I see all of Cosell’s worst qualities in myself. But none of his good ones.
They hate you because you went all the way. It does not seem like photographs of Aleister Crowley should exist. Paintings? Sure. But not photos. He seems like a creature who should have lived long ago, before cameras, within whatever fictional time frame Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be set. Like most males of my generation, I first learned of Crowley (and continue to mispronounce his name) thanks to the organ-driven Ozzy Osbourne song “Mr. Crowley.” Years later, I was shocked to discover that Aleister’s 1947 death occurred just twelve months before Ozzy’s birth; had Crowley taken better care of his lungs, the two men could have existed simultaneously. The deviant pair are linked forever; a 2003 article in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture directly compared their influence on the prevalent view of faux Satanism. [“Though their deepest motives are different,” author Christopher M. Moreman notes, “they share the need for fame, both going to extremes to attain it. This selfish need is couched in different forms by both men, one actively seeking to change society despite the people, with the other seeking only to please the people in the midst of a society-changing movement.”] The title of Crowley’s best novel (Diary of a Drug Fiend) is thematically transposable with the title of Osbourne’s second solo album (Diary of a Madman). At this point in history, both are representations of cartoonish evil, and Ozzy is far more famous. But this will not be the case in three hundred years; in three hundred years, Osbourne will be mostly forgotten, whereas Crowley will occupy the same cultural space he does today. Which is to say he will always be remembered as the person who put the most effort into being recognized as evil.
Had Crowley bitten the head off a bat or pissed on the walls of the Alamo, it would barely qualify as memorable. Relatively speaking, both acts would be footnotes within a much stranger career. As a young British boy in the late nineteenth century, Crowley killed the same cat nine different ways, just to find out if cats really had nine lives. This, as much as anything, portends how his mind would always work. He wasn’t insane. He was perverse. Raised in affluence as a Quaker, Crowley was eleven when his father died from tongue cancer. This is how he recounted the death in his journal: “I had some respect, but no love, for my father. And from the moment of his funeral, I entered a new phase of development, the main feature of which was nonconformity . . . it was around this time that I began to rebel and fantasize about torture and blood, often imagining myself being hurt and in agony.” At first blush, this sounds like teen posturing; it reads like something an erudite Ronnie James Dio fan would write in sophomore English. But Crowley goes further than the abnormal teenager, which is precisely what makes him Crowley. “Of course, just as any young boy, my vivid imagination also began to turn to the opposite sex. But in particular, I had visions of being degraded and suffering at the hands of wicked women.” This is, obviously, a peculiar desire. But Crowley goes further still, later writing, “Pleasure as such has never attracted me. It must be spiced by moral satisfaction.” In other words, he felt all the physical urges for sex, but needed sex to be both degrading and — somehow — ethically rewarding. He was like a druggier L. Ron Hubbard: He just sort of created an ever-devolving belief system as he marched through life, reverse-engineering his intellectual morality to fit whatever new awful decision he happened to make. Two of his central creeds were a) never make claims that cannot be proven and b) never pretend to be something you are not. This is actually excellent advice, although horribly impractical for a pansexual magick user who once tried to kill a personal rival with mind bullets.
So what did Aleister Crowley do, really? This is always the key question. He was a writer (he saw himself as Oscar Wilde’s dark, twisted fantasy) and he was a “real” magician (in order to avoid pickpockets in India, he claims to have rendered himself invisible). He was a mountaineer (Crowley tried to climb K2 in 1902 and nearly succeeded) and a general spouter of immoderate aphorisms (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”). He was born rich but wasted every penny; by 1924 he was living in poverty in France. Some people think he was a World War II spy (unlikely). Some believe he’s the biological grandfather of George W. Bush (equally unlikely, but not totally implausible — Aleister did party with the mother of W’s mother, Pauline Pierce, the year before she gave birth to a baby girl who’d become Barbara Bush). I suppose a Crowley apologist would argue he “modernized” the concept of magic and mysticism in 1912 with two books, Magick (Book 4) and The Book of Lies, thus forging the foundation for the Thelema and Wiccan religions. But those achievements strike me as just slightly less than totally goofy. The main thing Aleister Crowley did was be himself, which is why he was so good at it. His single-minded focus on being terrible remains unchallenged. And this was not a situation like N.W.A or the Oakland Raiders, where the perception of badness was supposed to inform the art; this was a situation where the badness had to be real. The badness was the art. He literally had to eat all the drugs and oppose the concept of nature and sharpen his incisors into fangs and throw his mother-in-law down a flight of stairs. Certainly, a lot of what we “know” about Crowley is based in false mythology (even during his own lifetime, there was a rumor that he ate two employees on a mountain-climbing expedition). But what’s crazier is that Crowley desperately wanted these rumors to be true. Near the end of his life, he boasted about potentially inspiring Mein Kampf by mailing a young Adolf Hitler a copy of his seminal work The Book of the Law. “Before Hitler was,” said the Yoda-like Crowley, “I am.” This would be akin to Ozzy retroactively changing the title of his song “Suicide Solution” to “Suicide Is the Best Possible Solution for Everyone, Even if Your Life Is Awesome and You Want to Live.”
