Fascists for the New Millennium

Welcome to the Meritocracy. We as a culture have become increasingly comfortable with the notion that everyone should be free to rise as high as their merit can take them, to the point where, in many circles, this idea is now a given. Perversely, we have also become a much more bureaucratic and conformist society over the past 50 years, one that can process only a pinched and narrow vision of merit, leaving the test takers and the product makers as the grand winners in our evolving societal bargain.

In politics, the folks who now run this country, people like Michael Bloomberg, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, et al., increasingly come from a rarified and specific class, that of the educated elite. While their birth places and backgrounds are varied, the one constant, no matter what their roots, is that most of our current leaders graduated from the same small coterie of Ivy League schools. By and large, these are men and women who knew what they wanted at a very early age. These were the kids who sat at the front of the class, who always turned their homework in on time. They were go-getters at a time in their lives when most of their classmates were still just getting comfortable with their bodies, their world, and how they were going to navigate their place within it. And I guess we should congratulate these folks for their precocious talent. But we also need to recognize it is a very narrow range of personality that wins this game, specifically a type of person who can fixate on the tangible means to wealth and power by mid-adolescence, if not earlier.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a great man could reveal his merit at some later stage in his life, but that world has largely disappeared. Yale graduate (Obama), Yale graduate (George W.), Rhodes scholar (Clinton), Yale graduate (the elder Bush): Our Presidents are symbols of the possible, and these are the men we have elected to run our country for the past 23 years. And now, it looks like we will soon be able to choose between which of two graduates from the Harvard Law School, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, will be our commander-in-chief for the coming four years.

And it isn’t just the Presidency, or even politics in general, where this is true. In a variety of fields, from the bowels of corporate America to the creative arts, it seems that a degree from a top-tier university has become an increasingly necessary calling card. I can speak as a journalist. A couple of generations back, journalism was still a working man’s profession. Sure, some reporters had a journalism degree from a major university, but many others were brought up through the ranks, from street hawker to cub reporter to newshound to columnist to bureau chief. But for at least the past couple of decades, the established news organizations have placed more and more emphasis on a strong academic pedigree. When I worked for a financial newswire, almost all of my peers had Master’s degrees from a prestigious journalism program, either tony schools on the eastern seaboard or highly regarded Midwestern institutions like Michigan, Missouri, or Northwestern. And, at least at the lower levels of the profession, what we earned didn’t even come close to justifying that kind of personal or societal expenditure. I personally was able to buck this trend and land a job despite the fact that I got my degree from a lowly teacher’s college, namely Northeastern Illinois University. But my boss hailed from Australia, a country where commoners are still respected, and I suspect that is part of the reason she gave me a chance, as I have little doubt that most American-raised bureau chiefs would have taken one look at my resume and dropped it into the circular file.

I have long put Michael Bloomberg, both the individual and the politician as well as the news corporation that bears his name, at the avant garde of this new age of meritocracy. As a journalist, I heard too many stories about his demanding standards and his enormous ego, how it was company policy to hire two people for the same position, place them at opposite ends of the office, and then summarily fire the one that showed the lesser promise within his or her first few days on the job. And I knew that resumes and pedigree always meant a lot in their corporate culture, and that this could be traced all the way back to the Man himself.

Their basic argument is simple, and on the surface at least somewhat compelling: In an interconnected world where there are thousands of potential employees for any particular position, a large corporation needs a simple heuristic with which to sort the wheat from the chaff. By inculcating managers to look for a prestigious degree as a prerequisite for that first interview, the corporation may lose a little wheat in the initial sorting, but it will also get rid of a lot of chaff, the assumption being that anyone who can get into an Ivy League school in this day and age is, at the very least, not a blooming idiot.

I admit that in some ways this may just be sour grapes. I staked my life on the rather indolent, hippy-fried notion that pursuing your true path was not just what mattered in life but was also the best way to have influence. Growing up as a kid in 1970’s California, we were all trained to be little transcendentalists. If we wanted to have meaning and purpose, first we had to go off and explore the world and get to know ourselves. Sure, that was all a crock, but so is the facile meritocracy we have become.

