Wakening the Beast
...the return of It
The title of this post comes from a mid-1990s back-page Newsweek (or Time?) editorial. It was written by some crusty bastion of liberal-or-conservatism, Lance Morrow or Charles Krauthammer or some guy like that and the idea was that feminism had gone too far. It was a long time ago and so I don’t remember specifics but the gist was that men stood unfairly accused of being rapists and assholes, while women gained more and more power yet complained constantly. Charles/Lance wrote (passionately I recall) that most men naturally love women and want to protect/care for them but yes, there is a dark side to maleness and women ought to beware; push too far and they might finally “awaken the beast.”
I found it annoying in a typical way; it seemed another way of saying that women should behave very carefully, even fearfully, and in reaction to what men might or might not do. It also seemed like a threat—made stronger by my sense that the author himself was actually afraid of what he suggested might happen. I still remember pausing at that phrase. Which I still remember today—maybe especially today.
I wanted to write about the election result, and I wanted to do so with some modicum of sense + engagement—but it’s hard not to scream incoherently when the world explodes in your face. I’ve had so many disgusted thoughts and anguished images in my head, weird chunks of reality that have leapt from my devices to join the riot taking place in my already over-populated imagination. People, it’s a mess and I suspect one that I have in common with a great many persons at this point. I have wanted to just calm down and wait for my thoughts to become a little more rational before posting anything about it. But I don’t know how long that will take and if I don’t say something I’m going to retreat into catatonia. So I turn to you, my (hopefully) tolerant and patient Founders. Please bear with me or try: my thoughts will ramble as I put chunks of reality together to make some kind of picture.
The first thing I want to ramble about is a now-obscure book I’ve been reading, a memoir by a tragi-comically eccentric now-deceased Brit named Sebastian Horsley. It is appropriately titled Dandy In the Underworld (also the title of T Rex’s final album), and it is about Horsley’s heroically sleazy efforts to enjoy a life blighted by an epically bad childhood featuring epically drunk, indifferent and insane parents. This book may seem a strange way into an essay (blog, post, mass of words) on the recent election but—it makes sense to me! Horsley’s family was wealthy and middle-class (not landed gentry, just rich) and he intended to stay wealthy (mostly by means of the stock market) while creating his own class of one, the Dandy. In order to do this he fed off and created phantasmagoric images of self, fueled by pop cultural fantasies of art, glamor, fame + addiction—and he was ridiculously compelling while doing it, at least by his own account. Sound familiar? Of course it does, he sounds like us—or rather like our deplored and adored folkloric sense of “us.”
I was reading the book during the week of the election, and the similarity seemed inescapable, particularly when I came to the part where Horsley describes himself, at the age of 21, becoming profoundly enthralled by a commanding bastard, a murderer-turned-celebrity-artist named Jimmy Boyle. Boyle involved Horsley and his girlfriend in an outfit called The Gateway Project meant to reform other criminals via art (an endeavor Horsley seems to have considered a sort of scam); he also brow-beat Horsley into getting married when he didn’t want to, then proceeded to periodically fuck both Horsley and his wife senseless, or as Boyle put it “fucked the erses oafay them [sic].” And they loved it! As Horsley describes it:
Boyle was an imposing person, with a self-confidence bestowed on him by the violent edge that made others cower. When he gave commands there was nothing to do but obey. For me, he took the place of an absent parent. He knew just how to frighten and to be tender, a method of persuasion who efficacy has been proved for thousands of years in the relations of parent to child. What I loved about Jimmy was that he allowed me to express forbidden impulses, secret wishes and fantasies. He seduced me because he did not have the conflicts that I had. As a leader he wiped out my fear and permitted me to feel omnipotent. Much later I came to recognize that I was meeting the same person time and time again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. Father. I was projecting my own Father image on to him, giving away my own authority and reverting to my earlier passivity. I carried within me a bondage that I needed in order to continue to live, craving my own subjection. As a slave, I was in love with my chains…But back then, I was happy. It is dangerous to free people who prefer to be slaves. I wanted to believe that I could live in the land of my favorite movie, Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon A Time in America.
This is of course the very personal and erotic response of one very particular person to another. Still, to me it quite viscerally describes why many people, especially men, voted for Trump. It describes the fundamental magnetic appeal of masculine authoritarianism. Trump devotees talk a lot about freedom—to carry a gun, to refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic, to say whatever they want to whoever, to stampede the capitol, to smear crap in the halls of congress, to assault people—but their desired freedoms are mere tributary veins flowing from the great body of the Leader who makes it all possible, who as Horsley puts it, “permits one to feel omnipotent [sic].” It is tiresome of me I know but it does seem they are talking about license rather than freedom, a lazy, lordly dominion based on who is stronger—licence that can be revoked by whoever bestowed it or broken by someone else stronger yet. It is disturbing to consider that drug addict and self-described “twat” Horsley would actually have known the difference.