It’s probably not surprising that my personal interest in Crowley was — for many years — exclusively tied to his accidental relationship with heavy rock music and my obsession with all the British artists he mesmerized (as opposed to my staunch lack of interest in the one American non-artist who actually fulfilled his promise — G. G. Allin). By far the most intimately remembered detail of Crowley’s legacy is that Led Zeppelin mastermind Jimmy Page purchased the dead occultist’s Boleskine mansion on the shore of Loch Ness. It was here that the pale guitarist would sit in the dark, shoot heroin, and think about the devil. It was a real Crowley-like move on Page’s behalf: Let me live in the home of the sickest person I can think of and try to get sicker. “Although I don’t agree with everything he said, he was a visionary,” Page is quoted as saying in Tangents Within a Framework, a book first published in 1983. “I don’t particularly want to go into it, because it’s a personal thing and isn’t in relation to anything I do as a musician, apart that I’ve employed his system into my own day-to-day life.” I’m not sure how this is supposed to be taken, unless it means Page cast a spell on whoever played bass on Kingdom Come’s second record. Today, Page claims his interest in Crowley was blown out of proportion (and I think he feels a little dumb about buying that mansion). But I do know this: It still means something to care about Aleister Crowley. It’s code. It’s like carrying a gun into a maternity ward; it means your superficial sympathies fall with the opposite of whatever you were taught to believe. One Christmas, a caustic friend gave me an audio collection of Crowley’s “music,” which includes recorded chanting from Mr. Crowley himself. It doesn’t sound like anything remotely good (every single track is super boring, and I can’t make out a word of whatever he’s saying). But I have other (generally nonreligious) friends who refuse to let me play this CD in their presence, even for scholastic purposes. They do not want to hear it. Do they honestly fear something evil will happen? No. That’s not part of their belief system. But it doesn’t seem worth the gamble, and it never will. I mean, why risk it? Who knows with this guy, really?
I see all of Crowley’s worst qualities in myself. But none of the good ones.
[Actually, that’s not true at all.]
I was w
atching a football game. It was the playoffs. It was third down. Pierre Garçon ran a curl pattern, and Peyton Manning missed him. The Colts had to punt, and the Jets went on to win 17–16. In retrospect, that third-down pass play didn’t matter at all. But at the time it mattered enough for me to spontaneously look at the Internet on my phone, because (for reasons I’ll never understand) I wanted to see what other people thought about Peyton Manning missing Pierre Garçon on a curl pattern. However, no one on Twitter was Tweeting about this third-down play; I suppose a few people were, somewhere, but those dissidents were being suffocated by a different problem that was more important and less clear.
It was like watching the world unravel in real time. But then it raveled back.
There had been a shooting in Arizona. I hadn’t heard the news, but I could piece it together, 140 characters at a time: Someone had appeared in the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway and shot nineteen people. The principal target was U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at point-blank range (and target would become the operative word here, at least for twenty-four to forty-eight hours). So now I’m reading about murder on my phone and following NFL football on my TV. My eyes are toggling between the two present-tense realities, and I’m not truly concentrating on either. But I start to notice a pattern on my phone; I start to see Sarah Palin’s name in half the posts I scroll past. And then the entire tone of Twitter shifts: People are still using words like tragedy, but the tenor in which they employ that word borders on gleeful. I was still having a hard time figuring out precisely what had happened in Tucson, but I started to sense that Palin’s career as a public figure was on the verge of ending (even if I couldn’t isolate why).
Now, I’m an apolitical person (which I realize is its own kind of misleading political posture, but I think you know what I mean). I do not have conventional political affiliations. I follow presidential elections the same way I follow the NFL playoffs: obsessively and dispassionately. But Sarah Palin was (and is) a real problem. Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840. This was not totally her fault, but it was mostly her fault. Yet, still . . . what did Palin possibly have to do with the shooting of Giffords (and why was everyone on Twitter so certain she was culpable)? I had no idea. My initial theory was that she must have come forward and supported the assassination attempt, which struck me as both totally unthinkable and marginally plausible. This was what I wondered while the Jets’ Nick Folk kicked a thirty-two-yard field goal to beat the Colts. Thirty seconds after the kick, I walked into my office and started reading about the Tucson shooting (in complete sentences), focused on why this event was prompting so many people to pretend they were sad about a situation that was clearly making them euphoric.
They were euphoric about a map.
