if you get to know me… x x x

Stacey Mitchell: Naturally they kill the only decent-looking woman among them

It’s a bit vague what Stacey’s exact relationship was to Jessica and her girlfriend Valerie. All the authors are certain about is she “connected” with them and was staying at their house the week before her death. Jessica was apparently jealous that Stacey was flirting with Valerie, so “the lovers had a discussion about it and, after some exchange of ideas, bizarrely decided the solution was that Stacey had to die.” However, Stacey phoned her parents the day before, wanting to come home, so this jealousy motive should be taken with a big chunk of salt. (The Birnies enjoyed similar role-play while torturing their third victim: Catherine accused David of being too partial to the airline hostess in the attic and made mock suicide threats. Just the ‘path version of cuckold fetishism, I suppose.)

Jessica ground glass to put into Stacey’s drink, but finally decided just to spike her whiskey with Ambien (or Stilnox, as they call it here). The girls then asked their roommate, a 27-year-old named David Haynes, to help them “corner and trap” Stacey, but he refused, so they suggested he “just watch.” He refused again (or so he told police) but eventually agreed to play loud music. The soundtrack he chose was Bach’s Johannes Passion, which sounds just out-of-place enough to be totally believable. They spent 40 minutes beating her over the head with a block of concrete (pieces of which they kept as souvenirs), kissed over her corpse and videoed themselves with a mobile phone making fun of Stacey’s accent. When Haynes wanted to leave, they led him to the door, blindfolded with a black t-shirt. Jessica phoned him later, saying “It’s still a bit messy, but come on in.” To help with the clean-up, Valerie recruited a homeless teenager and showed him the video. He must’ve kept quiet, because it was Haynes who led police to the body three days later. It was rotting in the back shed, in a rubbish container. Tabloids nicknamed it “The Wheelie Bin Girl.” They also leapt on the fact that Valerie had drunk her own blood since she was 10, and labelled the couple “lesbian vampire killers.”

Looking at a few couples in this book, you can’t help but see an odd pattern. When one sadistic killer gets caught, everyone agrees that they’re a monster. When it’s two killers, though, some people have trouble accepting that both of them are ‘paths. Valerie’s father called Jessica “the Devil’s child.” Jessica’s friends, however, were apparently “worried” about Valerie, found her “freaky and weird” and “tried to warn their friend that this relationship was wrong for her.” The authors include a long, incredulous MySpace entry:

HOW CAN THIS FACE … MY BEST FRIEND … BE A MURDERER … IF THERE’S A GOD OUT THERE PLEASE EXPLAIN … Yes Jess is wun of my bets mates and yes she did kill that 16yr old girl Stacey Mitchell, im not exactly sure for the reason behind stacey death but jess’z dad has been on the fone to me and as far as we know jess had a fit of rage after being told she couldnt come to my party and then her and her new girlfriend valerie decided to bash stacey over the head several times with a brick … there was a struggle in the house and as Jess and Valerie were highly intoxicated on chrystal meth, they then dragged the body out the back and put it in the bin, to continue going on with life …

It’s a bit odd that someone who refused to invite her “best friend” to a party would write a post supporting her during a murder trial. The poster’s definition of “friend” is so loose, though, it casts doubt on the idea that ‘ordinary’ Australians are that nice. These emos are either cruel enough to drive a normal person to murder (which is what the “couldnt come to my party” excuse is basically saying) or so senseless they’re barely above psychopathy themselves. The chapter doesn’t give enough information to fill in everyone’s exact relationship to everyone else (and I’m not great with emo-culture nuances) which is why I’m recommending it as snuff.

Jessica Stasinowsky: If only her daddy let her go to the party…

The Birnie chapter has a similar issue. The authors start by presenting Catherine as the weaker partner (though her psychopathy is glaringly obvious) but eventually suggest David was more fragile. Catherine feigns submissiveness rather well, claiming she only killed people because she loved David too much to break away, convincing some of her fellow prisoners she was only “seduced by an evil man.” David also allowed his younger brother to fuck her as a 21st birthday present. It was a “point of pride” for her that she stopped corresponding with him while in jail (though she eventually became pen-pals with British killer Myra Hindley). She is now Bandyup’s prison librarian, a former prisoner claiming she hung around with “a few middle-aged women… making teddy bears or something pathetic like that.” This is contrasted with David’s last days before his suicide. Catherine stopped responding to his letters, his antidepressant prescription wasn’t filled when it ran out, and aside from a crime writer named Amanda Howard, he didn’t have much company.

The creepiest question left by the Birnie story is whether there were more than four victims. To me, it’s pretty strange that only two weeks passed between their first and second killings. Most serial killers have longer “cooling-off” periods, especially when they’re inexperienced. David Birnie worked as a crane operator in a small town called Collie when a schoolgirl disappeared in the area. Since the couple were flexible in their choice of victims and dumping sites (and didn’t have anything approaching a “trademark”) they could have committed any number of murders in the first half of the 80s before the rather self-confident killing spree that got them caught.

There are plenty of other good cases in Women Who Kill, which is why it deserves an American audience. Despite the bouncy prefaces, it’s an excellent antidote to a decade of Tourism Australia propaganda.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

If you’re like us, you’re sick and tired of having to wait around for some loathsome celebrity to die just to read their obituary. Who says we can’t read the obituary before they die, on our own time? This is about empowering us, the non-celebrities, so that we can get our celebrity ghoul-pool porn fix when we feel like it, rather than waiting for their terminal illness to decide.

Which is why we here at The eXiled have developed a revolutionary new tool that will transform the literary death-watch. It’s a new technology we call “The Pre-legy.” At eXiled, we’re not content to wait for the doctors to give us the thumbs-down and the ol’ sad face. We want to know what folks’ll be saying after a celebrity death, without waiting for that celeb’s pig-valve heart to flatline.

Take our old friend Christopher “Hic!” Hitchens: instead of waiting for the throat cancer to take him away, we decided to get proactively involved in the ol’ warmonger’s impending death by generating, through our new technology, The Big Eulogy (or “Pre-legy) we’re all waiting for: the Martin Amis funeral speech, before it’s written. We managed to get ahold of the Amis eulogy in-advance thanks to an old Russian software programmer we know, who zombied up for us a virtual Martin Amis that can squirt out highbrow virtu-tears over the upcoming death of Amis’ best bud, Chris Hitchens.

Our programmer created a virtual Martin Amis verbiage-generator tool called MartinMate 2.0. Using MartinMate 2.0, we plugged in three key variables– “Hitchens,” “Terror,” and “Throat Cancer”–and ran them through the virtual Amis to generate a eulogy that will have them weeping in the seminar aisles. MartinMate 2.0 spat out the exact same eulogy, word-for-ridiculous-word, each time–proof that what you will read is an advance preview of Amis’ future-Booker-Prize-winning eulogy. You can’t fight science, folks.

Behold, then, the eXclusive advance copy of Martin Amis’ eulogy for Christopher Hitchens.

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Horrorized

By Martin Amis

In Memory of Christopher Hitchens, 1949-[TK date of publication] (note to ed: hold this piece for publication until throat c. gets Hitch; then publish IMMED. MA)

The first hiccup of his usurpation was the second bottle. It slithered past the incisors, a Mamba of zooanthropic vengeance, exuding a peaty pathos, a 12-year-old blurt of inhumation, to crash against the pharynx which had held, Cincinattus-esque, against so many lucre-hefted Caledonian tides, but which on this first day of a coming future teetered and fell, a single twin tower, a meat WTC, revealing in its nude Lucretism the weakness of the West. The belch of flame engulfed us all. It was the end of everything. In all the great conurbations of the trembling Occident, we took a step backward, appalled and sickened by that belch of the grave.

The pharynx:  une rose en steak, a cellwall sturdy yet preemptively extinguished like Harold’s at Hastings, stood revealed as mere jello against the Cullodenic onslaught of dissolution, literal, Balrogian, galvanic. Its first insolent anthem was a belch of Gehennan digestic juices screaming Jihad. Their chthonic conturbation overwhelmed Oxbridge, Fleet Street, and obliterated the Canary Wharf of his voice.

Yet the loyal were slow to assign verity to the dispersing cloud of thanatos, the radius of Terror, the red circle of total destruction mapped by that hiccup, for more than a pharynx wobbled in the scales.  This was the pharynx that, like Lady Gaga’s meat dress, shielded multitudes from the unspeakable. This voicebox shimmered wetly as impassable barrier to the desert hordes, a blood-gorged sahel holding back the sands of the Sahara, each grain incised with Koranic verses promising death. It was as if, in a documentary produced by Elburzian deities for our demoralization, we were watching in slow motion as an infiltrated grain of sand slipped through security, evaded the metal detectors unturned to silicate, however fanatical, and by stearine mimicry of the Western smile, was assigned a seat on that precious pharynx, economy class no doubt but deadly enough for all its demotic parsimony, and once strapped in, the safety video mournfully complete, the seat-belt sign turned off, this alien silicate, this Horda of fundamentalism, left its seat on the pharynx and migrated throatward, recruiting comrades among the notoriously perverted tribes of the lower throat, the upper Nile, the treacherous Nubia of a now utterly vulnerable Egypt: his very head.

(Note to ed. Is this enough? I can do you however much you want but it will be twice the usual rate—close friend, v. shaken up, etc. Please publish attached photo of me answering call of duty in war on pharynx terror, avenging CH’s pharynx, etc. MA)

“C’mon cancer, I dare you to knock this sneer off my face.”

Since writing my last piece on Hitchens (“How Christopher Hitchens Robbed Hunter S. Thompson’s Grave”), I’ve finally found a widow smart enough to give Blitcons a massive up-yours. At around the same time Hitchens’ character assassination of Gore Vidal hit American newsstands, retired BBC news anchor Anna Ford wrote a letter to The Guardian accusing him and Amis of smoking over the hospital bed of her dying husband, Mark Boxer.

According to Ford, not only did the two Blitcons fill his room with enough carbon monoxide to de-chav an entire council estate, but they “exhausted” the poor moribund by overstaying their welcome. Their visit, apparently, was “not borne just of affection” but also to kill time before their next flight left at Heathrow.

Hitchens’ response is an unintentionally funny piece of bathos. Not even for his “beloved Mark” will he bow to the knavish vituperation of plain and respectful English:

I did indeed accompany Martin Amis on one of the (several) bedside visits he made during Mark Boxer’s last illness, and can be quite certain that he abstained from smoking (Letters, 20 February). Conceivably it was I who was the offender, though even in 1988 that could not possibly have been without permission. The same goes for the mean innuendo that any welcome was outstayed (which is in itself incompatible with the hurtful allegation of a swift and heartless “drop-by”): there were persons attending who would have anticipated and cut short any such thing. These lazy but suggestive errors to one side, it is both ungenerous and untrue to doubt, let alone to deny, that the least lachrymose of my friends was more than once overcome with grief at Mark’s early death. He told me that after his final call – which was just before he left for America and when Mark had whispered “goodbye” to him – he sat in his car unable to drive away for weeping. (His departure for Heathrow, if it matters, was on the following day.) We both shed further tears when our beloved Mark died not long afterwards.

Hitchens has a rare gift: being so loathsome that, even if his version of events were completely true, you’d still wish his cancer would evolve into a human form of Devil facial tumour disease. “Unable to drive away for weeping”? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when someone mourns a “friend” with writing as purple as a dish of HeLa cells, they’re talentless at best and at worst, sociopathic. You’ll notice Hitchens doesn’t even own up to being the smoker. He’s “quite certain” it wasn’t Amis, but as for himself, it’s only a maybe.

Hitchens mugs another original talent

Of course, it’s perfect justice that he’d die from smoking. Cigarettes, after prose, were always the other great Blitcon pretension. The poses that Hitchens and Amis strike while drawing back are a natural extension of their prose style, lots of fake hustle wrapped around a squishy Etonian centre. As the picture above shows, Hitchens can’t even light up without plagiarising Serge Gainsbourg.

]]> http://exiledonline.com/christopher-hitchens-update-a-life-spent-blowing-smoke-a-death-by-poetic-justice/feed/ 32 http://exiledonline.com/how-christopher-hitchens-robbed-hunter-s-thompsons-grave/ http://exiledonline.com/how-christopher-hitchens-robbed-hunter-s-thompsons-grave/#comments Sun, 12 Sep 2010 02:31:55 +0000 Team eXiled http://exiledonline.com/?p=27424

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom should be a perfect book: a collection of all the interviews Hunter S. Thompson ever gave. It begins with a talk Thompson gave on ABC News in 1967, shortly after Hell’s Angels was released. It ends with his last ever interview, a Playboy piece by eXiled contributor Tim Mohr, one of the best in the collection. Mohr had the reasonably good idea of giving Thompson a list of topics (“Violence,” “Nutrition,” “Reading,” “Firearms”) and letting him speak freely about them instead of framing the interview in questions. (After all, Thompson’s already been asked a million variations of “What role do drugs play in your writing?” and “What are your views on objectivity?”.)

My favourite one is “On Medicine”:

“A lot of doctors are reluctant to take responsibility for me. Nobody wants to be the doctor who killed Hunter Thompson. I don’t trust the medical establishment, but I do trust individual doctors. I’m straight with doctors. They have to learn that they can talk straight to me too. There’s no point in trying to conceal anything. I appreciate the ones who take risks on me, and I have to look out for the chickenshits.”

There, the latest evidence that Thompson was right up there with Beowulf, William Tell and the bogatyri. Telling a doctor outright you’re looking for drugs requires a heroic level of bravery, and getting drugs after admitting a fancy to them takes frightening eloquence. 356 pages of Thompson’s bravery and eloquence should be something to celebrate, right?

It would be, if pages xiii-xx weren’t written by Christopher Hitchens.

I don’t know why Hitchens was selected to write the introduction to Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, since he admits that he was “only twice a visitor to Owl Farm and mustn’t exaggerate the extent of [his] acquaintance with the good Doctor.” In other words, he knew Thompson only slightly better than a nagging autograph hound, and the introduction ought to have been written by Ralph Steadman or Johnny Depp. Even Pat Buchanan would have done a better job. Unfortunately, for some stupid reason, Anita Thompson allowed Hitchens to write a strychnine-soaked introduction smearing her dead husband and then published it. And, as we’ll see, it’s not like Hitchens’ insults are particularly subtle.

Hitchens’ introduction starts in a tone of condescending pity, with some fake chumminess stirred in. He claims that on their first meeting, Thompson “seemed somewhat restless and discontented and – at least to me, who knew the symptoms of boredom so well because they terrified me too – to be confronted with a certain quotient of anomie.” What this means, once you suck out the purple, is: ‘Hunter was a lot like me, but I pity him because I know he wasn’t really happy.’ Hitch, if you’re really Thompson’s long lost twin, then prove it: name one person Thompson stabbed in the back, one situation where Thompson declared someone his friend, mentor or blood-brother, only to change his mind at a later date.