Now, if the only downside to the iron grip of our contemporary meritocracy is that just a narrow band of academic workhorses are being recognized by the established social institutions, you would probably be correct in regarding this as at worst an acceptable misfortune. But what this new meritocracy has been doing to our country is more sinister than that. From the NYPD’s late-night assault on the Occupy Wall Street camps to the city’s aggressive harassment of cigarette smokers and recreational pot users (for which a whopping 50,000 arrests were made across NYC in 2010), the supposedly tolerant Mayor Bloomberg has, if anything, looked to put an even tighter rein on the city’s lifestyle than did the more openly oppressive Giuliani administration. Similarly, Rahm Emmanuel is currently seeking city council approval to further restrict free speech rights ahead of Chicago’s hosting of the G8 summit this May.

Bloomberg and Emmanuel are fascists for the New Millennium. They are totalitarians who also happen to believe in gay rights, progressive urban planning, and the perfectibility of man. They may be assholes, but they’re our assholes. At least so they want you to believe.

The new meritocracy is creating a brave new world, and they are doing it for your own good. As the Dead Kennedys presciently quipped about an imagined President Jerry Brown over 30 years ago: “Zen fascists will control you/ 100% natural/ You will jog for the master race/ and always wear a happy face.”

Health, happiness, and tolerance have become cultural obligations. And if after your trip to Whole Foods and the yoga studio you are still lacking in either of the first two of these, don’t worry, whatever your malady, they probably have a pill for it. And don’t be surprised if a tolerance pill is on the way. Or more feasibly, some geneticist will uncover an intolerance gene, and we will shuffle all the kids with the gene off to Tolerance Camp, where they have their ways to make you into an acceptable citizen.

My biggest problem with many of my progressive friends is that they continually mistake symmetry of belief for nobility of soul. So they repeatedly fall for the appeal of, or at the very least tolerate, the likes of a Michael Bloomberg, a John Edwards, a Jon Corzine, power hungry egotists whose antics should have sent off their bullshit detectors years ago.

After years of playing their game, I’m starting to come around to the belief that the Meritocracy which increasingly runs the United States of America poses the gravest threat in my lifetime to our country’s long-held freedoms. As far as the meritocrats are concerned, a vigorous dissent from their policies is not conducive to any of their larger societal goals. Dissent is messy. And inefficient. Within the absolute surety of their fevered minds, they probably don’t understand why we inefficient little beings won’t just submit to their vision of the world. Little wonder they are trying to slowly but firmly squash us.

Sympathy for the Demon

Southern California is a land that eats its young. If I were to stretch my net wide enough, the list of my peers who are now dead would be as long as my arm, and if I were to expand the list to include those who are now but a hollow shell of their former selves, it would be like a photographic negative of the stars in the heavens, an almost numberless recitation of lives lost, of potentials unfulfilled.

I’ve yet to read a book that better captures the manic desperation of my time than Jack Grisham’s “An American Demon,” of the existential dichotomy that everything was possible but that nothing was right. The Orange County punk scene, circa 1980, was a white hot blast of unrivalled aggression, a dagger to the throat of a complacent suburbia where broken families, drug addiction, and a hollow materialism were hidden behind the smiling façade of the endless California summer.

Most of us were a little crazy, and some were just plain fucked. I had a friend named Rob who one day dyed his hair canary yellow, superglued devil horns onto his scalp, spray-painted a black swastika on his surfboard, and told me he was about to head to the beach with a blackjack in his bag, looking for a fight. Just about anything was a good reason for bloodshed, but jocks and “hippies,” which essentially meant the old school surfers who didn’t like the punk kids on their beach, were particular targets of abuse. From the cops to the jocks to the bikers to the Mexican gangsters, we took them all on. And lived to tell the tale. Well, most of us. At least for awhile.

