I was an angry young man.

Plugged into the barely-working electrical grid, which itself was like a cancerous excrescence of cables and transformers and confusing, overlapping regulatory jurisdiction where ultimately no company found it in their interest to rise up in heroism above this sump. Yes, where the ultimate authority was the tax-payer clawing over precious pennies and the grandstanding politicians "who played to the crowd" even while robbing them blind. You had the regional monolith of the cable companies, an infrastructure of wires and switching stations that indifferently pumped slots of programming into households as they merged with telecom giants like kingdoms and empires and fiefdoms of American trans-global consciousness.

Furthermore, you had the modern office cubicle arrangement-- or "veal-fattening pens" which was the answer to "the information age". No longer a respectable visage of "Father Knows Best" and giant mainframe computers but a bunch of little sociopathic tweakers trading talk around a water cooler like young wolves looking over their shoulder, on the look out from "an ice queen" of a middle manager who would not smile upon their juvenile antics taken beyond the pages of "Maxim" magazine like a skinny-shanked sacking of such hoary virtues of "honor" and "fair play" like the Vandals looting Rome. If you couldn't grow up to become a celebrity or a rock star or a slick-haired CEO in a Hugo Boss suit this is how you repaid the system.

I was repaying the system in my own way. . . . . baying at the moon like a rabid dog that would sooner or later get shot down by "animal control" if the authorities got wind of how sick it was. When you stopped to think about it, a young, half-Jewish Hitlerite made about as much sense as a light-skinned black man joining "The Ku Klux Klan" and "passing" for white as he held up a noose and hollered for blood. See their eyes light up with such venomous, vitriolic hatred when they rage against "the other" because they're secretly trying to keep a far distance from what they can't duck within themselves.

It was like those 1950's "Men's Magazines" that dealt with all sorts of strange, closeted issues. . . . . ultra-macho imagery, scantily-clad women being whipped, ghoulish images of totalitarian power-- if not "get-rich-quick" gimmicks and how to be a "Hercules" in bed. Take it as far as you could go and you had "The Communist Witch-Hunts" and ultra-paranoia run by two closeted characters, Senator Joe McCarthy and his boy wonder, Roy Cohn-- the elder who died of alcoholism in a disgraced room of depression's blue shadows as "a broken man". The "boy wonder" eventually died of AIDS. . . . . one of the ultra-right's more embarrassing open secrets, the iron fist "in the velvet glove".

Yet generations upon generations would stream over the years, unaware of the ultimate dynamic that drives all prejudice and "hatred of the other". Even the left, in an attempt to be high-minded, projects noble qualities upon "the dispossessed" in a mixture of honorable intentions and guilt for their secret dislike while at the same time saving their hatred for those of their own kind who don't share in such a "noble endeavor". Both the right and left mutually react to each other, like warring tribes hunkered in buildings across the street from one another, while using black people and Jews and immigrants as chess pieces for moral self-righteousness-- mostly not letting them speak for themselves, or even when they do saying exactly what is expected of them like known exotic quantities, a measuring cup of "this & that", akin to dancing bears, bejeweled elephants, or seals honking "Amazing Grace" on a line of horns.

Such as it was in the world of Hollywood and entertainment. . . . . selling tickets to attractions and following the money to the logically penny-stooping "bottom-dollar" to appease shareholders, the cultural elite, themselves. Yes, which they were all a part of at schmoozer's gatherings with martinis in their hands, trading in industry lingo and box-office figures, "green-lighting" certain projects as "a set quantity" while understanding that "you win some, you lose some" as one shrugged like a Yiddish charmer and understood that "there was always next year" to pull down an Academy Award for the studio. Perhaps a little bit like the characters from "The Great Gatsby", but more driven and focused and taken to quips as they moved through the gathering with restless energy and even less grace. . . . . an attribute that 1000 years of pales and ghettos and fenced-in nervousness can not so easily erase.

There was a cultural tone-deafness on both the East and West coasts-- when very bright, very sheltered, very successful people who overly traded in the world of abstracts did not have a sense of "what the heartland was thinking", but yet thought they knew what was best for all.