Hitchens then claims that Thompson didn’t commit suicide because of, say, Bush’s re-election (an embarrassing claim to make for a Republican shill) but because of “the strain imposed on him by visitors who wanted him to be outrageous.” The gloat continues:

“This of course happens to so many veterans and celebrities, but I fear that it may have had an especially enervating effect on someone to whom the authenticity and spontaneity of the moment had always been so essential. If you, dear reader, should ever have the opportunity of viewing the documentary Breakfast with Hunter, you will perhaps be able to guess what I mean. Wherever he goes, and whoever he meets in this film, he is under pressure to perform, to be “Hunter,” to do something “Gonzo.” One can detect, in a certain dullness in his eye, a weariness with all this and a wish to be released from the demands of stereotype. There are also some episodes of rudeness and ill-temper which strike me as opportunities, gratefully if ineptly seized, to alleviate the general tedium of life. I write these sentences with the benefit – surely that is exactly the wrong word – of hindsight, but I was not the only one to become aware that Dr. Thompson was privately construing the old word “freedom” as “free doom” or in other words as the absolute and individual right to determine the time and place of one’s own final exit.”

De-Johnsonised, this means: “I predicted it! I predicted Hunter Thompson’s suicide! Aren’t I clever? I wish I could say I was the fucking reincarnation of Nostradamus, but they’re paying me to be an atheist and everything so that’s not quite an option. Yep, I knew all along he was depressed, though you’d have to take my word for it. I’m so shit hot I can detect suicidal intent in a person’s facial expressions years before they shoot themselves.” It’s hard to imagine a more disgusting ‘tribute’ than this, full of self-referencing parenthetical clauses and snide little convolutions. “Dear reader”? No real admirer would describe a fallen hero with that Humbert-Humbert lilt. “One can detect… a wish to be released from the demands of stereotype”? Hitch wants to say “I could tell he wanted to kill himself,” but doesn’t want to put it too immodestly. “Gratefully if ineptly seized”? Better to say that Hitch’s account of the suicide is gratefully if ineptly written.

Christopher Hitchens: He lived as a literary thief, and will soon die a chickenshit’s death

He keeps this up for another four pages. Living in the “dreary shallows” after the “great cresting wave of the nineteen-sixties” was “Hunter’s fate.” Nobody could tell “when Hunter was, and was not, joking” and this “may be one of the reasons that the good Doctor eventually succumbed to terminal weltschmerz.” Hitchens suggests that Thompson brought the whole thing on himself by being funny. Who never gets blamed, though, is Bush. This is suspicious, considering that in the last interview published before his suicide, given in November 2004, Thompson says: “This is the darkest hour that I have ever seen in my long experience as an American.” And he reiterates: “You’ve got to vote now in self-defence. If we have another administration like this, it will be so bad that what’s happening now will look like a small breakfast for what’s coming next.”

Finally, a younger Thompson, in 1977, when asked “Where do you want to be when you’re fifty years old?” says: “Down with the maggots, with the sharks. If I ever got to be fifty years old, I’d be so confused I’d probably go into EST or something. To have lived this long has seriously disoriented me.” Obviously, Thompson stayed in good form much longer than he predicted, and didn’t see any reason to live through Bush’s second term.

Hitchens might’ve predictably jumped over to Obama’s side in late 2008, but that hasn’t stopped his denial of any wrongdoing on Bush’s part. In February, he wrote a Vanity Fair article “lamenting” Gore Vidal’s turn to a “crackpot strain” of “crank-revisionist” writing. We essentially have the old ‘conspiracy theorist’ slur. Not only that, but he launches every possible attack against Vidal, no matter how corny. Hitch was “fortunate enough to know Vidal” in earlier days, but “the price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included… a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong.” Good grief, he’s a mild anti-Semite! There’s nothing – not murder, not rape, not puppy abuse – as damningly evil as mild anti-Semitism! I mean, Hitler was sort of near to being a mild anti-Semite himself, so mild anti-Semites are almost down there with Hitler!

According to Hitch’s smear, not only is Vidal too partial to the Third Reich, but he’s entering his second childhood. Signs of this senility include dismissing John Updike and William F. Buckley, as well as calling dear old England “an American aircraft carrier.” Why are these opinions insane or unacceptable? Because Hitchens says so.

But Hitchens is stupid enough to reveal why he suddenly hates his old mentor so much. It seems the author of Myra Breckinridge, to his credit, has caused Hitch rather a lot of pain. And this is the remark that did it:

“You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn’t die.”

Vidal’s obviously not as senile as Hitch wants us to think. At 84, he still knows how to make his ungrateful protégé squirm. Hitchens must have felt a pang of self-recognition when he read that comment, because he categorically denies there’s anything witty about it. There’s so much cold sweat on his body, you just want to lick the little cane toad:

One report of the event said this not-so-rapier-like reply had the audience in “stitches.”

Yes, “stitches” in quotation marks. What’s the matter, Hitch? Can’t accept an audience laughing at your expense? Yeah, you’re right. They were only humouring old Gore. Nobody would really laugh at such a “not-so-rapier-like reply.” Totally against human neurology. Everyone knows comebacks are only funny when made by you, Martin Amis, or Julian Barnes. (All in all, if Hitchens’ smear job doesn’t give you the warmest feelings for Gore Vidal you’ve ever felt, there’s something wrong with you.)

His attack on Hunter S. Thompson is basically the same. After feigning sadness over Thompson’s suicide for four pages, Hitchens deploys the same conspiracy-theorist accusations we’ve seen with Vidal:

On the other hand (as Fay Wray actually did entitle her autobiography) when “it doesn’t work, man, it’s horrible.” Here is Hunter, using the same crap methods that would make any basement-dwelling paranoid into a master strategist, and analysing the real story behind September 11, 2001, for some rather indulgent reviewer from Australia:

“Well, I saw the US government was going to benefit, and the White House, the Republican administration to take the mind of the public off the crashing economy. Now you want to keep in mind that every time a person named Bush gets into office, the nation goes into a drastic recession, as they call it.”

This gives paranoia a bad name, and one feels the cringe as the interviewer wraps up with the condescending summary that this was “US journalist Hunter S. Thompson with a very personal and idiosyncratic view of September 11.”

You’ll notice that despite supposedly having “crap methods” and resembling a “basement-dwelling paranoid,” Thompson doesn’t make anything close to a wild claim. He’s not saying that Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. He’s not even saying that Bush deliberately neglected warnings by the FBI (though this is more likely). All he says is that Bush stood to benefit from the attacks and exploited them to raise his approval ratings. Later, Thompson tells his interviewer that he refuses to commemorate the first anniversary of the attacks or stoop to “flag-sucking.” Instead he plans to “grab Anita and take a road trip.” That short response has more balls than anything Hitchens has ever written.

(And what’s with all this talk about “some rather indulgent interviewer from Australia”? It’s “indulgent,” apparently, to ask a person for their opinion and let them express it. Hitchens also seems to think that mentioning the reporter’s Australianness is an effective way to discredit him, a classic Fox-News-style tactic. All Australians, see, are a mob of know-nothing pissheads with no hope of understanding what it means to be American after 9/11. Not like Hitch!)

Hitchens’ parasitism isn’t unique. His long-time crush, Martin Amis, has the same career-building strategy: getting his hands on as many father figures as possible. The main reason people noticed Amis in the first place was because he had a successful novelist for a father. So, he figured the more daddies, the better. The mileage he got from Amis Sr. wasn’t going to last forever, after all. He was quite successful with Saul Bellow. I still remember his introduction to More Die of Heartbreak, describing how he and Bellow visited a world conference of “Bellovians.” Amis can’t resist mentioning how Bellow confided in him that he found the papers boring. Surely this was a sign that he was the chosen heir. Then again, set against a mouldering mass of Herzog specialists, anyone could have been Bellow’s chosen heir.

Cheeseball Martin Amis (left) meows at the camera while posing with his famous novelist daddy, Kingsley Amis (right)

But Amis’ most successful grab was Nabokov. Everyone associates Amis with Nabokov, though no one is entirely sure why – they just assume there’s some kind of deep connection. The Guardian gave him the job of reviewing The Original of Laura when it came out last year. He’s written the introduction to the Everyman Lolita. I’ve heard him called “Nabokov’s heir” a million times: in the culture sections of big newspapers; on Amazon; in conversations with journalism students and book club presidents. A present-day Dictionary of Received Ideas would doubtlessly have an entry reading “Amis, Martin (1949-): expert on Islam; source of healthy controversy; adopted son of Nabokov.” I imagine Amis spent most of his youth lost in a single daydream of sitting on his trophy daddy’s lap, having his cheeks pinched and his hair ruffled (at the very least), and, after hours of fondling, hearing the most magical word in the world: “synochik.” (In my own generation, Y, a lot of people had the same designs on Updike.)

Unfortunately, Nabokov did the same thing to Amis that “Rabbit” did to every literary careerist born between 1980 and 1990. He died before Amis became a major writer, or anything other than “Kingsley’s son.” The ultimate snub! If Amis had been born 17 years early, he would have been perfectly positioned to leech off Nabokov and still find warm blood – it worked for Updike and Pynchon. But, with his idol lurking around the big playground in the sky, Marty was in a bit of a fix.

Luckily, women tend to live for about a decade longer than men and prospective trophy daddies often leave widows behind. As Anita Thompson’s case demonstrates, widows aren’t necessarily sharp enough to notice leeches and tell them to get fucked. So, in 1981, Amis interviewed Vera Nabokov and Dmitri (the real synochik.) The Observer article that came out of this, “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov,” isn’t very long and doesn’t give readers much they can’t find in Strong Opinions. Amis spends a great deal of time distracting readers from just how brief his encounter was: a paragraph on how Vera offered him a drink, another on how she insisted on paying for the booze, a few paragraphs on stuff everyone already knows about Nabokov’s relocations from Pityer to Berlin to Paris to New York. As for original information: Vera mentions her petty disputes with various editors and academics; she gets offended at any suggestion that Nabokov had flaws (calling him “good” is an insult in her book); and she tells an unexceptional story of how she met him and fell in love – her father was one of Nabokov’s publishers.

The interview ends with one of the most useless question and answer exchanges I’ve ever read:

Eventually, she said, ‘These questions you will ask. Where are these questions?’

‘Well, there were one or two things,’ I said. ‘Your husband dedicated all his books to you, every one. That’s very unusual, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? … What should I answer? We had a very unusual relationship. But that you knew before you asked. Anything else?’

‘Was he – was he great fun?’ I asked helplessly. ‘Were there lots of jokes? Did you laugh a lot?’

‘Oh, yes. His humour was delightful. He was delightful,’ said Mrs Nabokov. ‘But that you knew too.’

All in all, Amis’s meeting with Mrs. Nabokov could have happened in less than an hour, and judging by the padding, it probably did. It wouldn’t be remotely interesting if it wasn’t for the way Amis used it to build a career. In 1993, two years after Vera’s death, he shamelessly released a book called Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions. Everything implied by that title is a lie. If “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov” is supposed to be the book’s main essay, it sure doesn’t look like it – his interviews with Greene, Burgess, and Updike are longer, with more original information, and the book has large essays on mutually assured destruction and the 1988 Republican Convention that are at least passably interesting. Mentioning “other excursions” is just as misleading. It gives the impression that Amis’s 60-minute interview (which took place entirely within the Montreux Palace Hotel) was some kind of epic butterfly hunt through the rolling Swiss countryside.

In fact, I doubt Amis even wants people to read Visiting Mrs. Nabokov – the title is the part that does all the work. People see it on a bibliography page and assume his “excursion” was important enough to become the title of an essay collection. Nobody knows what’s important about it, but that’s the whole point. Only a minority of readers would bother with a book of essays – it’s novels that sell – so Visiting Mrs. Nabokov isn’t really a book, so much as a meme. And it’s worked extremely well, giving Amis the third daddy he’s always wanted.

I’m not going to overrate Nabokov: my admiration for him peaked at 18 and has steadily receded ever since. At the moment, I think of him as a highbrow, Eurotrash version of Ayn Rand. Most of his books (aside from Lolita) are a 50-50 cross between The Fountainhead and Finnegans Wake. There’s always a sensitive, intelligent libertarian protagonist fighting an evil mob of looters and straw-man communists. We know he’s sensitive and intelligent because he makes lots of observations and puns involving butterflies, which, like nymphets, are invisible to looters. The looters torment him until he becomes a martyr for libertarianism. Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, and Invitation to a Beheading all have the same hackneyed plot with prose soaked in Tyrian purple.

The question is, does Amis really write like Nabokov? Is it Nabokovian to write: “a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast across our bows”? How about: “The people ahead of me are all Venusians, pterodactyls, men and women from an alternative time-stream.”? Hmm, pterodactyls. Wasn’t there a much better writer who used reptile motifs to describe crowds of people and shark motifs to describe cars? Who also wrote a book about drug-sozzled misadventures in hotel rooms and airports? Yep. Amis’s way to seem original is to take two or so authors as official influences and adulterate their styles with a phantom third. To middlebrows, this makes him look like he’s ‘maturing’ and ‘departing from his roots.’ Hiding influences is just as important to the good careerist as snatching father figures.

Unlike Amis, Hitchens can’t stop acknowledging his debt to Hunter S. Thompson. There’s a weird Spice Girls structure to the Oxbridge “Blitcons” (a shortening of “British literary conservatives”) that Hitchens is a member of. Julian Barnes is ‘Froggy Blit,’ Ian McEwan is ‘Nerdy Blit,’ Salman Rushdie is ‘Curry Blit,’ Martin Amis is ‘Celebrity Blit,’ and Christopher Hitchens is ‘Gonzo Blit.’ The duties of Gonzo Blit include submitting to safe-word-protected waterboarding, bullying Arab youths, pretending to be a Bob Dylan fan, and, according to The Guardian, “courageously” asking people not to pray for him during cancer treatment (which shouldn’t matter to an atheist anyway). This is all pretty hardcore for Amis, though, when he claims that Hitchens is an all-round tough who ‘likes the smell of cordite’ (probably unaware the stuff’s been obsolete for over 50 years).

If Hitchens was simply a leech like Amis, or just another third-rate Thompson imitator, he wouldn’t be worth writing about. But he’s not content just to claim people as mentors – he has to betray them for even more leverage. In his introduction to Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, he mentions a rumour he heard at boarding school that, after the JFK assassination, Lyndon Johnson “had been discovered… gleefully fornicating in his deceased predecessor’s head wound.” The young Hitchens must have taken this as career advice.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

]]> http://exiledonline.com/how-christopher-hitchens-robbed-hunter-s-thompsons-grave/feed/ 91 http://exiledonline.com/ufos-made-boring/ http://exiledonline.com/ufos-made-boring/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:27:25 +0000 Eileen Jones http://exiledonline.com/?p=27284

There’s this woman making the rounds of the talk shows with her new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record. She’s an earnest, homely progressive named Leslie Kean with a tan semi-afro, wire-rimmed glasses, and the humorless manner of a recent convert to a new faith. She’s arguing that the US government should re-open its investigation into UFOs, because of all the UFOs hovering around. Seriously, the sky is thick with ‘em, as described by all those generals and pilots and officials in her book.