Jack Grisham was one of the leaders of this new wave of crazy beach kids. He was also the lead singer for Vicious Circle and TSOL, bands who developed a big following in the scene. While he may have been a first class asshole, Jack Grisham was also kind of a hero of mine. I was a scrawny kid from honors class who, predictably enough, hated to get hit and was not much good in a fight. At the time, there was a large crew of very large guys, many of them football players from Edison High School, known as the Crop Dusters (a “crop” being slang for short hair), who would drive around the coast of central Orange County, looking for punk kids to beat up. I would flip them off, of course, and get real mouthy. But once they got out of their cars and started their approach, I’d turn tail and run for all I was worth, at least if I was by myself. Now, if I was with a crew, that was a different story. I got pretty good at being a set-up man, looking some guy in the eye while my buddy cut his legs out from under him and then giving the fallen jock a swift kick to the skull. But one-on-one, I was just another lit school pussy.

Jack Grisham wasn’t one of these turn-tail punks. The night when the Vicious Circle crew routed a band of Crop Dusters at the river jetty, sending most of them to the hospital, was a legend we all knew (and one that is recalled by Grisham in his memoir). If an accompanying legend was that the VC’s, as part of an induction ceremony, stripped a young girl naked, tied her up, stuffed her private parts with raw hamburger, and then let a Doberman loose on her to do its worst, well it was abhorrent, of course, but these devils were our devils, and pretty damn good in a fight.

One of the great things about punk is that it is both decentralized and local, making it pretty easy to have direct contact with your heroes. I’d meet Jack at parties. We even had a couple of good conversations. He was smart and personable. So when Jack would get on stage, I could honestly look up there and say, “I know that guy, and he’s pretty cool.” Even if he was also a misogynist, a thief, and a thug.

When the L.A. press first stumbled onto the crazy, violent, destructive scene that was boiling up at south suburban beach clubs like the Fleetwood and the Cuckoo’s Nest, many were incredulous. Few of these writers were native Angelenos, and they struggled to make sense out of where this scene had come from. Weren’t Californians supposed to be mellow, laid back, go-with-the-flow kinds of folks? How could we get so angry living near the beach? They didn’t understand who we were, of course.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s, Orange County was largely populated by the children of Oakies. My generation was the children of these children, the 3rd generation of Scotch-Irish fucks to live in the warm California sun. Couple this with the 1970’s notion of personal license, where most parents were too busy “doing their own thing” to raise their children, and we were the result. We are what happens when you take a bunch of defiant Celts, place them in a sunny land, feed them well and give them decent dental care, but also deracinate them and take away most of their cultural bearings. What happened was HB 1979. And Jack Grisham was our poster child.

I’ve always had a problem with literary nastiness. You shouldn’t be able to talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. When someone like Bret Easton Ellis evokes an unblinking portrait of violence, it makes me want to pull him into a back alley and hit him over the head with a tire iron. But I don’t have that problem with the memoirs of Jack Grisham, because the guy is the real deal. Now, I can’t vouch for how autobiographical this “memoir” actually is, as it begins with the idea that Grisham has been inhabited by a demon. So let’s just say that Grisham takes a bit of license in portraying his life. And he also misses why we were so angry, blaming it on irrelevancies like Ronald Reagan and the Contras. Sorry Jack, none of us really gave a crap about politics. It was just an excuse, a vehicle to express our pent-up rage. The actual reason we were angry was because our ancestors had toiled for generations to get us to where we were, and we were told that this was the Good Life, but we were offered nothing: No purpose, no meaning, nothing real at all, nothing but a hollow materialism and a prepackaged notion of youth. And the beach. We were offered the beach. Which was nice. But everything human around us pretty much sucked.

Jack Grisham was one of those guys who could stand up on stage and get his fans to do almost anything. But I tell you what I wanted him to do. Towards the end of one of TSOL’s sold-out shows at the Cuckoo’s Nest, after we had routed all the bouncers and the hippies and the wanna be cowboys at Zubies next door, I wanted Jack to tell us that we should all go down to South Coast Plaza and burn that fucker down. It would be our way of saying that the stupid consumer society they were offering us was unacceptable. And it would have scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. It would have been glorious.