The grunts on the ground were angry. What did these elites know about "what was happening on the jungle floor"? Like anecdotal stories from Vietnam, I've heard plenty of tales when soldiers suspected suspicious activity happening on the outer perimeter of the compound, but by the time they radioed higher-up's for long-winded permission to investigate their barbed wire defenses had been sabotaged by the enemy. The whole operation, though cerebrally-executed by the best and brightest minds in The Pentagon, lost the confidence of the rank-and-file it depended upon to meet the objective. The heartland keeps trying to tell the media elites what's going on, but they can't listen. . . . . and the population descends into "Rambo" fantasy like a retread of those unprincipled "Men's Magazines" that appealed to something subterranean and vile. . . . . like G. Gordon Liddy and Pat Buchanan double-teaming Phyillis Schaffly in a Motel 6.

And for all that the conservatives vaunted "the free market", they shuddered at its implications There came a point towards the end of the Reagan/Bush years when something new and exciting and highly marketable came along to inject new blood in your grandfather's Oldsmobile of tempered moderation. The alternative/indie movement, opening up the sluice gates of the unsightly and unclean, appropriating "the sewage of the streets" as "a people's movement" because it could make quite a few people a lot of money. If you played this right, if you channeled the lemmings with the right appeals to "youth revolution", you stood to make more profit than ever.

Sell tickets to "the freak show" of perverted authenticity, waved in by a bunch of stick-waving rock n' roll scholars, film critics, and "free speech hucksters" in the so-called culture industry that panders to its audience while flattering its sophistication, the know-nothing's of the Trent Reznor/Quentin Taratino generation who think that swirling around the void "makes them more authentic". . . . . the slow, postmodern death-fuck of too much leisure and not enough adversity in our all too angst-ridden land of exurban sprawl and mall-monkeys looking for hijinks, if not furtive oral sex like crazed spider-fingered bonobos.

When Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" was fresh, an original in-crowd of underground scenesters were the first to be aware of it. Then a broader circle finds about it and the crowd grows. And grows. And grows. Because the sight of a crowd will always attract a bigger crowd, because they suppose that "something important is going on". Soon, the song is on the radio and like a swelling tidal wave becomes a monster hit when everyone is listening to it and it's "the hottest thing in the land". Everyone wants a piece of the buzz, the excitement, and that's when you have the very worst of tasteless craziness going on in young bedrooms.

"Fandom" has never been a pretty sight. Various ideas rise up from pockets of the population like a foul stench-- everything from mystic gothic poetry about ravens to kinky gay sex to people jumping off of highway overpasses with headphones on until it bottoms out to it's absolutely most degraded point of saturation-- little nine year old's with Kurt Cobain haircuts running around blindly parroting ideas they don't understand. But by then the singer is dead. The machine has killed him. And the marketing meat-grinder moves on to something else. As an ironic side-note, those who had been there in the beginning had long since "walked away in disgust" once all the idiots got on board and the band "sold out" its humble principles.

Oh, well.

Nowadays, music of that time can be heard in the background of Midwestern auto dealerships. It's all just "ambient noise" and red-state Americans waddle by "without knowing the difference". That's when you know "the revolution has died".

And the elites are wetting their fingers as they count the money. Like bookies, or dealers who have made a return on their investment.

But sometimes their bets are miscalculated.

My girl and yours, Winona Ryder, released "The Crucible" back in the fall of 1996 which was an adoption of the Arthur Miller play. Though much prestige was involved, ultimately few people could be convinced to see this geeky, bloodless, meatless, overly-earnest project helmed by joyless left-wing prigs appointed by no one. . . . . except the vain egos of wealthy backers "who wanted to do the right thing". The free market had spoken. . . . . and empty theaters were the only answer.

A few years later, Winona narrated the documentary "The Day my God Died" about the child sex-trade in India, trading grim spoken passages with an equally sanctimonious Tim Robbins. Unknown if this was just trying to make her recent conviction for shoplifting and prescription drug abuse stink a little less. The website for the movie, under "Cast & Credits", made no mention of this career-derailing scandal that would give the whole project an atmosphere of laughableness as everyone would try to deny the overhanging issue.

Besides, what did they really intend to achieve by putting out this movie? Nothing, really-- as they thoughtlessly sold tickets to this "sideshow attraction of horror" like indie circuit "mongers of suffering" who perhaps got an ego-boost out of behaving "so high-mindedly", like self-abnegating types who get off on their own pain like vegans or those who wore moccasins in the winter. Or those who hold their bladder and bowels for days on end to achieve some kind of saint-like, religious ecstasy. In a word, all manner of curdled deprivation, rib-exposed starvation, and stone-faced moping that "didn't know how to party" as they sat down with an egg-plant up their ass like some kind of retentive, mothering neurosis.