Okey-dokey, I say. Seems like we’ve got kind of a full plate right now, but what the hell. I can always work up an interest in crazy shit going on in the universe. Plus, hiring a staff of sky-watchers would create a few good government jobs, wouldn’t it?

But with an easygoing attitude like that, I’m not the reader Leslie Kean is trying to reach. She’s aiming to shake up fervent skeptics who are sure UFOs are a complete load. So she’s spent ten years of her life compiling just-the-facts-ma’am interviews with “credible witnesses,” full of precise dates and flight coordinates and scads of acronyms.

Boy, what a slog! It’s not everybody who could take a subject as lurid as UFOs and make it read like homework.

Here’s a sample quote from a French government official in charge of investigating UAPs (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomenon, the term adopted by those who want to avoid the tainted UFO acronym):

“Captain Duboc reported the incident to authorities at the Reims air navigation control center, which had no information about any aircraft in the location. A report was then sent to SEPRA, which classified it as Type C, meaning it was insufficiently documented for identification. However, Reims contacted the Taverny air defense operation center, CODA, and we later learned something important that allowed us to reclassify this event as a clear Type D: CODA recorded a radar track at their control center in Cinq-Mars-le-Pile that corresponded in both location and time to the observation of the crew of Air France flight 3532…”

To stay interested in this account, you’d have to be Hermes the lovable bureaucrat on Futurama.

It’s not as if “a clear Type D” is anything thrilling like a space alien showing up carrying a book titled To Serve Man. No, it’s the same as all the other Type Ds in the book: something aloft that’s perceived by multiple credible witnesses and can’t be slotted into the usual weather balloon or swamp gas categories. But we don’t know what the hell it is.

Unless you’re a real fanatic, a little Type D goes a long way. But you can see how it all becomes part of Kean’s persuasive strategy: she’ll make UFOs so boring that they’ll become respectable, and then nobody will object to studying them. Boring things are supposed to be studied; exciting things are supposed to be rigidly ignored or condemned in a frenzied manner until they can be made boring through tedious pontificating and co-opting by earnest progressives. (See also: Sex, Movies.)

To be fair, there are some interesting parts of the book, usually when somebody’s first-person account conveys a little drama, despite the officialese. For example, there are recordings quoted at length between air traffic controllers and pilots who are trying to describe the weird things they’re experiencing in the air. The most enjoyably Twilight Zone–esque one is the tape of twenty-year-old Frederick Valentich’s last known words, spoken to Melbourne Airport air traffic controller Steve Robey in 1978. Valentich is clearly losing it as he pilots his little private plane on a night-flight over Australia and describes the UFO that’s harrying him. Robey keeps telling him no aircraft are showing up around him on radar. It builds to a nice incoherent flourish:

“Ah, Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again…it is hovering and it’s not an aircraft.”

Metallic pulsating noise follows, then nothing. “End of transcript.” His plane is lost over Australia’s Bass Strait.

Of course, recreational drugs, pilot hallucinations, engine failure, and a crash into deep water might account for a lot of this too. Just saying.

There’s also an entertaining story by a retired pilot formerly with the Peruvian Air Force, Commandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas, recalling his “close combat with a UFO” in 1980, when he was a young hotdog, a “top aerial marksman with great skill at shooting from the air.” He gets sent up to deal with a UFO hanging in their airspace that’s refusing to either communicate or shove off. It’s a huge round metallic thing with no visible means of staying aloft, and his mission is to shoot it down. But for all his “great skill” he can’t touch it. In split-seconds, it seems to hop up effortlessly out of the way of his shells. So he tries flying above it and firing down, and it bobs up to hugging distance with his plane, too close to shoot at.

The damn thing’s dissing him! And nobody disses Commandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas!

Or as he tells it: “Then it became a personal thing for me. I had to get it.”

But he doesn’t get it. He keeps madly harassing the UFO till he’s almost out of fuel and finally has to coast back to base on fumes. But nothing human could have eluded his tremendous shooting skills!

Kean spends almost 300 pages documenting these international puzzlers. She uses this evidence to further her overarching goal, which is to demonstrate that there’s something fishy about way the US government refuses to investigate the odd stuff people see in the sky. In places like France and England and Brazil, they go right on patiently logging in the reported phenomena, figuring out that 95% of it is really military flares and that sort of thing, but 5% is unidentifiable and merits study. Is this 5% evidence of the existence of extra-terrestrial beings visiting Earth? They don’t know. They just put it in the file. And anyone who wants to can pore over the blurry photos and crudely drawn diagrams and official accounts of shiny saucers flying at impossible speeds.

But not in America. In 1970 the US government shut down “Project Blue Book” and classified all the documents related to UFO sightings. According to Kean’s reporting, a strident publicity campaign followed intended to debunk all UFO sightings, past, present, and future. It worked so well that to this day the vast majority of Americans sneer automatically at the mention of UFOs. Apparently there are still a lot of UFO sightings, even mass ones, like the mystery disc-shaped craft that hung over O’Hare Airport for at least five minutes in broad daylight on November 7, 2006, while crowds stared and air traffic controllers speculated. Then it “took off and left a hole in the clouds like Wile E. Coyote” as Stephen Colbert aptly summarized it during his interview with Kean.

But such is the force of the forty-year debunking campaign, Kean says, that nobody wanted to talk about the O’Hare UFO publicly. Aviation industry employees feared for their reputations and jobs; the media didn’t cover it till months later, starting in January with a Chicago Tribune article; then the FAA trotted out a pat weather-related explanation for the cloud-hole effect, which was generally accepted by the media etc.

Kean says this policy of “Move along, folks! Nothing to see up there!” only serves to ratchet up the level of paranoia and conspiracy theory as people come up with crazy X-Files-type explanations to account for what the big secret is. So the government should declassify the UFO docs and then set up an investigating body to look into further sightings, run by NASA or somebody. And in his forward to the book, John Podesta, former President Clinton’s chief of staff and current honcho at the Center for American Progress, agrees with these worthy goals.

Okay, fine. But with all Kean’s investigative journalism going on, I couldn’t help but wish she would advance a theory of her own, even a crazy one, about what the US government is getting out of this UFO policy. In a chapter entitled ”The Roots of UFO Debunking in America” Kean seems like she’s teeing up to offer a theory when she documents the CIAs close monitoring of UFOs after World War II, and subsequent manipulation of public opinion:

In short, a group of scientists selected by the CIA advised our government to encourage all agencies within the intelligence community to influence mass media and infiltrate civilian research groups for the purpose of debunking UFOs. Media could then become a tool for covertly controlling public perception, a mouthpiece for government policy and propaganda, to “debunk” or ridicule, UFOs. Public interest in UFO incidents was to be strongly discouraged and diminished through these tactics, and intelligence operatives could make sure that the facts were kept from leading researchers through disinformation. In the name of national security, the subject was fair game for the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. All of these recommendations were written in black and white and by the CIA panel and then classified….

You can see where the plot of The X-Files came from. But what’s the real story underneath the UFO debunking, if it’s not a covert human-alien breeding program? Kean doesn’t say. Though there are some good theories out there. Thanks to Mark Ames for tipping me off about this one:

…[T]he UFO thing—it’s often used as a “cover” for the crazy shit that the CIA or intel ops like that get involved in, those weird human experiments that they’ve done over the years. They conflate it a lot with UFO stuff to automatically discredit the real shit that’s going on–dosing unwitting people with psychedelics to “peel open their minds” and induce amnesia and control behavior and all that. So that when journalists or investigators get on the trail, they’re also on the trail of UFO hunters, and then they make fools of themselves. Actually quite a clever cover.

Kean doesn’t go into a lot of things that might have goosed up the read considerably, like “mind-peels” and alien abductions and anal-probes and all that. She also doesn’t discuss the sober, institutionally validated, highly public scientific pursuit of alien life forms that’s currently in progress. How come scientists who are working hard to locate extraterrestrials don’t seem impressed by these flocks of UFOs? There’s no secret about their ET-hunt; actor Morgan Freeman just told us all about it on that Science Channel series Through the Wormhole. (Yeah, I do like my scientific information presented at a ninth-grade level by actor Morgan Freeman—you wanna make something of it?) They’re aiming huge zillion-dollar radio-receivers at the sky trying to record even the tiniest alien cough, and so far coming up with nothing, while all the time there’s a flying saucer hanging out over O’Hare Airport? Hm!

They don’t call it “unexplained phenomena” for nothing.

When Amazon started printing readers’ book reviews on the net, a window opened briefly on the mental worlds of ordinary people — or, as Harry Dean Stanton so memorably called them, “ordinary fuckin’ people.”

Everyone should have a look at these reviews once in a while, to get an idea of what actually goes on in the heads of the other people who sit in a theater with you, not laughing at all the best lines, and applauding all the stuff you hate.

Hell, it turns out, isn’t other people; Hell is other people reviewing on Amazon.com.

And it’s good to get a glimpse into Hell every now and then. Slaps you awake.

To experience this Hell, just find the book or movie you most love on Amazon and read all the reviews. You will emerge a sadder, wiser aestheto-fascist, I guarantee.

And do it quickly, because Amazon’s remarkable venture in practical free speech is ending. In the nineties, before America’s dullard consensus had really gotten the hang of this internet thing, there really was a time when you could post honest reviews on Amazon. That’s over. First they did away with swearing and libel — the very mainstays of critical prose. Then they started insisting that reviewers use their real names, taking all the fun out of impersonating your enemies and plugging your own books.

Now Amazon’s added a feature the FBI must love: a little button at the end of each reader review, labeled “report this.” If you click the button, you get an invitation to turn in the offending review for “appropriate action” by Amazon.

Naturally, “appropriate action” means deletion. As this new feature goes to work, it will eventually grind away all the rough edges of these reviews. Soon nothing will be left but Amazon’s “top reviewers,” a few hundred bush-league Leonard Maltins incapable of blurting anything odd or new. So cherish these blurts while you can. Steep yourself in them. It’s an essential part of a dissident education. And fun, in a painful way, like swimming through a swarm of low-toxicity jellyfish.

I’ve been swimming through the reviews of the film Election posted on Amazon. I wasn’t sure why I picked Election. I love it, naturally. But I love Big Lebowski too, yet didn’t find much fun reading through Amazon reviews of it. For one thing, nearly everybody who reviews Lebowski loves it. How could you not? And there’s not much fun reading reviews by people you agree with. A big part of the pleasure of reading these things is the whip-sting of Wrong Thought.

That’s why the reviews of Election were so delectable: they were full of horrible wrongness, wrong statements by wrong people. I went through all 213 posted reviews the way kids in my high school used to pore over every page of the crash pictures in Highway Patrol magazine: for the sheer horror of it. What did Kurtz know about horror? He never read Amazon reviews of Election.

Election drew all the wrong viewers, sat them down comfortably… and then slashed them across the face with a bleach-dipped cat-o-nine-tails. When it came out in 1999, it was billed as a chirpy teen comedy, with Reese Witherspoon’s dimply smile fronting the ads. When her cornfed fans sat down with their popcorn, Election subjected them to a pitiless, contemptuous, proudly elitist dissection of the loathsome American polity. And this collision of ordinary fuckin’ viewers and Olympian chill-film makes for some wonderfully painful rat-squeaks from shocked Reese-fans who expected some sort of Legally Blonde prequel.

The reviewers you end up almost admiring are the ones who admit with grace that they didn’t get what they wanted:

“when i rented this film i thought it was going to be a cuetsy lil’ thing about highschool….WRONG! i soon realized i wasn’t watching something wholesome and family like. this movie is very, well it’s different. i don’t think i would buy the movie, but it was an interesting one to rent.”

But there were surprises, too. Small ones, like the number of people who whine about having paid a couple of dollars to rent this movie. When did it become socially acceptable to complain bitterly about a few dollars? I seem to remember a culture in which it was shameful to be that cheap. One of the effects of online discourse for the all-too-common Americans is that they’ve made it OK to be as tight as a snare drum.

And one big surprise: I learned that ordinary fuckin’ viewers require every movie to have a loud, crude, smarmy moral. The most common (and I do mean common) objection to Election is that you can’t “like” any of the characters, and none of them “learn” anything.

A review titled “Immoral Garbage” sums up this argument: “All the major characters are immoral bad people doing immoral bad stuff… nor do any of the characters show remorse or grow in anyway. There is nothing redeming about this movie.”

Some of the disappointed moralists all but plead with the film to help them out a little, like poor Karl Erickson of Dallas, who sobs, “I want to see something redemptive in a movie. I want to see characters – even ONE – change for the better. I want to see people learn lessons. If there are a lot of nasty deeds being done – whether they be sexual, drug-induced, hate-filled, whatever – I want to see someone regret something they’ve done, learn from their mistakes, you know?”

Actually I didn’t know this was such an unbreakable rule. In fact I was in the habit of admiring movies that refused the whole “epiphany” business, like Raging Bull and Fargo. No doubt because I haven’t spent much time in the US for a long time, I’d forgotten that the mainstream there sees all books and movies as so many After School Specials, whose sole purpose is the promotion of public morality.

It seems that not only must the characters learn from their mistake, but there’s a limit on how many mistakes they’re allowed to make, as Karl goes on to imply: “Again, it’s not that I’m a prude, but it isn’t like Broderick’s character is any better off at the end of this movie than he was before he made the MANY mistakes he does here.”

The key phrase here is “it’s not that I’m a prude.” Karl says this twice in his review. Anyone who says “I’m not a prude” once is probably a prude; anyone who has to say it twice definitely is.

And Karl’s not the only one saying it. Jeff Benson of Illinois sums it up in one sentence: “I’m no prude, but I was appalled by the lack of morality of these unlikable characters.” I counted five reviews that contain variations on the phrase, “I’m not a prude.” Helpful hint for prude reviewers out there: don’t use this line. It’s a dead giveaway. There, you can say you learned something from this review, your character grew.

If you know Election, you’re probably wondering what could bother even the grimmest prude. If there’s one thing Election is not, it’s sexy. It’s more like aversion therapy for the lustful. The only sane negative comment on the subject came from a dude in Hawaii who asked the film’s fans, “Are u people crazy this movie sucked a big fat one ….i mean matthew broderick gets it on with a yeti!”

That pretty much sums up the “adultery” which so scandalized most viewers: Broderick lusting after one of the ugliest actresses ever featured in an American film. (And just for the record, he doesn’t even “get it on” with her.)

The other scene which upsets these people is one in which Broderick, less than thrilled with his plain wife’s mating cry, “Fill me up! Fill me up!,” sneaks down to his miserable basement to watch a porn film featuring ugly actors in their 30s as high-school jock and cheerleader fucking in the locker room.

This comic abomination, which would have Jackie Treehorn in tears, apparently qualifies as what one reviewer called “bad smuttyness.” A viewer in Utah calls Election “…loaded to the hilt with sex, sexual innuendos, and language that would turn your mother’s hair white.” Another simply condemns the “cussing.” (Again, Lebowski haunts this other great 90s film: “Just one thing, Broderick…do yuh have ta use so many cuss words?”)