It seems there was a map of the United States displayed on the Internet, designed by Palin (or someone who worked for her) in March of 2010, seven months before that year’s midterm elections. The site was called Take Back the 20, and it specified the twenty congressional Democrats that Palin hoped would lose in November. The twenty were geographically pinpointed with the crosshairs of a gun scope, sort of like a James Bond poster or the cover of a Public Enemy album (and intended to be taken more seriously than the former but less so than the latter). One of the crosshairs was fixed on Giffords. The subsequent “logic path” was predictable: The shooter was obviously a fanatical Palin supporter who took the map literally, which means the true killer was Palin. The secondary logic path was more nuanced, but only slightly: Perhaps the person wasn’t literally killing Giffords on Palin’s behalf, but the “rhetoric” advocated by Palin supported a culture where liberal politicians might get shot. Palin activists responded by taking the map off the Internet. They claimed the crosshairs did not represent a gun but rather the scope of a road surveyor; this immediately made them seem ten times guiltier and one hundred times less reasonable. But then — first gradually, and then overwhelmingly — the story changed. The gunman was a conspiracy-driven schizophrenic named Jared Loughner who’d been obsessed with Giffords for three years. (He was still outraged over her unwillingness to sufficiently answer the following question at a 2007 political event: “What is government if words have no meaning?”) To me, this made the story far more compelling. But the rest of the country disagreed; three weeks after the shooting, the story had essentially disappeared from the American news cycle (which would never have happened if Loughner had actually been motivated by Palin’s map). It seemed crazy to direct vitriol at Loughner, because he was crazy. Loughner was perceived as more pathetic than sinister, and you can’t hate the pathetic (because that makes you pathetic). There was ultimately nothing to take away from this story, beyond the fact that a) crazy people do crazy things, and b) it’s easy to get guns in Arizona.
But I want to go back to the moment just after the football game ended.
I want to return to the moment before we knew who Loughner was; I want to reopen the window of time when the center of the story was Palin (and nobody knew how much responsibility needed to be dumped on her Neiman Marcus shoulder pads). It seemed like a critical moment for democracy. Was Palin truly finished? She had already become a political nonfactor, but now she might be a cultural nonfactor; if she had any tangible connection to the assassination of a rival politician, there would be no way for her to recover. There would be no comeback. And part of me knew this might be good for the country. Intellectually, I understood why the metaphorical elimination of Palin might be better for the world at large. But I felt something else: sympathy. (And since feelings are merely uncontained thoughts, I suppose I was thinking it, too.) I began rooting for Sarah Palin. I wanted all the bozos on my Twitter feed to be wrong. I empathized with her situation, I believed she’d been unfairly railroaded, and I couldn’t decide if the creation of that map was mildly problematic or completely irrelevant. I started to see the world from her perspective, which was jarring and intriguing. I still saw her as a problem, but that evening was absolutely the most I ever liked her.
Which made me wonder: Why do I always want to turn the bad guy into the good guy? Why does this make me feel better?
They hate you because you don’t hate anyone, even when you should.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (OR THE LACK THEREOF)
I had to take a lot of psychological tests. These tests asked certain questions. One of the questions was, “When you walk into a room, do you think everybody’s looking at you?” Yes! “When you walk into a room, do you feel people are talking about you?” Yeah, I do. Now, if a normal person says “yes” to those questions, they have some kind of complex. They have some kind of problem. But (for me), it’s true. I know when I walk into a room, people are looking at me. I know when I walk into a restaurant, people are talking about me.
— O. J. Simpson, telling the truth
I didn’t really seek attention. I just wanted to play the game well and go home.
— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, being honest
It’s unfair to write this, but I’m going to do it anyway: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don’t normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky — for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife. This is more than a significant detail. But let’s think about that specific dissonance last. Before we examine what makes them different, here’s what makes them similar . . .
1) Both are known by names that do not reflect their original identities. Abdul-Jabbar was born Lew Alcindor, which he changed for religious reasons; Simpson was born “Orenthal James” but chose to go by his initials for s
implicity and panache.
2) Both attended college in Los Angeles during a period of massive social upheaval: Abdul-Jabbar arrived at UCLA in 1965, while Simpson showed up at USC in 1967.
3) Both were culturally defined by their response to identity politics. Jabbar refused to participate in the ’68 Olympics in accordance with the black power movement and has recalled an “antiwhite” phase he explored during high school; Simpson is generally viewed as the first black athlete who was able to break into the white world of advertising endorsements on a national scale.
4) Both had high-profile relationships with white women (and were unjustly criticized for it).
5) Both began their professional careers in small markets (Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee, Simpson in Buffalo) and both finished on the West Coast (L.A. and San Francisco).
6) Both were the premier superstars of their respective sports throughout the 1970s. This is unquestionably true for Abdul-Jabbar, the winner of six NBA MVPs from 1971 to 1980. It’s a more debatable designation for Simpson, but he was absolutely the best running back in an era dominated by the running game.