Civilization & Its Malcontents
by Kerry Joyce
illustration by Jef Taylor
If you’re anything like me – a lone, angry nut – you’ve got to be mourning the capture of the Unabomber just a little bit. Not since the defeat of Michael Dukakis for president in 1988, have the prospects of lone, angry nuts not working in concert with others appeared dimmer.
I know, many are they who still harbor the ancient fear of the lone, angry nuts of this world, just as people still fear mice, which once threatened us with the Black Death (bubonic plague), but are now pretty harmless.
Many will soon claim that the Unabomber was not a Uni-bomber at all, but was in fact, a Bi-bomber, Octa-bomber, Dodeca-bomber, or some sort. That while he was at Harvard or Berkeley, some CIA guy snuck up on him unawares in the Men’s Room and shoved a micro-chip up his ass, which programmed him for mass destruction. Or it will turn out that he was a volunteer in one of Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments, which, come to find out, was really an NSA-fronted mind control operation. No doubt a whole cottage industry, now in its embryonic state, will discredit the singularity of the Unabomber’s actions.
This quackery will make a handfull of authors comfortably well off. One of the very few ways to make a fortune writing these days is to scare the daylights out of people. We have to be pretty motivated to tear ourselves away from Ricki Lake long enough to stick our noses in an actual book. And giving ourselves something more interesting and threatening to loathe than our own sorry selves is one of the few ways left to do it.
These authors and journalists are the wellpaid worker drones of the conspiracy industry, working hand in glove with government agencies, which deliberately foster the myth of conspiracy and shadow government.
The frightening truth is that the people running this country are exactly who they appear to be – damn fools who run around shaking hands and making inane statements every election year, just so they can get their mitts on the levers of government and tell other people what they can and cannot do for a couple of years, and maybe get their name affixed to a building, bridge, or tunnel someday, if it’s not affixed to a grand jury subpoena first.
Government security and law enforcement agencies promote the myth of conspiracies and shadow government as a method of demoralizing America’s disparate legion of lone, angry nuts. What’s the point of shooting some politician when a bunch of mystery figures who never make public appearances are really calling the shots with their self-encrypting cellular telephones from the beaches of some unpronounceably named Greek Island?
To that end, the FBI goes around deliberately starting rumors and leaving false evidence. They think a little paranoia among the malcontented is a pretty good vaccine against a lot of welled-up anger and deliberately undermine the status of lone angry nuts with rumors of conspiracy so that these individuals don’t become cult figures to other suspicious social misfits.
Such has been the lot of many of our modern-era lone, angry nuts – Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, and Lee Harvey Oswald, for example. While lone, angry nuts who’ve failed in their historic role, like John Hinckley (who only wounded Reagan), endure the full credit or blame for their actions.
In the ’90s, the lone, angry nut is pretty ineffectual. Most of us are decidedly lacking in the talent department anyway, but even a hell-bent and brilliant mathematician like the Unabomber couldn’t earn himself more than a footnote in history, it seems. He did bend the New York Times and Washington Post to his will by forcing them to publish his manifesto, but the rapid acceleration of technology that his manifesto condemns didn’t lose a step from his blackmail.
It is true that in recent times our most successful lone, angry nuts have been malefactors (usually assassins) but this just points to the fact that the role of the lone, angry nut as an historic force is in its death throes. As the Unabomber himself observed in his manifesto: You have to kill people to get anyone to pay attention.
But this wasn’t always the case in these United States. America didn’t accumulate 700 flavors of Protestantism without lending its lone, angry nuts an occasionally sympathetic ear.
Joseph Smith, founder of The Mormons, was a quintessential lone, angry nut and yet managed to found a Christian denomination noted for its sobriety, prosperity, and good citizenship. Many of the Biblical prophets and Saints of antiquity belong in the lone, angry nut category. Back then, all you needed was some high ground and a loud voice. If you seemed to make sense, people listened. Today, our lone, angry nuts must compete with television-enhanced personalities who are selected by the perfectly sane through a process that winnows out any and all lone, angry nuts.
When someone starts a religious movement now, it generally devolves into a cult. Probably because unless you isolate your flock from the encroaching power of mass media, they will invariably back slide into mainstream consumerism, or worse.
But even in the political realm it was not always so. The writings of Thomas Paine, John Adams, and other pamphleteers of the American Revolution bear the distinctive markings of the paranoid. The intellectual ferment of the American Revolution is directly attributable to a loose confederation of lone, angry nuts.
Would artistic visionaries like Gaughin and Van Gogh emerge from the muck of mass-manufactured artistry churned out by the likes of Disney if they were alive today? Would Van Gogh agree to draw the Lion King? Would he even be hired?
The last visual artist to penetrate the electronic stupefiaction and joint venturism of American culture was Andy Warhol, but he only succeeded by co-opting the very forces that were making his ancient brand of one-man-show obsolete. And that was decades ago.
So the feminists are right about one thing. It should not be called his-story. Not only because the word denotes maleness, but because it signifies individuality at a time when the individual has become historically meaningless. The new word should be Ourstory, or if you persist as a lone angry nut, Theirstory.