But one thing you can say about our people: we’re verbally cagey. Several of the reviews hint at outrage that one of the main characters is a lesbian, but only one, Brandon from Kansas, had the honesty to say so: “This movie contains some sex, lesbian issues and things worse than that.” Brandon herself is one of those delightful surprises you encounter reading these reviews. She IS Tracey Flick, (even if she is a he — Flicks come in several genders) and admits it: “[Flick] has the aggression just like everyone has running out for something. Like I did running for Student Council Secretary.”

The review which best sums up all the sorry revelations of the lot is by Russell Rubert from King of Prussia, PA: “…this is less a comedy, then an all too possible headline in your local newspaper you’ll skip this travisty. It is the most disapointing thing I’ve ever seen Matthew Broderick in, with the possible exception of “Godzilla” (The remake) Oh yes, the acting is good, it better be, I’d hate to think these people are really like that. If you are in the market for offbeat, quirky fun, buy Rushmore instead.”

Yes, we love that offbeat, quirky fun, as long as it’s not actually offbeat or quirky. Oh, and of course it has to jerk some tears: “Rushmore was far more poignant [than Election].” Another critic advises, “Whoever wrote [Election] could have learned a thing or two from Rushmore. You can have pretentious, annoying characters, but redeem them in the end so we’re not completely turned off!”

The funny thing is, I hated Rushmore; hated that “quirky, offbeat” protagonist; even hated Bill Murray for lending legitimacy to a film which I knew, somehow, was in the enemy camp. Yet everyone whose taste I respect loved it. I even, uncharacteristically, wondered if I might possibly have been wrong.

Seeing all these Amazon idiots praise it by way of damning Election gave me a wonderfully smug sense that I was right all along — thatRushmore was, as I’d argued at the time, nothing but an adoring biopic about the life and adventures of a young David Geffen.

Thus the Amazon reviews serve another important purpose: their endorsement of Rushmore proves, or at least suggests, that my inarticulate loathing of it was right after all.

Yet another pleasure in reading these things is the joy of seeing one’s ideological enemies acknowledge a direct hit. The reviews of Election provide many such yelps of pain, like this one: “As a 38 year old male this movie offended me greatly. It was made by MTV films which says alot about the politically motivated aspects of what happens when a Music Video cable channel decides to starts making movies which are politically based and totally one sided. Its hard to believe that Matthew Broderick went from Ferris Bueller (A Hero) to a conniving, evil, audulterer (Mr McAllister). Another thing that hurt (following MTV’S political agenda) was that it glorified Homosexuality and made men look stupid, evil, and immature.”

There it is, the Bush consensus: terrified, vengeful, and hopelessly confused; blurted out more clearly by an anonymous sucker than it could ever be by its spayed official spokespersons.

Seek out these blurts while they’re around. Go to the movie you most love and read what the bad people have to say about it. As a wiser fella than myself once said, “To defeat the bug, we must understand the bug.”

This article was first published in The eXile on March 11, 2005.

John Dolan is the author of Pleasant Hell.

Buy

“Pleasant Hell”

By John Dolan

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

This review was first published in The eXile on March 21, 2002.

Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal the fact that this novel is a simple mix of three of the most hackneyed storylines in American fiction:

1. The picaresque adventures of a feckless male academic, borrowed from DeLillo;
2. The sentimental tale of the decay and death of one’s parents as in Dave Eggers’s “masterpiece”;
3. The old, old plot device of the family Christmas reunion to bring the centrifugal parents and kids back together again against all odds, as in every sentimental John Hughes movie ever made and about a thousand more before him.

That, folks, is all there is to this mess: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation meets dying-parents memoir meets Manhattanite satire Lite. God help me, but that’s it!

It has now reached the point that I’d welcome a great book, something so good I’d have to bow my head and say, “The world is just.” I used to fear that encounter, thinking I’d die of envy. But I’m dying of bitterness now, and that’s no easier. How can they do it? How can people even pretend to like a novel so dull, formulaic, and unimaginative?

Well, I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised, because one thing I’ve learned from reviewing for the eXile — reading books I’d never’ve touched on my own — is that whoever controls American publishing loves reading the same thing over and over. Fiction, non-fiction — doesn’t matter. The Corrections, which purports to be a novel, is basically the same book as David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise, a “social history” I reviewed last year. Bobos is simply a booklength rim job on the “bourgeois bohemians” who love to read about themselves in The New Yorker, where their loathsome shopping habits are teased into 5,000-word massages. The Corrections does the same thing, at much greater length. It’s 568 pages of namedropping and gentle fun-poking, feather-light mockery with a maudlin affirmation of the most banal “family values” at the end.

Ugh, how they love to be stroked, the Bobos! It’s like that scene in Dune where the Baron’s doctor, draining his monstrous master’s pustules, pauses to whisper, “How beautiful you are, my Baron! Your diseases — love to me!” That should be the epigram for The Corrections, which uses a narrative frame as an excuse to linger lovingly on the pustules of Bobo life: wine pedantry, theory-jokes, SUVs — the usual suspects. Nothing new. Not one fresh observation.

But the Manhattan tenure-jokes are actually well done by comparison with the novel’s other plot-strand, the Midwestern family comedy. Franzen has soldered these two strands together in the most crude, formulaic manner: the hero, Chip (isn’t that funny, naming him “Chip”?) is a lit-theory academic, fired from a Northeastern college for stalking a female student and now scraping a living as a proofreader in Manhattan. His mom, “Enid” (isn’t that a funny housewifey name, “Enid”?) wants him and his siblings to come back to their Minnesota hometown “St. Jude” for Christmas. (“St. Jude” — isn’t that funny too? You see, it’s “St. Paul,” really, but “St. Jude” is the patron saint of lost causes, so it’s a joke, sorta like St. Elsewhere was… 20 years ago.)

And after lots of funny misadventures, the family — wouldn’t you know it! — DOES get back together for a nice Christmas, after all!

This plotline was old before Homer went blind. How many generations of playwrights, novelists and scriptwriters have used the holiday reunion gag to get all their characters together in one room so they can demonstrate what very different people they’ve become, only to draw together in family solidarity at the end?

It’s not only old, it’s very poorly done. See for yourself: read this novel, then watch Christmas Vacation, and tell me which does the family-reunion schick better — which one observes and plays with middle-class manners more cleverly.

Franzen can’t handle the Midwestern strand of his plot because he simply doesn’t know the Protestant milieu he tries to portray — and because he has no imaginative power, he can write only about what he actually knows, the Manhattan Bobo world. While his observations about Manhattan are merely trite, his attempts to depict Minnesota are just plain wrong.

Even his thefts are inept. Exhibit A: the recliner. Franzen spends pages and pages going on about how Al, the Midwestern husband, loves his recliner, though his wife would love to get rid of it. Sound familiar? It should. How many sitcoms have mocked the slob husband’s love affair with the big, overstuffed, ugly recliner? You know: the wife just hates the darn thing! But he, the big loveable lug, just won’t let her give it to Goodwill! I’ve seen that on Married with Children, The Simpsons — in fact, it goes back at least to the sitcoms of the sixties. You’d think that by now, the old recliner would be so used up that even Goodwill wouldn’t want it.

But it’s good enough for Jonathan Franzen. In fact, it’s such a selling point that the publishers actually put a sketch of this recliner on the book’s cover. What hicks!

Yes, it’s time someone said it outright: Manhattanites are the new hicks. The mall kids are generations ahead of them. Things that are stale jokes to the mall kids strike the NY publishing world as fresh and hilarious. Maybe they just don’t watch enough TV, or they spend too much time drinking cocktails with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ghost — whatever the reason, the Manhattanites have lost it completely. The scriptwriters of Christmas Vacationare Flaubertian chroniclers of provincial mores next to Franzen. When you compare Franzen with really talented observers of Minnesota life, like the Coens in Fargo, or even Garrison Keillor inLake Wobegon Days, his incompetence stands out even more sharply.

And if one were to compare him with the great novelist of “pelagic America,” Charles Portis… no, it would be an insult to Portis even to compare a hack like Franzen with him. And yet Portis is all but unknown, while Franzen is everybody’s darling…. Agh, ya buncha idiots! OK, I’ll try a little remedial education: if you want to see a truly brilliant depiction of provincial America, read Portis’s Dog of the South. If you want to see how an ordinary reclining chair can become — in the hands of a real writer — an object of terror and pity, read Portis’s grimmest book, Masters of Atlantis.

Franzen himself seems to know his attempt to depict Midwestern life is weak. He makes up for it with lots of “writerly writing.” Franzen, you see, wrote a bold manifesto a few years ago, in favor of “writerly” writers like himself. As opposed, I gather, to un-writerly writers. Well, who can disagree with the man? I myself am in favor not only of writerly writers but hit-manly hit men, whorish whores, and bakerly bakers. In fact, perhaps the hit-manly hit men could be persuaded to do something about the whorish whores, especially those posing as writers. Bake them in a pie with the help of the bakerly bakers….

Daydreaming again. Sorry. At any rate, Franzen’s idea of “writerly” writing seems to be page-long mock-heroic similes, which largely infest those parts of his novel dealing with Midwestern life. They show up on the very first page of the novel:

“Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety… by now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of ‘bell ringing’ but, as with any sound that continues so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound….”

That’s not even the whole thing; it goes on for another half-page. But the sample should be sufficient to give you an idea of what Franzen means by “writerly writing.” Again, it’s “writerly” in the way hicks always imagine literature: overwriting. And banal. Those two poles shape all of Franzen’s most “writerly” writing: vastly overextended metaphors and similes that expand around a core of utter banality. Look at the basis of the sprawling paragraph just quoted. The metaphor is “the alarm bell of anxiety.” That’s… it? That’s the metaphor? It’s a dead trope! It’sNaked Gun poetics! The mall kids would find it trite if it were spoken by Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun XXI, for God’s sake! How old is that trope: “alarm bells were going off in my head…”? Raymond Chandler would’ve shoved that metaphor in a cab and sent it home!

Franzen (who has clearly read Erasmus’s de Copia) doesn’t simply state the stale metaphor; he is so proud of it he extends it for an entire page, demanding that the reader admire a whole gallery of retakes — again using only the oldest, most thoroughly cliched tropes. First he invokes the arbitrary-sign cliche — the word is repeated until meaningless; then he applies that favorite prefix of seminar whores, “meta-,” to make the sound a “metasound” — which, by the way, makes no sense at all, but never mind; moving right along, we find him then displaying a bit of pop-science pedantry, defining ordinary sound waves (as opposed to “metasound”) as “compression waves”; he then trots out the oldest, dullest grad-school cliche, redefining the “metasound” yet again as “their consciousness [italics in original] of the sound.”

If a cliche falls in the forest, does anybody applaud? Apparently. A whole forest of dead, dry tree-tropes crashes to the ground in this novel, and everybody loves it.

“Writerly” writing abounds in the early chapters, especially at the very beginning of the novel. Here’s another gem from page 1: “Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.” This is as “writerly” as even DeLillo could ask — the sort of overwriting English professors love. The trouble is it’s supposed to be a thought in the mind of an elderly Midwestern railroad worker — and the “sinus” trope doesn’t exactly ring true as a sample of his “consciousness.”

But that matters far less to Franzen than the need to keep his very slow academic readers in tow by overdoing every metaphor, every turn of the plot, and every joke to make sure they get it. By that standard, his metaphors, which would make Chandler blush, are a success, because even an English professor — hell, even an American Studies professor! — couldn’t help noticing a metaphor comparing free time to “a sinus in which infection bred.” Short of providing his own “Study Guide” to the novel (there’s an idea, Jonathan!), Franzen does everything possible to remind the braindamaged seminar victim that this is a truly “writerly” bit of writing. When he has squeezed the last drop of metaphorical juice out of the “alarm bell,” Franzen dusts off a new extended metaphor, in which Enid’s domestic chores are compared to “guerrilla” raids. It’s an unrewarding and improbable metaphor, but that doesn’t matter; what’s important is that Franzen keeps it up for two pages — two… entire… pages. That’s the point: to get the reader to notice the writerliness of it all. Once that metaphor’s exhausted — and believe me, it takes a LONG TIME for him to use it up and throw it away — Franzen begins what may be the most silly and tedious of all his extended metaphors, in which the husband’s loss of mental acuity is compared, for an entire page, to a fairy-tale character becoming lost in the woods:

“…[W]hen he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and crepuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word ‘crepuscular’ in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse….”

You get the idea. The reader is stuck in these lightless woods for an entire page, and emerges having lost all track of the narrative but convinced of one thing: this is a “writerly” writer, by God. Only a very writerly writer indeed would drag you around a wholly metaphorical phorest phor an entire page, then remind you of how theory-ish it all was by ending with an allusion to “… the woods of this sentence.”

If Franzen had written like this for 500 pages, not even the hicks in Manhattan would’ve fallen for it. He’s not that stupid. In fact, like many of the authors I’ve encountered in this job, he’s beneath contempt as a writer but beyond reproach as an entrepreneur, as demonstrated by his masterful manipulation of Oprah — no slouch herself at publicity games.

So Franzen very quickly drops the page-long metaphors and self-reflexive poses, the instant he’s convinced the naive reader that this is High Literature. This moment corresponds to the shift from Minnesota, which Franzen knows he doesn’t really understand, to Manhattan, where he feels at home narrating the tale of Chip the failed academic. No more “writerly” writing here! Suddenly Franzen writes like the New Yorker hack he is, doing very chatty, accessible journalistic writing: dropping names, playing roman-a-clef games. For example, Chip has a colleague named “Vendla,” which I take to be some sort of smirky allusion to Helen Vendler, a Stevens critic.

Vendla, like all the women in the NY part of the novel, is a sleazy hypocritical schemer. In fact, The Corrections is full of a violent hatred for post-feminist women, as in this account of Chip’s big romance:

“His girlfriend in college and long after, Tori Timmelman, was a feminist theorist who’d become so enraged with the patriarchal system of accreditation and its phallometric yardsticks of achievement that she refused (or was unable) to finish her dissertation. Chip… stuck with Tori for nearly a decade. He did all of the laundry and most of the cleaning and cooking and cat care in the apartment he and Tori shared. He read secondary literature for Tori and helped her outline and reoutline chapters of her thesis that she was too throttled by rage to write.”

See? No more page-long metaphors, no more Keillor ripoffs. We’re back in Franzen’s homeland: NY academia. But though his prose suddenly improves when we leave Minnesota, his imagination serves him as poorly as ever. It’s just not accurate — I mean the misogyny in this paragraph, its depiction of feminist academics as crazed hypocrites. I live with these people. Until last year I literally lived with an American Women’s Studies professor; so I’m entitled to say, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson’s attorney, “I know these people in my goddamn BLOOD!” They’re no prizes, God knows; they’re bitter and sullen and above all deeply confused; but I must say that Franzen’s venomous depiction of them gets it all wrong. As any academic knows, the real surprise about Women’s Studies professors is that very, very few of them resemble the firebreathing dyke stereotype. Most of them are wretchedly lonely women whose secret dream is a husband and kids. But as I’ve tried to suggest, Franzen cannot really observe, let alone imagine; all he can do is paste together the bits of a world already sketched by other writers, to make a feeble collage of his own.