Instead, what we witnessed was a long, slow decay, both individually and collectively, a decay which is lived out in Grisham’s memoir. Grisham would set up scene after scene of depravity, and I kept telling myself, “Oh no, he’s not really gonna do that, is he?” And then the tale would head somewhere even worse. Destructive relationships, mind-numbing bouts of violence, alcohol and drug addiction, a general fall from grace; it’s an oft-told tale, but this is not a typical celebrity tell-all book. In the first place, Grisham wasn’t living the high life; he was increasingly broke and still living with his mom in a nondescript tract home on the flats of Long Beach. And he was convinced that he was possessed by a demon.

When I wasn’t horrified by Grisham’s actions, I found myself laughing with him, like at one point during his steep decline, as he was driving to his job at the “University Club” section of the young men’s clothing department in The Broadway, dressed in a dorky pastel polo shirt and wearing a name tag, when a car full of tough guys forced this seeming dork off to the shoulder of the 405 Freeway. Grisham gets out of his car, pulls a sawed-off shotgun from under his seat, and unloads a round of buckshot into the other car as they were stopped right there on the side of the freeway.

Then there are the odd sidebars of cosmogony, all justified by the fact that, hey, the narrator is a demon, so he has an up-front purview and can thus state as a matter of fact that all men go to God when they die, while demons are reincarnated, at least until the point that the “Not-Quite,” as Grisham refers to his demonic overlord, doesn’t need them anymore (at which point the demon simply ceases to exist). Also, he posits that men crave alcohol because it is a “synthetic God,” thus replacing and supplanting our own innate desire for a connection with the real thing. Then, after these bits of amateur theology, it’s back to vandalizing churches and screwing underage girls. So it is an odd book, a bit of a crazy quilt. But I liked it in part because of that.

I left Los Angeles in 1988 and moved to Chicago. I left for a lot of reasons, but probably the biggest was that I had gotten too immersed in the Hollywood music scene, which was becoming a dead-end road littered with victims of addiction, delusion, and plain old bad luck. I needed to find somewhere else to call home. But I still visited Southern California every year. And while most of my close friends are still alive, and many have found their niche, on seemingly every visit I would find out about one or two more folks from the scene who had kicked the bucket. This has been going on for over 20 years now. And these aren’t just due to the normal, expected causes of death. Sure, there has been the usual share of drug overdoses and suicides, but there have also been a lot of weird deaths, from drowning to a violent mugging to getting run over by a freight train. It is like the entire town lives under a bad moon. There are a lot of things that I love about Chicago, but perhaps the most inviolable is the fact it gave me another home away from all that shit.

Like a lot of us back in the day, Jack Grisham also tried to escape. At one point, he briefly moved up to Alaska, a move noted in his memoirs, but he hated the isolation and the cold and was soon back at his parents’ house in Long Beach. And there he remained, spiraling steadily downward, until he wound up crawling into a concrete sewage pipe that ran underneath a local park, contemplating the idea of slitting his wrists and ending it all right then and there. Then he thought about his estranged daughter, crawled back out of the drainpipe, and decided to live.

One of the problems with playing music in L.A. was that it had become a very cliquish scene. There was always a notion that style mattered, to the point where it became hard to imagine the next relevant thing. A lot of bands foundered on these shores, TSOL included. They did a glam/goth album, followed by something a little more metal. And while some of their individual songs were good, the band seemed to be thrashing around in a failed search for a new identity. So when I listened to Jack sing about depression or suicide on songs like "Beneath the Shadows", "I'm Tired of Life", or "Flowers at the Door," I assumed that he was just trying on another one of his personas. I now know that he wasn’t just trying to speak for the confused kids in his audience; he was one of us, another victim.

It seems every other prominent new writer these days hails from the same five-square mile patch of Brooklyn, channeling the same zeitgeist, or at the very least sitting in the same coffee houses. But most of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past couple of years have come from someplace else and been written by a comparative amateur. I find Grisham’s somewhat confused narrative style appealing. It sure beats another dish of polished tripe fed to you by some MFA grad. And unlike a lot of folks, Jack Grisham has stayed put, making a life amongst the non-descript tract homes of suburbia. He has written an inspired tale about my homeland. I wish him well.