I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  What You Say About His Company Is What You Say About Society

  Another Thing That Interests Me About the Eagles Is That I [Am Contractually Obligated to] Hate Them

  Villains Who Are Not Villains

  Easier Than Typing

  Perpetual Topeka

  Human Clay

  Without a Gun They Can’t Get None

  Arrested for Smoking

  Electric Funeral

  This Zeitgeist is Making Me Thirsty

  “I Am Perplexed” [This Is Why, This Is Why, This Is Why They Hate You]

  Crime and Punishment (or the Lack Thereof)

  Hitler Is in the Book

  The Problem of Overrated Ideas

  Acknowledgments

  About Chuck Klosterman

  Index

  One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

  — Klaus Kinski, super nihilist.

  I’m gonna quote a line from Yeats, I think it is: “The best lack all conviction, while the best are filled” . . . oh, no. It’s the other way around. “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.” Now, you figure out where I am.

  — Lou Reed, super high.

  I’m not a good guy. I mean, I don’t hurt anybody. But I don’t help, either.

  — Louis C.K., super real.

  PREFACE

  It seems like twenty-five lifetimes ago, but it was only twenty-five years: An older friend gave me a cassette he’d duplicated from a different cassette (it was the era of “tape dubbing,” which was like file sharing for iguanodons). It was a copy of an album I’d wanted, but the album was only thirty-eight minutes long; that meant there were still seven open minutes at the end of the cassette’s A-side. In order to fill the gap, my friend included an extra song by Metallica. It was a cover of a song by the British band Diamond Head, a group I was completely unfamiliar with. The opening lines of the song deeply disturbed me, mostly because I misinterpreted their meaning (although I suspect the guys in Metallica did, too). The lyrics described bottomless vitriol toward the songwriter’s mother and a desire to burn her alive. The chorus was malicious and straightforward: “Am I evil? Yes I am. Am I evil? I am man.”

  I can’t remember precisely what I thought when I first heard those words — I was a teenager, so it was probably something creative and contradictory, and I’m relatively positive I imagined a nonexistent comma after the fourth am. But I do remember how I felt. I was confused and I was interested. And if I could have explained my mental state at fourteen with the clarity of language I have as a forty-year-old, I assume my reaction would have been the same complicated question I ask myself today: Why would anyone want to be evil?

  I am typing this sentence on an autumn afternoon. The leaves are all dead, but still tethered to the trees, waiting for a colder future. Outside my living room window and three floors below, people are on the street. I vaguely recognize some of them, but not most of them. I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people. Still, I believe these strangers are nonthreatening. I suppose you never know for certain what unfamiliar humans are like, but I’m confident. They are more like me than they are different: predominantly white, in the vicinity of middle age, and dressed in a manner that suggests a different social class than the one they truly occupy (most appear poorer than they actually are, but a few skew in the opposite direction). Everyone looks superficially friendly, but none are irrefutably trustworthy. And as I watch these people from my window, I find myself wondering something:

  Do I care about any of them?

  I certainly don’t dislike them, because I have no reason to do so. If one of these strangers were suddenly in trouble and I had the ability to help, I absolutely would — but I suspect my motive for doing so might not be related to them. I think it would be the result of all the social obligations I’ve been ingrained to accept, or perhaps to protect my own self-identity, or maybe because I’d feel like a coward if I didn’t help a damaged person in public (or maybe because others might see me actively ignoring a person in need). I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was written poorly by me. The perspective is first person, but the hero doesn’t do much. He doesn’t do anything. He just looks out the window.

  This realization makes me feel shame . . . yet not so ashamed that I suddenly (and authentically) care about random people on the street. I feel worse about myself, but I feel no differently about them. And this prompts me to consider several questions at once:

  1) Am I a psychopath?

  2) Is my definition of the word care different from the definition held by other people? Is it possible that I do care, but that I define “caring” as an all-encompassing, unrealistic aspiration (so much so that it makes it impossible for me to recognize my own empathy)?

  3) Does my awareness of this emotional gap actually mean I care more than other people? Or is that comical self-deception?

  4) What if these strangers are bad people? Would that eliminate my emotional responsibility? Nobody needs to feel bad about not caring about Adolf Hitler. Right? Right. Well, what if some of these anonymous strangers — if given the means and opportunity — might behave exactly like Hitler? Or worse than Hitler? What if one of these people would become the Super Hitler, if granted unlimited power? Do I have to care about them until they prove otherwise? Do I have to care about them as humans until they invade Poland? And in order to be truly good, do I still need to keep caring about them even after they’ve done so?

  5) Why do I always suspect everyone is lying about how they feel?

  6) Why do I think I can understand the world by staring out the window?