But about the misogyny thing — it’s funny how much woman-hating you can get away with if you toss a few theory-jokes to the academic reader. This is only one sample; there are dozens of paragraphs like it in The Corrections. In fact, the only really good women characters are Chip’s sister, who’s a long-suffering cook, and his mom, who’s simply a mom (albeit a poorly drawn one, pasted together from Edith Bunker and Richie Cunningham’s mom). Franzen pretty much hates any woman who ain’t a cookin’ mom, in fact. His hero, Chip, actually makes the black pilgrimage to the East Bloc to find compliant, inexpensive women. Like a fool, though, he goes to Lithuania rather than Russia. And dear God, how poorly Franzen sketches the East! I thought his Midwest was bad, but it’s nothing to his Lithuania! It’s the worst thing to happen to the Baltic since the Teutonic Knights came a-callin.

But Chip comes home in the end. Just in time for Xmas. And they all get together, he and his Yuppie brother and victim sister, his sitcom mom and his demented dad. The American family wins out. No matter how far they may fly, they all come home for the holidays. And if that’s not sufficiently sentimental or cliche enough, Franzen throws in a wedding meant to symbolize the marriage of Midwest and Manhattan: Chip marries a Jewish doctor and moves to the city. His anti-Semitic mom, Enid, learns her little Civics lesson about accepting people.

And that’s it. The end. Banality triumphs; all the characters are absorbed into Franzen’s very narrow conception of the real, the crucial, world; and the grumpy Dad character is sacrificed — like Homer Simpson or Al Bundy, only not funny.

Not funny; not well observed; not imaginative; what does this super-sized bowl of prose porridge give its satisfied readers? All I can see is that it teaches what Vikram Seth’s novels teach at even more tedious length: that there is no world but this one, the mingy, dim, entropic circle of tenth-generation Thurber tableaux featured in The New Yorker and TLS — a world hermetically sealed, valuing literature only for the production of antibodies designed to repel newer, faster worlds and return the reader to the flabby bosom of the upper-middle-class family.

Long live the mall kids; may they show no mercy when their day comes.

John Dolan is the author of Pleasant Hell.

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“Pleasant Hell”

By John Dolan

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

You might have heard that Mark Twain’s autobiography is going to be published this fall—the real one, not the abridged, expurgated, censored, compromised, cleaned-up, Sunday school superintendent version that’s circulated over the years. 5,000 pages of sheer bile, cussedness, and truth-telling is what’s promised, and I’m ready to pre-order Volume One.

Twain famously stipulated that it not be published till one hundred years after his death in 1910, and here we are. How time flies when you’re destroying America! It seems like only yesterday when we were an embiggened nation and had some great people among us. They weren’t the majority, of course, but the ones we had were prime. Especially that fierce Civil War era crop. Besides Twain there was, lessee, off the top of my head, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass, and Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and John Brown, and Harriet Tubman, and Ambrose Bierce and…

That’s not so many, you say. Oh yeah? Try naming eight great Americans living right now. G’head. Try it. Okay, try naming three. I remind you that Johnny Cash already kicked the bucket and Hunter S. Thompson shot himself. But Muhammad Ali’s still alive, so that’s one. Oh, and Cesar Milan became an American citizen, didn’t he? So that’s two. In the unlikely event that you can think of a third candidate, please forward your bright idea to sic@exiledonline.com.

When the publication of the Twain autobiography was announced, the press tended to focus on certain eye-popping details the tome reveals about the author’s old age. The electric sex toy bought for him by his secretary/mistress, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, for starters, and the colorfully insulting language he used to describe her after the affair ended. Apparently it isn’t generally known that Mark Twain was an old rip.

Which means people aren’t reading Twain anymore, or anyway, they aren’t reading him with any real attention to detail. Even the milder stuff assigned in high school English classes is ripe, blasphemous, hilarious, and heartening. Sure, they don’t assign you Twain’s “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”. But The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is plenty lively, with exhilarating stuff on every page. Here, for instance, is Huck’s first-person description of his father, the malevolent town drunk:

He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no grey; so was his long mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fishbelly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all.

This is why kids should study literature. It does a child good to read a frank, straightforward assessment of a parental figure like that. It means you don’t have to lie to yourself, see; you can acknowledge, in your own mind, what you’re experiencing, even if you have to disavow it aloud in order to get along in society.

Huck’s all for the necessary lie, even the merely convenient lie, which provides cover while you’re making plans to escape whatever rotten situation you’re stuck in through no fault of your own. He conveys the genuine danger of being honest with others:

I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last I’m a-going to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a keg of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.

You know who’d understand Twain, and could get him across to these addled new generations? The Coen brothers. They’re the filmmakers who could actually get away with putting Huckleberry Finn—notoriously un-adaptable—on screen. They’re working on True Grit right now (adapting the Charles Portis novel, not remaking the wacky John Wayne movie version), which would be good practice, getting them into the properly tough-minded period mood to do Twain. They’re not afraid of episodic structures, strong dialects, regional specificity, humor and horror inextricably mixed, honest representations of weird American ways. And they were already inspired by Twain in their creation of the cowboy Stranger played by Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski; by their own account, they were trying to evoke the “earthiness” of Twain. Always on the right track, those guys!

(Hey, I almost forgot the Coen brothers! That’s two more great not-dead Americans, so we’ve got four. Woo-hoo! Do I hear five? Anybody?)

Most film and TV adaptations of Twain’s work are mushy and coy and filled with cheap Americana that makes you feel tired, with everyone saying “Shucks!” all the time. So far the only decent Twain adaptation I know of was a brilliant six-minute mash-up on The Simpsons with Bart as Tom Sawyer and Nelson as Huck Finn. (I wish I could remember more precisely the dialogue about the harsh-sounding food of the 19th century South. Something along the lines of, “You want some cornpone? Flapjacks? Hardtack? Fatback?”)

You have to admire Twain for having the savvy to suggest that his uncensored autobiography is such hot stuff, such pure Tabasco, it must be withheld from the public for a century, when presumably everyone savaged in its pages would be long gone. Twain knew the drama of the deathbed memoir; he’d arranged to publish the memoirs of his friend and personal hero, Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant achieved the most epic deathbed-memoir ever, famously writing it while dying in agony from cancer of the throat. Bad investments and fraudulent business partners had bankrupted Grant, and he wanted the money for his family. He finished the weighty tome just days before expiring, and he saved his family from penury, and he got a lot of posthumous raves from admiring critics and military experts, who said, essentially, “Hot damn, he sure was a clear thinker and a good describer of strategy and tactics and battles for a guy dying in agony from cancer of the throat.”

People did stuff like that then, sometimes; heroic stuff.

This is not to say that reading 5,000 pages by elderly Mark Twain will be any picnic, even for his biggest admirer (me). Late-life Twain is pretty rough. By then he was, as they always say, “bitter.” Like his pal Grant, he got swept up in the get-rich-quick fever of the Gilded Age and lost his shirt, as well as his house, and had to go on endless speaking tours to try to recoup. His beloved wife Olivia died; his children kept dying too; only one of four outlived him. As his notoriously high “animal spirits” faded, his affection for reprehensible humanity dissipated as well, and he began to roast them unsparingly in prose. He’d come to hate the Christian God too, and went after him “with a pen warmed up in Hell.”

All perfectly understandable, but you still have to brace yourself a bit when a great writer attacks. Here’s what old Mark Twain thought of humanity: “Oh, we are a nasty little lot—and to think there are people who would like to save us and continue us. It won’t happen if I have any influence.”

There’ll be lot more like that in the autobiography, reviling us for what liars we are, what cowards, what fools, what hypocrites, what sycophants, what conformists, what cruel bastards, what greedy sloppy pigs, with apologies to pigs for insulting them. But it’ll be good for us to read. Twain is exactly what we need right now, a necessary corrective. We’ve revived all the rotten vices of the Gilded Age, but with none of the ferocious virtues that made it interesting. We’re more damnable now than when Twain was alive, which he would’ve hardly thought possible, but there it is.

The following is an adapted excerpt from Alexander Zaitchik’s book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, just released by Wiley & Sons.

Every July 4, Glenn Beck emcees the Stadium of Fire celebration in Provo, Utah. The patriotic extravaganza is the most elaborate Independence Day celebration in the country, drawing more than fifty thousand people annually to Brigham Young University’s LaVell Edwards Stadium for a program of family music, star-spangled speeches, military displays, and a magnificent array of fireworks. Sponsored by the conservative Mormon group Freedom Festival, the Stadium of Fire is the closest thing in the country to an institutionalized Rally for America, Beck’s controversial 2003 traveling pro-war roadshow. It is not surprising, then, that this is among the high points of Beck’s calendar year. “There’s nothing like Utah on the Fourth of July,” he likes to say.

The Jonas Brothers were the biggest commercial act on the 2009 Stadium of Fire program, but the chaste Disney boy band didn’t headline. That honor went to an enormous American flag, 155 feet by 90 feet, which was ritually burned during the show’s climax. It was Beck’s job as emcee to narrate the rite as it was carried out according to an elaborate official protocol. When a cauldronlike container at the center of the field was set afire, an emotional Beck declared, “If our American flag could speak, oh, the stories she would tell.”

With those words, the Stadium of Fire became a Coliseum of Crying. “Many people teared up,” reported the Deseret News, “including event emcee Glenn Beck, who emphasized to the audience what a special ceremony they were witnessing.”

Except that it wasn’t. A few days later, Provo’s fire chief admitted that the nylon flag had not, in fact, been burned, as the crowd was led to believe. Because of safety concerns, a less volatile material had been quietly substituted for the flag in the giant cauldron. Like the emcee’s famous tears, Provo’s patriotic inferno was not what it seemed.

*

If people know one thing about Glenn Beck, it is that he cries. He is the Crying Conservative. Alone among cable news and talk-radio personalities, he frequently chokes up, his lips quiver, he wipes his eye, and he holds tortured misty pauses until he can hold them no more. For more than a decade, Beck has been crying on the radio, on television, on stage, in interviews, and even in scripted commercials. Sometimes the tears are implied; at other times, such as during a 2009 stage performance, he gets into a fetal position on the floor and bawls. But whatever the gradation, he owns the scale. It defines him like nothing else.

This is not an accident. As they were always intended to do, Beck’s tears have become a distinctive corporate-brand handle. They mark him clearly from everyone else in the broadcasting industry. When Beck began his career in conservative commentary, the field was thick with tough-guy know-it-alls—from the lace-curtain boor O’Reilly to the cigar-chomping blowhard Limbaugh.

But the cast of the late 1990s was incomplete. It contained no emotional Nancy, no repentant prodigal son, and no needy Twelve Stepper. Beck, a careful student of positional marketing theory since his days as a morning-zoo deejay in the 1980s and ’90s, identified and exploited the open niche. He began practicing the act during his transition from Top 40 to talk radio in the late 1990s. According to his Connecticut colleagues, he was known for being both genuinely emotional and able and willing to fake cry on cue.

“There were definitely times the crying was a tactic,” remembers Vinnie Penn, Beck’s former cohost in New Haven. “He’d be crying on-air. Then we’d go on commercial break and he’d phone in an order for a bacon-and-egg with cheese. Then we’d come back on-air and the tears would be back.” In Tampa, too, where he launched his talk radio career, he was known for turning on the waterworks for dramatic effect.

The role of Crying Conservative is well suited to Beck’s dramatic personality and emotional needs. But that alignment doesn’t make his execution of the character any less cynical. Sometimes Beck’s use of tears is so patently faked that it’s funny; at other times, it’s just nauseating. The best example of the latter is the time that Beck Freudian-slipped while choking up over the tragedy of someone else’s missing child. “Two years ago,” Beck said somberly one night early in his Fox News tenure, “I made the father a promise that I would not let this story dry—er, die …”

Beck’s tears are low-hanging fruit for parody, which no Beck hater can resist. It didn’t take long, however, to figure out that Beck was laughing the hardest of all, in the back seat of his limo. The trailers for Beck’s stage shows tout the star as “America’s favorite hysterical, fear-mongering, TV and radio crybaby.” The back cover of his best-selling book, Arguing with Idiots, shows the author pointing to a juicy tear on his right cheek, as if to say, “Make fun of me all you want, you fools. Please, don’t stop.”

Then there is the July 2009 GQ photo shoot in which Beck applied Tiger Balm to activate his famous tear ducts. It was from this shoot that the image for his September 2009 Time cover was drawn. Beck now uses the image as the screen saver on his office computers.

“It is not whether you really cry,” Ingrid Bergman once said. “It’s whether the audience thinks you are crying.” In Beck’s case, it’s not whether you really cry. It’s whether people are talking about whether you are really crying.

Making a joke of his tears, as he does, is not the same as copping to emotional dishonesty. Beck bristles whenever his tears are used not as joke material but as evidence of a larger, deeper fraudulence. Admitting that he is a charlatan is one bridge that Beck cannot afford to cross, even if his denials often serve to confirm the obvious. “I’m a crybaby. I’m such an easy target. I’m surprised SNL [Saturday Night Live] hasn’t come after me,” Beck once told a reporter.

“If you’re going to make that case [that he’s faking it], I deserve a frickin’ Emmy,” he said in the same interview. “That’s unbelievable acting. Do you think that a grown man crying on the air is something I wouldn’t get hammered relentlessly for?”

As Beck knows very well, being hammered relentlessly has its uses. When SNLfinally did come after Beck, he was thrilled. Heavy attacks by liberals only publicize and reinforce Beck’s faux vulnerability among the only people who matter to his business: conservatives who hate liberals.

*

Beck likes to say that his tears are biologically determined, that he’s “90 percent ‘chick’ in that category.” It’s a revealing statement, not just for himself but for his more macho peers as well. With his constant crying and effeminate hand gestures, “Glenda” Beck apotheosizes the gender blending that has always been at the heart of right-wing talk radio.

“On talk radio in the 1980s and 1990s, ” writes Susan Douglas, a media historian at the University of Michigan, “masculinity was constructed as a fusion of traditionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ traits. Boys were supposed to be boys, meaning white, heterosexual boys, but they were also gender poachers, recuperating masculinity at the end of the century by infusing it with the need to chat, the need to confess insecurities, the need to be hysterical and overwrought about politics, the need to make the personal political.”

But when it comes to public crying as vaudeville, Beck owes less to universal womanhood than to a very specific brotherhood. He’s not stereotypically premenstrual as much as classically Mormon. Like so much else that baffles people about Beck, his approach to public tears has been shaped in the crucible of his adopted faith. It was the lachrymose Latter-Day Saints who turned an amateur crybaby pro.