And one year I sat at a Passover celebration, of all places. . . . . the ultimate fount of liberal, secular-humanist unhappiness where many had the piteous faces of J.D. Salinger, if not more gnarled and grim and scoliotic. One was an author who had written a novel that had been optioned by Hollywood and made into a film some years back, a story about a young man who fell for an older woman somewhere on the East Coast who had initiated him into the world of Jewish cooking with the whirl of veils and then the ecstasy of Karma Sutra sex. Needless to say, she died in the second-to-last chapter in some hospital of an incurable, wasting disease as her body expired its waste with a primeval gurgle of belching finality that woke up the comatose car accident victim down the hall.

Death is not pretty. . . . nor the Jewish mind.

(-- Nor my half-Jewish mind, for that matter)

Our host was Lew, an overweight, repulsively-charming rabbi of counterculture who could never cease with his hyper-intelligent speechifying that was so puffed up on the ferment of the 1960's that lifted his hot-air balloon of windy hyperbole that he could not see the misery of the creatures waddling down on the ground below. Everything was one big issue of "MAD" magazine though there were definitely things you didn't laugh at.

For instance, there was a friend of the family who lived out in southern Illinois somewhere. . . . . a brooding "Monstro" of a man. What you notice about heavy people like this character is that either by habit or instinct or lifestyle they are very ponderous, heavy, snail-eyed creatures with a death instinct that is roused with a meaty fist when challenged, a stewing rage of consumption that takes up more space than what it actually produces. We don't know the whole story (-- being afraid to ask), but in the heaviness of that household the wife-- probably no "being of light" either-- got morbidly depressed and shot herself and her two kids to death. He had come home from work to find them and bellowed in despair because it was so immediately obvious what had happened.

Now he had a second family.

Of interest, was a sprightly overweight little 11 year-old boy who was massively gentle and creative and gifted. He seemed largely unable to comprehend the darkness that had transpired before his time and ran around the yard with his plucky 9 year-old sister as the father brooded like the grimmest Scotch-Irish Buddha you had ever seen with an iced-tea in his meaty fist.

In coming years Lew would turn out to be "The Dean" of advice when you wanted to jury-rig something flashy and questionable off the ground. Funny thing is, you already knew what his answer would be-- "go for it"-- even as he gave you whimsical tips and pointers that did not work out in the hard-scrabble world of "that night's receipts".

One time I got screwed out of many hundreds of dollars trying to run an open-mic comedy night at a local landmark bar but was like the rankest, greenest amateur you can imagine trying to cut his way into the experienced, wizened routes of the diamond business. In short, everything that could go wrong did go wrong and the night was taken over by young predators of the comedy world who humiliated me, only accenting the indifference of the universe to young and foolish dreams "of beating the system".

I did not know the details, but the 11 year-old in question many years later came to Lew for advice about "opening a club" of some sort. Details are lost to me, but I can only hope that he doesn't get skewered like a squealing pig like I was. In this jungle, you will be readily "sniffed out" because they can smell blood, uncertainty, fear, and desperation. Ultimately you will be put in a situation where you'll bleed like a stuck pig, run around in circles in a frenzied panic, and ultimately-- on an emotional level-- get your guts torn out by predators because that is the law of life.

Back at the Passover celebration, an elderly grandmother who spoke in the voice of Mae Questal-- the aged voice of Betty Boop-- was freaking out. A family had brought a German exchange student along. Not lost upon him, before he had left to pour himself some grape Manicheviz in the kitchen, was the awkwardness of this occasion as he sat with great silence and awkwardness upon his heavy brow as he communed "with the ultimate sin of the 20th century" and meant, somehow, to make amends with this symbolic appearance. What was the family supposed to do, leave him home? And it would probably be somewhat strained and awkward if he didn't go. . . . .

And there I was. Not a raging beast, but a lost, wounded little boy on the verge of tears who needed an older girl "to make it all better". . . . . yet that possibility was not in the cards tonight. And that was that, watching her depart, silently wishing her well, forgiving her for what she could not humanly give me, and vowing that no harm would ever come to her, extremist beliefs or not. Deeply ashamed, I at last began to move away from all of this extremism. It only goes to show that anyone can change if they really want to!