Bad Boys for Life

[Two years ago Francis Nally, a.k.a. the notorious Pilleater, contacted me to suggest I contribute a piece to a book project he conceived as a new generation's Apocalypse Culture or an "Angry Young Men 2019" anthology. The project never ended up coming together - and I now hear that it never will - so here, for readers' entertainment, is the short autobiographical essay I had written for it.]

I was always bad. When I was a junior in high school, I got booted out of a painting class after a series of escalating altercations with the instructor that had begun with me facetiously accusing the woman of “communist sympathies” and ended with me being regarded as potentially the next Columbine kid in the clueless eyes of the school’s administration. To fill the slot in my schedule, I was given a study hall in the school library, and that was where, to pass the time, I picked up Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the first book I ever read with no academic obligation. I knew that one of my favorite movies, Apocalypse Now, had been based on it, and – probably more important to me in my adolescent fuming – the title of the book seemed to speak to my inner state at the time. One particular passage from Heart of Darkness, in which a minor character describes the nihilistic Kurtz, has remained with me ever since:

This visitor informed me Kurtz’s proper sphere ought to have been politics “on the popular side.” [… “] He electrified large meetings. He had faith – don’t you see? – he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything – anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.” “What party?” I asked. “Any party,” answered the other. “He was an – an – extremist.”

The bit about the extremism of indeterminate tendency diagnosed me perfectly. While my peers were preoccupied with prom or the newest Adam Sandler movie, I would seclude myself in a corner of the library and scowl over encyclopedia entries about nationalism and anarchism – anything that sounded extreme, had a vintage feel, and appealed to me aesthetically. I liked fascism and communism – extremism in its array of flavors from tropical drab-uniformed cigar-smoking hipster to red-hating J. Edgar Hoover rigidity. I felt at times like what Hermann Hesse, in his essay “The Brothers Karamazov or The Downfall of Europe”, characterizes as the “Russian man” and “the unformed raw material of Destiny”:

What is that Asiatic Ideal that I find in Dostoevsky, the effect of which will be, as I see it, to overwhelm Europe? […]

Let us look at this “Russian man” a moment. He is far older than Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky has finally shown him to the world in all his fearful significance. […]

So the “Russian man” is drawn neither as the hysterical, the drunkard, the felon, the poet, the Saint, but as one with them all, as possessing all these characteristics simultaneously. The “Russian man”, Karamazov, is assassin and judge, ruffian and tenderest soul, the completest egotist and the most self-sacrificing hero. We shall not get a grasp of him from a European, from a hard and fast moral, ethical, dogmatic standpoint. In this man the outward and the inward, Good and Evil, God and Satan are united.

The urgent appeal ever rings out from these Karamazovs for the symbol after which their spirit is striving, a God who is also a Devil. Dostoevsky’s “Russian man” is penetrated by that symbol. The God-Devil, the primeval Demiurgus, he who was there from the beginning who alone stands the other side of the forbidden, who knows neither day nor night, neither good nor evil.

At any rate, I wanted to find something like that within myself. A notion that will probably sound silly is that I have always identified with the Russian people on account of their historical backwardness. Suddenly, after having awakened to the humanities and to intellectual ferment, my youth spent soaking up television felt like so many unproductive centuries wasted under the Mongol yoke. I had to catch up with mechanized Europe! Consequently, I skipped the middle and stuck to reading the extremes – Nietzsche, Kafka, d’Annunzio, Lenin, and de Sade. “Yes yes yes, there it was,” as Anthony Burgess has Alex word it in the last chapter of A Clockwork Orange, another one of the books I sought during my “extreme” period.

Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. […]

“And all it was,” Alex concludes, “was that I was young.”

Innocuousness started to seem more appealing, albeit more elusive, as college and failure and needing to find employment put the damper on some of my childish dynamism. History really seemed to have ended sometime back around World War II and a few years and a perusal of the Tao Te Ching later and I was on my way to becoming just another defeatist bugman – a latently racist and hate-filled bugman, that is, but still just a dust-collecting bugman. Having reached an age at which the unremarkably unobtrusive seemed a perfectly decent goal to have in life, however, I next discovered that society’s goal post for “normalcy” had been cut down by the winning mob and hauled so far off into the jungle that, again – by default – I find myself on the “extreme” side of things in spite of my intentions. It was the world that went insane, everyone else who became unreasonable – but those reading this will already know that score.

Looking back at the figures and movements who fascinated me in my youth, what strikes me today is not their extremity but their reasonableness. Would Joseph Stalin have cowered and cucked when confronted with his “toxic masculinity” and “white privilege”? Of course not. I can only imagine that Stalin would do the sensible thing and have his accusers put to work in the gulags. Any Soviet leader of the second half of the twentieth century – or even a photogenic Third World “terrorist” dictator like Muammar Gaddafi – would be preferable to the tawdry, hyper-capitalistic porno-brutalities of today. “Mr. Prime Minister,” Leonid Brezhnev is reported to have confided to James Callaghan, “there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Who among us would not be happy to have this lovable Soviet good ol’ boy representing our side today? The thought of a gray, plodding Second World existence of uniforms and surveillance fills me with a nostalgia for anything but the normatively mediocre multicultural decomposition “consensus” of unreasonable propriety. Even Enver Hoxha – even Idi Amin Dada and General Butt Naked – would be a breath of figuratively fresh air in comparison.

Like a Satan let out of his cell, the teenage me is again at the table in the councils of my mind, saying outrageous things that make more sense than ever before. He is still bad. I am still bad – and we cannot be stopped now.

Rainer Chlodwig von Diddy

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.