  7) Let’s assume half the people on my street are categorically “good” and half are categorically “bad.” I can’t tell who is who, but (somehow) I know that this is irrefutably the case. Let’s also operate from the position that humans somehow have agency over those two classifications. Let’s assume there is no Higher Power and no afterlife, and that all of these self-aware people — regardless of their social history or familial upbringing — are able to decide if they want to be good or bad. Let’s assume it’s every human’s unambiguous choice, based on all the information available. If this is true, then the import of the word “good” and the import of the word “bad” are nothing more than constructions. They are classifications we created subjectively; their meanings don’t derive from any larger reality or any deeper truth. They’re just the two definitions we have agreed upon, based on various books and myths and parables and philosophies and artworks and whatever “feels” like the innate difference between rightness and wrongness. In other words, there are “good people” and there are “bad people,” but those two designations are unreal. The designations exist in conversation, but they’re utterly made-up. Within this scenario, would goodness still be something to aspire to? Wouldn’t this mean that good people are simply the ones who accept that what they’ve been told is arbitrarily true? That they’ve accepted a policy
they didn’t create for themselves?

  8) American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) had a lot of mind-crushing ideas, but perhaps the most significant was his concept of “the veil of ignorance.” It best applies to the creation of social contracts. At risk of oversimplification, Rawls’s scenario was basically this: Let’s pretend you were instantly able to re-create American society in totality, and you could do it in whatever way you wanted. You could make (or eliminate) whatever laws you desired, and you could implement whatever financial and judicial structures you believed would work best. However, you must do this under a magical “veil of ignorance.” The moment after you create this system, you’ll no longer be yourself (and you don’t have any idea what your new role in this society shall be). You might be a rough facsimile of your current self, or you might be someone entirely new. Your gender might be different, or your race. It’s possible you will be extremely destitute and appallingly ugly. You’ll have a different level of intelligence and a different work ethic. You might suddenly be disabled, or super athletic, or homosexual, or criminally insane. As such, you will (probably) want to create a society that is as fair and complete as possible, since you have no idea what station you’ll inherit within your own new, self-constructed boundaries. You need to think outside of your current self, because tomorrow you’ll be someone else entirely. But try that same process with goodness, and particularly with how we gauge what goodness is. Try to come up with a list of declarations or rules that outline a universal definition for what it means to be good, for all people, for the rest of time. And do this under another “veil of ignorance.” Do this with the knowledge that — tomorrow — you will be a totally different person who views the world in a manner alien to your current self. This new you may have no ability to control your darker impulses. You may be incapable of natural compassion. You might have the emotional baggage of someone who was habitually ridiculed as a teenager, or of a child who was sexually tortured, or of a sorority girl born so rich she’s never had a real chance to comprehend any life except the one she fell into by chance. Would this possibility affect your forthcoming invention of goodness? Would you define the concept more broadly and with greater elasticity? For some reason, it’s human nature to say no. Our inclination is to see goodness as something that exists within itself; we want to believe goodness and badness are fundamental traits that transcend status or personal experience. The sorority girl and the serial killer don’t get special dispensation due to circumstance. We do not want to see goodness and badness as things we decide, because those are terms that we need to be decided by someone else.

  9) Am I evil? Yes. I am, man.

  This book is about presentation. It seems like it should be about “context,” but I’ve come to realize that audiences create context more than the creator. This book is about the presentation of material, since the posture of that presentation — more than what is technically and literally expressed — dictates the meaning that is (eventually) contextualized by others. Even if we view something as satire, we must first accept that a nonsatirical version of that argument exists for other people, even if they’re people we’ve never met. If it didn’t, why would we mock it? [This, I suppose, is a complicated way of explaining something too uncomfortable to state clearly: It’s possible that context doesn’t matter at all. It seems like it should matter deeply, because we’ve all been trained to believe “context is everything.” But why do we believe that? It’s because that phrase allows us to make things mean whatever we want, for whatever purpose we need.]

  Here’s what this book will not be: It will not be a 200-page comparison of the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, even though I was tempted to do so in seventeen different paragraphs. It will not analyze pro wrestling or women on reality TV shows who are not there to make friends. And most notably, it will not be a repetitive argument that insists every bad person is not-so-bad and every good person is not-so-good. Rational people already understand that this is how the world is. But if you are not-so-rational — if there are certain characters you simply refuse to think about in a manner that isn’t 100 percent negative or 100 percent positive — parts of this book will (mildly) offend you. It will make you angry, and you will find yourself trying to intellectually discount arguments that you might naturally make about other people. This is what happens whenever the things we feel and the things we know refuse to align in the way we’re conditioned to pretend.

  Before I started this project, I had lunch with my editor (the same editor who eventually worked on this manuscript). We were talking about Star Wars, which his four-year-old son had recently watched for the first time. The boy was blown away. In the course of our conversation, I expressed my theory that there’s a natural evolution to how male audiences respond to the Star Wars franchise: When you’re very young, the character you love most is Luke Skywalker (who’s entirely good). As you grow older, you gravitate toward Han Solo (who’s ultimately good, but superficially bad). But by the time you reach adulthood, and when you hit the point in your life where Star Wars starts to seem like what it actually is (a better-than-average space opera containing one iconic idea), you inevitably find yourself relating to Darth Vader. As an adult, Vader is easily the most intriguing character, and seemingly the only essential one.