*

Buy ‘Common Nonsense’

During the first weekend of October 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints held its semiannual general conference in Salt Lake City. For two days, church leaders sermonized on the power of the Holy Spirit and railed against pornography, a “potent tool of Lucifer.” In turn, the speakers described powerful spiritual experiences in highly personal terms. Throughout the telling, often at similar dramatic turns, many speakers appeared on the verge of being overwhelmed by emotion. Sometimes the emotion broke through. Voices cracked, throats caught, eyes misted over. To the uninitiated, it seemed as if the speakers were all imitating Glenn Beck.

Among the practices that distinguish Mormonism from other forms of Christianity is a highly stylized social ritual known as bearing testimony. On the first Sunday of each month, Mormons gather at their local ward house to speak about “what they know to be true.” The format is something like a cross between an open-mic poetry slam and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. One by one, congregants give semi-structured speeches—testimonies—that deal with a central theme; each one usually lasts no longer than a few minutes. These testimonies, structured like radio monologues, describe the feeling of being overwhelmed by the love of Jesus, of struggling against temptation, and of maintaining full dedication to the restoration of the gospel. As the speakers relive these feelings, it is common for them to emote within circumscribed boundaries.

Because they are such emotional events in which pure feeling trumps argument or rhetoric, some consider the ritual to be the Mormon equivalent of speaking in tongues.The Encyclopedia of Mormonism describes it as follows:

Bearing testimony is based on [the belief] that the power that motivates individuals to live as Christ taught is the power of the Holy Ghost, rather than the power of logic or the eloquence of gospel teachers. . . . This is illustrated by Brigham Young’s account of his own conversion when an LDS missionary bore his testimony: “If all the talent, tact, wisdom and refinement of the world had been sent to me with the Book of Mormon, and had declared, in the most exalted of earthly eloquence, the truth of it, undertaking to prove it by learning, and worldly wisdom, they would have been to me like the smoke which arises only to vanish away. But when I saw a man without eloquence, or talents for public speaking, who could only say, ‘I know, by the power of the Holy Ghost, that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith is a prophet of the Lord,’ the Holy Ghost proceeding from that individual illuminated my understanding, and light, glory, and immortality were before me. I was encircled by them, filled with them, and I knew for myself that the testimony of the man was true.”

Those who study Mormon rituals and rhetoric say that the fingerprints of bearing testimony can be found all over Beck’s public tearfulness. “Beck’s ability to ‘cry on cue’ appears to be a combination of Mormon culture and the practiced delivery of a media professional,” says Daymon M. Smith, a Mormon doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “He is using Mormon tactics to spread Mormon ideas, such as the gospel of Cleon Skousen, under the cover of secular political revelations.”

“Beck’s emotional performances are very like Mormon testimonies,” agrees David Knowlton, a Mormon cultural anthropologist at Utah Valley University. “Beck has married two rhetorical styles: the quiet, Mormon sense of emotion present during key moments in testimony, and the bombast of more mainstream evangelical performances. Mormons and evangelicals simply do not trust reason to the same degree they trust feeling. George W. Bush also tapped into this with his elevation of gut over mind.”

When viewed in the context of Mormon practice, Beck’s public crying begins to make more sense. Like his Millennialist politics, they cause liberals to laugh but command respect from Mormon and evangelical religious conservatives. This helps to explain the yawning comprehension gap between his religious fans and his secular critics. Secular liberals watch Beck’s cheap theatrics and see unmanly, dishonest, and possibly insane behavior. Mormons and like-minded evangelicals, especially Pentecostals, see familiar signposts associated with masculinity, sincerity, and even authority.

“The tears of Mormon men are emblems of sincerity,” says Knowlton. “This is the role of light crying from the stand, when one chokes up and may even tear up. Public crying gets more common as one climbs the ladder of church authority. Mormonism praises the man who is able to shed tears as a manifestation of spirituality. Testimony is both a formal genre and a performance of personhood that marks a transition from a mundane to a mystical way of knowing. The emotion involved is a symbol of righteousness.”

It is also the ultimate rhetorical punch. “Nothing can silence a Mormon congregation like a voice crack from a speaker,” says Brad Kramer, a Mormon anthropologist who writes on Mormon politics and culture. “The testimonial style unites an unquestioning audience, and they too may report feeling, as a sort of divine contagion, the truth of another’s testimony.”

It is hard to imagine a religion better suited to Beck’s emotional neediness, unrivaled egomania, and hack entertainment chops than the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Mormonism has not only made an art of fake crying, it has institutionalized Beck’s favorite mode of speech, the sentimental monologue. It also encourages a certainty of spirit based on self-revelation that lies outside argument, fact, or logic. What Beck does on radio and television is an amped-up version of the testimony ritual: he fervently talks about what he believes—knows—is happening, describes the dark secrets he has uncovered, conveys the transcendent importance of these discoveries, and frames it all in a Manichean narrative straight out of the Book of Mormon—America as a battlefield on which God-fearing defenders of liberty face off against evil big-government conspirators.

The way Beck has built his movement and his audience is a microcosm of the method by which the Mormon Church grew into a worldwide religion. Like an earnest young missionary spreading the good word through emotional speeches to confused Latin American villagers, Beck has brought his gut self-revelations to the angry, not-so educated audiences of Fox News and AM talk-radio, employing emotional intensity overflowing into tears to conquer doubts of his sincerity and prove his access to powerful truths. By asking his viewers to “join him”—in the 9.12 Project, as a “constitutional watchdog,” for his 100-year plan—or to “follow him” (as he says at the beginning of each Fox broadcast), he is offering viewers a chance to share in his revelation.

Bear testimony; recruit. Bear testimony; recruit.

*

On Thursday evening, October 15, 2009, Brother Beck’s Mormon Masterpiece Theater treated Fox viewers to an especially memorable production. The one-act performance had no official title, but it quickly became known on liberal blogs as “Glenda Watches a Coke Commercial, Cries, and Goes to a Suburban Keg Party.”

Beck began the performance with two well-known television advertisements from the early 1980s: one for Coca-Cola and one for Kodak. The spots represented the first time in weeks that major-brand advertising had been seen on Fox News between 5 and 6 p.m. When Beck’s eyes misted over after playing the spots, it seemed that the memory of such advertising was too much for him to take.

Beck was crying for more than just the memory of blue-chip sponsorship. He was crying for the innocent America of 1980 and the great U.S. advertising agencies of that long-lost era, which conceived ads of such power and wholesomeness. Where were the advertising creatives of today who were worthy of standing on the shoulders of these giants? Not traitorous GEICO with its limey lizard or the proud radicals at Progressive Insurance. (These two companies were among the first to join the advertiser boycott against Beck’s Fox News show in August 2009.)

Beck explained that 1980 was “a simpler time” when Americans “were united on some basic things.” He asked his audience to join him in remembering what life was like during this simpler time, when Three’s Company was the biggest show on television and the top marginal income tax rate was 50 percent. Beck acknowledged that America “has never been a perfect place.” Then came a long, choked-up pause, during which Beck appeared to resist the urge to bite his knuckles. He launched into a rambling allegorical tale about how his viewers are a lot like teenagers at a party on a Saturday night, out way past curfew. They smell of weed and booze, but they didn’t really do anything wrong. Still, they are going to be in trouble when they get home. They will be grounded and forced to stay home on the following Saturday night.

If Beck were capable of driving his most flummoxed viewers to suicide, this would have done the trick. In the Internet discussions the segment sparked, many participants found themselves at a complete loss. “While watching this,” wrote one person in a liberal discussion group, “I could almost hear the shotguns being cocked and loaded across the country.”

Indeed, there was something about this segment that was fundamentally unanswerable. The sentimentalism of the bit was so cheaply canned, so reflexively narcissistic, and so historically obtuse that it was less a piece of theater than an act of violence. With this bit, Beck’s love of vulgar sentimentalism hit terminal freak velocity. Anyone who looked directly into its light was sucked through a vortex and deposited into a strange land where Free Willy is Citizen Kane, and a sepia-toned Kodak commercial is capable of capturing all that is good and true about an America that never was.

In this, too, Beck’s adopted religion has been a perfect fit. Along with being the teariest form of Christianity, Mormonism has developed maudlin sentimentalism into an art and an industry. Mormonism is the closest thing America has to a Disney religion, with an orthodox culture that has replaced the tragic sensibility with a masochistic addiction to uplift. The Church produces and promotes a steady stream of LDS-approved books, music, and films that form a G-rated Wellbutrin-fueled world unto itself. In this world, the grand Wurlitzer of human experience is reduced to a single-note caricature of the redemption theme.

Like Beck’s work in radio, television, stage, and publishing, official Mormon culture is more than aggressively anti-intellectual. It is infantilizing. Those who stray too far outside the sandbox of accepted narratives do not fare well. In 1993, after a brief glasnost period at Brigham Young University, the school purged its faculty of feminists and liberals. Church officials gave speeches naming feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians as the three greatest enemies of the church. Ever since, the BYU faculty has been required, as a condition of employment, to annually renew their endorsements by local ecclesiastical leaders. Beck, so ready to decry imaginary neo-Soviet policies in the U.S. government, is silent about the real neo-Soviet policies within his church.

Before Beck embraced this world, it confused him. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, The Real America, he describes the curious case of the Amazing Mr. Plastic Man, an especially happy member of his future ward house. Beck describes how he and his fellow congregants were in Sunday school class discussing the Mormon concept of Zion—a place where, in Beck’s words, “we can all make as much money as we want, where we can all still be capitalists, but we only take the amount we need and give the rest to help the poor, widowed or fatherless.”

Mr. Plastic Man raised his hand. “There’s only one way this will happen,” he said, “If I truly love you and you truly love me. If deep down inside of ourselves we see people for who they really are, our literal and spiritual brothers.” Beck then comments:

He was crying and I was crying. Simple truth. . . . It was then that I decided, “I don’t care if you have Kool-Aid in the basement, give me a cup. I’m so tired, I can’t live with the baggage of my life any more. I can’t live with the mistakes I have made. I’m laying down my sword, because I want to be like the Amazing Mr. Plastic Man.”

Anyone who has followed Beck over the course of his career knows that he never followed the Amazing Mr. Plastic Man into the basement, never drank from the Kool-Aid tasting of a truly loving cosmic consciousness. Nor did he lay down his sword. Beck’s spleen drives him still; his self-loathing remains as twisted and deep as ever, daily manifested by a steady stream of gruesomely violent fantasies, vicious personal attacks, and eliminationist rhetoric that routinely reduces his political opponents to cockroaches, cancers, and vermin.

No, Glenn Beck is still the same splenetic jerk he was before he found his Mormon Jesus. His newfound piety is as contrived as his tears.

*

There is no better example of Beck at his saccharine sentimental worst than his first novel, The Christmas Sweater. Although he doesn’t advertise it as such, it is an archetypically Mormon creation. Beck claims that the story is based on true events, centered on the death of his mother. But the standards of Mormon sentimentalism demand more than one parental death, so the young protagonist’s father also dies. Beck cowrote the number-one New York Times best seller with another Mormon author, Jason Wright.

The result is an unwieldy collection of clichés and congealed preteen literary sugar that could easily be confused with any number of other Mormon-authored novels. One of these, Richard Paul Evans’ The Christmas List, shares not only a cover design with Beck’s book but also enough by-the-numbers pathos to melt the human brain. (The biggest difference between the two novels is that Beck manages to work in a swipe at the federal food-stamp program in the first five pages.) The Web site of the church-owned Deseret Book Company describes The Christmas Sweater as a “warm and poignant tale of family, faith and forgiveness.” The same description could have been lifted from almost any other work of Mormon popular fiction.

LDS Church-produced films offer more of the same. All follow the trajectory of cartoon tragedy to bright-light redemption with pummeling predictability. Consider the plots of Mormonism’s most famous “film classics,” as described in the BYU Creative Works Catalogue:

The Gift: A twelve-year-old boy struggles to understand why his father is so hard on him. When he realizes that his father is simply trying to teach him a strong work ethic, the boy searches for the perfect Christmas gift to give in return. Since it is the depression of the mid 1930s, money is scarce, but when he decides to get up early on Christmas morning to do the farm chores, he gives him a gift that will last a lifetime.

Cipher in the Snow: When a teenage boy dies unexpectedly, his math teacher is asked to notify the parents and write the obituary. Although he was the boy’s favorite teacher, he hardly knew him. Shy and ostracized, the boy was considered a “cipher”—an unknown number in a class roll book. As the teacher unravels the mystery of what led to the boy’s death, he commits himself to not letting others suffer the same fate.

The Emmett Smith Story: When Emmett Smith has a brain tumor removed, he loses his equilibrium and is told he will never run again. With determination, the high school track coach is able to run 20 miles once again within a year. When Cindy Duncan becomes a student at his high school, Emmett challenges her to do the same—set a goal for leaving her wheelchair to walk to the podium to get her graduation diploma.

John Baker’s Last Race: When John Baker learns he is dying of cancer, he faces a choice: to end his life, or to use his remaining time to make a difference in others’ lives. He chooses to dedicate himself to his young students and his citywide girls’ track team, leaving them with a legacy of love and accomplishment, and an understanding of the value of determination and a positive attitude.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Mid-nineteenth century Mormons gathered together to build gleaming cities in the desert into which they imagined the rest of the world would one day flow, drawn by reputations of learning and high culture. Alas, the Mormon cities of today are spirit and intellect crushing wastelands of stricture and schmaltz. The roads leading into Salt Lake City and Provo are dotted with billboards covered in slogans like “Escape from the world” and the faces of people like Glenn Beck.

The degeneracy of Mormon sentimentalist culture has resulted in more than just horrible film and fiction. It has also obliterated any possibility of a fuller reckoning with the complexities of history. In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin argued that sentimental novels, by cheapening tragedy, help to reinforce the reality that made the tragedy possible in the first place. Sentimentalism, Baldwin wrote, is rooted in a “medieval morality [of] black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames.” This medieval morality, he argued, is fertile ground for medieval politics. For Baldwin, the politics of sentimentalism always shared an “indecent glibness” with those “moral, neatly framed and incontestable . . . improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms.”

In other words, Beck World politics.

Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and former editor of The eXile. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, will be published by Wiley in June. Pre-order it today!

On February 17, 1967, the newspapers ran stories about a sensational new investigation into JFK’s assassination, headed by a New Orleans DA named Jim Garrison, who called into question the “lone gunman” theory laying all the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald. Five days after the news story broke, the prime target of Garrison’s investigation, David Ferrie, a right-wing pilot linked to the CIA, was found dead of a “cerebral hemorrhage.”

Public opinion was polarized over JFK’s assassination. Forty-six percent of Americans doubted the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald “acted alone;” Garrison was becoming more vocal about Oswald’s alleged CIA connection; and independent journalists were asking potentially embarrassing questions. Nerves in Washington were frayed.

