Liberal Man vs. Conservative Man
November 10, 2009Henry Baum 1 Comment »“Spoken Word Piece” by the Minutemen
Liberal Man meets Conservative Man
Conservative Man wears his myth on his skin
Liberal Man has to explain his and keeps his shirt all buttoned up
Conservative Man greets Liberal Man with a well-rehearsed cold stare
Liberal Man replies by issuing forth horseshit
Conservative Man retaliates by taking the concrete reality of the
situation and lodging it, like a wedge, right between both sides of
Liberal Man’s brain
Liberal Man is caught off guard by this apparent non-abstraction
There is one full minute of confusion
Liberal Man becomes Conservative Man
Conservative Man becomes Liberal Man
War is declared
Liberal Man cheats by calling in reinforcements
Conservative Man is set upon by a mob and murdered
Said mob then turns on Liberal Man and he dies a broken man
Something has happened in America. The teabagging right has sucked all the fun out of being a conspiracy theorist. When I began writing The American Book of the Dead, we were in the middle of the Bush administration, and I let some of my paranoia get the better of me. Part of the reason it took me a few years to write was because I had to get some of that paranoia out of my system or the book would start reading like a tract rather than a novel. But at one point in my life I had a deep-seated fear of the people in power. My novel’s about a president who declares himself the Anti-Christ in order to start Armageddon and usher in the Second Coming of Christ. I actually believed at one point that George Bush jr. was capable of this type of hysteria. The Bush administration seemed to be proving right all the paranoid rantings of people like Alex Jones and Jim Marrs. The Patriot Act exists: it’s not a fabrication.
One of the disappointments of Obama’s election was seeing how seamlessly conspiracy theorists switched from Bush to Obama, as if they’re identical. And it proved Robert Anton Wilson’s theory that conspiracy theorists are just “adrenaline addicts.” They like having something to fear. It gives you pleasant little self-righteous jolt that you really know what’s happening and there’s an actual enemy that can be defeated. And now that type of conspiracy theory has entered the mainstream. By holding up pictures of Dachau to protest the health care bill, teabaggers have drained the enjoyment out of believing in conspiracies.
But it’s also made me wonder if my book could possible be adopted (read: misunderstood) by the far right. After all, it’s about a president who declares himself to be the Anti-Christ (see: Obama) based on widely paranoid musings about what’s really going on behind the scenes (see: Democrats are socialist Nazis). And then I think, nah, my president is a Christianist zealot who’s corrupted Christianity past recognition. He’s a hell of a lot more Sarah Palin than Barack Obama.
Another point though that’s been troubling me is how all of my books could be read as conservative tracts. My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker targeting the superficiality and vapidity in Hollywood. The “liberal Hollywood elite” is something very often criticized by the right. The Golden Calf is heavily inspired by “Taxi Driver,” and considering the climate of today, Travis Bickle could be seen as a kind of teabagger assassin – he targets a politician and laments the breakdown of society. Sounds like today’s rhetoric from the right. You could say, Yes, exactly, it’s the portrait of a deranged teabagger – it is, after all, based on Arthur Bremer, an actual assassin. But Travis Bickle is actually a positive model in a sense – because he accurately portrays a certain kind of anger, loneliness, and alienation. That I can get behind – the Dachau-wielding lunatics (also borne of anger and alienation) are totally foreign to me.
My second novel, North of Sunset, was actually criticized for being conservative. On Ready Steady Book, the critic wrote:
This book and all such books could be read as a Marxist fable. The unfettered wealth that public individuals enjoy could build hospitals, get the homeless off the street. And god knows, any reader of Holy Moly and Popbitch will know that many celebrities are complete arseholes. Yet the deeper moral of this book is unflinchingly conservative…These are essentially reactionary, Hobbesian theories. Rousseau said that man is born free, but is everywhere in chains; Hobbes, Houllebecq and Henry Baum are saying that the individual has an unlimited capacity for evil and violence and must therefore be kept subject to authority, restraint and checks.
I don’t actually agree with that sentiment, but it’s a possible interpretation. In The American Book of the Dead, the novel begins with a father discovering his daughter doing porn online – to me, a pretty archetypal example of how society can disintegrate. Everyone’s daughter suddenly doing porn is not automatically an example of liberation and progress. When the father confronts his daughter, he says,
“Believe me, you know I’m no conservative. But given the world heading where it is, I think it’s important to fight the good fight.”
If I hadn’t included the line, “I’m no conservative,” you might think that this is a puritan’s view of the world. A man – like Glenn Beck – longing for “simpler times.”
What it comes down to is this: the world is fucked up. Politicians wield power horribly. But somehow the right have adopted a certain kind of indignation I once kept as my own. And because they give lie by saying things like, “Health care will kill you,” it gives lie to that kind of indignation. It sucks: they’ve distorted everything.
Part of the fun of conspiracy theories is having a sense of humor about it, knowing how ridiculous they are. Once you leap over the edge and believe in them unquestioningly, you’re not a free thinker anymore, you’re a fanatic. And these are the people who hold up the banner of “freedom.” Terrifying, and they’re creeping closer to the mainstream. I want my spook country back.
February 25th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
[...] written before about how certain types of conspiracy theory have been taken over solely by the right. I’ve been on the lookout for a forum to discuss some of these issues but find [...]