"The Underground Is A Lie"

by Jim Goad



You don't shock me. I shudder with boredom at everything you do, from tattooing your dick to chewing on
your own poop. Not only have I seen all of your weak gestures before, I've seen them done better.

You remind me of someone I knew in college. His name was Mark. Pale, unshaven, and wearing his dishwater-colored hair in a Mohawk, Mark was an anarchist. He railed against the corporate elite and cheered for the collective. Projecting himself as his own mascot, he defaced hundreds of buildings with a goofy cartoon drawing of a Mohawk-wearing anarchist. The back of his leather jacket had an anarchy 'A' crudely daubed in white paint. Mark could be seen around town clustered with similarly disaffected youth, drinking out of paper bags, committing petty acts of vandalism, and plotting America's overthrow.

Unfortunately, Mark's parents were publishing magnates who had tucked away forty thousand dollars in stock for their baby anarchist. I once watched Mark transform into a sobbing bitch when he lost a bootleg cassette of his favorite hardcore band. Despite his lowlife appearance, he was a rich boy with the time and money to act poor. So were all of his friends. So are all of the people who consider themselves "alternative." Mark - you remind me of him.

Like Mark, your underground is strictly an upper-class phenom. You're a body-pierced, hair-dyeing, chain-smoking, whip-carrying FAKE, a little bitchy snitch who hasn't been hit enough. Your black eyeliner, rubber pants, and asymmetrical hairdo are a post-pubescent way of playing costume. You can't handle the guilt of your comfortable background, so you commit the heinous crime of slumming. No one worships trash in the slums, where they have to eat and breathe it daily. In poor neighborhoods, weirdness invites violence. Yet a blue-blooded nabob like you acts triflingly eccentric and considers it radical.

The "creative community" doesn't consist of the most creative people; you're the ones with the most spare time to create, those whose parents tolerate - and often finance - your flighty pursuits. What usually passes for art is just the idle noodling of the leisure class.

Your gizzard ululates with, "You sellout!" Well, the wealthy are the only ones who can afford not to sell out. Yes, there are a holy few who have refused cash when it's been dangled in front of them - they're called masochists. If you're still reading this, you're a masochist, too.

In your typically egocentric way, you pretend you're the vanguard, freeing the oppressed from the shackles of ignorance. You conduct a sorry crusade to recast the world in your image. You're dumb enough to think you'll make a difference. You feel that if everyone was like you, society would be wonderful. Yet you walk away scratching your head when the truly oppressed don't want anything to do with you. You've never fought for anything but the right to be infantile.

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, political rhetoric is a cubbyhole for dullards. The political is merely the personal in a cheap, quivering act of sublimation. You oppose power, which is like protesting the sun - scream all you want, but it'll still scorch you. As you cry about global warming, global corporations, and global revolution, I stare into the vacant globes of your eyes. The only anarchy going on is the mutinous misfiring of your brain cells. The 'A' stands for "asshole."

You whine about your "sexuality," how your body is a political combat zone. You're a simple rodent with boring bodily functions which you seek to ennoble. With your flagrant vanity and dishonesty in personal interactions, you reveal yourself to be equally as rotten as the leaders you despise. You invariably wind up imitating the oppressor. Unfortunately, you weren't oppressed to begin with.

For not only are you a liar, you're a hypocrite. You're fascinated by violence until you're confronted with it. You romanticize trauma but have never been traumatized. You demand grant money from a government you seek to destroy. You idolize primitive cultures but would slash your wrists if your CD player broke. You condemn religion but consider yourself enlightened. You're as self-righteous as the moralists upon which you spit. You hate hatred, won't tolerate intolerance, and conspire with others against conformity.

All your cohorts are hypocrites, too. Feminists don't degrade, objectify, and stereotype men? Socialists aren't elitists? Environmentalists don't drive cars? A pox upon all your houses. I'd wish for a rat to bite your ass and give you the Black Plague, but you'd probably consider it a fashion statement.

While you slurp the dick of political correctness, your amber asshole is being torn asunder by aesthetic correctness. You flush your self-respect down the toilet while scrambling to obey the edicts of boho taste. You're frightened senseless that others will think you're uncool. You'd rather swallow whale sperm than admit you like disco, Chicken McNuggets, or Love Connection You're frozen with fear that someone will realize what little you have to say. You squirm in the face of your own dullness. You are a prisoner of the underground, a hostage of your own creative retardation. Ideas emerge from your head stillborn.

Your rebelliousness is laid out for you like the portions of a TV dinner. You ape the powers that be with every clove-scented breath you take. You are nothing more than socioeconomic ectoplasm, a target market, a file folder at Central Casting. You exist as a parasite, because without an Establishment for you to oppose, you'd shrivel into cellular waste. Try as you may to avoid being absorbed by the mainstream, you remain trapped under its microscope, an amoeba with a nose ring.

This isn't an apologia for the mainstream, not by any stretch. Those who seek to defend it might as well believe in the Easter Bunny, too. The mainstream's models of reality are clunky and obsolete, just like yours. To attack it is too easy, like stealing crutches from a cripple. I'll leave those tactics to cowards such as you.

True psychos stand alone. The only pioneers are those who give voice to the ugliest corridors of their unconscious without fear of censure from any quarter. The acts that ordinary people commit behind closed doors are beyond the ken of any performance artist. Humans' innate weirdness is far more threatening and entertaining than anything the professional shock mavens could conjure.

I boggle your conception of a world split between cognoscenti and squares. I subvert the subversives and bury the underground under six feet of its own hypocritical manure. I perform unsolicited tattooing, body-piercing, and ritual scarification upon you.

Give vent to your sickest fantasies, but don't call it art. Cornhole Barbara Bush, but only if you want to. Sketch your astrological chart with your own feces, but only if it feels good. If you want to do something truly radical, kill yourself… the world will be a better place.