  “I’m not sure all people would agree with your premise,” said my editor. “I think most guys stop evolving at Han Solo.”

  That’s when we started talking about this book, or what this book would theoretically be. Our conversation was nebulous. My editor wanted to know why I wanted to write about villains. I said I could not give a cogent explanation, but that I knew this was the book I wanted to write.

  “Well, I have my own theory,” he said. “I think I know why you want to do this. I think it’s because you’re afraid that you are actually a villainous person.”

  I had no response. Much later, I wrote this.

  WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT HIS COMPANY IS WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT SOCIETY

  What is the most villainous move on the market?

  I suppose “murdering a bunch of innocent people” seems like the obvious answer, but it obviously isn’t (there are countless statues of heroes who’ve killed thousands). Electrocuting helpless dogs for the sake of convenience seems almost as diabolical, but not diabolical enough to keep you off the NFL Pro Bowl roster. Rape is vile; human trafficking is disturbing; blowing up a planet and blotting out the sun are not for the innocent. These are all terrible, terrible things. Yet none of them represent the pinnacle of villainy. None of them embody culture’s most sinister deed.

  The most villainous move any person can make is tying a woman to the railroad tracks.

  There’s simply no confusion over the implication of this specific act: If you see someone tying a woman to train tracks, you are seeing an unadulterated expression of evil. Such a crime is not just the work of a villain, but of someone who wants to be a villainous cliché. In 2008, this actually happened in Thailand — a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Niparat Tawonporn was tied to a railway path about five hundred miles south of Bangkok and cut in half by the oncoming locomotive (it was rumored to be the result of some unexplained romantic disagreement, although that was merely conjecture among the local villagers). Still, this kind of ritualistic homicide is exceedingly rare. In response to the query “Did anyone really ever get tied to the railroad tracks?,” weirdness raconteur Cecil Adams (creator of the wry “Straight Dope” column for the Chicago Reader) detailed the following dossier: “The earliest real-life incident I could find was from 1874, when on August 31 the New York Times reported that a Frenchman named Gardner had been robbed and tied to railroad tracks. He managed to loosen all the ropes but the one that secured his left foot, and the train cut off his leg below the knee. Though he survived to describe the attack, he soon died of his injuries.” The five other examples Adams cites include a thirteen-year-old boy kidnapped in 1881 and a college student from 1906 who experienced the wor
st nonsexual fraternity initiation imaginable. All told, this is not much train-related violence, particularly since all the victims mentioned were male. It’s sexist to say this, but — somehow — tying a man to the train tracks just doesn’t seem as wicked.

  Considering its scarcity, it’s unclear how a crime that almost never happened became the definitive Crime Of The (Nineteenth) Century. Its origin is mostly a theatrical construction. The first “popular” images of humans roped to railroad ties derived from an 1863 British play titled The Engineer and an 1867 American play titled Under the Gaslight. By the dawn of the silent-movie era, the trope had been adopted completely: The 1913 comedy Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life is structured around a woman tied to the tracks. Serials from 1914 like The Hazards of Helen and The Perils of Pauline employed similar premises. But in those cases, the idea is already comedic. It’s satiric melodrama. It’s almost as if the concept of using a train to kill someone is so complicated and absurd that it can only be viewed as a caricature of villainy. It was never based on any legitimate fear. This is even true with the first (and only?) pop song about train-related homicide, the Coasters’ 1959 single “Along Came Jones,” in which a woman is assaulted through a variety of bizarre, ever-escalating means, all in the hope of stealing the deed to her ranch.

  This is why no nonfictional villain can compete with Snidely Whiplash.

  Snidely Whiplash was the animated villain in the Dudley Do-Right segments of the 1960s cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle. (Dudley was the dim-witted Canadian Mountie who was always trying to capture Snidely.) Based on the silent-movie villain archetype, Whiplash had a waxed mustache and a black hat (and, of course, is literally named “Snidely”). He spoke with a hiss and laughed like a maniac. However, his true failing was a compulsion. Snidely Whiplash was obsessed with tying women to railroad tracks. He simply couldn’t stop himself. It was the foundation of his entire ethos. And this was what made him so amusing: his total inability to express any reason whatsoever as to why he was doing so. There didn’t seem to be any financial upside or competitive advantage; Snidely Whiplash just enjoyed placing Canadian women in a position where they wait to die. He loved the idea of his victims hearing the chug-chug-chug of the machine that would kill them in the future, even though that sadistic lag time did not benefit him in any way (beyond giving him a few extra moments to stroke his mustache). There was no thinking behind his sadism; it was just something he did, seemingly every day of his cartoon life. He had no external purpose. His only motive for tying women to railroad tracks was that tying women to railroad tracks was what he did.