Then on April 1, the CIA circulated an extraordinary memo instructing agents how they could play the mainstream media in order to discredit all the speculation of CIA involvement. The top-secret memo—marked PSYCH for psychological warfare—read in part: “Employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

So the CIA instructed its media assets to plant book reviews designed to debunk conspiracy theorists. And lo and behold, almost five decades after the assassination, mainstream media reviewers in the daily and weekly press are still carrying out the CIA’s orders, willingly or unwillingly. The New York Times has been especially zealous in this respect. The Village Voice ran a detailed report in 1992 on how the Times has managed the JFK assassination story; what they found is that over the years, in the rare instance of a reporter trying to file a dissenting opinion on the JFK assassination, the piece was either killed, or drastically altered. (A meticulously researched 14,000 word piece published in 1972 by Reason Magazine, “How All the News About Political Assassinations in the United States Has Not Been Fit to Print in The New York Times,” documented the august daily’s unwillingness, all the way back to the day of the assassination, to brook any alternative to Oswald’s sole guilt.)

Now, in response to a flurry of new books dealing with issues related to JFK’s November 22, 1963, assassination, the mainstream media have gone back to defending the “coincidence theory” consensus, but oddly enough they’re even more aggressive now than before —going so far as to question the sanity of people who doubt that Oswald “acted alone.”

The Times is again at the fore, using reviews of fiction, obituaries and even television coverage to smack down “lone gunman” doubters.  On February 17, hipster-in- residence, Dave Itzkoff, sneered at Oliver Stone’s “opinionated — some would say imaginative — takes on notable American events and figures.” The December 7 obituary of Malcolm Perry, the surgeon who performed a tracheotomy on the dying president —a procedure that made it much more difficult to forensically identify the wound—speculated as to why Dr. Perry refused to speak to the press: “[P]erhaps because he regretted contributing, however inadvertently, to the various conspiracy theories that have sprung up despite the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone,” the Times man mused. But through it all, as urged in the CIA memo, book reviews have stuck to the coincidence-theorist program.

The NY Times doesn’t only carry the CIA’s water in covering the JFK assassination aftermath. Frances Stonor Saunders’ highly respected history of the CIA’s influence on American arts and letters during the 1950s and 60s, The Cultural Cold War, singles out the Times‘ book review page being specifically prone to Agency influence. “Sometimes reviewers of books in the New York Times or other respected broadsheets were penned by CIA writers under contract,” she writes.

Those who try to question the assassination “lone-nut” consensus could find out about the Times’ unwritten editorial policy the hard way. The paper’s first edition, on December 1st 1970, carried a provocative, mostly positive, review of Jim Garrison’s book Heritage of Stone—by then newly minted critic, John Leonard. Citing a string of hard-hitting forensic questions about the assassination raised by Garrison, Leonard strongly implied that the DA might have been on the right track. He wrote: “Something stinks about the whole affair.” But immediately after it ran, the newspaper pulled it, scrubbed it, and ran an altered version of review in subsequent editions, which was much more keeping in the spirit of the consensus. Leonard was promoted to editor of the Sunday Book Review, but the incident left a sour taste in his mouth. From then on, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a thoughtful purveyor of the Warren findings, who had panned Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, handled assassination books.

“The only reason I continued to review assassination books was because they fascinated me,” Lehmann-Haupt wrote me. “It did not reflect any policy of the paper whatsoever.” But he admits Times editors made their opinions known about a range of subjects in more indirect ways, which still affected coverage. In 1977, a still rebellious John Leonard filed a piece on the book My Story,by Kennedy mistress and Mafia moll Judith Exner. (She made waves in 1975 when the Church Committee investigating CIA crimes subpoenaed her.) Managing editor Abe Rosenthal–a notorious Agency suck-up– killed it.

Kennedy assassination references materialized in Lehmann-Haupt’s fiction reviews as well. The protagonist of The Magician, by Sol Stein, was portrayed as, “one of those `types,’ like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, who are born to lead, but lacking the equipment to do so, must assassinate the true leaders.” Coincidentally, Stein, an intellectual Cold Warrior, had served as Executive Director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an Agency-backed operation, in the 1950s.

In 1993, Lehmann-Haupt championed serial-plagiarist Gerald Posner’s Case Closed–still considered the definitive defense of the Warren Commission’s version of events. Described—in one of the Times’ more tepid critiques of his work— as, having “built his literary career in no small part on debunking popular conspiracy theories,” Posner has never wanted for space in the Times. One of his pro-Establishment Op-ed page contributions was “Single Bullet, Single Gunman,” published February 2007. And it’s continued until recently: In December 2009, Bryan Burrough, writing in the Book Review, praised Posner’s latest piece of non-fiction Miami Babylon. But last month, Posner’s luck ran out. After being caught plagiarizing pieces he filed for the Daily Beast, it was quickly discovered that long passages of Miami Babylon were lifted from another Miami history, Frank Owen’s Clubland. So now it turns out that the chief propagandist promoting the Warren Commission’s theory has been outed as a liar and a fraud—or in Posner’s own words, “Yeah, I’m a thieving cocksucker.”

Burrough is positioning himself as the Times‘ next-generation debunker-cop: In 2007, he handled the review of Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,612-page Reclaiming History, a much denser and more rigorous defense of the Warren Commission than Gerald The Thieving Cocksucker could manage. But once again, Burrough’s review was so full of over-the-top praise that it verged on bad parody. Lauding the doorstop as a “public service,” Burrough stood up and saluted it: “It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” And then there’s the Times‘ chief critic, Michiko Kakutani, who wields considerable might in the publishing world: she too has been equally enthusiastic in hurling brickbats at lone gunman skeptics. In a February 15 review of Voodoo Histories, an epic put-down of a wide range of conspiracy theories by British neocon columnist, David Aaronivitch, Kakutani lays it all on the table. Repeating Aaronivitch’s reference to a poll that found 40% of Americans believe in “a Kennedy conspiracy,” she cracks: “It’s enough to make the characters from X-Files… Proud.”

In fact, it’s even worse than Kakutani lets on. An ABC poll taken in 2003 found that “7 in 10 Americans think the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the result of a plot.” Not to mention the 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations which found that there was a “probable conspiracy” to kill Kennedy; or the real-life CIA conspiracies documented in the 1975 hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence–including a scheme to supply anti-Castro Cuban dissidents with a rifle equipped with a telescope and silencer. Perhaps Kakutani avoids referring to these facts because they run counter to Aaronovitch’s overarching thesis that modern conspiracies are fantasies cooked up by civilization’s discontents.

Into this vortex of institutional skepticism and editorial consensus steps Russ Baker, an investigative journalist who has been published in just about every heavyweight publication, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His contribution to the JFK controversy is a 500-page, a massively footnoted history of the rise of the Bush family, titled Family of Secrets. Not only does Baker challenge the conventional wisdom that Oswald “acted alone,” he argues forcefully that the JFK assassination was a successful coup pulled off by a “globally reaching, fundamentally amoral, financial-intelligence-resource apparatus.” At the center of this anti-democratic clique, which operated feverishly in Dallas around the assassination, was a 39-year-old deep-cover CIA operative named George “Poppy” Bush. Since then, with the help of its planted assets in the media, the power of the financial-military-intelligence elite has only grown. And with it, the power of the Bushes, who, like some tribe of malign Zeligs, were present at virtually every pressure point in our recent history, including Watergate.

The country’s collective image of “Poppy” Bush has been shaped by a few broad biographical strokes: genial patrician who, after flying a fighter in the Pacific and a political career of ups and downs, finally lucked his way into the presidency in 1988. (His brief stint as the CIA’s “first civilian director,” in 1977, when the agency was under fire from Congressional investigators—the Church Commission in the Senate, and the Pike Commission in the House– might be referenced in passing.) An unwitting illustration of just how pervasive is Bush’s benign if bumbling public persona came from stand-up comic– and fierce Warren Report critic– Mort Sahl in 2004. Deadpanning that Bush had once asked him who he would get to run the CIA, Sahl quipped: “Why don’t you get the guy who ran it when you were ‘running’ it?”

Yet the public record has long held clues that hint at a darker reality. Baker cites an FBI memo from November 29, 1963, in which FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover reports having briefed “Mr. George Bush of the [CIA]” after the JFK assassination. While the memo proved a mild Beltway curiosity in 1988, when the Nation first broke it, Bush was able to duck the issue by denying he was that George Bush. A different “George Bush” was identified who had worked as a clerk in the CIA—but it was found to be implausible that Hoover would have contact with someone as low-ranking as the other George Bush, and the mystery remained.

The FBI memo recording George Bush’s “I was in Tyler” alibi

One of Family of Secrets’ most tantalizing threads centers on Bush’s long-time relationship to George de Mohrenschildt, a mysterious right-wing White Russian who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s “mentor.” Bush has long stated that he does “not recall” where he was on the day that Kennedy was killed, making him one of the only Americans who was an adult at the time not to remember that day—but his lapse of memory becomes even more strange when one considers Bush’s similar evasions on Iran-Contra.

Baker cuts through the multiple layers of noise (he would say disinformation) to establish once and for all Bush’s whereabouts on that fateful day.

The timeline of Bush’s movements are almost impossible to read without raising suspicions:

1. George Bush Sr. spent the night of November 21—and early the next day morning—in Dallas at the Sheraton Hotel. The next day, November 22, Bush flew out of Dallas on a friend’s private plane to nearby Tyler, Texas, around 12:30 PM, the time of the shooting.

2. Surfacing in Tyler around 1 PM, he begins a scheduled talk to a local Kiwanis club. After being interrupted with the tragic news, he stoically halts the speech.  At 1:45 he calls the FBI in Houston to claim that a local [Dallas] GOP employee, James Parrott, was acting suspiciously and might be JFK’s shooter. Parrott turns out to be harmless and childlike.

3. Later that same day he flies back to Dallas again, but leaves immediately—on a civilian flight—to return to Houston, where he lives.

Unsurprisingly, Bush “does not recall” making the FBI call from Tyler, which Baker sees as a transparent ploy to establish an alibi. Barbara Bush has added another layer of doubt by admitting, in her vaguely sketched memoir, “Barbara Bush: A Memoir,” to spending the 22^nd with the wife of Al Ulmer, a CIA “coup expert.” While Baker may be too quick to interpret these facts in the most damning possible light—that Bush was directly involved in the assassination—Bush’s actions certainly cast doubt on his claim to “not recall” where he was on that momentous day.  Which raises the truly serious question of what he is trying to hide.

Baker reveals that in addition to Bush, a dazzling line-up of powerful players, who each harbored hatred of Kennedy—including Richard Nixon, who gave a speech to a beverage convention—were in Dallas on or around November 22. Allen Dulles, who had been purged by Kennedy from his CIA directorship in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, spent time in Dallas in late October, ostensibly on a book tour promoting his tell-nothing memoir, “The Craft of Intelligence.” (Baker does not mention the fact that Dallas’s mayor, Earl Cabell, was the brother of Air Force General C.P. Cabell—the CIA’s Deputy Director under Dulles.)

While Baker admits that all of these facts could amount to nothing more than an incredible series of coincidences, at the very least his portrayal of the elite’s powerful and coordinated behind-the-scenes machinations to consolidate power – which reached critical mass at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, and culminated in George W. Bush’s stolen election in 2000 – reminded me of the Roman Republic’s transition to empire as described in Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Indeed, Baker’s W. seems eerily reminiscent of Gibbon’s Augustus, who “at the age of nineteen [assumed] the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.”  Augustus, Gibbon adds, “was sensible that mankind…would submit to slavery, provided they were assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.”

**

In the fall of 2008, as the publication date for “Family of Secrets” approached, establishment reviewers signaled growing interest. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times asked for a reviewer’s copy. Professing enthusiasm about the book to its publisher, Bloomsbury, Time magazine’s Lev Grossman floated the possibility that Baker could make his case to Time’s readers in an online op-ed. Understandably, Baker began to feel his book might become an “an instant blockbuster.”

The first review of “Family of Secrets” appeared in Time’s December 17, 2008, issue, the same one that named Barack Obama “Man of the Year.” But the review was only 164 words long–leaving Grossman with just enough space to blurb Baker’s two most shocking assertions: “The prodigiously industrious investigative journalist Russ Baker has drawn [dozens of connections] between President No. 41 and the assassination of President No. 35,” he writes. “He also connects the dots between the Bushes and Watergate.” So there you have it: Credibly sourced claims that “Poppy” Bush was involved in two acts of high treason – charges laid down by a seasoned mainstream reporter and duly noted in the leading journal of the midcult establishment. Major media names like Bill Moyers, Dan Rather and Gore Vidal lent their praise to Baker’s book. Surely, Meet the Press and Hardball would come knocking on Baker’s door next—and the Bush family would be rocked back on its heels. Says Baker sadly, “That’s how it would have played out if the system worked,” he told me in an interview.

Baker—a Columbia j-school grad who trained Serbian journalists for the State Department in the 90s—found out very quickly that the system did not work. After it became clear that his book was being ignored by the majority of the mainstream media, Baker fell back on Plan B. By late January 2009, he had embarked on a low-rent talk-show circuit, comprised of public access TV shows and Internet radio programs. (When New World Order-obsessed phony-preacher Alex Jones asked Baker if he was afraid of being murdered, Baker replied dryly: “No, my health is just fine.”) In blurbing the book, Bill Moyers had commented: “A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we don’t know.” Yet this magnum opus of one of America’s brightest and hardest working reporters had been pushed to the fringes of American consciousness by the collective spokes-apparatus of the Establishment.  I wanted to know why.

After several attempts to penetrate the sheer volume of its reporting, “Family of Secrets” hooked me in. Baker pulls no punches in exploding the myth that the CIA performs covert operations only on foreign soil. In chapter after chapter he offers a glimpse of how power is really exercised in this country—and has been since the 1950s, when the seeds of a covert-police state were laid. While I’m not willing to swallow every connection Baker makes, there are hundreds and hundreds of well-documented and carefully footnoted facts that deserve a fair hearing. So far, they have received nothing of the sort.

In hindsight, Time’s review—printed in a comically slim sidebar found to the far right of a full-page pictorial, “History of the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball”—was rife with clues as to what the establishment had in store for “Family of Secrets.” No one, least of all Baker, should have been surprised that Time’s editorial brass made it a point to literally marginalize—and scoff at—Baker’s work. Prescott Bush’s “close friend and fellow Bonesman,” Henry Luce, Time’s founder, makes numerous appearances in the book using the Time-Life empire to provide cover for the CIA. He put up capital for “Poppy” Bush’s first spy-fronting business, a murky off-shore oil company named Zapata; he threatened John F. Kennedy with Time’s wrath; he purchased Abraham Zapruder’s famous color film of the assassination and kept it hidden from public view for over a decade, until it was pried out and finally released, shocking the country with visual evidence strongly suggesting that one shot hit Kennedy’s head from the front. Grossman didn’t respond to my attempts to get him to explain just how his piece wound up edited down to such a tiny blurb. Time has a long-standing caste system, favoring unseen rewrite men at the top. Conspiracy-minded readers might be forgiven for wondering if Grossman, known as something of a stylist, would voluntarily mar his prose with a made-up adjective, “farfetchedly,” especially when it seems to undercut his thesis.

But the sleaziest attempts to undercut Baker’s book came from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post—the papers notorious for their campaign to discredit and destroy Pulitzer Prize journalist Gary Webb–the heroic San Jose Mercury reporter who exposed the CIA’s connection to the ghetto crack epidemic in 1996. Their campaign worked—Webb was eventually demoted and finally committed suicide. With Baker’s book, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post went back to work discrediting their colleagues who dare to get out of line. Tim Rutten, a bearded LA Times metro-desk tool, filed his handiwork on January 7, 2009.  After framing his attack by quoting long passages of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Rutten goes after Baker with bizarre language that reads like some fanatical Bolshevik. He decries the very existence of Family of Secrets as a “reprehensible calumny” and denounces Baker’s reliance on “mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places”– in other words, too many facts. That any American would even question the findings of the Warren Commission makes Rutten sputter with rage: “I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health,” he writes. Two months earlier, Rutten had been the proud recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize.  The last time I looked, the First Amendment was about encouraging freedom of speech, not vilifying the bearer of unpopular opinions

“Rutten actually did me a favor.” Baker says, a rare smile passing over his face. “It was so over the top that people in LA started to pay attention.”

Writing in the January 11 issue of the Washington Post, former Spy-editor Jamie Malanowski refused to even consider the possibility that the elder Bush would lie to protect his cover; that is, to deny he was a part of the CIA until 1977, when he became the agency’s first “civilian” director. Citing a 1988 denial by “a spokesman for the then-vice president,” Malanowski dismisses the memo from J. Edgar Hoover linking “Mr. George Bush [CIA]” to a November 29, 1963, briefing on the assassination. (Oddly, the Post’s hawk-eyed proofreaders nodded when Malanowski referred to Baker as “Smith.” Former Slate media-critic Russ Smith is a nearly universally despised figure in journalism.)

It’s hardly surprising that the Post review fails to disclose Baker’s damaging exposes on the Washington Post’s well-documented links to intelligence and domestic propaganda. “Family of Secrets” offers a trove of evidence that calls into question Bob Woodward’s—and by extension his editor Ben Bradlee’s and the Post’s—trustworthiness. The Watergate myth (enshrined by Hollywood in the movie “All the President’s Men”) tells the underdog story about how a plucky pair named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein cracked Nixon’s complicity in the break-in, and how the two reporters managed to do it all with only shoe-leather and a conveniently voluble insider-informant (or in fiction terms, a “cheap literary device”) known as “Deep Throat.” But Baker raises evidence that Woodward, who served five years in Naval Intelligence in the 1960s, as a long-time deep-cover intelligence operative advancing his handlers’ hidden agendas. Of course, the Post will argue that any reporter who says that Naval Intelligence counted Ben Bradlee in its ranks during WWII, and that Paul Ignatius, the Post’s president until 1971, was secretary of the Navy under Lyndon Johnson, suggests an addiction to “mind-numbing” facts that raises questions about the author’s mental health. Better to de-numb the mind with fewer facts.

Demonstrating just how convoluted the real-world machinations of the intelligence community can be, Baker has dug up an undated memo from Charles Colson, then Nixon’s Special Counsel, that reads, in part: “The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward was employed by the CIA.” This extraordinary document goes on to say that the CIA director had gotten the message to Woodward—who was reportedly “incensed” that his murky connections were being looked into.

No one today doubts that George W. Bush transformed the country for the worse, in ways that won’t be fully understood for decades.  By the time W. and his cabinet hunkered down in the White House for their final days, however, elements of his legacy had emerged: a politicized Supreme Court ever willing to curtail civil liberties and protect corporate interests; a never-ending war at home and abroad against a sketchily defined, shape-shifting supranational enemy; a highly concentrated and virtually unregulated banking elite, which in the process of amassing unheard-of fortunes left a great recession in its wake. (Even Bob Woodward, who earlier in W.’s first term penned an admiring volume about Bush 43’s administration, had become highly critical by the end of his second term.) The disaster we’re now in deserves more investigations with more open minds—the very opposite of what the establishment will allow. Back in December 2008 the besieged mainstream media—busied with breathless blanket coverage of Barack Obama—was in no position to even raise the key question, namely: How did this dyslexic princeling, son of a one-term president, steal an election, start two endless wars, wreck the financial system—and get away with it?

Seemingly alone among American journalists, Baker had the guts – and smarts – to at least try to answer this question without falling into the mainstream trap of self-censorship. Explaining to me how he wound up getting pushed out into mainstream Siberia, he says: “You can’t even ask if the conventional surface explanation is adequate, let alone totally wrong.”

I’m sitting with Baker in an upscale East Village café, listening to him argue his case. Middle-aged, with preternaturally youthful features, hooded eyes, and short graying hair, he wears the uniform of a typical middle-aged professional: glasses, white designer tee shirt and leather jacket. His voice barely rising above a whisper, he says: “I’m as shocked at the stuff in my book as my readers.”

“Poppy” Bush has long been on his radar.

On September 21, 1991, Baker published a scathing feature in the Village Voice, entitled “CIA: Out of Control.” Baker’s article argued that the Agency was scrambling to find new “bogeymen to vanquish” after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and amid this scramble for a new enemy, Baker wrote, “Bush has worked unceasingly to weaken the checks and balances that were instituted following a string of White House-connected scandals in the 1970s.”

Even Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley was tied to the Bush family. Above: Hinckley poses for future newspaper reports. Below: Houston Chronicle report on Scott Hinckley’s assassination-day dinner date with Neil Bush.

Baker himself is a man without definable qualities, except for hints of an East Coast formality inconsistent with the vibe of the town where he grew up: Venice Beach, California. You can easily come away from a long conversation with him wondering who he really is. He even refuses to give his age. Adding to his sense of mystery, when pressed, he sketches out a hazy background, which includes: time spent working in a “family importing business;” “a father who was an officer in the Air Force and worked in the aerospace industry, simultaneously;” “a mother originally from Europe.” Whatever the genesis of Baker’s disgust with the Bushes, few would deny that in the years following his Voice article, the trend towards weakening checks and balances—and towards manufacturing new bogeymen—went haywire.

“You can be a reasonably good political reporter without ever coming across this stuff about Bush,” he says, charitably. But despite his dry demeanor, it is clear that his treatment at the hands of the mainstream media, especially the Times, stings him deeply, and his mood begins to visibly sink when the subject of his freeze-out is raised.

Asked why the Times gives so much space to conspiracy de-bunkers like Posner while ignoring Family of Secrets, Baker says: “It’s a mind set.”

He attributes the inability of his nominally liberal peers to even consider his findings to “cognitive dissonance.” In other words, it’s just too jarring for the average Manhattan liberal, who Baker says is primarily interested in “yoga, food and feng shui.” Journalists especially are almost by nature part of and ingratiating themselves into the Establishment, he explains. “When you’re in the status quo, you’re invited to a lot of dinner parties. Even if you watch Jon Stewart, you can still think things are OK,” he says. “If you have to stop and say ‘Oh my God, something scary,’ you can’t function”

“Journalism is not a moral business,” he says finally.

But it is supposed to take its role as one of the checks and balances seriously, if this country is going to function properly.

On December 22, 1963, a month after JFK’s assassination, the Washington Post published a confounding editorial by ex-President Harry Truman in which he attacked the power of the CIA. Truman was a beloved figure across the country—and yet even he couldn’t defeat the Washington Post’s censors. Incredibly, former President Truman’s piece was quickly yanked from subsequent editions of the Washington Post, as if it hadn’t ever been published. But the record of it remains, and it is worth re-reading Truman’s ominous final sentence, published one month after JFK’s murder, which reads: “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

According to Baker, that need has only grown more pressing.

Lotta books on The Big Lebowski have come out recently, and I’ve slogged through them so you don’t have to:

I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski by Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell, and Scott Shuffitt

The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers by Cathleen Falsani

BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski by J. M. Tyree and Ben Walters

The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe

Presumably they’re cashing in on the Lebowski cult phenomenon—Lebowski Fest and all that—mobs of fans getting together annually to bowl, drink Caucasians, dress in character, watch the movie for the hundredth time, yell “You’re out of your element!” “I will not abide another toe!” “Nobody fucks with the Jesus!” “Nice marmot!” “Who the fuck are the Knudsons?” etc.

I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski is by the actual guys who started Lebowski Fest in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s the most endurable of the books. It’s even endearing. Inspired by a fervent love for the film that allowed them to see how it applies to every single situation in contemporary life, these guys discovered that they could create a communal bond simply by saying “Shomer Shabbos!” in public and waiting for the call-and-response cry of “Shomer fucking Shabbos!” (Though apparently “Shut the fuck up, Donny!” is the more typical conversational pass-phrase for discovering a fellow Lebowski-phile.)

It’s a nice book, smooth matte cover, pleasantly laid out, loaded with dumb filler (“How to Dude-ify Your Car”) and interviews with cast members from Jeff Bridges on down to Robin Jones, who played the Ralphs Checkout Girl. The Coen Brothers, of course, maintained their magnificent reserve about the whole project, contributing only a fiercely non-committal line regarding the authors that’s featured on the book’s dedication page: “They have neither our blessing nor our curse.”

If you want to know lots of trivia about the film, there are some enlightening interviews with people who supposedly inspired the lead characters. The Dude is a loose riff off of Jeff Dowd (independent film producer/“Pope of Dope”/member of the Seattle Seven, him and six other guys). Walter = Pete Exline (USC film professor/Viet Nam vet/owner of a rug that really tied the room together) + John Milius (right-wing film writer-director/gun nut) + “Big” Lew Abernathy (private detective/screenwriter/actor/blowhard).

You also get the back-story on key incidents in the film that the Coens took from anecdotes about real-life L.A. experiences. That scene with Little Larry Sellars featuring the homework in a baggie kinda actually happened, though no Corvettes were destroyed in the process.

Goofy fandom, that’s okay. Makes sense. I don’t personally want to attend Lebowski Fest, but I’m happy the kids seem to like it.

Much more irritating is crap like The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, because it’s got no business approaching The Big Lebowski if it’s not going to make an effort to be worthy. The cover art is a hideous tarted-up image of the Dude in a halo, and it turns out the book deals with all the Coen films to date and only uses the Lebowski come-ons to push some product.

Crack the cover and you find it’s all plot summaries, plus a few lazy notes gathered under short chapter conclusions called “The Moral of the Story.” For The Big Lebowski, “the moral” includes “treat others as you want to be treated yourself” and piffle like that. Fucking amateurs! Author Cathleen Falsani, may she rot in Hell, is a “religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times” who calls herself “God girl.” She’d’ve been fired the minute this pathetic book hit the shelves if there were any justice in the world. Which there ain’t.

The British Film Institute puts out a “Film Classics” series of high-toned monographs, and imagine my surprise to find out The Big Lebowski got BFI-ed way back in 2007. Again, nice-looking book, handsome color photos and all the fixings. But reading the text itself is a schizo experience, featuring blandly informative commentary battling it out with rank stupidity. This leads to a semi-diverting game of Who’s-the-Idiot? as you try to guess which of the two authors is irredeemably thick. Is it Ben Walters, Deputy Film Editor at Time Out London and author of books on Orson Welles and The Office, or J.M. Tyree, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University? Tough call! My money’s on Tyree.

Just so you’re prepared for the rhythm of the experience, reading it goes like this: “Okay…okay…ouch…okay…ouch…ouch…ouch-ouch-ouchouchouchOUCH!!” As long as the book sticks to the more obvious analysis, it doesn’t hurt. For instance, it tracks the influence of Raymond Chandler’s famous L.A.-centered detective fiction from Howard Hawks’ adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep through Robert Altman’s revisionist update of Chandler’s The Long Good-bye to the Coens’ easy sweep of them all in The Big Lebowski. It’s a straightforward lineage if you know American noir, and reading this part is fine as long as you don’t get hung up on actual wording or anything. Just glide along keeping your eyes slightly out of focus. You don’t want to settle on a wince-inducing line like, “[The Coens] are teasing Hawks the way Hawks teased Chandler.”

But then there’s the really painful stuff you can’t avoid. The conclusion is a mass of sick statements comparing the Coens’ work to the novels of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers and the films of Wes Anderson in one big po-mo jamboree that invalidates any of the non-stupid things the authors might’ve written before. Skip pages 104-106, for sure, and sort of tiptoe through the rest, picking around the landmines, if you want to read it.

The most ambitious of the books is The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, as the title suggests. It was inspired by a symposium where the essays in the book were originally presented as papers, and which pulled together the Lebowski Fest guys and academic types in an attempt to bridge the gap between pop and high culture. It’s kind of a gruesome read, featuring academics trying to be funny in scholarly form.

Scholarship doesn’t tend toward comedy much. If you’re inclined toward hilarity you pick another mode of expression. And scholars themselves often fulfill the stereotype: sniffy, pompous, and humor-impaired. Example: a film studies pedant at a conference once told me that he didn’t see The Big Lebowski as a comedy at all; he said it was a meditation on male mourning and castration anxiety.

To be fair, there’s no easy way for a scholar to approach the Coen brothers’ films. They’ve already barred the way, already pre-mocked those who would intellectualize them. If you ignore that and proceed in a traditional, self-serious manner to analyze The Big Lebowski, you rightly fear you’ll seem almost as ludicrous as Assistant Professor Joshua Kates of Indiana U., who titled his essay “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism.”

On the other hand, attempts at humor are generally worse. Something about interpreting the Coens often flusters scholars into trying to write like them. For example, Justus Nieland, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, starts his essay “Dudespeak: Or How to Bowl Like a Pornstar” with a gust of nervous hipsterese:

What condition is the Dude’s linguistic condition in? Obviously, it’s fucked.

And here’s Professor Thomas B. Byer’s attempt to write funny scholarship about The Big Lebowski in his essay, “Found Document: The Stranger’s Commentary and a Note on His Method.” Byer’s trying to imitate the narrating voice of the Stranger, played by Sam Elliott:

And then, there’s another fella I want to tell you about, fella from back East in Durham. Lotta powerful smart idears, this’un. Some say he’s a pinko, too. But I don’t know. Cause what’s a pinko, anyway? And, I hear tell he drives a purty fancy car. Now, this here Fred fella said somewheres that one of them shortcuts we use nowadays fer thinkin’ is sortin’ folks into decades…

This drools on for pages. Laborious footnotes don’t help: it seems that the fella from back East in Durham with the fancy car is a reference to Fredric Jameson, the guy who wrote the endlessly referenced essay about postmodernism and the po-mo filmic traits of blank parody and pastiche and all that guff the Coen are accused of doing, and if I explain any further it will not get one iota more entertaining, I assure you.

Still, if you think you’d like a book made for “the slacker as well as the scholar,” as a cover blurb enthuses, this one’s for you. There’s an essay solely contemplating the significance of the Dude’s drink of choice, the White Russian; another one on “The Big Lebowski as Medieval Grail-quest”; still another taking up “the political subtext of The Big Lebowski, which critiques the growth of car culture in twentieth-century America and the nation’s resultant involvement in overseas wars for oil.”

They’ve managed to attack every aspect of The Big Lebowski without ever laying a glove on it, so the book’s kind of fascinating if you look at it that way.